358 
This potlatch system spread to the other Interior Salish tribes during 
the nineteenth century, but fell into abeyance again before its close. 
The most notable festival was a ghost or circle dance, celebrated 
in summer or in winter whenever some member of a band claimed 
to have received a message fi'om the land of ghosts. Then the people 
gave themselves over to a series of feasts and dances. On the morn- 
ing of each dance day they fasted and washed; at noon they feasted 
and prayed the Chief of the Dead to preserve them from all ill; in 
the afternoon they danced; and at evening the men held a smoking 
ceremony. So greatly did they reverence this Chief of the Dead 
that at the coming of Europeans several bands elevated him to the 
rank of a sky-deity and identified him with the God of the Christian 
missionaries. 
European diseases, and the complete overthrow of the old 
economic and social conditions, have produced a decline among the 
Interior Salish parallel to that of their kinsmen on the coast. 
Mooney estimates their number in 1780 at 15,500;^ to-day it scarcely 
reaches 6,000. 
KOOTENAY 
The Kootenay,- who were taller than most of the Indians of 
British Columbia, inhabited in the second half of the eighteenth cen- 
tury the northern part of the state of Idaho, and the southeastern 
corner of British Columbia between the Rocky mountains and the 
Selkirks from about latitude 49 degrees north to 52 degrees north. 
Even at that time they seem to have been divided into two groups: 
the Upper Kootenay of the upper Columbia and upper Kootenay 
rivers, who continually crossed the mountains to hunt the buffalo 
on the prairies, and even attempted to reach the posts of the fur 
traders on the upper Saskatchewan;-^ and the lower Kootenay of the 
lower Kootenay I’iver, who spoke a slightly variant dialect and, being 
farther removed from the mountains, seldom joined in the buffalo 
hunt but subsisted principally on fish. Both groups, as we know 
from their traditions and from the explicit statement of the explorer 
Thompson,"^ lived on the eastern side of the Rockies during the 
1 Mooney; Op. cit., p. 29 f. 
2 Tile meaning of tlie word is not known. 
3 Cf. Journal of Duncan McGillivray of the Northwest Company at Fort George on the Sas- 
katchewan, 1794-5, with introduction, notes, and appendix by Arthur S, Morton, Toronto, 1929, p. 56. 
^Thompson; Op. cit., p. 327 f. 
