240 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Watching for Salmon. 



seeds^ and had at hand their primitive devices for milling such things. 

 On the other hand, the small quantities of canned stuff found in the 

 cahins and camps were never touched. The Indians seemed to have a 

 peculiar fear of it, perhaps from one or two unfortunate experiences, 

 with canned goods that had spoiled. On at least one occasion there was 

 taken from a cahin a small quantity of flour conspicuously labelled 

 poisoned. No white man would have taken chances with this flour, 

 however hungi-y. 



More than once on such expeditions the Indians were perilously 

 near exposure. Once an excited white man, with a repeating rifle and 

 dogs, trailed them so closely that in crossing a stream they dropped 

 a piece of headgear in their hurry. This headdress, fearfully and 

 wonderfully wrought out of scraps of a dozen different fabrics, is now 

 in our Museum. At the time of this escape the Indians were not seen, 

 though where they had forded the stream the rocks were still wet. 



Mere chance on several occasions nearly resulted in discovery for 

 them. A hunter one time, passing along in the winter, noticed a low 

 smoke rising out of a snow-covered thicket across a stream where he 

 knew that no white man would have been. Later on, after the final 

 emergence of the tribe from their obscurity, we found the remains of 

 one of their encampments in this very thicket. 



Such is the only actual evidence we have of the life of this tribe for 

 over a generation. The most important change within that period is 

 a shift in their habitat. After the massacre of '65 they lived at various 

 places up and down the stream known as Mill Creek, robbing cabins when 

 driven by famine. After 1885 however no more cabins were robbed 

 along this stream. The Indians were evidently driven out by the in- 



