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CHAPTER VI 
DRESS AND ADORNMENT 
The fur-bearing animals which the Indian hunted for his daily 
food provided him also with the clothing he required to withstand 
the rigours of a continental climate in a country of rather high lati- 
tudes. He might have survived without clothing on the Pacific 
coast, where the warm Japanese current, sweeping southward from 
the Aleutian islands and the Alaskan gulf, kept the temperature 
within moderate limits at every season of the year; but nowhere 
else in Canada could he have lived through a single winter without 
warm garments to shield his body and limbs. He knew neither cotton 
nor linen, which in any case cannot give adequate protection in zero 
and sub-zero temperatures, and he had never domesticated the wild 
sheep or the wild goat of the Rocky mountains, the buffalo of the 
plains, or the musk-ox of the Arctic and sub-Arctic tundra, all animals 
provided wdth long coats of wool. The amount of wool yielded by 
the buffalo and the musk-ox is indeed small compared with the yield 
from the sheep and goat, and their domestication might have pro- 
duced little change in the Indian’s clothing (which already included 
the dressed hides with their wool), although it would have furnished 
him an ample supply of meat. But the domestication of the sheep 
and goat would surely have stimulated the art of weaving, already 
familiar to most tribes, and have made woollen garments the every- 
day dress west of the Rocky mountains, if not to the east of those 
ranges. The Tlinkit Indians of southern Alaska and the Tsimshian 
of the Skeena and Nass rivers did actually weave the wool of the wild 
mountain goat into blankets, which were traded all down the coast 
of British Columbia. But the wool was so difficult to procure that 
they generally mixed it with strands of cedar bark, or, less often 
perhaps, with narrow strips of sea-otter skin;^ and the manufacture 
of a single blanket, with its intricate and often beautiful patterns, 
entailed so much labour that only the most influential natives could 
aspire to its possession, and then for ceremonial purposes only. The 
Salish tribes, particularly those near the mouth of the Fraser, made 
1 C/. Milet-Moreau, M.T..A.: “Voyage de la Peronse”; tome second, p. 233 (Paris, 1708). 
