A STUDY OF PRIMITIVE MONEY. 333 



the shell money aristocracy of the Karoks, Hupas, Haidahs, and others 

 of the ancient families of western America. 



Among the Karoks " no marriage is legal or binding unless preceded 

 by the payment of money, and that family is most aristocratic in which 

 the most money was paid for the wife. For this reason it stands a young 

 man well in hand to be diligent in accumulating shell money and not 

 to be a niggard in bargaining with his father-in-law. So far is this 

 shell aristocracy carried, that the children of a woman for whom no 

 money was paid are accounted no better than bastards, and the whole 

 family are condemned." 



The Hupas have the same shell aristocracy as the Karok, the amount 

 paid for the wife determining her rank in society. 



Among the Haidahs "rank and power depend greatly upon wealth, 

 which consists of implements, wives, and slaves. Wealth, which is 

 quite as important here as in any civilized communities and of much 

 more importance than is customary among savage nations, consists in 

 shell money, called alli-co-chick, white deer-skins, canoes, and indirectly 

 in women." Again : u Wives, as they must be bought, are a sign of 

 wealth, and the owner of many is resjfected accordingly." 



Two centuries have nearly passed since the u peage " and " wampum h 

 of the eastern aborigines ceased to be an implement in the current 

 activities in the colonial life of the Atlantic sea-board. A century later 

 and the red men themselves had become as obsolete as their " coinage ; " 

 outcasts and wanderers from their native haunts, overlooked and for- 

 gotten in the tumult, or trampled out in the triumphant westward march 

 of a conquering race. 



The past of the red men of the Pacific has not yet been reached. They 

 still live and wander, but the twilight is upon them. The glimpse that 

 we get incidentally in our brief review is that of forty or fifty years ago 

 rather than to day. 



On the shores of British Columbia and at many places to the north, 

 to Alaska and inclusive of that Territory, they are numerous even now. 

 To the southward it is different. We may follow the westerly slopes of 

 the Sierra Nevada, or either flank of the picturesque Coast Ranges, or 

 the shore line from southern California to Puget Sound without meet- 

 ing a solitary sample of the native stock. Again, perchance while hunt- 

 ing in the valleys or fishing in the streams a few " bucks and squaws" 

 may be met with, disguised in the cast-off garments of the alien whites. 



In the pleasant valleys where the Wintuns, Matsuns, and Shastas 

 once roamed in all the pomp and circumstance of savage pride, adorned 

 with glittering fragments of aulone, or necklaces of hawocJc or leol-kol, 

 a few arrow-heads or mortars may be found to verify the traditions of 

 former occupancy. Here and there the shriveled remnants of the tribes 

 and families, the former tenants of this vast region, are gathered into 

 reservations, human drift- weed in the eddies of the stream, thrust aside 

 by the pitiless current of a resistless civilization. 



