Author: David I. Bushnell

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-11-25

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780331935042

Excerpt from Native Cemeteries and Forms of Burial East of the Mississippi In the journals of many explorers and missionaries who traversed the great wilderness east of the Mississippi when it was yet the home of native tribes are references to the burial customs of the people with whom they came in contact. Villages were widely dispersed throughout the land, and often the places of burial were near by, differing in distant parts of the country, conforming with the man ners of the tribe by whom the particular region was occupied. The native villages have now disappeared, although many sites are indicated by bits of pottery and other objects scattered over the surface, but frequently the cemeteries once belonging to the settle ments may be discovered. The forms of burial varied. Among some tribes a period of months or years would intervene between the death of the person and the final disposition of the remains, and seldom were all the ceremonies attending death and burial recorded by a single writer, therefore it is necessary, when attempting to re count the entire procedure, to quote from several narratives. And in many instances the description of the last disposition of the dead will agree with the position of the remains now revealed in the ancient cemeteries, thus tending to identify the former occupants of the sites, and to verify the statements of early observers, many of which are presented on the following pages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.