SHUSWAP PEOPLE OF BEITISH COLUMBIA. 9 



The sweat-houses or sweating booths of the Shuswaps are identical with those of the 

 Tiuneh, Crées and other peoples. They consist usually of about a dozen thin willow 

 wands, planted in the ground at both ends. Half of them run at right angles to the other 

 half, and they are tied together at each intersection. Over these a blanket or skin is usiially 

 spread, but I have also seen them covered with earth. A small heap of hot stones is piled 

 in the centre, and upon these, after carefully closing the apertures, the occupant pours 

 some water. The sweat-house is always situated on the banks of a stream or lake, so that 

 on issuing therefrom the bather may at once plunge into the cold water. 



The permanent marks of old inhabited places met with throughout the Shuswap 

 country are of the following kinds : — 



Sites of old Keekwilee-houses, in the form of hollows ten to thirty feet in diameter. 

 These hollows soon become widely saucer-shaped depressions, and they mark the positions 

 of old winter houses or winter villages. Old fish-caches. — These are found after the lapse 

 of some time as similar hollows, but deeper and narrower in proportion, being usually 

 from three to six feet wide only. As originally made they are cylindrical pits excavated 

 in dry ground and lined with bark. Dried salmon is then piled into them, and the whole 

 is covered with bark and earth. Such caches often occur about the sites of winter villages, 

 but are also frequently found at a distance from these and grouped around the actual fish- 

 ing places. Eoot-bakiug places. — In baking various roots, more particularly those of the 

 lily {Lilium Columbianum), a spot is first cleared and a fire built upon it. When the sur- 

 rounding soil has become sufficiently heated, the roots, enveloped in mats or green herb- 

 age, are laid upon the bed of the fire, and the whole is covered up by piling together the 

 earth from all sides upon the mass of roots. After the lapse of a sufficient time the roots 

 are dug out in a baked or steamed condition, and either at once eaten or dried for future 

 use. Such root-baking places are usually in the vicinity of root-gathering grounds, and 

 after some years appear as low cones from fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, with mini- 

 ature craters in the middle. These might easily be mistaken by an imaginative anti- 

 qtiarian for old sacrificial sites, on account of the evident traces of fire which the stones 

 and earth show. 



To the above it may be added that a little group of fire-scarred stones buried in moss 

 or other vegetation, and marking the site of an old sweat-house, is often found as an 

 enduring sign of the spot near which a hunting or fishing camp has been pitched many 

 years before. 



One of the largest and most important sites of the old winter villages which has been 

 noted is that known as Hut-tsat-tsl, or "cold spring." This is situated on the north side 

 of the valley of Kelly Creek, about two miles below the lake. Just below the old village 

 site the stream plunges precipitately down to the Fraser River, its lower valley being nearly 

 impassable. If all the old Keekwilee-houses here indicated by hollows still visible were at 

 any time simultaneously inhabited, the population must have been numerous. It has been 

 long abandoned, and in and aboiit the sites of the houses large trees of at least one hundred 

 years of age are growing. The present Indians say that the old people carried their dried 

 salmon up from the edge of the river to this winter village by way of the valley of the 

 small stream immediately north of Kelly Creek, which is still named Ni-hlip-toiv' -us-tum, 

 or " going over stream," and on this route are two smaller groups of hollows representing 

 houses and showing similar signs of considerable antiquity. The site of Hut-tsat-tsl was 



Sec. II, 1891. 2. 



