168 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1887. 



Boss, in describing the Eastern Tinneh, says:* "Among the Eastern 

 Tinned, immediately after birth, without washing, the infant is laid 

 naked on a layer of moss in a bag made of leather, and lined with hare- 

 skins. If it be summer the latter are dispensed with. This bag is 

 then securely laced, restraining the limbs in natural positions, and 

 leaving the child freedom to move the head only. In this idiase of its 

 existence it resembles strongly an Egyptian mummy." Cradles are 

 never used; but this machine, called a "moss bag," is an excellent ad- 

 junct to the rearing of children up to a certain age, and has become 

 almost if not universally adopted in the families of the Hudson Bay 

 Company's employes. The natives retain the use of the bag to a late 

 period, say until the child passes a year, during which tinie it is never 

 taken out except to change the moss. To this practice, continued to 

 such an age, I attribute the turned toes and rather crooked legs of 

 many of these Indians. One is somewhat reminded by this process of 

 the Eskimo sleeping-bag. In the National collection are several small 

 bags of the same pattern, but the label does not authorize the conclusion 

 that these small bags were used as cradles for infants. 



Bordering the Eskimo in the Labrador Peninsula live the Naskopi or 

 Scoffies, in latitude as far north as 53 degrees. Lucien Turner spent two 

 years among them, and has collected much precious information. He tells 

 us that when the Naskopi child is born it is not washed or allowed to 



made of a piece of leather. * * * Some moss is laid in the bottom of this hag, the 

 child is laid into it, and moss is inserted between its legs. The bag is then laced to 

 the fore side of the child as high as its neck. This bag is laid upon a board, to which 

 it is fastened by means of a strip of leather" (p. 316). Further details of arrangement? 

 ornamentation, and nursing (pp. 316, 317). 



Mackenzie, Sir A. (Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans, Lon- 

 don, 1801, 4to): Descriptive of the "swaddling-board" used by the Beaver Indians 

 (p. 149). 



N. B. — This board, about 2 feet long, covered with a bed of moss, to which it (the 

 child) is fastened by bandages "was in use in a sub-arctic climate"! Equally op- 

 posed to Hearne's statement concerning the absence of cradles in these regions is 

 Mackenzie's full description of a board cradle "in which the child, after it had been 

 swathed, is placed on a bed of moss." Head compression practiced here, i. e., near 

 Northwest coast; tribe not named (p. 371). It is to be remarked that Mackenzie 

 speaks of this last as a "neiv kind of cradle," the inference being that the Beaver 

 "swaddling-board" was used by the Chippewa, Knisteneaux, Assiniboines, etc. 



Fitz William (Northwest Passage by Land, p. 85) says that the cradle is "a board 

 with two side flaps of cloth, which lace together up the center. The child is laid on 

 its back on the board, packed with soft moss, and laced firmly down with its arms to 

 its sides, and only the head at liberty. The cradle is slung on the back of the mother 

 when traveling, or reared against a tree when resting in camp, the child being only 

 occasionally released from bondage for a few moments. The little prisoners are re- 

 markably good ; no squalling disturbes an Indian camp." 



Whymper (Alaska, p. 229): "The Tenan Kutchin (Tinneh) children are carried 

 in small chairs made of birch bark." Richardson (Journal I, 384) makes the same 

 statement. Bancroft (Nat. Races, etc. I, 131) says: "The women carry their infants 

 in a sort of bark saddle, fastened to the back; they bandage their feet in order to 

 make them small." 



* Smithsonian Report, 1856, p. 302. 



