Our attention should next be turned to sepulture above the ground,
including lodge, house, box, scaffold, tree, and canoe burial, and the
first example which may be given is that of burial in lodges, which is
by no means common. The description which follows is by Stansbury,
[Footnote: Explorations of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah,
1852, p. 43.] and relates to the Sioux:
"I put on my moccasins, and, displaying my wet shirt like a flag to
the wind, we proceeded to the lodges which had attracted our
curiosity. There were five of them pitched upon the open prairie, and
in them we found the bodies of nine Sioux laid out upon the ground,
wrapped in their robes of buffalo-skin, with their saddles, spears,
camp-kettles, and all their accoutrements piled up around them. Some
lodges contained three, others only one body, all of which were more
or less in a state of decomposition. A short distance apart from these
was one lodge which, though small, seemed of rather superior
pretensions, and was evidently pitched with great care. It contained
the body of a young Indian girl of sixteen or eighteen years, with a
countenance presenting quite an agreeable expression; she was richly
dressed in leggins of fine scarlet cloth elaborately ornamented; a new
pair of moccasins, beautifully embroidered with porcupine quills, was
on her feet, and her body was wrapped in two superb buffalo-robes
worked in like manner; she had evidently been dead but a day or two,
and to our surprise a portion of the upper part of her person was
bare, exposing the face and a part of the breast, as if the robes in
which she was wrapped had by some means been disarranged, whereas all
the other bodies were closely covered up. It was, at the time, the
opinion of our mountaineers that these Indians must have fallen in an
encounter with a party of Crows; but I subsequently learned that they
had all died of the cholera, and that this young girl, being
considered past recovery, had been arranged by her friends in the
habiliments of the dead, inclosed in the lodge alive, and abandoned to
her fate, so fearfully alarmed were the Indians by this to them novel
and terrible disease."
It might, perhaps, be said that this form of burial was exceptional,
and due to the dread of again using the lodges which had served as the
homes of those afflicted with the cholera, but it is thought such was
not the case, as the writer has notes of the same kind of burial among
the same tribe and of others, notably the Crows, the body of one of
their chiefs (Long Horse) being disposed of as follows.
"The lodge poles inclose an oblong circle some 18 by 22 feet at the
base, converging to a point at least 30 feet high, covered with
buffalo-hides dressed without hair except a part of the tail switch,
which floats outside like, and mingled with human scalps. The
different skins are neatly fitted and sewed together with sinew, and
all painted in seven alternate horizontal stripes of brown and yellow,
decorated with various life-like war scenes. Over the small entrance
is a large bright cross, the upright being a large stuffed white wolf-
skin upon his war lance, and the cross-bar of bright scarlet flannel,
containing the quiver of bow and arrows, which nearly all warriors
still carry, even when armed with repeating rifles. As the cross is
not a pagan but a Christian (which Long Horse was not either by
profession or practice) emblem, it was probably placed there by the
influence of some of his white friends. I entered, finding Long Horse
buried Indian fashion, in full-war dress, paint and feathers, in a
rude coffin, upon a platform about breast high, decorated with
weapons, scalps, and ornaments. A large opening and wind-flap at top
favored ventilation, and though he had lain there in an open coffin a
full month, some of which was hot weather, there was but little
effluvia; in fact, I have seldom found much in a burial-teepee, and
when this mode of burial is thus performed it is less repulsive than
natural to suppose."
This account is furnished by Col. P. W. Norris, superintendent of
Yellowstone National Park, he having been an eye-witness of what he
relates in 1876.
The Blackfeet, Sioux, and Navajos also bury in lodges, and the Indians
of Bellingham Bay, according to Dr. J. F. Hammond, U. S. A., place
their dead in carved wooden sarcophagi, inclosing these with a
rectangular tent of some white material.
Bancroft [Footnote: Nat. Races of Pac. States, 1874, vol. 1, p. 780.]
states that certain of the Indians of Costa Rica, when a death
occurred, deposited the body in a small hut constructed of plaited
palm reeds. In this it is preserved for three years, food being
supplied, and on each anniversary of the death it is redressed and
attended to amid certain ceremonies. The writer has been recently
informed that a similar custom prevailed in Demerara. No authentic
accounts are known of analogous modes of burial among the peoples of
the Old World, although quite frequently the dead were interred
beneath the floors of their houses, a custom which has been followed
by the Mosquito Indians of Central America and one or two of our own
tribes.