﻿WESTERN TRIBES. 363 



believes that the Western Eskimos who meet the 

 Mackenzie River tribes at Barter Island have 

 their Avestern boundary at Cape Barrow ; there 

 they have commercial intercourse with the tribes 

 described by Wrangell and Baer, who, in their 

 turn, barter with the Asiatic Tchuktche and with 

 the Russians settled on the American coast, and 

 their neighbours the Kolushans. The tribes 

 crowded together on the shores of Beering's Sea 

 within a comparatively small extent of coast-line 

 exhibit a greater variety, both in personal appear- 

 ance and dialect, than that which exists between 

 the Western Eskimos and their distant countrymen 

 in Labrador; and ethnologists have found some 

 difficulty in classifying them properly. The ap- 

 pellations they have assumed, or which have been 

 bestowed upon them correctly and incorrectly, have 

 increased the confusion. They are, however, like 

 the other Eskimos, a littoral people, who, in their 

 skin kaiyaks, pursue all kinds of sea-beasts, — seals, 

 sea-lions, walruses, polar-bears, sea-otters, and 

 whales, — clothing themselves in their spoils and in 

 bird-skins, and making much less use of the leather 

 of the rein-deer skin than their southern and eastern 

 neighbours of a different stock. The Tchugatschih 

 of King William's Sound are the most southern of 



particular islands, there is external evidence that it is consider- 

 able." — Dr. Latham, Varieties of Man, Sfc. 



