The aboriginal dress of the Nootkas is a square blanket, of a coarse yellow material resembling straw matting, made by the women from cypress bark, with a mixture of dog's hair. This blanket had usually a border of fur; it sometimes had arm-holes, but was ordinarily thrown over the shoulders, and confined at the waist by a belt. Chiefs wore it painted in variegated colors or unpainted, but the common people wore a coarser material painted uniformly red. Women wore the garment longer and fastened under the chin, binding an additional strip of cloth closely about the middle, and showing much modesty about disclosing the person, while the men often went entirely naked. Besides the blanket, garments of many kinds of skin were in use, particularly by the chiefs on public days. In war, a heavy skin dress was worn as a protection against arrows. The Nootkas usually went bareheaded, but sometimes wore a conical hat plaited of rushes, bark, or flax. European blankets have replaced those of native manufacture, and many Indians about the settlements have adopted also the shirt and breeches.[288]
DWELLINGS OF THE NOOTKAS.
The Nootkas choose strong positions for their towns and encampments. At Desolation Sound, Vancouver found a village built on a detached rock with perpendicular sides, only accessible by planks resting on the branches of a tree, and protected on the sea side by a projecting platform resting on timbers fixed in the crevices of the precipice. The Nimkish tribe, according to Lord, build their homes on a table-land overhanging the sea, and reached by ascending a vertical cliff on a bark-rope ladder. Each tribe has several villages in favorable locations for fishing at different seasons. The houses, when more than one is needed for a tribe, are placed with regularity along streets; they vary in size according to the need or wealth of the occupants, and are held in common under the direction of the chief. They are constructed in the manner following. A row of large posts, from ten to fifteen feet high, often grotesquely carved, supports an immense ridge-pole, sometimes two and a half feet thick and one hundred feet long. Similar but smaller beams, on shorter posts, are placed on either side of the central row, distant from it fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five feet, according to the dimensions required. This frame is then covered with split cedar planks, about two inches thick, and from three to eight feet wide. The side planks are tied together with bark, and supported by slender posts in couples just far enough apart to receive the thickness of the plank. A house like this, forty by one hundred feet, accommodates many families, each of which has its allotted space, sometimes partitioned off like a double row of stalls, with a wide passage in the middle. In the centre of each stall is a circle of stones for a fire-place, and round the walls are raised couches covered with mats. In rainy weather, cracks in the roof and sides are covered with mats. No smoke or window holes are left, and when smoke becomes troublesome a roof-plank is removed. The entrance is at one end. These dwellings furnish, according to Nootka ideas, a comfortable shelter, except when a high wind threatens to unroof them, and then the occupants go out and sit on the roof to keep it in place. Frequently the outside is painted in grotesque figures of various colors. Only the frame is permanent; matting, planks, and all utensils are several times each year packed up and conveyed in canoes to another locality where a frame belonging to the tribe awaits covering. The odor arising from fish-entrails and other filth, which they take no pains to remove, appears to be inoffensive, but the Nootkas are often driven by mosquitos to sleep on a stage over the water.[289]
FOOD OF THE NOOTKAS.
The Nootkas, like the Haidahs, live almost wholly on the products of the sea, and are naturally expert fishermen. Salmon, the great staple, are taken in August and September, from sea, inlet, and river, by nets, spears, pots or baskets, and even by hooks. Hooks consist of sharp barbed bones bound to straight pieces of hard wood; sea-wrack, maple-bark, and whale-sinew furnish lines, which in salmon-fishing are short and attached to the paddles. The salmon-spear is a forked pole, some fifteen feet long, the detachable head having prongs pointed with fish-bone or iron, and the fish in deep water is sometimes attracted within its reach by a wooden decoy, forced down by a long pole, and then detached and allowed to ascend rapidly to the surface. Spearing is carried on mostly by torch-light. A light-colored stone pavement is sometimes laid upon the bottom of the stream, which renders the fish visible in their passage over it. Nets are made of nettles or of wild flax, found along Fraser River. They are small in size, and used as dip-nets, or sunk between two canoes and lifted as the fish pass over. A pot or basket fifteen to twenty feet long, three to five feet in diameter at one end, and tapering to a point at the other, is made of pine splinters one or two inches apart, with twig-hoops; and placed, large end up stream, at the foot of a fall or at an opening in an embankment. The salmon are driven down the fall with poles, and entering the basket are taken out by a door in the small end. This basket is sometimes enclosed in another one, similar but of uniform diameter, and closed at one end. Fences of stakes across the river oblige the salmon to enter the open mouth in their passage up, and passing readily through an opening left in the point of the inner basket, they find themselves entrapped. In March, herring appear on the coast in great numbers, and in April and May they enter the inlets and streams, where they are taken with a dip-net, or more commonly by the fish-rake—a pole armed with many sharp bones or nails. Early in the season they can be taken only by torch-light. Halibut abound from March to June, and are caught with hooks and long lines, generally at some distance from shore. For all other fish, European hooks were early adopted, but the halibut, at least among the Ahts, must still be taken with the native hook. Many other varieties of fish, caught by similar methods, are used as food, but those named supply the bulk of the Nootka's provision. In May or June, whales appear and are attacked in canoes by the chief, with the select few from each tribe who alone have the right to hunt this monarch of the sea. The head of their harpoon is made of two barbed bones and pointed with muscle-shell; it is fastened to a whale-sinew line of a few feet in length, and this short line to a very long bark rope, at one end of which are seal-skin air-bags and bladders, to keep it afloat. The point is also fastened to a shaft from ten to twenty-five feet in length, from which it is easily detached. With many of these buoys in tow the whale cannot dive, and becomes an easy prey. Whale-blubber and oil are great delicacies, the former being preferred half putrid, while the oil with that of smaller denizens of the sea preserved in bladders, is esteemed a delicious sauce, and eaten with almost everything. Sea-otters and seals are also speared, the former with a weapon more barbed and firmly attached to the handle, as they are fierce fighters; but when found asleep on the rocks, they are shot with arrows. Seals are often attracted within arrow-shot by natives disguised as seals in wooden masks.
Clams and other shell-fish, which are collected in great numbers by the women, are cooked, strung on cypress-bark cords, and hung in the houses to dry for winter use. Fish are preserved by drying only, the use of salt being unknown. Salmon, after losing their heads and tails, which are eaten in the fishing season, are split open and the back-bone taken out before drying; smaller fry are sometimes dried as they come from their element; but halibut and cod are cut up and receive a partial drying in the sun. The spawn of all fish, but particularly of salmon and herring, is carefully preserved by stowing it away in baskets, where it ferments. Bear, deer, and other land animals, as well as wild fowl, are sometimes taken for food, by means of rude traps, nets, and covers, successful only when game is abundant, for the Nootkas are but indifferent hunters. In the time of Jewitt, three peculiarities were observable in the Nootka use of animal food, particularly bear-meat. When a bear was killed, it was dressed in a bonnet, decked with fine down, and solemnly invited to eat in the chief's presence, before being eaten; after partaking of bruin's flesh, which was appreciated as a rarity, the Nootka could not taste fresh fish for two months; and while fish to be palatable must be putrid, meat when tainted was no longer fit for food. The Nootka cuisine furnished food in four styles; namely, boiled—the mode par excellence, applicable to every variety of food, and effected, as by the Haidahs, by hot stones in wooden vessels; steamed—of rarer use, applied mostly to heads, tails, and fins, by pouring water over them on a bed of hot stones, and covering the whole tightly with mats; roasted—rarely, in the case of some smaller fish and clams; and raw—fish-spawn and most other kinds of food, when conveniences for cooking were not at hand. Some varieties of sea-weed and lichens, as well as the camass, and other roots, were regularly laid up for winter, while berries, everywhere abundant, were eaten in great quantities in their season, and at least one variety preserved by pressing in bunches. In eating, they sit in groups of five or six, with their legs doubled under them round a large wooden tray, and dip out the food nearly always boiled to a brothy consistency, with their fingers or clam-shells, paying little or no attention to cleanliness. Chiefs and slaves have trays apart, and the principal meal, according to Cook, was about noon. Feasting is the favorite way of entertaining friends, so long as food is plentiful; and by a curious custom, of the portion allotted them, guests must carry away what they cannot eat. Water in aboriginal days was the only Nootka drink; it is also used now when whisky is not to be had.[290]
NOOTKA BATTLES AND BOATS.
Lances and arrows, pointed with shell, slate, flint, or bone, and clubs and daggers of wood and bone, were the weapons with which they met their foes; but firearms and metallic daggers, and tomahawks, have long since displaced them, as they have to a less degree the original hunting and fishing implements.[291] The Nootka tribes were always at war with each other, hereditary quarrels being handed down for generations. According to their idea, loss of life in battle can be forgotten only when an equal number of the hostile tribe are killed. Their military tactics consist of stratagem and surprise in attack, and watchfulness in defense. Before engaging in war, some weeks are spent in preparation, which consists mainly of abstinence from women, bathing, scrubbing the skin with briers till it bleeds, and finally painting the whole body jet-black. All prisoners not suitable for slaves are butchered or beheaded. In an attack the effort is always made to steal into the adversary's camp at night and kill men enough to decide the victory before the alarm can be given. When they fail in this, the battle is seldom long continued, for actual hand-to-hand fighting is not to the Nootka taste. On the rare occasions when it is considered desirable to make overtures of peace, an ambassador is sent with an ornamented pipe, and with this emblem his person is safe. Smoking a pipe together by hostile chiefs also solemnizes a treaty.[292]
Nootka boats are dug out each from a single pine-tree, and are made of all sizes from ten to fifty feet long, the largest accommodating forty or fifty men. Selecting a proper tree in the forest, the aboriginal Nootka fells it with a sort of chisel of flint or elk-horn, three by six inches, fastened in a wooden handle, and struck by a smooth stone mallet. Then the log is split with wooden wedges, and the better piece being selected, it is hollowed out with the aforesaid chisel, a mussel-shell adze, and a bird's-bone gimlet worked between the two hands. Sometimes, but not always, fire is used as an assistant. The exterior is fashioned with the same tools. The boat is widest in the middle, tapers toward each end, and is strengthened by light cross-pieces extending from side to side, which, being inserted after the boat is soaked in hot water, modify and improve the original form. The bow is long and pointed, the stern square-cut or slightly rounded; both ends are raised higher than the middle by separate pieces of wood painted with figures of birds or beasts, the head on the bow and the tail on the stern. The inside is painted red; the outside, slightly burned, is rubbed smooth and black, and for the whale fishery is ornamented along the gunwales with a row of small shells or seal-teeth, but for purposes of war it is painted with figures in white. Paddles are neatly made of hard wood, about five and a half feet long with a leaf-shaped blade of two feet, sharp at the end, and used as a weapon in canoe-fighting. A cross-piece is sometimes added to the handle like the top of a crutch.[293]
In addition to the implements already named are chests and boxes, buckets, cups and eating-troughs, all of wood, either dug out or pinned together; baskets of twigs and bags of matting; all neatly made, and many of the articles painted or carved, or ornamented with shell work. As among the Haidahs, the dried eulachon is often used as a lamp.[294] The matting and coarser kinds of cloth are made of rushes and of pine or cedar bark, which after being soaked is beaten on a plank with a grooved instrument of wood or bone until the fibres are separated. The threads are twisted into cords between the hand and thigh; these cords, hung to a horizontal beam and knotted with finer thread at regular intervals, form the cloth. Thread of the same bark is used with a sharpened twig for a needle. Intercourse with Europeans has modified their manufactures, and checked the development of their native ingenuity.[295]