Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/214

202 natural that the chiefs were lodged in a manner superior to their subjects. The following description (Garcilaso de la Vega, Historia de la Florida) will apply generally to all the capitals and habitations of the chiefs in Florida:

They always endeavored to place their towns upon elevated sites; but, because such situations are rare in Florida, or on account of difficulty in procuring suitable materials for building, they raised eminences (mounds). Choosing a suitable place, they brought a great quantity of earth, which they raised into a kind of platform, sometimes of a very considerable height, the flat top of which was capable of holding from ten to twenty houses, to lodge the cacique (chief), his family, and suite. The sides of the mound were made so steep that it was impossible to ascend but by steps, or causeways of earth, sloping gradually to the ground. Around the foot they traced a square, conformable to the extent of the town they intended to build, and around this square the more considerable people built their dwellings. The commonalty built around them in the same manner; the whole population thus surrounding their chief.

The house of the cacique was larger and more commodious than the houses of the people, but not otherwise materially different; though a Portuguese gentleman who accompanied De Soto describes the houses of the chiefs in some parts of the present State of Alabama as having had porticoes to their doors.

It is stated that in the dwelling of the Cacique of Palisema the inner apartment was hung with buckskins so well dried and wrought "that one would have taken them for good tapestry, the floor being also covered with the same." The furniture in the dwellings of the Natchez corresponded with their superior construction. They had an equivalent for a bedstead, and also wooden seats or stools, boxes, baskets, and mats of split cane, finely wrought and ornamented.

Their tools, like those of the barbarous tribes, were made of bones, flints, etc., although copper was sometimes used. In the history of De Soto's invasion we read of copper axes or hatchets, pikes with copper heads, staves, clubs, etc., made partly or entirely of copper. They also made "kettles of an extraordinary size, pitchers with small mouths, gallon bottles with long necks, and pots or pitchers for bear oil which would hold forty pints." They made salt from the water of saline springs near the mouth of the Arkansas River, evaporating it in earthen pans made for the purpose, which left the salt formed into square cakes. Their dress was much like that of the ruder tribes, which, however, they surpassed in the manufacture of clothing from wild hemp, mulberry bark, and feathers. McCulloh states that fans made from feathers were used by the Natchez nobility.