THE INDIANS OF THE NORTHWEST COAST. 383 



totemic organization into phratries, totems, and subtotems, their 

 legends and their matriarchal organization, all bear a distinct and orig- 

 inal stamp. The Tsimshian, on the other hand, have been greatly influ- 

 enced by the northern Kwakiutl tribes, who have been, by the reciprocal 

 influence of the former, in turn drawn away from the southern tribes 

 of their own stock. In the legends of the Tsimshian we find much that 

 is peculiar to themselves, much in common with those of the Tlingit and 

 Haida, and a good deal borrowed from the northern Kwakiutl. On the 

 other hand, their totemic organization is according to Boas a modifica- 

 tion of that of the Kwakiutl, and radically different from that of the 

 Haida and Tlingit.* The totems of the Tsimshian are the wolf, raven, 

 eagle, and the bear, with no phratries ; those of the Kwakiutl the raven, 

 eagle, and the bear, with no phratries. It may possibly be that the Haida 

 have been the centre of impulse on the northwest coast and that in 

 their development they may have influenced the adjacent tribes to a 

 great degree, but the weight of evidence is that, with no great origi- 

 nality in themselves, they yet present the curious and puzzling circum- 

 stance that they extensively borrowed their ideas from the other stocks 

 but developed what they have borrowed with a marvelous skill and 

 independence. They seem in themselves to have typified or intensified 

 the representative characteristics of the Indian stocks of the northwest 

 coast. Whether they have originated or borrowed their ideas can not 

 be made apparent with the data at hand, but it may be well to here 

 state briefly the peculiarities of the Haida as they have struck the writer 

 in their relation to the other Indians of the region. 



Tattooing, found hardly at all amongst the other tribes and then 

 without much importance attached to it, is with them a fine art, and 

 has both a bearing on their totemic system and the deepest signifi- 

 cance in their ceremonies. The Tlingit and Tsimshian only occasion- 

 ally etch the totemic figures on their painted bodies on ceremonial occa- 

 sions, while their neighbors of whom we are speaking take every possi- 

 ble occasion to display their family crests. The carved totemic columns, 

 stunted and dwarfed in the south amongst the Kwakiutl and also in 

 the north amongst the Tlingit, here become the most elaborate and 

 striking characteristic of the Indian village, so much so that a Haida 

 settlement looks at a distance like a forest of stripped, bare tree 

 trunks.t The mortuary and commemorative columns are also more 

 elaborate here than elsewhere, and the memory of the dead is celebrated 

 in feast, legend, and carving with the greatest pomp and ostentation. 

 The Chilkat blankets pictured in Plates ix and x, and the copper 

 shields from the Chilkat region are nowhere so numerous and elaborate 

 as in the Queen Charlotte Islands. The art of basket-making, first 



* Science, vol. xii, No. 299, p. 195. * 



t Boas is of the opinion that the carved heraldic columns originated aaiougst the 



Kwakiutl, and were adopted and developed amongst the llaida. Science, Vol. xii, 



p. 105. 



