The more correct name for the former is that which they give themselves, Innuit, “men.” They are essentially a maritime people, extending along the northern coasts of the continent from Icy Bay in Alaska on the west, almost to the Straits of Belle Isle on the Labrador side. Northward they reach into Greenland, where the Scandinavians found them about the year 1000 A. D., although it is likely that these Greenland Eskimos had come from Labrador no long time before.[179]
Throughout the whole of this extensive distribution, they present a most remarkable uniformity of appearance, languages, arts and customs. The unity of their tribes is everywhere manifest.
The physical appearance of the Eskimos is characteristic. Their color is dark, hair black and coarse, stature medium, skull generally long (dolichocephalic, 71-73). The beard is scant and the cheek bones high.
They usually have a cheerful, lively disposition, and are much given to stories, songs and laughter. Neither the long nights of the polar zone, nor the cruel cold of the winters, dampens their glee. Before their deterioration by contact with the whites, they were truthful and honest. Their intelligence in many directions is remarkable, and they invented and improved many mechanical devices in advance of any other tribes of the race. Thus, they alone on the American continent used lamps. They make them of stone, with a wick of dried moss. The sledge with its team of dogs is one of their devices; and gloves, boots and divided clothing are articles of dress not found on the continent south of them. Their “kayak,” a light and strong boat of sealskins stretched over a frame of bones or wood, is the perfection of a sea-canoe. Their carvings in bone, wood or ivory, and their outline drawings, reveal no small degree of technical skill; and they independently discovered the principle of the arch and apply it to the construction of their domed snow-houses. The principal weapons among them are the bow and arrow and the lance.
The Aleutians proper live on the central and eastern islands of the Archipelago named from them. Their language differs wholly from the Eskimo. At present they are largely civilized.
2. The North Atlantic Group.
The spacious water-shed of the Atlantic stretches from the crests of the Rocky Mountains to the Eastern Ocean. Whether the streams debouch into Hudson Bay or the Gulf of Mexico, their waters find their way to the Atlantic. The most of this region was in the possession of a few linguistic stocks, whose members, generally at war with each other, roved widely over these lowlands.
The northernmost of them was the Athapasca stock. Its members called themselves Tinnéh, “people,” and they are also known as Chepewyans, an Algonkin word meaning “pointed skins,” applied from the shape of the skin robe they wore, pointed in front and behind.[180]
Their country extended from Hudson Bay to the Cascade Range of the Rocky Mountains, and from the Arctic Ocean southward to a line drawn from the mouth of the Churchill river to the mouth of the Frazer river. The northern tribes extend westward nearly to the delta of the Yukon river, and reach the seacoast at the mouth of the Copper river. At some remote period, some of its bands forsook their inhospitable abodes in the north, and following the eastern flanks of the Cordillera, migrated far south into Mexico, where they form the Apaches and Navajos, and the Lipans near the mouth of the Rio del Norte.
The general trend of the pre-historic migrations of the Tinnéh, seems to have been from a centre west of Hudson Bay, whence they diverged north, west, and southwest.