the myriad waterways of the Virginia coast and the Chesapeake, are
recorded as bathing every morning, whereas sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Englishmen, who considered bathing unhealthy, generally bathed
only about once a year. In drafty English houses, they had a point; but filth
provoked a variety of skin diseases. The Virginia Indians, the Delaware, the
Creek, and other societies enjoyed steam baths in buildings rather like
Finnish saunas where groups of neighbors gathered to gossip and refresh
themselves. Robert Beverley wrote in 1705 that “in every town they have a
sweating house, and a doctor is paid by the public to attend it.”
Since the English went weeks or months without taking off their
clothes, even to sleep, they had to resign themselves to hordes of bodily
pests. In contrast, the Indians provided a poor habitat for vermin, since
they had little body hair and wore few clothes. Champlain saw 500 or 600
Indians on the New England coast “who were all naked, except for their
private parts, which they cover with a little piece of doe-skin or seal-skin.
The women also cover theirs with skins, or white leaves, and all have the
hair well combed, and braided in various ways.
The common dress of a man was a fur mantle that the English called a
“matchcoat” (from the Odjibwa dialect of Algonquian,matchigode). This
cloak made the Indians appear to the English like the despised Irish in their
falaing.In everyday working situations Indian men normally wore just a
loincloth, and children wore nothing. Women were usually bare-breasted
but normally wore a sort of loincloth, which the English called a flap.
However, while picking fruit, working in a cornfield, or bathing, they dis-
pensed with all clothing, as the traveler William Bartram rather closely
observed of a group of young Cherokee women, “disclosing their beauties to
the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool, flitting streams.”
Another somewhat less poetic but even more observant Englishman,
William Fyffe, remarked in 1761 that both sexes shave pubic hair “off
their privities.” Travelers were fascinated by what they saw. John Lawson
remarked: “As for their Privities, since they wore Tail-Clouts, to cover their
Nakedness, several of the Men have a deal of Hair thereon. It is to be observ’d
that the Head of the Penisis cover’d (throughout all the Nations of the
IndiansI ever saw).”
What was true of clothing was also true of housing: simplicity was the
The Native Americans 13