ETHNOGRAPHIC SKETCH OF THE NATIVES. 



i. 



During our stay wo improved each opportunity to add to our knowledge of the peculiar 

 people inhabiting this coast. A want of NulhYient knowledge of their language at first made 

 the work difficult, as we had no interpreter. So our first energies were devoted to learning their 

 language sufficiently well to communicate with them, as none of them could speak a word of 

 English, neither did they show any disposition to learn. 



Of their origin and descent we could get no trace, there being no record of events kept 

 amoug them. Even the sign record of prominent events in individual life, so common among 

 some of the natives in the lower latitudes, is almost unknown among them. Their language 

 abounds iu legends, but none of these gave any data by which we could judge how long these 

 desolate shores Lave been inhabited. 



That the ancestors of those people have made it their home for ages is conclusively shown by 

 the ruins of ancient villages and winter huts along the sea-shore and in the interior. On the 

 point where the station was established were mounds marking the site of three huts dating back 

 to the time when they had no iron and men ' talked like dogs"; also at I'crigniak a group of 

 mounds mark the site of an ancient village. It stands in the midst of a marsh ; a sinking of the 

 land causing it to be flooded and consequently abandoned, as it is their custom to select the 

 high and dry points of land along the sea-shore for their permanent villages. The fact of our 

 finding a pair of wooden goggles twenty-six feet below the surface of the earth, in the shaft sunk 

 for earth temperatures, points conclusively to the great lapse of time since these shores were first 

 peopled by the race of man. That they have followed the receding line of ice, which at one time 

 capped the northern part of this continent, along the easiest lines of travel is sho\\n in the gen- 

 eral distribution of a similar people, speaking a similar tongue, from Greenland to liehring Straits; 

 in so doing they followed the easiest natural lines of travel along the water-courses and the sea- 

 eh ore, and the distribution of the race to-day marks the routes traveled. The sea shore led them 

 along the Labrador and Greenland coasts; Hudson's Bay and its tributary waters carried its 

 quota towards Boothia Land; helped by Back's Great Fish River, the .Mackenzie carried them to 

 the northwestern coast; and down the Yukon .they came to people the shores of Norton Sound 

 and along the coast to Cape Prince of Wales. They occupied some of the coast to the south of 

 the month of the Yukon, and a few drifted across Behriug Straits on the ice. and their natural 

 traits are still in marked contrast with their neighbors, the Chuckchee. They use dogs instead of 

 deer, the natives of North America having never domesticated the reindeer, take their living from 

 the sea, and speak a different tongue. Had the the migration come from Asia it does not stand 

 to reason that they would have abandoned the deer upon crossing the straits. 



The following table will show that physically the Inyn of North America coa>t docs not 

 conform to the typical idea of the Eskimo. They are robust, healthy people, fairer than the North 

 American Indian, with brown <\es and straight black hair. The men are beardless until they 

 attain the age of from twenty to twenty-five years, and even then it is very light and scattering, 

 and is always clipped close in the winter; at this season they also cut oil their eyebrows and 

 tonsure their crown like a priest, with bangs over their forehead. Their hands and feet aro 



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