HOLMES ANNIVERSARY VOLUME 



in width, and from nine to ten feet high; above the staging there were 

 a number of poles laid across, and well arranged, with cross poles to 

 which these packages of souls [bodies] were hung or bound. The 

 whole bodies, as they were to be put in the bottom of the pit, had been 

 the preceding day placed under the scaffold, stretched upon bark or 

 mats fastened to stakes about the height of a man, on the border of 

 the pit. . . . They unfolded also their parcels of robes, and all the 

 presents they had brought, and hung them upon poles, which were 

 from 5 to 600 toises in extent; so there were as many as twelve hun- 

 dred presents which remained thus on exhibition two full hours, to 

 give strangers time to see the wealth and magnificence of the coun- 

 try." 1 The sides and bottom of the pit were lined with beaver robes, 

 forty-eight in number, each formed of ten skins. Many of the bodies 

 were wrapped in similar robes. Various objects were placed with the 

 remains, including three large kettles which were deposited near the 

 center of the pit. This ceremony was witnessed among the Hurons, 

 and although ossuaries were not made by the Cherokee, the southern 

 Iroquoian tribe, small pits which have been found to exist beneath 

 the cairns attributed to this people may, in some manner, be asso- 

 ciated with the great burial pits of the north. 



The extensive stone-grave cemeteries of Tennessee and parts of 

 Kentucky were probably the work of the Shawnee. In the majority 

 of the graves the bodies had been placed in an extended position, but 

 in others the bones alone had been deposited after the flesh had been 

 removed. Similar graves occur northward along the Mississippi to 

 beyond the mouth of the Missouri, up the valley of the Ohio into 

 Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and Virginia. They have been 

 traced along the course of the Tennessee river into Alabama, and a 

 few scattered stone-lined graves have been discovered in northern 

 Georgia. They do not indicate the custom of a single tribe, but rather 

 prove the presence of a material suitable for their construction. It 

 is known that the Kaskaskia, and probably other Illinois Indians, 

 constructed stone-lined graves on the bluffs near the Mississippi, at 

 the mouth of the Kaskaskia, in the early part of the last century, and 

 other similar burials may be equally modern. The Kaskaskia, before 

 their removal southward in 1703, occupied a site on the upper Illinois 

 river. Their village and stone-grave cemetery were destroyed by the 

 Iroquois early in 1680. 



Burial mounds, isolated and in groups, are more numerous north 

 of the Ohio than in the southern country. And along the bluffs 



1 Jesuit Relations, vol. x, Cleveland, 1897. 



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