335 
tribes, and as the process was very painful, they performed it in three 
stages, each of which required the assumption of a new name and 
the liolding of a potlatch. Cremation, common among the northern 
ddinkit, was comiiaratively rare among the Haida, who sometimes 
deposited their dead in caves, but more frequently laid them in 
mortuary houses, three or four in a single structure, or else placed 
the coffin on the top of a carved post or in a niche in its side. Occa- 
sionally the body of a prominent chief lay in state within his house 
for a whole year before removal to its final resting place. 
Contact with Kuro]:>eans wrought a speedy change in the lives 
of these islanders. Potatoes, introduced by the early voyagers, took 
the place of the vanishetl sea-otter skins in purchasing oolakan oil 
from the Tsimshian. Steel tools gave a tremendous impetus to sculp- 
ture, for the Haida, though inferior to the Tlinkit in basket-making, 
far surpassed them and all the other west coast tribes in painting and 
wood-carving. Enormous totem-poles that only the highest chiefs 
could afford in the days of stone adzes now stood before every house, 
and Haida carvers found their services in demand up and down the 
coast of the mainland. A few turned their talents to metal-work, 
and from the large United States dollar wrought silver bracelets and 
brooches beautifully engraved with the highly conventionalized bird 
and animal designs so typical of west coast art. Potlatches became 
more frequent when money could purchase the Hudson’s lUiy blankets 
that re])laced skins as the cui’rency, and whole villages flocked to 
\hctoria to gain quick wealth by lending their women to immoral 
white men. But smallpox at the end of the eighteenth century, and 
both smallpox and venereal diseases in the nineteenth, took their 
toll of the population, which rapidly dwinrlled from perhaps 8,400 
in 1800’ to less than 1,000 (including the Haida on Prince of Wales 
island) a centurv later. To-flay there are but two inhabited villages 
on the (^ueen Charlotte islands, Skidegate and Massett, and their 
combined population numbers barely 650. 
TSIMSHIAN 
The third northern people along the Pacific coast, the Tsimshian 
(“people inside of the Skeena river”), were divided into three 
1 Kcwcombe, C, F. : “The Truliaiis’'; International Congress of Americanists, XVth sess., 
1!)06. p. 146 (Quebec, 1907). That Xewcoinhe’.s estimate is not excessive appears from the eensus made 
between 1836 and 1841, which gave a total of 8.328. Dawson; “Report on the Queen Charlotte Islands,” 
p. 173 13. 
