“Ninety miles without stopping,” six Indians paddling his canoe, is Kane’s record of his crossing from Nasqually on the mainland to the four-year-old Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. Beside the harbor of the future capital stood an Indian village boasting 500 warriors, armed chiefly with bows and arrows. Some of their lodges were sixty or seventy feet long, and well built; the boards were split from the logs with bone wedges, but were very smooth and regular.
Dogs were bred for their wool,—a peculiar breed with “long hair of a brownish black and clear white.” A winter suit consisted of a blanket made of dog’s hair, or dog’s hair and goose-down mixed, or frayed cedar [a]Indian Sports and Slavery] bark, or wildgoose skin. The sea otter was then the most valuable fur animal on the coast—twelve blankets had to be paid for one skin. It has now been hunted out of existence.
Like most barbarians, and many white folk who call themselves civilized, the Indians were great gamblers. They often spent two or three days and nights on end playing such simple games as “lehallum.” Ten small round pieces of wood, one being black, were shuffled rapidly between two bundles of frayed bark, by one player, and his opponent had to guess which bundle contained the black piece when the shuffling stopped. A player would often keep this up till he had lost everything, even his wife; and some of them had much wealth in blankets, furs and slaves.
Coast Indian Mask
Any Indian caught by another tribe, even if there was no war between them, could be kept as a slave; [a]Making Flat-heads] and slaves had no rights, not even a right to live. Kane tells of a chief who “erected a colossal idol of wood and sacrificed five slaves to it, boastfully asking who else could afford to kill so many slaves.” Before going off to fish, or to fight, or even to gather camas, the tribe had a “Medicine Mask Dance.” Half a dozen men put on wooden masks “highly painted and ornamented, with the eyes and mouth ingeniously made to open and shut. In their hands they hold carved rattles, which are shaken in time to a monotonous song or humming noise (there are no words to it) sung by the whole company as they slowly dance round and round in a circle.”
The camas, by the way, was their favorite vegetable; it is a bulbous root, looking like an onion, but “more like a potato when cooked, and very good eating.” Fish, of course, was the principal food all along the coast. In fact, salmon pemmican was carried far inland. The coast canoe, very large but very light, was hollowed out of a cedar tree by fire and smoothed off with stone axes.
One of the chief amusements Paul Kane found among the Chinooks was picking and eating insects from each other’s heads. “On my asking an Indian why he ate them, he replied that they bit him, and he gratified his revenge by biting them in return.”
The Flat-head monstrosity which Kane found and depicted was cultivated by whole tribes on the mainland and around Victoria on the island. The infant, strapped to its papoose board for the mother to carry on her back, had its head pressed by a leather band passing tightly over the forehead and through holes in the board. This pressure was kept up steadily till the child was eight or twelve months old; that was enough to give its head the shape of a wedge for the rest of its life. Kane [a]A Colony under a Company] says that he never heard an infant cry under this treatment until the fastenings were removed, when it would cry until they were replaced. Farther north on the island the head was pressed by bandaging into the shape of a cone.
About this time a proposal was made in England to organize a colony on the Pacific coast. The Hudson’s Bay Company asked to be entrusted with the task. Mr. Gladstone and other British statesmen argued that the Company had always opposed settlement and was quite unfit for such an enterprise: as well ask the wolf to guard the sheepfold.