92 TRIBES TRIBUTATY TO THE HUPA. 
they are now extinct. When the Americans arrived there were only two 
families, or about twenty-five persons, on that stream who still spoke Chi- 
malakwe; all the rest of them used Hupa. On the Trinity itself, from 
Burnt Ranch up to the mouth of North Fork, there lived a tribe called the 
Chim-a-ri-ko (evidently the same word as the above), who spoke the same 
language as the Chimalakwe, and there are perhaps a half dozen of them 
yetliving. The New River Branch were interesting as affording indubitable 
proof that the Hupa exacted tribute from certain surrounding tribes, for at 
the time when the whites arrived the Chimalakwe were paying them yearly 
a tax of about seventy-five cents per capita—that is, an average deer-skin. 
An early pioneer among them named White states that they were once 
nearly as numerous as the Hupa, but the restless aggression and persistency 
of that sturdy race crushed them utterly out. The Chimalakwe seem to 
represent the true California Indians, while the Hupa belong to the Atha- 
bascan races; and we behold here one of the last conquests of this northern 
invasion, whose steady progress southward was only checked by the advent 
of the Americans. As above stated, there were two families of Indians 
speaking more or less Chimalakwe when the whites arrived; but in fifteen 
years from that time it had dwindled to a mere category of names, though 
there were not many of the tribe left to speak either Hupa or Chimalakwe. 
They are a melancholy illustration of the rapidity with which the sim- 
ple tribes of mountaineers have faded away before the white man, while the 
more pliant and less heroic lowlanders, conserving their strength through 
sluggishness, have held on for years. When the serpent of civilization came 
to them, and they found they were naked, like Adam and Eve in the garden, 
they made for themselves garments or stole them. Then when there came 
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one of those sweltering days of California the savages chafed themselves, 
and grew hot in their new clothes, and they stripped them off to the last 
piece. Besides that, they suddenly changed their diet to a semi-civilized 
fashion. All these things opened a broad door to quick consumption and 
other maladies, and the poor wretches went off like leaves on a frosty morn- 
ing in October. It is related that at one time there were not enough able- 
bodied Indians in the tribe to dig graves for the dead; and the neighboring 
whites, to their shame be it recorded, refused to assist them, so that many 
