1877.] Aboriginal Funereal Customs in the United States, 208 
_ out on raised platforms, wrapping them in blankets and leaving 
them to the mercies of the elements and carnivorous birds. 
Lieut. J. W. Abert tells us, in his Notes of a Military Recon- 
noissance in 1846, that he saw in the Arkansas bottom “ several 
Indian bodies wrapped in blankets and skins, exposed on plat- 
forms of lodge poles, high up in cotton-wood trees, where they 
are safe from wolves and the sacrilegious touch of men. The 
` air of the prairie produces rapid desiccation, and in this respect 
resembles Egypt and the islands of the ancient Guanches.” Ca- 
noe burial is resorted to by several tribes of the Northwest. Mr. 
John K. Townsend, in his narrative of a journey across the 
Rocky Mountains, describes several such burial grounds. One, 
at Mount Coffin, consisted of a great number of canoes containing 
bodies of Indians, each being carefully wrapped in blankets, and 
supplied with many of his personal effects in the form of weap- 
ons and implements. Near the Columbia River was found an- 
other cemetery of this sort. The bodies were lying in canoes 
which had been elevated five or six feet into trees or placed on 
stakes. In some instances the corpses ‘+ were nailed in boxes or 
covered by a small canoe, which was turned bottom upwards and 
placed in a larger one, and the whole covered by strips of bark 
carefully arranged over them. 
“ The corpses of the several different tribes which are buried 
here are known by the difference in the structure of their canoes, 
and the sarcophagi of the chiefs from those of the common peo- 
ple by the greater care which has been manifested in the ar- 
rangement of the tomb.” 
Mr. Townsend also mentions another method which some of 
these tribes occasionally employed: “ We observed to-day sev- 
eral high, conical stacks of drift-wood near the river. These are 
the graves of the Indians. Some of the cemeteries are of consid- 
erable extent, and probably contain a great number of bodies.” 
These tombs should in all likelihood be classed with tumuli or 
burial mounds. i 
_ Washington Irving describes some of the same burial grounds 
in his Astoria, but his descriptions do not differ materially from 
those of Mr. Townsend. 
In the Sandwich Islands, Mr. Townsend informs us, the natives 
practiced another mode of burial which was partially aquatic. 
Similar to a sacrificial altar, they construct what is called a morai. 
“It was the place to which the bodies of the dead chiefs were 
carried previous to interment. After lying here in state for a 
