68 
cruder blankets of goats' wool mingled with dogs' hair^ and featliei’S, 
but their supply of the wool was even more restricted than that of 
the northern tribes. This scarcity of wool forced the west coast 
natives to have recourse either to dressed skins, like other Indians, 
or to a verv different material, the bark of the vellow cedar, which 
they wove into blankets on a primitive frame, and bordered with 
goat yarn or strips of sea-otter skin.- Some Salish Indians living in 
the dry belt of the Fraser River area, where cedar was lacking, used 
sagebrush instead of cedar bark; and others wove blankets from 
Coast Salisli woman weaving a l)lanket of clog liair and niomitain-goat wool; anotlier 
woman s])inning the wool; in t!io foreground a shoin dog. < R( prothiveii , iliroiitjh 
the courtcK!/ of ihr h’oi/itl Ottiario M Ksvuin of A rrhtcolofu/, from a pnintitig hy 
Ran} Kain'j 
strips of rabbit furs, like the Indians throughout the basin of the 
upper Mackenzie and in the northern parts of Ontario and Quebec. 
Hut these woven garments of bast and fur were more akin to mats 
1 For this pnrnose llit-v raised a .sra’cial breed of dops, now extinct ajipurcntly, but described by the 
early navigator Vancouver: “The dogs belonging to this tribe of liidian.s were numerous, and much 
resembled those of Poinc'rania, though in general somewhat larger. They were all shorn a.s close 
to the skin as sheep are in England ; and so compact were their fleeec.s, that large portion.^ could be 
lifted up by a corner without causing anj' separation. They were composed of a mixture of a coarse 
kind oi wool, with \ cry fine, long liair, capal>le of being s]iun into yarn.” Vancouver, (Jeurge ; ' A 
Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World”; vol. i, p. 266 (London, 
“ Clogs of the American Aborigines”; Hull. Mus. Com. Zool., vol. Ixiii, No. t), 
p. 469 ff (Cambridge, Mass., 1920). 
2 Mackenzie ((;)p. cit., pp, 322-338) says that the Bella Coola interwove the skin with the cedar 
bark, but no specimen of this kind seems to have been preserved. 
