1 882.] Limit of the Inmtit Tribes on the Alaska Coast. 569 



captured by the more warlike Thlinkets, and a few skulls in Santa 

 Barbara county may be all that is left of the prisoners taken on 

 that very coast from sea-otter hunting expeditions undertaken by 

 English and American skippers who were furnished with Innuit 

 hunters by the Russian authorities at Sitka. 



I am aware that my classification of these tribes conflicts with 

 that adopted by Mr. William H. Dall in his essay on the Distri- 

 bution of the native tribes of Alaska, in Vol. 1, Contributions to 

 North American Ethnology. Mr. Dall's personal intercourse 

 with these people must have been of brief duration, or he would 

 not have confounded the Chilkhaaks and the Oughalentzes. The 

 name of the latter in its proper form of Oughalakmute simply 

 means " far away people ;" Oughaluikhtuk in the Chugach dialect 

 meaning-' far distant." Mr. Dall also was mistaken in his asser- - 

 tion that the Copper river or Ah-Tena Indians had forced their 

 way between the Thlinkets and the Innuits, and hold a small part 



These Indians do not hold now and never did hold, as far as it 

 is possible to learn, any portion of the coast. A small number 

 of them, consisting of traders only, visit the post of Nuchek or 

 Port Etches every year, but to enable them to accomplish this 

 voyage, they purchase large bidars or skin-covered boats of the 

 Innuits. In their own country birch bark canoes form their only 

 means of navigation. 



We have every reason to believe that formerly the Innuits oc- 

 cupied the coast as far as the indentation commonly called Icy 

 bay, but the constant pressure of the stronger Thlinket tribes has 

 caused them to recede gradually to the localities occupied by 

 them at the present day. In the vicinity of Icy bay the glaciers 

 of the Mt. St. Elias range of Alps reach down to the coast, form- 

 ing a long line of icy cliffs, a stretch of coast affording absolutely 

 no landing place for boats or canoes. This feature has proved an 

 ^surmountable obstacle in the way of kaiak navigation, necessi- 

 tating as it does a continuous sea voyage of between two and 

 three days without making a landing. The Innuit in his kaiak 

 could not accomplish this, but the Thlinkets in their large wooden 

 canoes, provided with masts and sails, could easily traverse this 

 d t ce th favorable winds, without being obliged to land. 



When the Russians first came into this neighborhood, they 

 found the two tribes struggling for supremacy ; the Muscovite 



