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Updated: June 10, 2025
Near to each stood a small cabin, partly dug out of the ground, and in consequence very warm; to this the inmates retired in winter, for they were sensitive to cold. In the centre of each village stood the great council-house or rotunda, capable of containing the whole population; it was often thirty feet high, and sometimes stood on a raised mound of earth.
Gilbert was in despair, when a grey-headed old man on a rough pony, armed with a big gun, a cutlass, and a huge pair of pistols, came clattering up to the council-house. "What!" he exclaimed, when he heard Gilbert's last appeal; "are none of you ready to go and help the daughter and son-in-law of my old commander, Captain Amyas Layton?
Here in huts of logs, turf, and other primitive materials, their town had been laid out with streets and byways, a large council-house, a mill, a stockade, and blockhouses. The Indians had received them with great friendliness, feeling with them a common cause of grievance, since the heavy hand of the Gentile had pushed them also to this bleak frontier.
The captives were tortured to death in the red towns, and it was in these that the chiefs and warriors gathered when they were planning or preparing for war. They held great marriage-feasts; the dead were buried with the goods they had owned in their lifetime. Every night all the people of a town gathered in the council-house to dance and sing and talk.
The conical-shaped winter tenements had each a thatch of snow; the great circular council-house, with its whitened dome, glimmered as stately as some marble rotunda, on its high mound, distinct against the blurring blue shadow of the night and the gray clouds and the bare boughs of the encompassing forest.
The braves, with your brother O-pe-chan-ca-nough, have taken the pale-face chief in the Chickahominy swamps and are bringing him to the council-house." "Great man" or "strong one," a title by which Wa-bun-so-na-cook, or Powhatan, was frequently addressed. "Wa," said the old chief, "it is well, we will be ready for him." At once Ra-bun-ta was surrounded and plied with questions.
"On his way he passed a very large Indian lodge, which was probably designed as a great council-house; but it differed in its construction from all that we had seen, lower down the Missouri or elsewhere.
The rest of the Carolina pack-men, trooping noisily past, averted their eyes from the darkened doors of the empty houses; the weed-grown spaces of the "beloved square," where once the ceremonies of state, the religious rites, the public games and dances were held; the council-house on its high mound, whence had been wont to issue the bland vapors of the pipe of peace or the far more significant smoke emitted from the cheera, the "sacred fire," which only the cheera-taghe, the fire-prophets, were permitted to kindle, and which was done with pomp and ceremony in the new year, when every spark of the last year's fire had been suffered to die out.
While the sachems deliberated in the council-house, the chiefs and old men, the warriors, and often the women, were holding their respective councils apart; and their opinions, laid by their deputies before the council of sachems, were never without influence on its decisions.
Soon after his return a feast is made for the slain man, in order that his ghost may not haunt his slayer. In the Pelew Islands, when the men return from a warlike expedition in which they have taken a life, the young warriors who have been out fighting for the first time, and all who handled the slain, are shut up in the large council-house and become tabooed.
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