BABY-BASKETS AND FLATTENED SKULLS. Aa | 
sumption any considerable amount of fish, the principal kind used for this 
purpose being the small white lake-fish. 
The Modok women make a very pretty baby-basket of fine willow- 
work, cylinder-shaped, with one-half of it cut away, except a few inches at 
theends. It is intended to be set up against the wall, or carried on the 
back; hence the infant is lashed perpendicular in it, with his feet standing 
in one end, and the other covering his head like a small parasol. In one I 
saw this canopy was supported by small standards, spirally wrapped with 
strips of gay-colored calico, with looped and scalloped hangings between. 
Let a mother black her whole face below the eyes, including the nose, 
shining black; thrust a goose-quill three inches long through the septum 
of the nose; don her close-fitting skull-cap, and start to town with her baby- 
basket lashed to her back, and she feels the pride of maternity strong within 
her. The little fellow is wrapped all around like a mummy, with nothing 
visible but his head, and sometimes even that is bandaged back tight, so 
that he may sleep standing. 
From the manner in which the tender skull is thus bandaged back, it 
occasionally results that it grows backward and upward at an angle of about 
forty-five degrees. Among the Klamath Lake Indians I lave seen a man, 
fifty years old perhaps, whose forehead was all gone, the head sloping right 
back on a line with the nose, yet his faculties seemed nowise impaired. 
‘The conspicuous painstaking which the Modok squaw expends on her 
baby-basket is an index of her maternal love. And, indeed, the Modok are 
strongly attached to their offspring—a fact abundantly attested by many 
sad and mournful spectacles witnessed in the closing scenes of the war of 
1873. On the other hand, a California squaw often carelessly sets her 
baby in a deep, conical basket, the same in which she carries her household 
effects, leaving him loose and liable to fall out. If she makes a baby-basket, 
it is totally devoid of ornament; and one tribe, the Mi-wok, contemptuously 
call it ‘the dog’s nest”. It is among Indians like these that we hear of 
infanticide. : 
One ancient aboriginal custom observed by the Modok was rather 
pretty and poetical—that of intoning an orison in the morning before they 
rose. At early daylight, before any one had come out of his wickiup, they 
IU/L) 
