538 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 137 



thus every night until its skull has taken on the shape prescribed by custom. 

 Some savages near Mobile, through our example, are beginning to give up a 

 custom which costs so much. (Swanton, 1911, pp. 54-55.) 



Du Pratz, Dumont, and other writers speak of this same usage. 

 When Iberville visited the Houma Indians opposite the mouth of 

 Red River, in 1699 he noticed that the chief had "a very flat fore- 

 head, although the other men of his nation do not have it, at least 

 very few of the old men. This custom is changing among them." 

 (Margrj^, 1875-86, vol. 4, p. 184; Swanton, 1911, p. 286.) From 

 what we know of the Houma tribe, we may interpret this to mean 

 that when they were living farther north, in their old home, head 

 deformation was not extensively practiced, but that when Iberville 

 paid his visit, they were gradually adopting the usage from the 

 Natchez and other neighboring Indians. 



Du Pratz, in speaking of the Natchez infant, says : 



The head is placed on a little pillow of skin filled with Spanish beard, which 

 does not extend beyond the upper part of the cradle, in such a way that the 

 head is as low as the shoulders, and is held to this pillow by thongs which are 

 double strips of deerskin over the forehead. It is this which makes their heads 

 flat. (Le Page du Pratz, 1758, vol. 2, pp. 309-310; Swanton, 1911, p. 86.) 



Dumont remarked that: 



When their children come into the world they take care to crush and 

 flatten the upper part of the forehead with a plank, so that when they shall 

 have grown up they may be in better condition to bear all kinds of loads. 

 (Dumont, 1753, vol. 1, pp. 140-141 ; Swanton, 1911, pp. 89-90.) 



Adair is one of the earliest writers to speak of head deformation 

 among the larger tribes of the central South : 



The Indians flatten their heads, in divers forms: but it is cliiefly the crown 

 of the head they depress, in order to beautify themselves, as their wild fancy 

 terms it; for they call us long heads, by way of contempt. The Choktah 

 Indians flatten their fore-heads, from the top of the head to the eye-brows 

 with a small bag of sand; which gives them a hideous appearance; as the 

 forehead naturally shoots upward, according as it is flattened : thus, the rising 

 of the nose, instead of being equidistant from the beginning of the chin, to that 

 of the hair, is, by their wild mechanism, placed a great deal nearer to the one 

 and farther from the other. The Indian nations, round South-Carolina, and 

 all the way to New Mexico, ... to effect this, fix the tender infant on a kind 

 of cradle, where his feet are tilted, above a foot higher than a horizontal 

 position, — his head bends back into a hole, made on purpose to receive it, where 

 he bears the chief part of his weight on the crown of the head, upon a small 

 bag of sand, without being in the least able to move himself. The skull re- 

 sembling a fine cartilaginous substance, in its infant state, is capable of taking 

 any impression. By this pressure, and their thus flattening the crown of the 

 head, they consequently make their heads thick, and their faces broad: for, 

 when the smooth channel of nature is stopped in one place, if a destruction of 

 the whole system does not thereby ensue, it breaks out in a proportional re- 

 dundancy, in another. (Adair, 1775, pp. 9-10 ; also p. 284.) 



