216 THE MAKNHELCHEL. 
built up perpendicular, but only one or two tules thick, and not ribbed. 
After being in the water awhile the thick bottom becomes water-logged, and 
if the boat is capsized it rights itself in an instant, like a loaded cork. One of 
these boats will last five years, and carry several men or a ton of merchandise 
in a heavy sea. The Makhelchel are bold watermen and skillful fishers. 
Yet they take most of their fish in the creeks in spring, which they frequently 
do by treading on them with their naked feet in the crevices of the rocks. 
They burn the dead, and always if possible on their native island. 
W. C. Goldsmith described a funeral he once witnessed, where a squaw was 
conducted from the main-land where she had died, across the lake by night, 
followed by a long procession of boats in single file, carrying torchlights, 
and filled with mourning women, chanting and wailing as the cortege moved 
with noiseless paddles across the water—a mournful and impressive spec- 
tacle. The relations do no mourning, which is performed by hired mourners. 
But on the occasion of a funeral of some friend of Salvador, an irreverent 
American offered him a dollar if he would ery, whereupon the avaricious 
old chief moved by the seductive coin lifted up his voice and wept, though 
he may have done it from grief at the insult. As all good Indians are burned, 
so the wicked are “holed”. Their neighbors on the east, the Patwin, whom 
they heartily despise, always bury; hence the greatest contumely these 
people can offer an Indian is to ‘thole” him. 
Once this tribe had occasion to make a treaty with the Cache Creek 
Indians for the privilege of fishing in a certain creek. Four captains, two 
for each tribe, squatted down together on some deer-skins, surrounded by a 
great circle of their followers. After an impressive silence of some minutes 
one of them lifted up his voice and chanted without ceasing for nearly three- 
quarters of an hour, gesturing the while toward the four quarters of heaven. 
Then one of the opposite party took up the refrain for an equal length of 
time. Altogether they were several hours crooning a wholly unmeaning 
farrago, simply as a solemnization of a matter already consummated. All 
such treaties as these they observe with religious scrupulosity—until they 
are strong enough to break them. 
One of their modes of medical practice deserves mention for its naive 
exhibition of human nature. The patient is wrapped tight in skins and 
