BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY


is at their head. At a whistle they break their circle and mingle together,
always keeping time. Then, on a second whistle, they reform their circle with
astonishing accuracy. They have other dances besides, of which I will speak
later more fully. [See pl. 4, a.]
 We slept at the house of the great chief on beds of canes which are plaited
and tied, like beds of sacking (lits de singles), interlaced with each other and
covered with buffalo skins. The next morning we went to walk in their fields
where they sow their corn. The women were there with their men, working.
The savages have flat, bent sticks, which they use to hoe the ground, for they
do not know how to work it as is done in France. They scratch the soil with
these crooked sticks and uproot with them the canes and the weeds which
they leave on the earth in the sun during fifteen days or a month. Then they
set fire to them, and when they are reduced to ashes they have a stick as
large as the arm, pointed at one end, with which they make holes in the earth
3 feet apart; they put into each hole seven or eight grains of corn and cover
them with earth. It is thus that they sow their corn and their beans. When
the corn is a foot high they take great care, as in France, to get rid of the
weeds which get into it, and repeat it two or three times a year. They make
use even now of their wooden hoes, because they find them lighter, although we
have given them hoes of iron.
 We remained some days in this village, and then we returned to our fort.a
 Like P6nicaut, Iberville speaks of this village as if it belonged to
 the Pascagoula tribe alone:
 The 29th [of April, 1700] I repaired at 7 in the morning to the village,
 in which there are about 20 families. This nation has been destroyed, like
 the other [i. e., the Biloxi], by diseases; the few who remain are well-formed
 people, especially the women; they have the best figures of any I have seen in
 this country. Having known that I was going to come to their village they
 made me a cabin entirely new. One can go from this village to the fort
 [Biloxi] in a day by land. [The Choctaw] are five days' journey
 from this village, straight to the north. The village of the Mobile is three
 days [journey] from here, to the northeast. b
 After this time, however, French endeavor was divided between
 Mobile on one side and the Mississippi on the other, little attention
 being paid to the small tribes intervening. The only reference to
 them in La Harpe is to the effect t tht the Pascagoula declared war
 against the Tawasa in March, 1707, but Bienville reconciled the two.c
 This probably had something to do with the first settlement of the
 Tawasa at Mobile. Unlike the Biloxi, the Pascagoula appear to
 have remained near the place where we first find them. Dumont
 gives an account of their temple and mortuary ceremonies as if, in
 his time, they constituted one village with the Biloxi,d in which case
 he probably visited them just after the return of the latter from the
 neighborhood of New Orleans.
 Du Pratz (1718-1726) has the following to say of them:
 Returning toward the sea and to the west of Mobile is the little nation of
 Pachca-Ogoulas, which the French call Pascagoulas. This nation is situated
 a largry, D6couvertes, v, 388-391, 1883.
 b Ibid., iv, 427, 1880.
 SLa IIarpe. Jour. Hist., 101, 1831.
 d To be published in the introduction to a forthcoming bulletin on the Biloxi language.


[BULL. 43