SWANOWN] INDIANS OP THE SOUTHEASTEEN UNITED STATES 539 



Eomans has a brief note to the effect that : 



The women disfigure the heads of their male children by means of bags of 

 sand, flattening them into different shapes, thinking it adds to their beauty. 

 (Romans, 1775, p. 82.) 



The Choctaw in particular were widely known among the traders 



as "Flat Heads," and it is to them again that William Bartram's 



description applies: 



The Choctaws are called by the traders flats, or flat-heads, all the males 

 having the fore and hind part of their skulls artificially flattened, or com- 

 pressed ; which is effected after the following manner. As soon as the child 

 is born, the nurse provides a cradle or wooden case, hollowed and fashioned, 

 to receive the infant, lying prostrate on its back, that part of the case where 

 the head reposes, being fashioned like a brick mould. In this portable machine 

 the little boy is fixed, a bag of sand being laid on his forehead, which by 

 continual gentle compression, gives the head somewhat the form of a brick 

 from the temples upwards; and by these means they have high and lofty 

 foreheads, sloping off backwards. (Bartram, 1792, p. 515.) 



The term "flat head" was also bestowed upon the Catawba Indians 

 and their allies, but, although I am not prepared to deny that the 

 Catawba were given to the practice, it happens that the only descrip- 

 tion that has come down to us is from the Waxhaw tribe, near neigh- 

 bors of the Catawba, and it is this tribe which the writer of this 

 description, Lawson, says were "called by their neighbors flat heads" : 



In their infancy, their nurses lay the back part of their children's heads on 

 a bag of sand, (such as engravers use to rest their plates upon.) They use a 

 roll which is placed upon the babies forehead, it being laid with its back on a 

 flat board, and swaddled hard down thereon, from one end of this engine to 

 the other. This method makes the child's body and limbs as straight as an 

 arrow, there being some young Indians that are perhaps crookedly inclined, 

 at their first coming into the world, who are made perfectly straight by this 

 method. I never saw an Indian of mature age that was anyways crooked, 

 except by accident, and that way seldom; for they cure and prevent deformi- 

 ties of the limbs and body very exactly. The instrument I spoke of before 

 being a sort of a press, that is let out and in, more or less, according to the 

 discretion of the nurse, in which they make the child's head flat: it makes 

 tlhe eyes stand a prodigious way asunder, and the hair hang over the fore- 

 head like the eves of a house, which seems very frightful. They being asked 

 the reason why they practiced this method, replied the Indian's sight was 

 much strengthened and quicker thereby to discern the game in hunting at 

 larger distance, and so never missed of becoming expert hunters, the per- 

 fection of which they all aim at, as we do to become experienced soldiers, 

 learned school-men, or artists in mechanics. (Lawson, 1860, pp. 61-6Z) 



Mention of the effect of this process on the stature probably serves 

 to explain the custom reported by Peter Martyr on the authority of 

 Ayllon and his companions and a Siouan Indian of this general region 

 by which children of the "royal" family were given gigantic size 

 through a kind of postnatal manipulation. 



I now come to a fact which will appear incredible to your excellency. You 

 already know that the ruler of this region is a tyrant of gigantic size. How 



