60 OUR AKCTIC PROVINCE. 



the man brings in. She has an infinite amount of drudgery to do 

 in the line of gathering certain herbs, bark, and shell-fish. Many- 

 small roots indigenous to the country, containing more or less 

 starch, are eagerly sought after, dried, and stored away by the 

 women. The inner sap-layer of the spruce and also that of the 

 hemlock — the cambium layer — is collected by cutting the trees 

 down and then barking the trunks for that object. It is shaved off 

 in ribbons and eaten in great quantities, both fresh and dried, and 

 is considered very wholesome. It is sweet, mucilaginous, but dis- 

 tinctly resinous in flavor. The rank-growing seeds, shoots, and 

 leaf-stalks of the Epilobiam heracleum, and many others, are 

 plucked and carried by the squaws in huge bundles to the family 

 fire, and there eaten by all hands, the stalks being dipped, mouth- 

 ful after mouthful, in oil. 



She has, however, no washing whatever of clothes to do for any- 

 body, except what little she may see fit to do for herself ; she never 

 treats the dishes even to that ordeal. With all this, however, it 

 seems rather strange that the clothes of the Indians, consisting of 

 dresses, shirts and blankets for the men ; and for women, petticoats, 

 chemises, dresses (sometimes), and blankets also — that these articles 

 usually appear neat and tolerably clean — the children excepted, as 

 they are always dirty beyond all adequate description. Every indi- 

 vidual attends to his or her own washing — if the husband wants a 

 clean shirt, he washes it himself. 



Before the introduction of the potato through early white fur- 

 traders, the only plant cultivated by the Alaskan savages was a po- 

 tent weed which they grew as a substitute for tobacco — the impor- 

 tation of the latter, however, has taken its place entirely to-day, be- 

 cause the Virginian weed is far more pleasant. But the old stone 

 mortars and pestles that are still to be found knocking around 

 the most venerable town-sites, bear evidence to the industry of 

 making native tobacco here ages ago. This plant was prepared 

 for use by drying over a fire on a little frame stretcher, then bruised 

 to a powder in the stone mortars, then moistened and pressed into 

 cakes. It was not smoked in a pipe, but, mixed with a little clam- 

 shell lime (burnt for the purpose), it was chewed or held in the 

 cheek, just as the Peruvian Indians use coca.* Everybody' knows 



* This accounts for tlie puzzling appearance of ancient stone mortars and 

 pestles in Alaska, throughout the Sitkan region. Ethnologists have endeav- 



