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In my frequent walks, some years since, along the beaches of the bays and inlets of the Gulf of Mexico, a few miles south of the Guadalupe River, I rarely failed to find a numbed of aboriginal relics—especially immediately after the ebb of a high tide. I have also found many about the bases of the sandy hillocks, or "dunes," which have been heaped up by the winds in many places along the coast. I have occasionally found large flints; but these were probably used for harpoons. Some of these arrow-heads are very rudely wrought, while others, particularly a very small kind, are of exquisite finish, with a point as sharp as a lancet, and the cutting edges finely and beautifully serrated. Most of the specimens collected by me had necks, or shanks, by which they were fitted into the shaft; a few, however, were without this appendage, but were either grooved or beveled on both sides of the base of the tongue. The flint pebbles, from which these arrow-heads were chipped, were probably obtained from 30 to 40 miles inland, where they abound in several localities. All the Indian tribes of Texas, when it was first colonized by Americans, used metallic arrow-heads, which they had probably substituted for flint ones nearly a century before, or not long after the establishment of the missions and military posts of San Antonio and La Bahia, where they doubtless obtained copper, brass, and iron, all of which metals they used for pointing their missiles. Fragments of earthen pottery are coextensive with the flint relics. But they bear evidence that our aborigines were never much skilled in the ceramic art.

The Indian dead usually receive very shallow sepulture. Often the Texas tribes do not bury their dead at all, but merely pile logs or stones upon their bodies, which are soon extricated and the flesh devoured by beasts of prey. The bones being thus left to the action of the elements, rapidly decay. Hence the osseous remains of the aborigines are rarely found far inland, but in various places along the coast the winds have performed the rites of sepulture by blowing the sand upon the dead. At Igleside, in 1861, human bones were disinterred at two localities more than a hundred yards apart, from a depth of 8 feet; and recently, in October, 1877, others were discovered in a sand hill, or "dune," near what is locally known as the "False Live Oak," in Refugio County. About a month after the discovery I went to the spot and found that a large quantity of human bones, including several skulls, had been exposed by the caving of the "dune;" but being much decayed, had broken to pieces in falling, and quickly dissolved in the Gulf tide at the base of the "dune." I saw for 40 feet along the face of the steep slope, from which the sand had slidden, a number of human bones and skulls projecting at various angles. One skull, which was better preserved