CRADLES OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES 179 



colored grass. This pretty, flat cone resembles the salmon-baskets fig- 

 ured and described in the Ray collection.* 



There is in the National Museum a cradle for a new-born babe, from 

 the McOloud River Indians of California, belonging to the basket-tray 

 type. It is shaped very much like a large grain-scoop or the lower 

 half of a moccasin inverted, and made of twigs in twined weaving. 

 There are double rows of twining two inches or thereabouts apart, and 

 nearly all of them are interlocked, which gives the appearance of a four- 

 ply braid. The meshes form a diamond pattern by inclusion in the 

 half turns of the twine quincuncially. 



The general shoe-shape of the cradle is produced by commencing at the 

 heel, which is here the bottom, and doubling the twigs by a continually 

 sharper turn until along the bottom the rods simply lie parallel, that 

 is, the rods that lie along the middle of the bottom terminate at the 

 heel, while those that form the sides and upper end are continuous. 



Around the edge and forming a brace across the upper end is a 

 border made of a bundle of rods seized with tough bast or split root.t 

 The twigs themselves project upwards an inch or two from this brace, 

 and are not fastened off. (Figs. 11 and 12.) 



The Modoc women make a very pretty baby-basket of fine willow- 

 work, cylinder-shaped, with one-half of it cutaway, except a few inches 

 at the ends t It is intended to be set up against the wall or carried on 

 the back; hence the infant is lashed perpendicular in it, with his feet 

 standing in one end and the other covering his head, like a small para- 

 sol. In one that I saw this canopy was supported by small standards, 

 spirally wrapped with strips of gay colored calico, with looped and scal- 

 loped hangings between. Let a mother black her whole face below the 

 eyes, including the nose, shining black, thrust a goose quill 3 inches 

 long through the septum of the nose, don her close-fitting skull cap and 

 start to town with her baby-basket lashed to her back, and she feels the 

 pride of materuity strong within her. The little fellow is wrapped all 

 around like a mummy, with nothing visible but his head, and sometimes 

 even that is bandaged back tight, so that he may sleep standing. 



From the manner in which the tender skull is thus bandaged back it oc- 

 casionally results that it grows backward and upward at an augleof about 

 45 degrees. Among the Klamath Lake Indians I have seen a man fifty 

 years old, perhaps, whose forehead was all gone, the head sloping right 



* Perouse, G. de la. (Voyage Round the World. London, 1/99. 8vo. Vol. in.) 

 Description by Dr. Rollin of the manner of swathing infants and of the cradles used 

 by the California Indians (p. 209). Almost the same statement is made of the treat- 

 ment of infants among the Tartars of the east coast, opposite Saghalien. Their 

 cridles were of basket work, wood or birch bark (p. 237). 



t Bancroft. (Native Races of the Pacific States. New York, 1873. Vol. i.) Among 

 the central Californian tribes, " as soon as the child is born" it is washed "and then 

 swaddled from head to foot in strips of soft skin and strapped to a board, which is 

 carried on the mother's back" (p. 391). 



t Powers, Cont. N. A. Ethnol., in, p. 257. 



