The inhabitants of this retired spot, although offering fewer charms than did their residence, were in many respects scarcely less interesting. In front of the foremost hut was assembled a group of creatures with dark shining skins, which, at a first glance, and owing to their comical movements, might well have been taken for a herd of apes. Now, like those animals, they leaped the hedges and bushes, and then, like snakes, wound along the ground, or rolled down the river bank with a rapidity of motion that the eye could scarcely follow. Further on in the village were seen lads of a maturer age, practising warlike games and exercises. They were performing the spy-dance. Whilst one party crept stealthily over the grass, others lay upon the ground in a listening posture, and with their ears pressed to the earth, strove to distinguish the movements of their antagonists. At last, when the two parties had approached each other, they sprang suddenly up, and forming themselves in Indian file, commenced a combat in which they dealt furious blows with their blunt wooden tomahawks, exhibiting in every movement an extraordinary degree of activity and natural grace. Little interest was shown in these evolutions by the adult inhabitants of the village, whose extreme apathy and indifference contrasted curiously with the display of violent exertion on the part of the young Indians. Before the open doors of the huts sat the squaws and their daughters, stripping the maize from the ear, beating hemp, or picking tobacco; the children, who, according to Indian custom, are from their very birth kept in an upright posture, hanging against the outer walls on long concave boards or pieces of bark, to which their hands and feet were fastened by thongs of buffalo hide, their only garment a strip of calico round the hips.
At a short distance from the upper part of the clearing stood two wooden huts, which might have passed for two of the school or meeting-houses often met with in the American backwoods. Like the other dwellings composing the hamlet, they were propped against sycamore-trees, but they were distinguished by their larger dimensions and more careful style of building, by the bowers of palm and mangrove that surrounded them, and the plots of smooth turf before their doors. In front of one of these little houses, and in the centre of the lawn, about fifty men were squatted upon the ground, enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke, proceeding from tobacco-pipes, three to five feet in length, with which all of them were provided. They were attired in hunting-shirts, open in front, and showing the naked breast down to the wampum girdle, to which a second garment, reaching to the knee, was attached. Instead of the shaved head and scalping-tuft adopted by many Indian tribes, they wore the whole of their hair. They appeared to have taken their places according to their rank, the inner half-circle being composed of the older warriors, whilst the young men formed a second and third line. In the centre of the curve sat an old warrior, on whom the eyes of the assembly were respectfully fixed, and whose remarkable exterior, combined with the deference shown him, bespoke the chief of the tribe. It would be difficult to imagine a more singular, and at the same time interesting-looking person, than this old man, whose body seemed to consist of nothing but skin and bone. All the coarse and fleshy portions of his frame were dried up, and only veins and sinews remained. His open hunting-shirt disclosed a breast far broader than that of any one of his companions, resembling a board that had been chopped and hacked, so covered was it with the scars of many wounds. The chief characteristic of his countenance was a gloomy stoical gravity, mingled with a resigned expression, telling a tale of many a fearful struggle, and of grievous mental suffering. The fall of his tribe, and seven years' exile, had brought about this change in the Miko of the Oconees.