kindly lent me by Dy. O. H. Fowler, of this city. Whether it be a Choctaw or
a Natchez, I cannot determine, but it is probably the latter.
The W axsaws, according to Lawson, resorted to a somewhat similar device.
1£ They use a roll which is placed on the babe’s forehead, it being laid with its
back on a flat board, and swaddled down hard thereon, from one end of this engine
to the other.” “ The instrument,” he adds, “ is a sort of press that is let out and
in, more or less, according to the discretion of the nurse, in which they make the
child’s head flat: it makes the eyes stand a prodigious way asunder, and the hair
hang over the forehead like the eaves of a house, which seems very frightful.”*
Finally, it seems certain that the Katawbas on the east, and the Attakapas on the
west side of the Mississippi, practised a similar usage.
T H E C H E T IM A C H E S .
Near the Natchez was another powerful though not numerous nation, called
the Chetimaches. Du Pratz states that the latter are a branch of the Natchez,
who have always looked upon them as their brethren.! But this aflinity appears
to have been of a social nature only, for Mr. Gallatin observes that he could find
no analogies in their respective languages, and their customs appear to have been
altogether dissimilar.
Hist, of Carolina, p. 33. t Hist, of Louisiana, p. 314.