5 o8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



difficult h and tl sounds, so characteristic of the Kootenay language, is 

 also much appreciated by the Indians. This will be easily understood 

 when one learns that, in the mouths of the whites the word for ' horse,' 

 h'Tcatldhaatltsin, is made over into kallahalshin, or worse, while the 

 distinction between words of entirely different significations, e. g., 

 g ' iistet, ' trout,' and h • 'iistit, ' tamarack,' is altogether ignored. His 

 attention to these points caused the Indian to dub him ' The man who 

 talks straight.' A third name conferred upon him recorded the fact 

 that he never lied to them. In another the Indians called attention 

 to his very dark hair, ' The man with hair like an Indian ' — the posses- 

 sion of which was another bond of union with them. A fifth, and 

 more formidable name, ' He uses the long stick ' — he owed to the 

 anthropometric apparatus which he carried with him. By use of these 

 various names the coming and going of the writer was heralded all 

 over the Indian country and the natives soon came to know him well 

 and understand the reason of his presence among them. Some of the 

 white settlers have also received interesting nicknames, one prominent 

 individual, who had a glass eye, being termed ' The man who takes out 

 his eye,' and the Indians are clever in their imitation of his manipula- 

 tion of it. 



To hear a white man blundering along in his efforts to speak 

 Kootenay correctly is one of the best quarter-hours the Indians ever 

 enjoy. Even the wives and children of white men who have married 

 squaws extract considerable amusement out of the linguistic mistakes 

 of their husbands and fathers. Any one who believes that the Indian 

 never laughs will be heartily undeceived after a session of this sort. 

 The inability of the whites to master the numerous gutturals with 

 which the Kootenay language is provided is a never-ending source of 

 laughter. The Indians went off into roars of merriment over such 

 mistakes as saying inisin (horsefly) for inisimin (rainbow) ; J/upi 

 (owl) for Viipok (woodpecker) ; hahas (skunk) for halia (crow), etc. 

 When some one said for Jcdnkuptse (bread baked in a pan), the per- 

 fectly unmeaning tankuptse, it reminded the Indians of a real word, 

 tfarikuts (grouse), and they indulged in a fit of laughter. When the 

 writer mispronounced the word g m iistet (trout), on one occasion, an 

 Indian went off into the woods near by and returned with a diminutive 

 ' tamarack,' the name of which is in Kootenay h • 'iistit, pronouncing 

 that word correctly, as he handed him the shrub. The writer's desire, 

 which the Indians fully comprehended, to obtain a large vocabulary 

 and a considerable body of texts of myths and stories in the native 

 language led naturally enough to the very embarrassing demand that 

 he should read every word and every sentence over and over again until 

 he could repeat them all without the slightest error — this was worse 

 than the child's well-known demand for the repetition of its favorite 



