38 MUMMIES— SOUTH CAROLINA. 



they remove it and lay it upon crotches cut on purpose for the support 

 thereof from the earth ; then they anoint it all over with the aforementioned 

 ingredients of the powder of this root and bear's oil. When it is so done 

 they cover it over very exactly with the bark of the pine or cypress tree 

 to prevent any rain to fall upon it, sweeping the ground very clean all 

 about it. Some of his nearest of kin brings all the temporal estate he was 

 possessed of at his death, as guns, bows and arrows, beads, feathers, match- 

 coat, &c. This relation is the chief mourner, being clad in moss, with a 

 stick in his hand, keeping a mournful ditty for three or four days, his face 

 being black with the smoke of pitch-pine mixed with bear's oil. All the 

 while he tells the dead man's relations and the rest of the spectators who 

 that dead person was, and of the great feats performed in his lifetime, all that 

 he speaks tending to the praise of the defunct. As soon as the flesh grows 

 mellow and will cleave from the bone they get it off and burn it, making 

 the bones very clean, then anoint them with the ingredients aforesaid, 

 wrapping up the skull (very carefully) in a cloth artificially woven of opos- 

 sum's hair. The bones they carefully preserve in a wooden box, every 

 year oiling and cleansing them. By these means they preserve them for 

 many ages, that you may see an Indian in possession of the bones of his 

 grandfather or some of his relations of a longer antiquity. They have other 

 sorts of tombs, as when an Indian is slain in that very place they make a 

 heap of stones (or sticks where stones are not to be found) ; to this memo- 

 rial every Indian that passes by adds a stone to augment the heap in respect 

 to the deceased hero. The Indians make a roof of light wood or pitch-pine 

 over the graves of the more distinguished, covering it with bark and then 

 with earth, leaving the body thus in a subterranean vault until the flesh 

 quits the bones. The bones are then taken up, cleaned, jointed, clad in 

 white-dressed deer-skins, and laid away in the Quiogozon, which is the royal 

 tomb or burial-place of their kings and war-captains, being a more mag- 

 nificent cabin reared at the public expense. This Quiogozon is an object of 

 veneration, in which the writer says he has known the king, old men, and 

 conjurers to spend several days with their idols and dead kings, and into 

 which he could never gain admittance." 



Another class of mummies are those which have been found in the 



