The Custom Of Artificially
Flattening The Heads Of Both Men And Women, In Infancy,
Was Formerly Practised By Nearly All The Tribes Of The Chinook Family
Along The Columbia River.
Various means are used to accomplish
this purpose, the most common and most cruel being to bind a flat
Board on the forehead of an infant in such a way that it presses
on the skull and forces the forehead up on to the top of the head.
As a man whose head has been flattened in infancy grows older,
the deformity partly disappears; but the flatness of the head
is always regarded as a tribal badge of great merit.
"On the morning of the twenty-eighth," says the journal, having dried
our goods, we were about setting out, when three canoes came from above
to visit us, and at the same time two others from below arrived for the
same purpose. Among these last was an Indian who wore his hair in a que,
and had on a round hat and a sailor's jacket, which he said he had obtained
from the people below the great rapids, who bought them from the whites.
This interview detained us till nine o'clock, when we proceeded down
the river, which is now bordered with cliffs of loose dark colored rocks
about ninety feet high, with a thin covering of pines and other small trees.
At the distance of four miles we reached a small village of eight houses
under some high rocks on the right with a small creek on the opposite side
of the river.
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