these means they preserve them for many ages that you may see an
Indian in possession of the bones of his grandfather or some of his
relations of a longer antiquity. They have other sorts of tombs as
when an Indian is slain in, that very place they make a heap of stones
(or sticks where stones are not to be found), to this memorial every
Indian that passes by adds a stone to augment the heap in respect to
the deceased hero. The Indians make a roof of light wood or pitch pine
over the graves of the more distinguished, covering it with bark and
then with earth leaving the body thus in a subterranean vault until
the flesh quits the bones. The bones are then taken up, cleaned,
jointed, clad in white dressed deer skins, and laid away in the
_Quiogozon,_ which is the royal tomb or burial place of their
kings and war captains, being a more magnificent cabin reared at the
public expense. This Quiogozon is an object of veneration, in which
the writer says he has known the king, old men, and conjurers to spend
several days with their idols and dead kings, and into which he could
never gain admittance."

Another class of mummies are those which have been found in the
saltpeter and other caves of Kentucky, and it is still a matter of
doubt with archaeologists whether any special pains were taken to
preserve these bodies, many believing that the impregnation of the
soil with certain minerals would account for the condition in which
the specimens were found. Charles Wilkins [Footnote: Trans. Amer.
Antiq. Soc., 1820, vol. 1, p. 360] thus describes one:

"... exsiccated body of a female ... was found at the depth of about
10 feet from the surface of the cave bedded in clay strongly
impregnated with nitre, placed in a sitting posture, incased in broad
stones standing on their edges, with a flat stone covering the whole.