beads, shells, &c., with children, toys of pottery, beads,
curious pebbles, &c.

Sometimes, in the subsequent burials, the side slab of a previous
burial was used as a portion of the second cist. All of the cists
were covered with slabs.

Dr. Jones has given an exceedingly interesting account of the stone
graves of Tennessee, in his volume published by the Smithsonian
Institution, to which valuable work[15] the reader is referred for a
more detailed account of this mode of burial.

G. K. Gilbert, of the United States Geological Survey, informs the
writer that in 1878 he had a conversation with an old Moquis chief as to
their manner of burial, which is as follows: The body is placed in a
receptacle or cist of stone slabs or wood, in a sitting posture, the
hands near the knees, and clasping a stick (articles are buried with the
dead), and it is supposed that the soul finds its way out of the grave
by climbing up the stick, which is allowed to project above the ground
after the grave is filled in.

The Indians of Illinois, on the Saline River, according to George Escoll
Sellers,[16] inclosed their dead in cists, the description of which is
as follows:

Above this bluff, where the spur rises at an angle of about 30 deg., it
has been terraced and the terrace as well as the crown of the spur
have been used as a cemetery; portions of the terraces are still
perfect; all the burials appear to have been made in rude stone
cists, that vary in size from 13 inches by 3 feet to 2 feet by 4
feet, and from 18 inches to 2 feet deep. They are made of
thin-bedded sandstone slabs, generally roughly shaped, but some of
them have been edged and squared with considerable care,
particularly the covering slabs. The slope below the terraces was
thickly strewed with these slabs, washed out as the terraces have
worn away, and which have since been carried off for door-steps and
hearth-stones. I have opened many of these cists; they nearly all
contain fragments of human bones far gone in decay, but I have never
succeeded in securing a perfect skull; even the clay vessels that
were interred with the dead have disintegrated, the portions
remaining being almost as soft and fragile as the bones. Some of the
cists that I explored were paved with valves of fresh-water shells,
but most generally with the fragments of the great salt-pans, which
in every case are so far gone in decay as to have lost the o