A STUDY OF PEIMITIVE MONEY. 317 



it is valued even more highly than on the Sound and the Columbia, 

 and those aboriginal peddlers, the Klikitat, frequently carry it to 

 southern Oregon for sale. * * * I have never met with mnemoni- 

 cal signs or pictorial help to memory." 



Mr. Lord also says that the use of these shells (Dentalium) as money 

 had at the time he wrote to a great extent died out. This was due to 

 the introduction of blankets by the Hudson Bay Company. "A slave, 

 a canoe, or a squaw is worth in these days so many blankets ; formerly 

 it was so many strings of Dentalia."* 



Further touching the value of the tusk shell money the same writer 

 remarks : " The value depends upon its length. Those representing the 

 greater value are called, when strung together end to end, a hi-qua, 

 but the standard by which Dentalium is calculated to be fit for a hi-qua 

 is that twenty-five shells placed end to end must make a fathom, or G 

 feet in length." 



In 1810 1 these were the circulating medium of the country, and twenty 

 [? shells] of them would buy agood beaver-skin. 



Pickeringf says "the Chinooks have 'wampum' of the usual descrip- 

 tion, but strings and bands of Dentalium shells of somewhat similai 

 model seem principally to subserve the purposes of currency." 



" In early days, ere the red and white men knew each other, the 

 Bentalium was the ouly currency in use. It is quite clear, and also a 

 very curious fact, that the hiqua and Jcop-lcop were known and used by 

 the Indians of the interior at some distant period, although no trace of 

 their use or knowledge of the shell exists among them at present; for 

 in digging out some flint implements, stone beads, and other things I 

 need not here enumerate, from the drift, I found numbers of dentaliums 

 and round buttons made of the Haliotis nacre. The distance from the 

 nearest sea-board was about 1,000 miles, and the language spoken by 

 these inland Indians quite incomprehensible to the Indians on the 

 coast." § 



Among the Tali kali or Ta cullies, regarded by Gibbs as belonging to 

 the Tinnehs, inhabiting a region extending from the Cascade Eange in 

 British Columbia eastward to the Rocky Mountains, their avarice it was 

 said " lies in the direction of hiaqua shells, || which they obtain indi- 

 rectly from the sea-coast or of the maritime tribes through intervening 

 tribes." 



Whymper,^ describing an Indian muster of various tribes at or near 

 Fort Yukon, Alaska, in 1867, said : " Their clothing was much befringed 

 with beads, and many of them wore through the nose (as did most of 

 the other Indian men present) an ornament composed of the hyaqua 



* Proc. Zool. Soc. London, March, 1864. 



t Harmon's Jour., Voyages and Travels, 1820. 



t Eaces of Man. This "was in 1841. 



§ Lord, 1. c. 



|| Harmon's Journal. 



IfWhyrnper's Alaska. 



