Next day the party came in sight of the village, painted in alternate compartments of red and black, their heads enveloped in swan’s down, and the centre of their crown, surmounted with long white feathers.  They advanced, singing their war song, and bearing the scalps on a verdant branch of evergreen.

Arrived at the village, the chief who had led the party advanced before his warriors to his winter cabin, encircling it in an order of march contrary to the course of the sun, singing the war song after a particular mode, sometimes on the ten or and sometimes on the bass key, sometimes in high and shrill, and sometimes in deep and guttural notes.  The waiter, or servant of the leader, called Etissu, placed a couple of blocks of wood near the war-pole, opposite the door of a circular cabin, called the hot-house, in the centre of which was the council fire.  On these blocks he rested a kind of ark, deemed among their most sacred things.  While this was transacting the party were profoundly silent.  The chief bade all set down, and then inquired whether his cabin was prepared and every thing unpolluted, according to the custom of their fathers?  After the answer, they rose up in concert and began the war-whoop, walking slowly round the war-pole as they sung.  All the consecrated things were then carried, with no small show of solemnity, into the hot-house.  Here they remained three whole days and nights, in separation from the rest of the people, applying warm ablutions to their bodies, and sprinkling themselves with a decoction of snake root.  During a part of the time, the female relations of each of the consecrated company, after having bathed, anointed, and drest themselves in their finest apparel, stood, in two lines opposite the door, and facing each other.  This observance they kept up through the night, uttering a peculiar, monotonous song, in a shrill voice for a minute; then intermitting it about ten minutes, and resuming it again.  When not singing their silence was profound.

The chief, meanwhile, at intervals of about three hours, came out at the head of his company, raised the war-whoop, and marched round the red war-pole, holding in his right hand the pine or cedar boughs, on which the scalps were attached, waving them backward and forward, and then returned again.  To these ceremonies they conformed without the slightest interruption, during the whole three days’ purification.  To proceed with the whole details of the ceremony to its close, would be tedious.  We close it, only adding, that a small twig of the evergreen was fixed upon the roof of each one of their cabins, with a fragment of the scalps attached to it, and this, as it appeared, to appease the ghosts of their dead.  When Boone asked them the meaning of all these long and tedious ceremonies, they answered him by a word which literally imports “holy.”  The leader and his waiter kept apart and continued the purification three days longer, and the ceremony closed.