him alone, but that they would cease to be his friends unless he gave orders to light the fires again,[93] lighting his own before them; and that they should not leave him till his brother was buried.

He took all the Frenchmen by the hands, and said:  “Since all the chiefs and noble officers will have me stay on earth, I will do it; I will not kill myself; let the fires be lighted again immediately, and I’ll wait till death joins me to my brother; I am already old, and till I die I shall walk with the French; had it not been for them I should have gone with my brother, and all the roads would have been covered with dead bodies.”

Improbable as this account may appear, it has nevertheless been credited by some of the wisest and most careful of ethnological writers, and its seeming appearance of romance disappears when the remembrance of similar ceremonies among Old World peoples comes to our minds.

An apparently well-authenticated case of attempted burial sacrifice is described by Miss A.J.  Allen,[94] and refers to the Wascopums, of Oregon.

At length, by meaning looks and gestures rather than words, it was found that the chief had determined that the deceased boy’s friend, who had been his companion in hunting the rabbit, snaring the pheasant, and fishing in the streams, was to be his companion to the spirit land; his son should not be deprived of his associate in the strange world to which he had gone; that associate should perish by the hand of his father, and be conveyed with him to the dead-house.  This receptacle was built on a long, black rock in the center of the Columbia River, around which, being so near the falls, the current was amazingly rapid.  It was thirty feet in length, and perhaps half that in breadth, completely enclosed and sodded except at one end, where was a narrow aperture just sufficient to carry a corpse through.  The council overruled, and little George, instead of being slain, was conveyed living to the dead-house about sunset.  The dead were piled on each side, leaving a narrow aisle between, and on one of these was placed the deceased boy; and, bound tightly till the purple, quivering flesh puffed above the strong bark cords, that he might die very soon, the living was placed by his side, his face to his till the very lips met, and extending along limb to limb and foot to foot, and nestled down into his couch of rottenness, to impede his breathing as far as possible and smother his cries.

Bancroft[95] states that—­

the slaves sacrificed at the graves by the Aztecs and Tarascos were selected from various trades and professions, and took with them the most cherished articles of the master and the implements of their trade wherewith to supply his wants—­

while among certain of the Central American tribe death was voluntary, wives, attendants, slaves, friends, and relations sacrificing themselves by means of a vegetable poison.