132 
DALL. 
the region comprised trapping, hunting, and fishing; the first 
for revenue, the others for subsistence. The means of navi¬ 
gation were birch-bark canoes and small skin-boats. Once 
a year the clumsy barkass of the Russians, loaded with tea, 
flour, and trading goods, was laboriously forced upstream 
to the Nulato post, returning with a load of furs. The tribes 
of Eskimo extraction occupied the lower river banks from 
the sea to the Shageluk slough, above which they were re¬ 
placed by Indians of the Tinneh stock. These were to be 
found in scattered villages at various points on the river or 
its tributaries, where the abundance of fish offered means of 
subsistence. The extreme limit of population was to be 
found at the junction with the Yukon of the large river 
Tanana, where the island of Nuklukayet was recognized as 
neutral ground, where delegations from all the tribes met in 
the spring for their annual market of furs. Here our party 
had the interesting experience of meeting the delegation of 
Tanana Indians in full native costume of pointed shirts and 
trousers of dressed deerskin adorned with black and white 
beads, the nasal septum pierced to carry an ornament of 
dentalium shell, their long ham formed into a bundle of 
locks, stiff with tallow, wound with beads, dusted wfith pow¬ 
dered hematite and the chopped down of swans. The ranks 
of frail birch canoes were accurately aligned, and their pad¬ 
dles rose and fell with military precision. When they 
rounded the point of the island and approached the beach, 
where stood the first white men they had ever seen, they 
were met by a complimentary salvo from the guns of the 
Indians already on shore, and responded by wild yells and 
graceful waving of their paddles. 
The waters of the Tanana had never known an explorer 
and its geography was wholly unknown. Never again will 
it be possible for an ethnologist to see upon the Yukon such 
a body of absolutely primitive Indians untarnished by the 
least breath of civilization. 
Above Nuklukayet the Yukon enters a canon, known as the 
Lower Ramparts, above which the depopulated area already 
