370 
Tlinkit, for example, they divided their population into two exo- 
gamoiis phratries that reckoned descent through the female line.^ 
TAHLTAN 
Very similar to the Carrier in their dress, their implements, and 
their general mode of life, were the Tahltan,- who occupied the- 
country from about latitude 56° 30' north to 60° north, and from 
the Cascade range of mountains to the Cassiar, thus controlling the 
entire drainage basin of the upper Stikine river, and the headwaters 
of some of the streams that fed the Taku, Nass, Skeena, Vlackenzie,. 
and Yukon rivers. The Stikine River valley below Telegraph Creek 
they shared with the Tlinkit, who caught salmon and gathered berries- 
there during the summer months, whereas the Tahltan hunted over 
it during the winter after the Tlinkit had retreated to the coast. 
The climate throughout all this interior country was rather dry,^ 
and the snowfall in winter comparatively light. Grassland or stony 
ridges covered much of the area, and large timber was scarce except 
in the valleys near the coast. Yet it was a splendid game country, 
with abundance of caribou, moose, bear, and smaller animals;^ and 
large shoals of salmon annually ascended the Stikine. The Tahltan 
regulated their lives to meet these conditions: they .scattered to the- 
hunting-grounds in the early winter, and gathered towards spring 
at the fishing- places to await the arrival of the salmon. In mid- 
summer they moved to the mountains again to snare marmots. 
Some remained there until the hunting season, but the majority 
assembled on the Stikine river for the autumn trade with the Tlinkit 
and for the festivals that succeeded it. 
Scarcity of timber allowed the Tahltan to make only a few 
spruce-bark canoes, and those small and of poor quality, little better 
than the temporary rafts that they sometimes constructed to cross- 
1 All our information about the Tsetsaut eomes from Boas, F. : “ The Tinneh Tribe of the Portlanff 
Inlet, tile Ts’els’aut” ; Fifth lleport on the Indians of Britisli Columbia, Kept. British Ass. Advance- 
ment of Sci,, 1805 (London, 1S9.5L I have tonsulted also a few notes left by James Teit, 
“ Two or three meanings have been "ivt'n for this nnme. The most jirohable is one given by Teit, a 
“basin-shaped hollow',” from two Tlinkit words tat, "a basin or bowl,” and tan. “to remain, to be.”' 
It seems to have been the Tlinkit name for I he low fiat at the inouih of the Tahltan river, on its west 
side, t.|)posite the old village of Titcakhan from whieh the Tahltan derived their own name for them- 
selves, tHrakhariotene: “ ]ieople of Titcakhan.” 
tilt was the arid air of the interior that induced the Tlinkt to asccml the river, because they 
could dry fish there more easily than in the damp climate of the coa.st. After the Russians began to- 
visit the northwest coast, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the Tlinkit kept a strict guard 
over the river to preserve their inonoiioly of the fur trade with tlic TaliUan, a monopoly that was not. 
broken unlil the Cassiar gold rush of 1874. 
4 The Indians stale that there were butfido in pre-European times. 
