446 REPORT— 1902. 



given to friends or chance visitors, and thus got scattered beyond i*ecovery. 

 Not a few found their way to eastern collectors and museums. Mr. 

 Harlan Smith, of the New York Museum of National History, spent some 

 weeks here with a staff of diggers two or three summers ago, and, 

 I understand, secured many interesting specimens which are now in the 

 museum at New York. I also paid a short visit here last summer on 

 behalf of the Museum of the Dominion Survey at Ottawa and secured a 

 few specimens of adzes, axes, chisels, fractured slate knives, pestle- 

 hammers, spear and arrow heads, and the like. The limited means at my 

 disposal necessarily restricted my investigations, much and deep digging 

 being now required to secure anything of value or interest. The territory 

 in the neighbourhood of this midden was formerly regarded as the summer 

 camp of the Ke'tsi tribe, whose headquarters were at the head of Pitt 

 Lake. Whether the ancestors of the Ke'tsi once dwelt here and formed 

 this extensive midden is not at all clear. It possesses many features in 

 common with the older middens, and was doubtless formed when the salt 

 waters of the gulf came many miles higher up the estuary than they do 

 now, and when the clam and mussel beds were not so far off as at present. 

 Although the Ke'tsi are said to have claimed this camp as theirs, the 

 condition and extent of the main mass of the midden demonstrably proves 

 it to be of comparatively ancient formation. For my own part, if the 

 Ke'tsi are to be regarded as a genuine branch of the Halk5me'lEm, of 

 which there is some doubt, I do not see, for the reasons already given, how 

 their ancestors could have formed this old and extensive midden. 



I now pass on to a summary consideration of the burial mounds 

 or tumuli of this district. Certain sections of the province abound in 

 these, notably the delta of the Fraser, the shores of Puget Sound, and 

 the southern half of Vancouver Island. In the latter place they are 

 found stretching from Nootka Sound on the west to Comox on the east. 

 Wherever these structures are found, though they sometimes differ con- 

 siderably in detail, they share, in the main, certain general characteristics. 

 I have already described in detail one of the most interesting groups of 

 these situated at Hatzic on the Fraser, and given illustrations of their 

 internal and external structure, and figured the few relics recovered from 

 them in my earlier publications on these subjects referred to before, and 

 so shall here only treat very generally of them as far as they are found in 

 the Halkome'lEm territory. In the groups on the Fraser, though they all 

 consist of heaps of clay and sand and boulders, they differ one from 

 another considerably in detail. Some were simple mounds of clay which 

 had been heaped up over the corpse to a height of several feet. The 

 diameters of these varied from 3 to 20 or 25 feet. These smaller 

 ones were doubtless graves of children. The bones in all these clay 

 mounds that I examined were always wholly decomposed, and their 

 remains so closely integrated with the soil that the fact that a body once 

 lay there could only be discovered after careful search. I may here state 

 that in all these Fraser mounds, as well as in all others I have opened 

 elsewhere, only one body was interred. About this there is no doubt, and 

 this fact of separate individual interment is certainly one of the most 

 striking features of these tombs. Another peculiarity is that few or no 

 relics are recovered from them. A few copper specimens were taken 

 from one or two of the most elaborate of the Hatzic group, but not a 

 single specimen of stone or bone of any kind ; and it is the same of others 

 elsewhere. If we take these groups in the order of their elaborateness 



