Passing to the tribes nearer the Mississippi, most of them of Choctaw affiliation, we find considerable testimony in the French writers to their use of mounds. Thus M. de la Harpe says: “The cabins of the Yasous, Courous, Offogoula and Ouspie are dispersed over the country on mounds of earth made with their own hands.”[75] The Natchez were mostly of Choctaw lineage. In one of their villages Dumont notes that the cabin of the chief was elevated on a mound.[76] Father Le Petit, a missionary who labored among them, gives the particulars that the residence of the great chief or “Brother of the Sun,” as he was called, was erected on a mound (_butte_) of earth carried for that purpose. When the chief died, the house was destroyed, and the same mound was not used as the site of the mansion of his successor, but was left vacant and a new one was constructed.[77] This interesting fact goes to explain the great number of mounds in some localities; and it also teaches us the important truth that we cannot form any correct estimate of the date when a mound-building tribe left a locality by counting the rings in trees, etc., because long before they departed, certain tumuli or earthworks may have been deserted and tabooed from superstitious notions, just as many were among the Natchez. We have the size of the Natchez mounds given approximately by M. Le Page du Pratz. He observes that the one on which was the house of the Great Sun was “about eight feet high and twenty feet over on the surface.”[78] He adds that their temple, in which the perpetual fire was kept burning, was on a mound about the same height. The custom of communal burial has been adverted to. At the time of the discovery it appears to have prevailed in most of the tribes from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. The bones of each phratry or gens—the former, probably—were collected every eight or ten years and conveyed to the spot where they were to be finally interred. A mound was raised over them which gradually increased in size with each additional interment. The particulars of this method of burial have often been described, and it is enough that I refer to a few authorities in the note.[79] Indeed it has not been pretended that such mounds necessarily date back to a race anterior to that which occupied the soil at the advent of the white man. I have not included in the above survey the important Dakota stock who once occupied an extended territory on the upper Mississippi and its affluents, and scattered clans of whom were resident on the Atlantic Coast in Virginia and Carolina. But, in fact, I have nowhere found that they erected earthworks of any pretentions whatever.