219 



CLOTHING, UTENSILS, ETC. 

 The iutroductiou of European or American articles has, in great mea- 

 sure, done away with their own. Almost all the Indians of the district are 

 now principally clothed like the whites, and avail themselves of many of 

 their tools and utensils ; but their original manufactures possessed a great 

 deal of merit. The ordinary dress of the men, when they saw fit to use any, 

 was a deer-skin shirt, leggings, and moccasins, which, among the prairie 

 Indians, was often embroidered with the quills of the porcupine. On the 

 coast these quills were scarce, being obtained from a distance and by ex- 

 change, and since the opening of trade with the whites they have used beads 

 and various colored threads. The skins are well dressed, being worked over 

 a frame and softened with the brains of the animal. Before being used, they 

 are smoked over a fire of green twigs, which prevents them from permanently 

 shrinking or becoming hard from wet. They also wore on occasion robes 

 made of the skins of small animals, such as the rabbit, sewelell {A;plodontia 

 leporina), muskrat, &c., or of larger ones, as the cougar and beaver. Fur 

 caps, of a form suited to the fancy of the wearer, were used occasionally ; 

 but the most noticeable covering was a broad, conical hat, with an inner 

 rim fitting the head, made of a tough grass resembling hemp, which came 

 from the interior. Tliis was made water-proof, and painted with figures. 

 The women universally wore a breech-clout of strands gathered round the 

 waist and falling usually to the knees, which served the purpose of conceal- 

 ment. With the men no idea of immodesty existed. Decency had not even 

 its fig-leaf The clout was sometimes made of twisted grass, at others of 

 cedar-bark, hackled and split into a fringe. Of later yeai's, they have adopted 

 the dress of the whites, and it is only in remote districts, or among old 

 people too poor or too obstinately attached to the habits of their youth to 

 change them, that one now sees this pristine type of the petticoat, 



"A garment of mystical sublimity." 



The Indians of the Sound and the Straits of Fuca attained considerable 

 skill in manufacturing a species of blanket from a mixture of the wool of the 

 mountain-sheep and the hair of a particular kind of dog, though in this art 

 they never equaled the more northern tribes, some of whose workmanship 

 equaled the common kind of Mexican scrape. Vancouver describes the 

 dogs as "resembling those of Pomerania, though, in general, somewhat 



