d a murderer who fled thither was safe from
vengeance. The captives were tortured to death in the red towns, and
it was in these that the chiefs and warriors gathered when they were
planning or preparing for war.

They held great marriage-feasts; the dead were buried with the goods
they had owned in their lifetime.

Every night all the people of a town gathered in the council-house to
dance and sing and talk. Besides this, they held there on stated
occasions the ceremonial dances; such were the dances of war and of
triumph, when the warriors, painted red and black, returned, carrying
the scalps of their slain foes on branches of evergreen pine, while
they chanted the sonorous song of victory; and such was the Dance of
the Serpent, the dance of lawless love, where the women and young
girls were allowed to do whatsoever they listed.

Once a year, when the fruits ripened, they held the Green-Corn Dance, a
religious festival that lasted eight days in the larger towns and four
in the smaller. Then they fasted and feasted alternately. They drank out
of conch-shells the Black Drink, a bitter beverage brewed from the
crushed leaves of a small shrub. On the third day the high-priest or
fire-maker, the man who sat in the white seat, clad in snowy tunic and
moccasins, kindled the holy fire, fanning it into flames with the
unsullied wing of a swan, and burning therein offerings of the
first-fruits of the year. Dance followed dance. The beloved men and
beloved women, the priest and priestesses, danced in three rings,
singing the solemn song of which the words were never uttered at any
other time; and at the end the warriors, in their wild war-gear, with
white-plume headdresses, took part, and also the women and girls, decked
in their best, with ear-rings and armlets, and terrapin shells filled
with pebbles fastened to the outside of their legs. They kept time with
foot and voice; the men in deep tones, with short accents, the women in
a shrill falsetto; while the clay drums, with heads of taut deer-hide,
were beaten, the whistles blown, and the gourds and calabashes rattled,
until the air resounded with the deafening noise.[24]

Though they sometimes burnt their prisoners or violated captive women,
they generally were more merciful than the northern tribes.[25]

But their political and military systems could not compare with those of
the Algonquins, still less with those of the Iroquois. Their confederacy
was of the loosest kin