355 
with rush mats.^ The coast people stored their food in large boxes 
beneath the rafters or under the benches; the Interior Salish cached 
it outside the dwellings in boxes raised on posts, or, more often., in 
rleep pits lined with bark. The dome-shaped sweat-house, infrequent 
on the coast of British Columbia, was as common in the interior as 
on the plains or in the eastern woodlands of Canada; it was the 
home of the youth during his period of fasting, and both men and 
women purified themselves in its steam before feasts and religious 
dances. Though the principal source of food remained the salmon, 
land animals — black-tailed deer, elk, bear, beaver, and marmot — 
took the place of sea mammals and were much more prominent in 
the diet. The Okanagan tribe even crossed the Rocky mountains, 
like their Kootenay neighbours, to hunt the buffalo on the prairies. 
Cooking vessels were not the neatly made boxes of red cedar employed 
by the tribes on the coast, but either vessels of birch bark or baskets 
woven so tightly that they held water. Often, however, the Indians 
preferred to roast their meat and fish on spits, or to bake them in 
the ashes. 
Piven in their dress the Interior Salish departed radically from 
the coast tribes and resembled the Indians east of the Rocky moun- 
tains. It is true that like the Coast Salish they made blankets of 
goat’s wool, though without the admixture of dog’s hair; but they 
also wove blankets from strips of rabbit fur, after the manner of 
tribes in northern and eastern Canada. Instead of the oblong cloaks, 
the capes, and the domed or conical hats woven from spruce-root, 
that were worn from Puget sound to the gulf of Alaska, they had 
robes of fur, and breech-cloths (men), tunics (women), leggings, 
and moccasins of dressed skin. Their transportation methods, again, 
were different. A few families had dug-out canoes like the river 
canoes used in the delta of the Fraser, but before the introduction 
of iron tools the great majority of the Interior Salish preferred the 
more easily made bark canoe, which generally projected under the 
water-line at bow and stern like the bark canoes of the Kootenay. So 
full of rapids, however, were the Fraser and Columbia rivers and 
their tributaries that the Indians performed most of their travelling 
on foot, and transported their weapons, trade goods, and household 
furniture on their backs or on the backs of dogs. A small, round- 
1 The Lillopt had at least one villape fortified with a palisade, like some of the villages of the 
coast tribes. Journal of Simon Fraser; in Masson, i, p. 177. 
