820 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Boll. 137 



had houses with wattle walls. They wore their hair in a manner 

 reminding Europeans of the Turks, and occasionally reddened it with 

 certain kinds of duck feathers. They indulged less in tattooing than 

 the tribes along the Mississippi. They were noted for their pottery 

 and engaged much in boiling down and selling salt. They also traded 

 in the wood of the Osage orange, the favorite bowwood west of 

 the Mississippi. They did excellent work in ornamenting shell gor- 

 gets. Visitors were greeted with wailing and bathed ceremonially. 

 In 1541 some of them seem to have practiced frontal skull deforma- 

 tion, but this was given up before the French and Spaniards entered 

 their country. At that early period they also used lances in battle. 

 Warriors assembled in a special house to go through certain cere- 

 monies before setting out to war, and when the day came this was 

 burned down. The calumet ceremony had reached the eastern Caddo 

 by 1687 but not the western bands. Chiefs had gi^eat power but the 

 Hasinai Confederation, at least, seems to have been a theocracy. 

 Chiefs were borne directly on the shoulders of their subjects instead 

 of in litters. The eastern Caddo apparently had a well-developed 

 totemic clan system similar to that of the Creeks, but in the west 

 although a totemic system existed it was much modified and the rela- 

 tions between the clans suggest caste differences. Their terms of re- 

 lationship class them as of the Mackenzie type in this particular. 

 The corpses of leading men were treated with elaborate rites and 

 sometimes they were cremated. They had circular temples with 

 priestly guardians and ceremonies connected with them similar to 

 those of the Natchez. The cult seems to have been solar, or rather 

 celestial, and the stars constitute a conspicuous element in their myths. 



A word or two might be said regarding the marginal Quapaw 

 and Shawnee tribes. Quapaw houses were rectangular or rather 

 oval, apparently a wigwam pattern with mats used as covering 

 instead of bark. They were without temples. Their social organiza- 

 tion included numerous gentes with patrilineal descent and probably 

 moieties and other features like the Dhegiha Siouans. 



Shawnee houses were similar to those of other central Algonquians. 

 In their settlement among the Creeks on Tallapoosa Kiver they had 

 a town house said to be rectangular but perhaps oval. Their orig- 

 inal social organization was gentile and they had many totemic 

 divisions with male descent. Shamanism was highly developed, the 

 reputation of this tribe in such matters being very widely spread. 



Toward the west the cultural province of the Southeast ended 

 sharply with the Caddo and Chitimacha tribes. The Tonkawa, Ata- 

 kapa, Bidai, and Karankawa and the tribes beyond them extending 

 into northeastern Mexico and on the coast to Panuco, lived mainly by 

 food gathering and hunting, and had a culture so low that I have else- 



