48 THE YUOROK. 
wonderful symmetry and elegance, leaving the sides and ends very thin and 
as smooth as if they had been sandpapered. At the stern they burn and 
polish out a neat little bracket which serves as a seat for the boatman. 
They spend an infinity of puddering on these canoes (nowadays they use iron 
tools and dispatch the work in a few days), two Indians sometimes work- 
ing on one five or six months, burning, scraping, polishing with stones. 
When completed, they are sold for various sums, ranging from $10 to $30, 
or even more. They are not as handsome as the Smith River or the 
‘l’sin-ik canoes, but quite as serviceable. A large one will carry five tons 
of merchandise, and in early days they used to take many cargoes of fish 
from the Klamath, shooting the dangerous rapids and surf at the mouth 
with consummate skill, going boldly to sea in heavy weather, and reaching 
Crescent City, twenty-two miles distant, whence they returned with mer- 
chandise. 
When they are not using these canoes, they turn them bottom side up 
on the sandy beach and bream them, or haul them into damp and shady 
coves, or cover them thickly with leaves and brushwood, to prevent the 
thin ends from sun-cracking. When they do become thus cracked, they 
bore holes through with a buck’s horn, and bind the ends together with 
withes, twisting the same tight with sticks—a kind of rude tourniquet— 
which closes up the cracks better than calking would. 
To make a quiver, the Yurok takes the skin of a raccoon or a marten, 
turns it wrong-side out, sews it up, and suspends it behind him by a string 
passed over one shoulder and under the other, while the striped tail flutters 
gayly in the air at his shoulder. In the animal’s head he stuffs a quantity 
of moss, as a cushion for the arrow-heads to rest in, to prevent breakage. 
In catching salmon they employ principally nets woven of fine roots. 
or grass, which are stretched across eddies in the Klamath, always with the 
mouth down-stream. When there is not a natural eddy they sometimes 
create one by throwing out a rude wing-dam. ‘They select eddies because 
it is there the salmon congregate to rest themselves. At the head of the 
eddy they erect fishing-booths over the water, by planting slender poles in 
the bottom of the river, and lashing others over them in a light and artistic 
framework, with a floor a few feet above the water, and regular rafters over- 
