12 THE HAIDAH INDIANS OF 



ment necessary for building it ; she has certainly placed the man of the forest in 

 the middle of the materials with which to construct his ; but he has been under 

 the necessity of creating the varying tools without which he could not employ 

 those materials. A sharp stone, hafted on a branch of a tree, the bone of a quad- 

 ruped, the bone of one fish, and the rough skin of another, form instruments more 

 fit to exercise patience than to help industry, and which would have been ineffectual 

 in seconding his eff'orts, if fire which he discovered, and the action of which he 

 learnt to regulate and direct, had not come to the assistance of his genius, and 

 of the art which he executes through the impulse of genius." 



When we examine the whole of the operations necessary for constructing and 

 ornamenting one of the edifices which I have just described, when we reflect on 

 this assemblage of useful arts, and of those which are merely agreeable, we are 

 forced to acknowledge that these arts have not taken birth on the small islands 

 where they are cultivated ; they come from a greater distance. 



Marquand observes that "the distinction between the winter and summer habita- 

 tions of the Queen Charlotte Islanders, recalls to mind the custom of the Kamt- 

 schadales, who have their halagans for summer and their jourts for winter ; the 

 former erected on posts or pillars, twelve or thirteen feet in height, and the latter 

 dug in the ground and covered with a roof: it is even remarked that some of the 

 halagans have oval doors." 



The country of these Kamtschadales, as we know, is a peninsula of north- 

 eastern Asia, and seems to show that this style of houses of northern Asia must 

 have been introduced by immigration at some remote period from that region. In 

 fact everything seems to prove that Asia peopled the northwest coast of America, 

 the buildings, the manners and customs and general appearance of the natives 

 from Vancouver's Island to the Siberian Coast, are very similar, and in certain 

 respects nearly identical. 



Marquand thinks, and my own observations certainly verify the theory, " that it 

 is not without the sphere of probability, that the northwest coast should reckon 

 three species of inhabitants ; of the first date, the men who might belong origin- 

 ally to the very soil of America, if we adopt the opinion, that this large country 

 had its own men or aborigines, as it has its animals and its plants," a view which 

 is coincided in by Sir Charles Lyell, Agassiz, Forshey, Morton, Squire, and other 

 eminent authorities. This first class of inhabitants I have in this paper termed 

 Selish, or Flat Heads. 



The second species are the Asiatics of the north, whose transmigration seems to 

 have been retarded at Queen Charlotte's Islands, and to have stopped at Van- 

 couver's Island ; and lastly, and of the third date, the Mexicans, who fled for 

 refuge to the coast after the destruction of their empire, and whopeopled the Cali- 

 fornias, and wandered north and mingled with the Selish Marquand says, "that 

 everywhere on the Queen Charlotte's Islands appear the traces of an ancient civili- 

 zation; everything indicates that the men with whom they had the opportunity of 

 being acquainted have belonged to a great people, who were fond of the agreeable 

 arts^ and knew how to multiply the productions of them." 



