364 Canadian Record of Science, 



Note on the Occurrence of Jade in British 

 Columbia, and its employment by the natives, 



By George M. Dawson, 

 with quotations AND EXTRACTS FROM a paper by prof. a. b. 



MEYER, ON NEPHRITE AND ANALOGOUS MINERALS 

 FROM ALASKA. 



From the Strait of Fuca northward along the entire coast 

 of British Columbia and Alaska to the Arctic Sea, imple- 

 ments of jade or closely allied materials are found in consid- 

 erable numbers, either in association with relics of various 

 kinds, in shell-heaps and about old village sites, or in other 

 cases still preserved, though scarcely now used, by the na- 

 tives. Of implements which may collectively be designated 

 as " adzes " or " celts ;" those of jade form a considerable pro- 

 portion of the whole. Jade is also found, in a similar man- 

 ner, at least as far inland as the second mountain system of 

 the Cordillera belt — that represented by the Gold, Cariboo 

 and other ranges — and is notably abundant among speci- 

 mens from Indian graves, etc., along the lower portions of 

 the Fraser and Thompson Eivers, within the territory of 

 the people of Selish stock. Elsewhere in the interior of 

 the province, jade implements are rarer, a circumstance 

 probably in part to be accounted for by the fact that adzes 

 or adze-like tools have not been so much employed by the 

 interior Indians as by those of the coast, who are pre-em- 

 inent as dexterous workers in wood, and noted for the size 

 and superior construction of their wooden houses and 

 canoes. 



While jade was evidently a material highly prized and 

 carefully hoarded, the aggregate quantity of this mineral 

 in use by the Indians and Eskimo of the coast at any 

 one time previous to the introduction of iron tools among 

 these peoples, must have been very great — so great as to 

 clearly indicate that its origin is proximately local, and to 

 preclude a belief in the theory that it was obtained casu- 

 ally, or in the course of trade, from remote sources. The 

 facts are indeed such as to fully bear out the autochthonous 

 origin of this material, which has on several occasions been 

 ably contended for by Prof. A. B. Meyer, of Dresden, whose 



