. THE INDIANS OF THE NORTHWEST COAST. 277 



winter's use, forming, with the dried fish, the principal winter's supply 

 Poole (1863) says of the Haida, that they often, through feasting or 

 improvidence, eat up all the dried berries before spring, and " were it 

 not for a few bulbs which they dig out of the soil in the early spring- 

 time, while awaiting the halibut season, numbers of Indians really 

 would starve to death."* 



Portlock mentions the root of the wild lily as very much used by the 

 Tlingit. Crab-apples are found, but are scarcely edible. Wild parsnips 

 are abundant and palatable. Many years ago an American ship cap- 

 tain gave the Indians potatoes, and they are now regularly cultivated, 

 and form a considerable item in the winter food supply. Other vegeta- 

 bles miy be and are grown. IsTear all the villages now may be seen 

 patches of ground planted, however, principally in potatoes. 



Oil. — Fish is eaten dried by breaking it up and soaking the bits in 

 fish-oil or grease, having the consistency of uncooled jelly. This oil 

 is obtained from seals, porpoises, herring, salmon, eulachon, goat, deer, 

 bear, and the livers of the dog-fish, shark, and other vertebrates. It 

 is the odor of this rancid oil which permeates everything Indian, and 

 renders a visit to a lodge on the northwest coast somewhat of an 

 ordeal. 



Invertebrates. — Invertebrates and several species of marine algae or 

 sea-weed are eaten. Of the former there are clams, crabs, cuttle-fish, 

 and mussels or oysters, the last named being often poisonous at certain 

 seasons. The clams, echinoderms, and sea-weed are gathered at ebb 

 tide. The shell fish are usually eaten in the winter months. 



Sea-weed. — The sea- weed is dried for winter's use and pressed into a 

 kind of cake, like plug tobacco. A species of it, quite black when dried, 

 is used for making a dish called sopallaly^ of which the Indians are im- 

 moderately fond. This is made by breaking up a very small piece of 

 the pressed sopallaly cake into little bits in a bowl or dish and adding 

 warm water. It is then beaten with a wooden spoon and sugar is 

 added. It froths and foams like the white of an egg or like soap, and 

 gradually turns from a terra-cotta color to white. Berries, fresh or 

 dried, are sometimes added, and the mixture is consumed with avidity 

 by old and young. Langsdorff (1805) says in spring and summer the 

 Tlingit gather several sorts of sea- weed, which, " when cooked, make a 

 bitterish sort of soup." t 



He mentions also " a sort of square cake made- of the bark of the 

 spruce fir, pounded and mixed with the roots, berries and train oil." t 



Bark.— The inner bark of the spruce and hemlock forms an important 

 part of the food supply of the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian. The 

 southern Indian eats pine bark. Plate xx, Fig. 79a, shows a stone 

 scraper used by the northern Indians for removing this inner bark from 

 the trunk. The scrapings are molded into cakes about a foot square 



* Poole, Queea'Charlotte Islands, p. 315. f Langsdorff, Voyages, Pt. ii, p. 131. 



