Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 August 1876 — Customs and Characteristics' of the Sinox. [ARTICLE]

Customs and Characteristics' of the Sinox.

The Sioux at present are more numerous than any other family of North American Indians. Together they number not less than 35,000, and up to 1866 fifty of their living chiefs had been photographed. The Sioux, with the exception of a certain characteristic lankness like all other American Indians, is physically well made. He is tall, muscular, and capable of enduring any amount of fatigue and privation. His forehead is narrow and retreating, though backed by a massive head. His face is broad in proportion to its length, the breadth being caused by the high cheek-bones. His eyes are small, black, and piercing; pose prominent, somewhat aquiline and widespread, lips thin, and chin somewhat prominent. The complexion is uniformly a clear, pinkishbrown or copper color. The women are much more inclined to fatness than the men, and while the latter are very tall the former are usually the reverse. Though as a rule the females are ugly, good faces and forms are not wanting among them. Both sexes are addicted to tire practice of eradicating from their persons all hair except that of the head. They sometimes tattoo, though of late this practice has fallen into disuse. Paint, however, on stated occasions is still used in profusion. it was a custom - with young men to cut the rim of the ear from top to bottom, thus forming a sort of loop, which, by means of weights or wires, Was gradually drawn down, in some cases even to the shoulders. To this loop ornaments of various kinds were conveniently appended. They also sometimes pierced the septum of the nose, decorating it with hollow bones, feathers, quills, or any other material which happened to strike them as ornamental.

Their food consists principally of game, though the Indian corn and a small variety of beans are cultivated by them, and afford additional means of subsistence. In former times their principal mode of cooking was by roasting. All kinds of birds, beasts and reptiles were esteemed as food, and even the larvae of some species of insects. Though when discovered they possessed the art of manufacturing vessels of clay, in which they sometimes cooked, it is not impossible that at some period of their existence they boiled by immersing heated stones in vessels of water containing the ingredients to be cooked. The Assiniboines, a dissenting tribe of the Sioux, have even received their name on account of this practice. It was not uncommon for them to cook an animal in its own skin or pouch. This was done by digging a hole in the earth into which the skin was pressed, being firmly secured with pegs around the edge. Water was then poured in, and to this joints of the meat, berries, roots and seeds W ere added. Into the whole a few hot stones were dropped until the mass was sufficiently cooked or rather heated for the red man’s palate. If, when a meal of this mush was concluded, any remained, and it was desirable to preserve it, the sediment was pressed into balls slightly flattened, and these, roasted in the ashes or dried in the sun, constituted their bread or cake. Their beverages consisted of the broths of meats and fermented liquors prepared from the juices of fruits, from maple sugar, from preparaions of starch of seeds. A preparation known as Konick k’nick; and formed of tobacco, sumac leaves, and the outer bark of the red willow, constituted their smoking material. At present they have substituted for their rude vessels of clay and their still more primitive boiling hollows, the metal vessels of the white man. The more civilized of them use to a limited extent flour and pork. In addition to their own mildly intoxicating liquors, they have adopted the rum and foul whisky of the frontiers. Cakes and coarse bread were also prepared from the meal

of the Indian corn and other seeds, formed into a paste. and baked either on hot atones or in (the ashes. The Indian delicacy, matrow, was prepared for eating by roasting tlie larger bones, breaking the ends and splitting them. It was eaten while still hot, lieing sucked from the cavities er scooped out by means of rude spoons of horn, wood or bone. The smaller bones were comminuted by means of large stone mauls and boiled until the meduiar matter rose to the surface; this was skimmed off and poured into large intestines or pouches, and thus preserved for future use. Berries, bone, canned meats of all kinds, and roasted insects, pounded together, constituted a very serviceable pemmican, which was used during long journeys and on hunting excursions. These methods, of preparing foou, together w ith some of tlie foods themselves, though still surviving among many of the Sioiix, are or have been going somewhat into disuse. Another preparation much used by men and hunting parties was the perfumed sagamite or roasted corn-meal and maple sugar? ■ : Though their habitations consist principally of tents of dressed buffalo skin, originally the Sioux, like the Manduns, Gros Ventres and Arickarces, used to some extent more substantial dwellings, consisting of conical huts of poles, thatched over with bark and earth. This form, however, never prevailed among them. In summer the women rarely wear anything on the head, and the men wear only ornamented head-dresses. In former times a muchprized head ornament consisted of a small, flat bone, with lines cut to represent the head of a buffalo, behind which was placed, according to the rank of the wearer, two or more sockets for eagle’s quills. The whole was surmounted with a tuft or crest of dyed buffalo hair. Such ornameats were placed on theshaved head, immediately in front of the scalp-lock. Chiefs sometimes wear a head-dress of feathers, made by connecting in a long row a large number of turkey or eagle quills in such a way that they would form a tapering line from one epd to the other. This was made fast to a sort of hood or cup with a long pennant tail, and hung gracefully from the crest to the feet. Masks made from the heads of animals have been used among them, especially at the torturing of captives and in spijje of their feasts and exhortations. ThenuHalo masks are well-known specimens of this kind, six or eight of which are exhibited. In addition to these head-dresses the women sometimes use disks of silver or sheet metal, the first being as broad as the band, the next a little smaller, and so on. The largest of these disks confined the hair immediately back of the head, and the others slightly under, lapping each other like the "scales of a fish, formed a tapering line from the head to the end of the hair. Such head-dresses are used only by the better classes, the poorer squaws contenting themselves by parting their hair in the middle and allowing Mt to hang in two braids behind or makingja roll of it in front of either ear—Philadelphia Press.