48 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
will show this eulichon industry. Natives hang fish on racks to dry in 
the sun, women press the sediment ieft from the cooking through a coarse 
mesh to secure the remaining oil. The fire silhouettes the figures and 
makes plain the method of heating the stones. ‘There is a lean-to, an 
old building used only at this time of the fishing, and always the Nass 
River with its sand bars flows in swift current beyond the trees. 
One of the pleasantest localities we visited was Bella Coola at the 
head of Burke Channel, the site that furnished material for the fourth 
painting of the series. Set back between the mountains the Bella Coola 
valley with its swift river and its lines of delicately colored cotton-wood 
trees impresses one at once with its beauty. Here we found excellent 
gardens, ideal homes and broad fields. On either side of the river were 
Indian communities, one modern and under missionary influence, the 
other still retaining its old customs. 
I learned here the fascinating facts of the bread-making industry. 
Down in the flats, near the mouth of the river, the families gather during 
the summer and make bread for themselves and their neighbors. Seated 
in a rope chair, high up in a hemlock tree, a native scrapes away the 
inside bark of the tree. Below in the sunlight children hold out a cedar 
blanket to catch the shreds as they fall. Near them is the large pit in 
the ground to which they carry the bark for cooking. Hot stones are put 
over the surface of the pit, and over these stones alternate layers of moist 
skunk cabbage leaves and the scraped bark. Four days are required 
for the cooking, at the end of which time the bark is ground into a pulp 
by means of pestle and stone, and then is left in the sun to dry. 
dverywhere during the expedition I studied the commercial transac- 
tions of the Indians, but it was not until I reached the Kwakiutl tribe, 
on the northeast end of Vancouver Island that I found material for the 
fifth picture. Since the traders have taken away from the Indians all 
the skins and furs, tribal currency has been limited to blankets, though to 
a large extent it has given place to the money of the United States and 
Canada. We find the Kwakiutl Indian still using blankets for exchange 
in their potlatches, and therefore I have chosen this tribe to illustrate 
the fact that a basis of finance did exist. It must have been no unusual 
thing in the past to see ornamented natives unload canoes full of blankets, 
while groups of waiting “financiers” stood in picturesque arrangement 
before their houses and totem poles. 
When I reached the west coast of Vancouver Island, where I went in 
