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sickness the tribe could muster 500 fighting men. The total of both sexes 

 and all ages is noAv reduced to little more than that number. Both Yalla- 

 kub and Kleh-sitt, or the white chief, died during that winter. The latter, 

 a Eussian half-breed, was the head of the tribe ; Jack being however the 

 best known, from his speaking a little English, and his greater familiarity 

 with the traders. 



The Neeah village, at the time of our visit in January, 1855, consisted of 

 two blocks of four or five houses each built close together. The largest single 

 house was about seventy-five feet long by forty in width, and probably fifteen 

 feet high in front, the whole constituting one room. The frame consisted of 

 heavy posts set in the ground, supporting rafters, some of which were at least 

 eighteen inches in thickness at the butt. The labor of raising them to their 

 position, with no aid from machinery, maybe imagined. The sides were formed 

 of planks placed horizontally, and secured by upright poles, inside and out, 

 at a few feet apart, to which they were tied through small apertures by 

 withes. The roof, like those of the Sound Indians, was made of boai'ds, 

 guttered out and lapping one over another. Each house is occupied by 

 several families, their respective portions being separated by a partition of two 

 or three feet high. Chests of quite large size, and very neatly made consid- 

 ering the tools employed, contained the personal chattels of the owners. A 

 raised platform ran around the house, on which the inhabitants sat, slept, or 

 worked; and overhead were shelves and poles on which their property was 

 stowed. A more miscellaneous assortment could hardly be found at a pawn- 

 broker's. Seal-skins full of oil, baskets of dried halibut and salmon, flitches 

 of blubber, whaling apparatus, paddles, bundles of mats, articles of all sorts 

 from wrecked vessels, boxes and bags of every description, hung, lay, or 

 stood in endless variety and confusion. Some of the other houses were 

 nearly as large. Into one, a canoe thirty-six feet in length had been introduced 

 for the purpose of repairing, nor did it occupy any inconvenient room. 

 Mr. Goldsborough, who visited the village in 1850, informed me that the 

 houses generally were on an even larger scale at that time ; that Flattery 

 Jack's house was no less than one hundred feet in length, and that about 

 twenty women were busily engaged in it making bark mats and dogs'-hair 

 blankets. One of the blocks is partly surrounded with a stockade of 



