sehold, the
relatives begin a peculiar wailing, and the immediate members of the
family take off their customary apparel and clothe themselves in
rags and cut themselves across the arms, breast, and other portions
of the body, until sometimes a fond wife or mother faints from loss
of blood. This scarification is usually accomplished with a knife,
or, as in earlier days, with a flint. Hired mourners are employed at
times who are in no way related to the family, but who are
accomplished in the art of crying for the dead. These are invariably
women. Those nearly related to the departed, cut off the long locks
from the entire head, while those more distantly related, or special
friends, cut the hair only from one side of the head. In case of the
death of a chief, the young warriors also cut the hair, usually from
the left side of the head.

After the first few days of continued grief, the mourning is
conducted more especially at sunrise and sunset, as the Comanches
venerate the sun; and the mourning at these seasons is kept up, if
the death occurred in summer, until the leaves fall, or, if in the
winter, until they reappear.

It is a matter of some interest to note that the preparation of the
corpse and the grave among the Comanches is almost identical with the
burial customs of some of the African tribes, and the baling of the body
with ropes or cords is a wide and common usage of savage peoples. The
hiring of mourners is also a practice which has been very prevalent from
remotest periods of time.

_GRAVE BURIAL._

The following interesting account of burial among the Pueblo Indians of
San Geronimo de Taos, New Mexico, furnished by Judge Anthony Joseph,
will show in a manner how civilized customs have become engrafted upon
those of a more barbaric nature. It should be remembered that the Pueblo
people are next to the Cherokees, Choctaws, and others in the Indian
Territory, the most civilized of our tribes.

According to Judge Joseph, these people call themselves _Wee-ka-nahs_.

These are commonly known to the whites as _Piros_. The manner of
burial by these Indians, both ancient and modern, as far as I can
ascertain from information obtained from the most intelligent of the
tribe, is that the body of the dead is and has been always buried in
the ground in a horizontal position with the flat bottom of the
grave. The grave is generally dug out of the ground in the usua