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With their undoubted advancement beyond the Iroquois and Minnitarees, the Mound-Builders may have constructed better houses upon these platform elevations than the plans indicate. No remains of adobes have been found in connection with these embankments, and nothing to indicate that walls of such brick had ever been raised upon them.
He establishes the fact, that the "kinship" or "gens," which we may justly consider as the unit of organization in American aboriginal society, participated in the property of the deceased. Wyandottes, Id., cap. VII, p. 153. Missouri-tribes, p. 155. Winnebagoes, p 157. Mandans, p 158. Minnitarees, p. 159. Creeks, p. 161. Choctas, p. 162. Chickasas, p. 163.
Openings through the roof are left over the fire-pits for the exit of the smoke. The principle of construction adopted is that employed in the dirt lodges of the Minnitarees and Mandans of the Upper Missouri.
Or they might have fallen back upon a house of inferior grade, located upon the level ground, such as the timber-framed houses of the Minnitarees and Mandans, in which case there would have been no necessity for the embankments in question.
In this restoration the houses are nearly triangular and of simple construction. Indians much ruder than they are supposed to have been, as the Minnitarees and Mandans, walled their houses with slabs of wood standing on a slope, and roofed them at a lower angle, covering both the sloping external walls and the roof with a "concrete of tough clay and gravel," a foot or more thick.
The Mandans and Minnitarees of North America used to hold a festival in spring which they called the corn-medicine festival of the women. They thought that a certain Old Woman who Never Dies made the crops to grow, and that, living somewhere in the south, she sent the migratory waterfowl in spring as her tokens and representatives.
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