94 



the tribes of Northern Siberia drove them still farther to the north." " Year 

 after year, the intruding Tatars continued to press on." "Their. descend- 

 ants, the Yakuts,* pressed on until they are now found at the mouths of 

 rivers falling into the Polar Sea. But these regions were formerly inhabited 

 by numerous tribes, which were driven away still farther north over the 

 frozen sea.f " Wrangell has preserved traditions of their disappearance, § 

 and in them I think we may find a clue to the origin of the Greenland 

 I<]skimos." " The Yakuts were not the first inhabitants * * of the 

 Kolyma." " The Omoki, * * the Chelaki, * * the Tunguses, and 

 the Yukagirs were their predecessors. These tribes have so wholly disap- 

 peared that even their names are hardly remembered."!! "TheOnkilon, 

 too, once a numerous race of fishers on the shores of the Gulf of Anadyr, 

 are now gone, no man knows whither. Some centuries ago, they are said 

 to have occupied all the coast from Cape Chelagskoi to Bering Strait ; and 

 the remains of their huts of stone, earth, and bones of whales are still 

 seen along the shores." " The Omoki are said to have gone northward 

 over the Polar Sea. The Onkilon, too, fled away|| north to the land whose 

 moim tains are said to be visible from Cape Jakan." " Here we have prob- 

 abl}^ the commencement of the exodus of the Greenland Eskimo," &e. 



Mr. Markham goes on to elaborate his theory to the eff'ect that the 

 wanderers "without canoes" pushed on from the Siberian Capes to the 

 Parry Islands, an unknown region of 1,140 miles in breadth, the march to 

 Melville Island occupying probably more than one generation. He then 

 mentions various Innuit remains found at different points in the Parry 

 group between Banks Island and Baffin's Bay, as illustrations of the 

 supposed march. He considers that they kept marching steadily eastward 

 along and north of Barrow Strait, finally arriving in Greenland on the 



* The Yakuts are Scythians, allied to the Turks, not Tatars. 



tNo proof of this proposition is adduced; videpostea. 



§ The tribes to which Wrangell refers belonged to a much later era than that mentioned. 



HThe Tnnguses, still numerous in Eastern Siberia, are a Tatar race. So far from the other tribes 

 having wholly disappeared, Wrangell states that there were in 1820, in the Kolyma circuit alone, 1,13D 

 Yukagirs and others, related to the Koraks. In Eastern Siberia, iu 18(;0, by the Russian census obtained 

 by me from the governor of Kamchatka iu 1865, there were in all about five thousand of these people. 

 I have a Tunguse portrait taken from life in 1865. 



II Wrangell, page 178, states that the Omoki and Schelagi disappeared from their wars with neigh- 

 boring tribes, small-pox, and devastating sickness. The Onkilon still exist, according to Wrangell, ou 

 Anadyr Gulf (page 372;. 



