The Indians flatten their heads, in divers forms: but it is chiefly the crown of the head they depress, in order to beautify themselves, as their wild fancy terms it; for they call us _long heads_, by way of contempt. The Choktah Indians flatten their fore-heads, from the top of the head to the eye-brows with a small bag of sand; which gives them a hideous appearance; as the forehead naturally shoots upward, according as it is flattened: thus, the rising of the nose, instead of being equidistant from the beginning of the chin, to that of the hair, is, by their wild mechanism, placed a great deal nearer to the one, and farther from the other.[9] The Indian nations, round South-Carolina, and all the way to New Mexico, (properly called Mechiko) to effect this, fix the tender infant on a kind of cradle, where his feet are tilted, above a foot higher than a horizontal position, {8} —his head bends back into a hole, made on purpose to receive it, where he bears the chief part of his weight on the crown of the head, upon a small bag of sand, without being in the least able to move himself. The skull resembling a fine cartilaginous substance, in its infant state, is capable of taking any impression. By this pressure, and their thus flattening the crown of the head, they consequently make their heads thick, and their faces broad: for, when the smooth channel of nature is stopped in one place, if a destruction of the whole system doth not thereby ensue, it breaks out in a proportional redundancy, in another. May we not to this custom, and as a necessary effect of this cause, attribute their fickle, wild, and cruel tempers? especially, when we connect therewith, both a false education, and great exercise to agitate their animal spirits. When the brain, in cooler people, is disturbed, it neither reasons, nor determines, with proper judgment? The Indians thus look on every thing around them, through their own false medium; and vilify our heads, because they have given a wrong turn to their own. {9} ----- Footnote 1: The earliest home of the Shawnee Indians in historic times was on the Cumberland River, in Tennessee, which for a long period was called by the French, and so named on their maps, Chaouanon (Shawnee) Riviere. A branch of the tribe moved from there southward across the Tennessee where the Savannah River took their name. Shortly before 1715 the Chickasaw and Cherokee Indians combined and drove the Shawnees from their long-established settlements on the Cumberland. Haywood says that a part of the tribe returned to the region (about 1745) to be again expelled, going to the Creeks.