BOATS, MORTARS, AND BASKETS—GAMBLING. sar lft 
long, in which they cruise timidly about near the shore. There is a margin 
where the bottom is almost level and the waves ran light; but the midd'e 
of the lake is of immense depth, and the billows sometimes lash themselves 
into oceanic proportions. 
Around the lake and on King’s River one will often find a family 
using a tolerably well-made stone mortar. They always admit that they 
did not manufacture these implements, but happened on them in digging 
or found them on the surface, and that they belonged to a race other 
than their own. They sometimes have the ingenuity to improve on them 
by fastening a basket-hopper around the top to prevent the acorns from 
flying out. On the west side of Tulare Lake these mortars are very numer- 
ous, and of course they must have been carried thither from the mountains. 
On Tule River I saw the process of basket-weaving. Instead of wil- 
low twigs for the framework or warp, the squaw takes long stalks of grass, 
(Sporobolus); and for the threads or the woof various barks or roots split 
fine—pine root for a white color, willow bark for a brown, and some unknown 
bark for a black. The process of weaving is like that heretofore described; 
the awl or needle was the sharpened thigh-bone of a hawk. 
The Gualala style of gambling prevails all over the State, but the 
Yokuts have another sort, which pertains exclusively to the women. It is 
a kind of dice-throwing, and is called w-chu'-us. For a dice they take half 
of a large acorn or walnut shell, fill it level with pitch and pounded char- 
coal, and inlay it with bits of bright-colored abalone shells. For a dice- 
table they weave a very large, fine basket-tray, almost flat, and ornamented 
with devices woven in black or brown, mostly rude imitations of trees and 
geometrical figures. Four squaws sit around it to play, and a fifth keeps 
tally with fifteen sticks. There are eight dice, and they scoop them up in 
their hands and dash them into the basket, counting one when two or five 
flat surfaces turn up. 
The rapidity with which the game goes forward is wonderful, and the 
players seem totally oblivious to all things in the world beside. After each 
throw that a player makes she exclaims yet'-ni (equivalent to ‘‘one-y”), or 
wi-a-tak, or ko-mai-ch, which are simply a kind of sing-song or chanting 
One old squaw, with scarcely a tooth in her head, one eye gone, her face 
