FQ:TICIDE—A SCENE OF CREMATION. 207 
also. Moved by her passionate sorrow and her entreaties, they complied 
with her wishes; she was hanged, and then laid upon the funeral pyre 
beside her son, and together they were burned. Such is the tradition. 
It is very generally asserted that unlike the river tribes they never 
committed infanticide before the advent of our countrymen. When whites 
took Indian women for wives, they were often mortified at the receipt of 
little pledges of love; and to their lasting shame and infamy be it written, 
(this fact is well authenticated,) they compelled them either to give them 
away or destroy them outright. But even if they were not originally 
addicted to infanticide, they were sometimes guilty of fceticide, which was 
accomplished, not by drugs, but by violent physical means. This fact was 
stated to me by an accomplished lady who had lived among them many 
years with her husband. 
They are singular also in their devotion to the formality of incinera- 
tion. ‘Two Indians were once drowned in the lake near Kelsey, and their 
relations searched for them assiduously for weeks that they might reduce 
their bodies to ashes, without which they believed they would never behold 
the Happy Western Land. A lady described to me a scene of cremation 
which she once witnessed, and instead of the revolting exhibitions seen 
among some tribes it was conducted with seemly and mournful tenderness. 
The body was carefully wrapped in blankets, laid upon the pyre, and the 
torch applied, and as the flames advanced fresh blankets were continually 
thrown over the body to conceal its loathsomeness from sight until it was 
consumed. A woman, one of the chief mourners, sat at the head, with her 
eyes upturned to heaven, chanting, mourning, and weeping. The mother, 
bowed down and broken with grief, with close-cropped head, and face 
disfigured with the blackest pitch, as the emblem of mourning, sat at the 
foot, lamenting and lacerating her face until she was exhausted. She then 
rose, tottered away and fell at the feet of her husband who encircled her 
with his arm and tenderly stroked down her hair while he mingled his 
tears with hers. An Indian counts it no unmanliness to weep for his friends. 
They believe, like all others, that the soul can be disembodied and set 
free by the agency of fire alone; hence the necessity of burning. Hence, 
also, when a person of a goodly fatness is burning, and his flesh sputters 
