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