1891.] Mortuary Customs of the Navajo Indians. 305 
either at once abandoned to fate, or else may be fed from time to 
time by relatives until death comes in relief. 
Navajos believe that an evil spirit or devil is at the bottom 
of everything that has in.any way anything to do with death, 
and they rarely speak of their dead, for fear of offending the evil 
„one; and it has been said that one of these Indians will freeze to 
death rather than build a fire for himself out of the logs of a 
hogan wherein one of their number has died. 
Next, or in the third place, the Navajos will resort to grave- 
digging as a means sometimes of disposing of their dead, and of 
this method I have seen one or two examples. While living at 
Fort Wingate, New Mexico, a few years since, there was a 
drunken brawl among some of those Indians at a hogan ona hill 
within a few steps of my house. During the fracas a Navajo 
squaw was shot and killed. The following day the party pulled 
down the hogan and burned it, and, wrapping the body of the 
woman in some cocoa coffee-sacks obtained at the trader’s, they 
buried her on the spot in a grave so shallow that she was hardly 
covered from sight. A heavy log or two was placed to protect 
the corpse against dogs and wolves, and the place was abandoned. 
A year afterwards I secured her skull, and at this writing it 
adorns the top of one of the bookcases in my study. 
In none of these burials do any ceremonies ever seem to be 
indulged in by the Indians; but it has been reported that the 
mourners, after the death of a relative, smear their foreheads 
and under their eyes with tar obtained from the piñon tree, 
leaving it there until it wears off, and do not renew it. I have 
never observed any custom of this character. 
Others have said that in the event of a Navajo dying and 
leaving no kin, the lodge of the deceased is pulled down over his 
or her dead body, stones piled over it, with a few branches and 
mud, and the vicinity is at once deserted. Instances of this 
kind must also be rare, and it has never been my fortune to see a 
similar case. Sometimes the shallow grave is dug within the 
hogan, and the latter pulled down over it, and the Indians move 
away from the place as usual. 
