88 THE INDIANS OF CAPE FLATTERY. 



their names.^ Drowned persons they supposed to turn into owls, and several years 

 since a party of Indians having been lost by the accidental demolishing of their 

 canoe by the tail of a whale they were killing, I was gravely assured that the 

 night after the accident eight owls were seen perched on the houses of the drowned 

 men, and each had suspended from his bill the shell worn in the nose of the man 

 while alive. 



A most ludicrous instance of their superstition occurred while I was making a 

 survey of the reservation during the summer of 1862. A chief, Kobetsi, who lived 

 at Tsuess village, owned a large cranberry meadow, of the possession of which he 

 was very jealous. Among the Indians who accompanied me on the survey was a 

 young man who had quite recently had a difficulty with Kobetsi, in which he felt 

 that the chief was the aggressor. The Indians, who are very fertile in inventing 

 tales, informed Kobetsi that the fellow had sold the cranberry meadow to me, and 

 that I had a great medicine which I could set in the field which would gather aU 

 the cranberries. This medicine was a field compass. They had seen the mariner's 

 compass, but a field compass on a Jacob staff was something they could not compre- 

 hend. Old Kobetsi believed the tale, and sent a party, armed and painted, from the 

 island where he was then residing, to attack me and the surveying party at Tsuess. 

 We did not happen to be there on their arrival, so they returned ; but the following 

 day I went down and finished the survey, and after returning home the old chief, 

 who had been informed of the fact, came himself from Tatoosh Island with 

 his warriors to demand redress for the supposed loss of his cranberries. He was 

 soon convinced of the real facts, and left, quite mortified that he had worked him- 

 self up into such a state of excitement about nothing ; but he still believed that 

 the compass possessed great and mysterious properties, and requested me not to 

 place it on his land again. Another instance of superstition was during the time 

 of my taking a census of the tribe in 1861. The Indians at Hosett village were 

 much opposed to giving me their names, from the belief that every man, woman, 

 or child whose names were entered in my book, would have the small-pox and die. 



The cliffs at the extreme point of Cape Flattery are pierced by deep caverns and 

 arches that admit the passage of canoes, not only saving the distance of going around 

 or outside the rocks during rough weather, but affording snug coves and shelter 

 during high wind, and secure passages for the Indian to skulk along unseen. 

 Some of the caverns extend a great distance under the cliff, and afford hiding places 

 for seals, which, however, are not allowed to remain always in peace ; for the Indian, 

 watching an opportunity when it is calm, boldly ventures in as far as his canoe can 

 be managed ; then with a torch in one hand, and a knife in the other, he dashes 

 into the water and wades or swims to where the seals are lying on the sandy bottom 

 at the remote end of the cave. The light partially blinding and stupefying the 



* Traditions of the Eslvimos as a race of dwarfs, possessing supernatural powers, who dwell in the 

 "always night country," are current among the Indians of Puget Sound also. One of the incen- 

 tives to desperate resistance by them during the war of 18.'S5-56, was the circulation by their chiefs 

 of a story that it was the intention of the whites to take them all there in a steamer. The idea of 

 eternal cold and darkness carried with it indescribable horrors to their imaginations.— G. G. 



