NA TURE 



165 



THURSDAY, JUNE 13, i^ 



ETHNOLOGY OF NORTH-WEST AMERICA 

 United States Geographical and Geological Survey of 

 the Rocky Mountain Region; Tribes of the Extreme 

 North- West. By W. H. Dall. Tiibes of Western 

 Washington and North-Western Oregon. By Geo. 

 Gibbs. (Washington, 1877.) 



WE have already had occasion to draw attention to 

 the extremely good work which is being done by 

 the United States Geographical and Geological Survey, 

 as well as to the liberal construction put upon the duties 

 attached to it. The yolume now issued is another striking 

 illustration of both facts, and makes us wish that other 

 Governments would follow the example of that of 

 America. For the first time we have full and accurate 

 details regarding the Eskimaux and other tribes of what 

 was once Russian America and of the adjoining territory. 

 Not only has all the available literature on the subject 

 been consulted, but the errors and deficiencies of former 

 writers have been corrected and supplemented by personal 

 and patient observation. A wholly new light has been 

 cast on the ethnology of these remote regions, and both 

 the ethnologist and the philologist will obtain fresh ma- 

 terials of the utmost value. The scanty and often inac- 

 curate information we have hitherto possessed has now 

 been replaced by the full and careful statements of 

 scientifically trained observers. 



Mr. J. W. Powell was the geologist in charge of the 

 expedition, and it is the materials collected by him and 

 his assistants that have been thrown into shape and 

 edited in the present volume by Mr. W. H. Dall and the 

 late Mr. George Gibbs. Mr. Dall's elaborate articles on 

 the tribes of the extreme North-West acquire additional 

 importance from the fact that they represent in large 

 measure the fruits of his own researches. Since 1865 he 

 has visited nearly the whole of the north-west coast, be- 

 sides a good deal of the interior, and his statements have 

 consequently all the advantage of being the results of 

 personal knowledge. His first article describes the 

 various tribes of Alaska and the adjacent territory, com- 

 prising the Innuit or Eskimaux, and their off-branch, the 

 Aleuts, and the Indian tribes belonging to the Tinneh 

 and T'linket groups. Mr. Dall seems to exclude the 

 Chukchis from the Innuit family ; to use his own words, 

 they are "totally distinct in language and race from the 

 nomadic 'reindeer-people' with whom they trade." 

 Their trade-jargon, by the way, is a lingua franca com- 

 posed of words or corruptions of words belonging to both. 

 However, nothing is more remarkable than the differ- 

 ences in manners and condition between many of the 

 tribes described by Mr. Dall, who must, nevertheless, be 

 of the same origin, and this fact shows how rapidly and 

 widely savage tribes will come to differ from one another, 

 even when living in close proximity. Mr. Dall's second 

 article is a very interesting one on his exploration of 

 the numerous kitchen -middens of the Aleutian Islands. 

 Usually the middens consist of three layers, the lower 

 most being composed of echinus and similar shells, the 

 second of fishbones, and the third of mammalian and 

 other remains, the ruins of villages of a more recent 

 period often crowning the whole deposit. The lower- 

 VoL. XVIII. — No, 450 



most layer must go back to a remote date, and as Mr. 

 Dall points out, would have required an immense number 

 of years to form. The savages to whom it bears witness? 

 must have been very low in the scale of humanity. They 

 have left no traces of fire, weapons, or implements ; 

 indeed, had they possessed any, they would hardly have 

 been content to subsist on sea-eggs. It is only towards 

 the top of the layer that net-sinkers of a very rude pattern 

 have been met with ; but these may have worked their way 

 through from the layer above, though the possibility does 

 not seem to have suggested itself to Mr. Dall. With the 

 fish-bone layer stone tools come into use ; as Mr. Dall 

 observes, "fish, Avhen raw, is a substance which cannot 

 be conveniently dismembered by teeth and nails." But it 

 is not till we come to the mammalian epoch that the 

 weapons show a decided improvement in form with 

 attempts at ornamentation, though from the first the types 

 are remarkably like those still used by the Eskimaux. 

 Lamps, also, first came into use during this period, and 

 no doubt the improvement in the tools was largely due to 

 the lengthening of the working day by the introduction of 

 artificial light. 



Mr. Dall's third article is on the Origin of the Innuit. 

 He differs from Mr. C. R. Markham in thinking that the 

 Innuit emigration goes back to a vast antiquity, and 

 agrees with Dr. Rink in holding that the Innuit have 

 not come from northern Asia, but been pushed northward 

 from the interior of America itself. Like the walrus they 

 can be shown to have once ranged as far south as New 

 Jersey. He admits, however, that green patches similar 

 to those that mark the Aleutian kitchen-middens, have 

 been observed by whalers on the shores of Wrangell 

 Land, and he is certainly wrong in stating that " Lin- 

 guistically, no ultimate distinction can be .drawn between 

 the American Innuit and the American Indian." It is 

 true that both groups of languages are polysynthetic, not 

 agglutinative, as Mr. Dall affirms, but it is doubtful 

 whether all the Indian languages even can be referred to 

 a single source, and certainly the Indian and the 

 Eskimaux cannot be. Nor, again, does Mr. Dall seem 

 to be right in suggesting that the Arctic Highlanders, who 

 have no means of navigation, represent the original con- 

 dition of the Innuit tribes generally ; they must rather be 

 regarded as an instance of degradation and relapse. But 

 he does good service in pointing out the untenabihty of 

 the theory which would bring the first inhabitants of 

 America from Asia, by way of the Aleutian Islands. Apart 

 from the fact that Behring found no traces of inhabitants 

 on the islands named after him, and that the echinus 

 layer in the Aleutian kitchen middens pre-supposes a. 

 population without means for crossing the sea ; " we find 

 that a gap of 138 statute miles separates the Com- 

 mander's Islands from Kamschatka, and another of 253 

 miles exist between the former and Attu. Here is one of 

 the deepest gulfs known in any ocean, over which rolls a 

 rough, foggy, and tempestuous sea." Three appendices 

 are attached to Mr. Dall' s part of the work : one on the 

 natives of Alaska, another on the terms of relationship 

 used by the Innuit, while the third gives comparative 

 vocabularies of the tribes of the extreme North- West. 

 The first appendix contains the outlines of two grammars, 

 one belonging to the Sitka dialect of the T'linket Indians 

 and the other to the Innuit Aleuts of Unalashka, both by 



