236 BELIEFS AND USAGES OF CHICKASAW [PTH. ANN, 44 
which the fireplace stood, and on these blocks he rested the supposed sacred 
ark, so that it and the holy fire faced each other. The party were silent a 
considerable time. At length the chieftain bade them sit down, and then 
enquired whether his house was prepared for the solemn occasion, according 
to his order the day before; being answered in the affirmative, they soon rose 
up, sounded the death whoop, and walked round the war pole, during which they 
invoked and sung three times Yo, He, He, Wah, Wah, in the manner already 
described. Then they went with their holy things in regular order into the 
hothouse, where they continued, exclusive of the first broken day, three days 
and nights apart from the rest of the people, purifying themselves with warm 
lotions and aspersions of the emblematical button-snakeroot, without any other 
subsistence between the rising and the setting of the sun. 
During the other part of the time the female relations of each of the company, 
after having bathed, anointed, and dressed themselves in their finest, stood 
in two rows, one on each side of the door, facing each other, from the evening 
till the morning, singing Ha Ha, Ha He, with a soft shrill voice and a solemn 
moving air for more than a minute, and then paused about ten minutes, before 
they renewed their triumphal song. While they sung they gave their legs a 
small motion by the strong working of their muscles, without seeming to bend 
their joints. When they had no occasion to retire, they have stood erect in the 
same place, a long, frosty night, and except when singing observed a most pro- 
found silence the whole time. During that period they have no intercourse 
with their husbands, and they avoid. several other supposed pollutions, as not to 
eat or touch salt, and the like. 
The leader, once in two or three hours, came out at the head of his com- 
pany and, raising the death whoop, made one circle round the red-painted war 
pole, holding up in their right hands the small boughs of pine with the scalps 
fixed to them, singing as above, waving them to and fro, and then returned 
again. This religious order they strictly observed the whole time they were 
purifying themselves, and singing the song of safety and victory to the goodness 
and power of the divine essence. When the time of their purification and 
thanksgiving expired, the men and women went and bathed themselves, re- 
turned in the same manner, and anointed again, according to their usual custom. 
They joined soon after in a solemn procession, to fix the scalps on the tops 
of the houses of their relations who had been killed without revenge of blood. 
The war chieftain went first—his religious attendant followed him; the waz- 
riors next, according to their rising merit; and the songstresses brought up the 
rear. In this order they went round the leader’s winter house from the east to 
the north, the men striking up the death whoop and singing the death song; 
and then Yo, He He, Wah Wah, as described, the women also warbling Ha Ha, 
Ha He, so that one might have said, according to the sacred text, “great was 
the company of the women, who sung the song of triumph.” ” Then they fixed 
on the top of the house a twig of the pine they had brought with them, with 
a small piece of one of the scalps fastened to it, and this order they observed 
from house to house, till in their opinion they had appeased the ghosts of their 
dead. They went and bathed again, and thus ended their purification and 
triumphal solemnity—only the leader and his religious waiter kept apart three 
days longer, purifying themselves. I afterward asked the reason of this; 
they replied they were Ishtohoollo.” 
Last year I heard the Choktah women, in those towns which lie next to New Orleans, 
sing a regular anthem and dirge, in the dusk of the evenings, while their kinsmen were 
gone to war against the Muskohge.—Note by Adair. 
80 Adair, Hist, Am. Inds., pp. 164-167. 
