198 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 192 



patterned section seems to have none. This fragment is totally 

 without provenience either temporal or geographical. 



The blanket illustrated in Davis (1949, p. 64) is part of the Kasmus- 

 sen collection of the Portland Art Museum (cat. No. 49.3.546). 

 The card on the blanket reads as follows: 



Chilkat Blanket. Tsimshian. 10-18-39. A very old blanket collected by 

 Mrs. Kirk, wife of the soap Mfg. in San Francisco in 1880. . . . Date ? Un- 

 usually fine weaving. Moth eaten places. Sea otter fur ? Laced in top. A 

 remarkable piece. Its faded colors match the Chilkat blanketry leggings I got 

 from Nass River. 



This blanket was lent for comparative study by the Portland Art 

 Museum. It is indeed a remarkable and beautiful blanket. It has 

 the typical five-sided shape of the Chilkat blanket with the very deep 

 lower fringe (never characteristic of the geometric-patterned blankets). 

 It has a wool-wrapped cedar-bark warp and fringe. The warp and 

 weft counts indicate greater fineness of yarns than any Chilkats that 

 I have observed. The center yoke is a geometric-patterned, two- 

 colored section in which the wefts proceed from one side of the yoke 

 to the opposite. The geometric pattern is obviously not as intricate 

 as any of the previously observed; but its technique is the same. 

 The stylized naturalistic section surrounding the yoke uses every 

 known Chilkat technique. The colors are unique insofar as my 

 observation and Emmon's remarks are concerned. The green is a 

 decidedly yeUow green and rather deep in the unfaded reverse side; 

 the usual pale yellow, dark brown or black, and the natural white 

 complete the colors. The pattern is simpler than in many blankets; 

 the faces are upside down to the observer as in old dance kilts. The 

 wing design is also reversed and it lacks the common three-section 

 division of design. 



Emmons (1907, p. 388, fig. 581, a) illustrates one other blanket 

 which he calls Tsimshian. It has no geometric patterning, but the 

 design is aberrant from the usual Chilkat designing. This is also 

 true of his oldest Chilkat blanket which he was told was copied from 

 a Tsimshian blanket (ibid., p. 390, fig. 580). 



A few old dance shirts have bands of geometric designs in selvage- 

 to-selvage twining. Washington State Museum cat. No. 1-631, 

 Chilkat Tlingit, is a shirt that shows the geometric band in the back 

 of the shirt only; it is simpler in its development than any of the wholly 

 geometric-patterned blankets. The shirt has a wool-wrapped cedar 

 bark warp, as, I beUeve, do all of the dance shirts. 



It is on the basis of the known provenience of the Yakutat blanket 

 that it has been possible to place more accurately the aU mountain 

 goat wool, geometric-patterned blankets. Their more northerly location 

 seems to indicate an earlier center of blanket weaving than that 



