e two joined a-top by some strong cement. A large nest
consists of eight or ten baskets, contained within each
other. Their dimensions are different, but they usually make
the outside basket about a foot deep, a foot and an half
broad, and almost a yard long.[7]

This statement could in most respects be made with equal truth and
propriety of the Cherokee work of the present time; and their
pre-Columbian art must have been even more pleasing, as the following
paragraph suggests:

The Indians, by reason of our supplying them so cheap with
every sort of goods, have forgotten the chief part of their
ancient mechanical skill, so as not to be well able now, at
least for some years, to live independent of us. Formerly,
those baskets which the Cheerake made, were so highly
esteemed even in South Carolina, the politest of our
colonies, for domestic usefulness, beauty, and skilful
variety, that a large nest of them cost upwards of a
moidore.[8]

That there was much uniformity in the processes and range of products
and uses throughout the country is apparent from statements made by
numerous writers. Speaking of the Louisiana Indians, Du Pratz says:

The women likewise make a kind of hampers to carry corn,
flesh, fish, or any other thing which they want to transport
from one place to another; they are round, deeper than broad,
and of all sizes. * * * They make baskets with long lids that
roll doubly over them, and in these they place their earrings
and pendants, their bracelets, garters, their ribbands for
their hair, and their vermillion for painting themselves, if
they have any, but when they have no vermillion they boil
ochre, and paint themselves with that.[9]

It happens that few baskets have been recovered from mounds and graves,
but they are occasionally reported as having been discovered in caverns
and shelters where conditions were especially favorable to their
preservation. Such specimens may as reasonably be attributed to the
mound-building as to the other Indians. The following statement is from
John Haywood:

On the south side of Cumberland river, about 22 miles above
Cairo, * * * is a cave * * *. In this room, near about the
center, were found sitting in baskets made of cane, three
human bodies; the flesh entire, but a little shrivelled, and
not much so. The bodies were those of a man, a female and a