PREFACE. 



The derivation of the term used to designate tlie family wliicb 

 embraces the group of languages treated of in tlie present paper is 

 from the ISTutka word uuddash, meaning good, and when heard by 

 Captain Oook at Friendly Cove, Nootka Sound, was supposed to be the 

 tribal name. 



As the name of a family it was first used by Gallatin, in his Syno])sis 

 of the Indian Tribes, ]mblished in the Transactions of the American 

 Antiquarian Society in 183G, based upon a vocabulary taken from 

 Jewitt's Narrative of Adventures and Sufferings. In this article he 

 gives, from Galiano, a vocabulary of the Maka, one of the Wakashan 

 dialects, as a family of itself, under the name of Straits of Fuca. In 

 his later article, Hale's Indians of Northwest Ameriea, published in the 

 Transactions of the American Ethnological Society in 1848, Mr. Gallatin 

 retains the name Wakash as a family designation, using a vocabulary 

 of the Niwiti as a basis; but two of its dialects, the Hailtsa and Haelt- 

 zuk, he includes under the Nass family. Indeed, until recently the 

 Maka, Hailtsuk, and Kwakiutl dialects have not been embraced in the 

 Wakashan family by any writer, the first one to d<^ so being Dr. Franz 

 Boas, who has made extensive studies among these northwest iieoples 

 and collected vocabularies of many of them. Intermediate writers 

 have used a number of names to designate this family, the principal 

 ones adopting Nootka and Nootka-Columbian. 



The geographic distribution of the tribes forming this family, accord- 

 ing to Major Powell, in his Indian Ling ii istio Families North of Mexico, 

 published in the seventh annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology, in 

 1891, is as follows: 



Thf tribes of the Alit (livisum of this lamily are confined chiefly to the west coast 

 of Vancouver IsLiud. They range to the north as far as Cape Cook, the northern 

 side of that cape being occupied hy Haeltzuk tribes, as was ascertained by Dr. Boas, 

 in 1886. On the south they reached to a little above Sooke Inlet, that inlet being" 

 in possession of the Soke, a Salishan tribe. 



The neighborhood of Cape Flattery, Washington, is occupied by the Makah, one 

 the Wakashan tribes, Avho probably wrested this outpost of the family from the 

 Salish (Clallam) who next adjoin them on Puget Sound. 



The bouudaries of the Haleltzuk division of this family are laid down neai'ly as 

 they appear on Tolmie and Dawson's linguistic map of 1884. The west side of King 

 Island and Cascade Inlet arc said by Dr. Boas to be inhabited by Haeltzuk tribes, 

 aud are colored accordingly. 



VII 



