“highly prize personal bravery, and therefore constantly wear the marks of distinction which they received for their exploits; among these are, especially, tufts of human hair attached to the arms and legs, and feathers on their heads."[56]

When Sioux warriors return from the warpath with scalps “the squaws as well as the men paint with vermilion a semicircle in front of each ear."[57] North Carolina Indians when going to war painted their faces all over red, while those of South Carolina, according to DeBrahm, “painted their faces red in token of friendship and black in expression of warlike intentions.”  “Before charging the foe,” says Dorsey, “the Osage warriors paint themselves anew.  This is called the death paint.”  The Algonquins, on the day of departure for war, dressed in their best, coloring the hair red and painting their faces and bodies red and black.  The Cherokees when going to war dyed their hair red and adorned it with feathers of various colors.[58] Bancroft says (I., 105) that when a Thlinkit arms himself for war he paints his face and powders his hair a brilliant red.  “He then ornaments his head with a white eagle feather as a token of stern, vindictive determination.”

John Adair wrote of the Chickasaws, in 1720, that they “readily know achievements in war by the blue marks over their breasts and arms, they being as legible as our alphabetical characters are to us”—­which calls attention to a very frequent use of what are supposed to be ornaments as merely part of a language of signs.  Irving remarks in Astoria, regarding the Arikara warriors, that “some had the stamp of a red hand across their mouths, a sign that they had drunk the life-blood of an enemy.”  In Schoolcraft we read (II., 58) that among the Dakotas on St. Peter’s River a red hand means that the wearer has been wounded by an enemy, while a black hand indicates “I have slain an enemy.”  The Hidatsa Indians wore eagle feathers “to denote acts of courage or success in war”; and the Dakotas and others indicated by means of special spots or colored bars in their feathers or cuts in them, that the wearer had killed an enemy, or wounded one, or taken a scalp, or killed a woman, etc.  A black feather denoted that an Ojibwa woman was killed.  The marks on their blankets had similar meanings.[59] Peter Carder, an Englishman captive among the Brazilians, wrote: 

“This is to be noted, that how many men these savages doe kill, so many holes they will have in their visage, beginning first in the nether lippe, then in the cheekes, thirdly, in both their eye-browes, and lastly in their eares."[60]

Of the Abipones we read that,