by the Seneca more than fifty years ago. A somewhat similar story
is related by Adair (Hist. American Indians, p. 392) of a young
"Anantooeah" (i. e., Nûndawegi or Seneca) warrior taken by the Shawano.
Death song--It seems to have been a chivalrous custom among the eastern
tribes to give to the condemned prisoner who requested it a chance to
recite his warlike deeds and to sing his death song before proceeding
to the final torture. He was allowed the widest latitude of boasting,
even at the expense of his captors and their tribe. The death song
was a chant belonging to the warrior himself or to the war society of
which he was a member, the burden being farewell to life and defiance
to death. When the great Kiowa war chief, Set-ängya, burst his shackles
at Fort Sill and sprang upon the soldiers surrounding him, with the
deliberate purpose to sell his life rather than to remain a prisoner,
he first sang the war song of his order, the Kâitseñ'ko, of which the
refrain is: "O earth, you remain forever, but we Kâitseñ'ko must die"
(see the author's Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, in Seventeenth
Annual Report of the Bureau American Ethnology, part 1, 1901).