66 THE TOLOWA. 
safe under the protection of the whites, would jump up on a huge log, 
round out his flat breast and beat the same with extreme defiance in sight 
of one of his enemies. 
A few sneaking curs prowled about; a few rows of flags were spread 
to dry, for the manufacture of mats; a little smoke oozed out through the 
superabounding crevices of the crazy driftwood huts; while around lay 
the disorderly and battered riches of the sea—binnacles of shipwrecked 
vessels, boxes, bits of oakum, cordage, splinters of spars, kelp, seaweed, 
those beautiful star-marked shells of the Crescent City beach, ete. Within, 
amid a cluster of baskets, dogs, mats, baskets of saldl-berries, and billets of 
wood, squatted a few broad-faced squaws, of an almost African blackness, 
with their stiff, harsh hair cut loav on their foreheads, blinking in the smoke, 
and weaving baskets, or shelling acorns, in that quiet, dogged way they have 
in the presence of an American, without ever deigning him a glance. 
The Tolowa are slightly taller than this melancholy remnant about 
Crescent City, with more sinew and less adipose, their cheeks a little more 
drawn and longer, and their noses a trifle higher, but they are about as dark 
as their kinsmen. The Tataten appear to have had their general stature 
shortened by losing the tallest and finest fellows among them, who were 
picked off on account of their former rashnéss in indulging in an occasional 
brush with the Americans. 
These three bands have the coast partitioned off between them, and the 
boundaries accurately marked by natural objects, such as bowlders, head- 
lands, ete. Each chief or head-man inherits a portion in behalf of his 
band—for the coast is owned in common, not in severalty—and whatever 
of jetsam or flotsam is cast upon it by the ocean is his by indefeasible right. 
Any attempt on the part of a neighboring band to appropriate any part of 
the treasures yielded them by Neptune and the Nereids, even to a piece 
of putrescent whale-blubber, is strenuously resisted, and leads to bloody 
contentions. Curious and many are the stores which they gather from the 
sea, from a figure-head of a Cleopatra or the spar-deck of a Spanish galleon, 
to a horse-mussel or a star-fish. 
Probably there are no other Indians in California so avaricious as those 
of Del Norte County. Money makes the chief among them, and he is en- 
