Fig. 77.—Man’s dress boot of deerskin.
Boots of this style are the common everyday wear of the men, sometimes made wholly of dark deerskin and sometimes variegated. They are often made of a pattern like that of the lower part of the women’s pantaloons; that is, with the uppers separate from the leg pieces, which are brown, with four white gussets on the calf. Fig. 77, No. 56759 [91], is one of a pair of full-dress boots of a slightly different pattern. The leg pieces are the same in number as in No. 56750, and put together in the same way, but 2 and 3 are of a different shape.[236] They are made of deer-leg skins, each piece with a lighter streak down the middle. The soles are of white sealskin, finely crimped, with the edge coming to a point at the toe, and the five ornamental bands are of sealskin, alternately black and white. A strip of edging three-fourths of an inch wide is inserted in the seam between 2 and 3 on each side. The light stripes are mountain-sheep skin and the dark ones the usual young fawnskin, tagged with red worsted. The leg reaches to just below the knee, and is hemmed over on the inside, to hold the drawstring, which comes out behind. There are strings at the ankles as before.
Fig. 78.—Pattern of man’s dress boot of deerskin.
Fig. 79, No. 89834 [770], is one of a pair of almost precisely the same pattern as the last, but made of mountain-sheep skin. The soles are more deeply turned up all round and have three ornamental bands of sealskin around the edge, black, white, and black. Edging is inserted into both the seams on each side. It is strips of mountain-sheep skin and a dark brown deerskin, tagged with red worsted, with the edge which laps over the side piece cut into oblique tags. There are no tiestrings, as the soles are turned up high enough to stay in place without them. These boots were brought from the east by one of the Nuwŭk trading parties in 1882. Fig. 80, No. 56749 [110], is also a full-dress boot, with soles like the last and no tiestrings. The leg is of two pieces of dark brown deerskin with the hair clipped short. These pieces are shaped like 2 in No. 56750, and the inner is larger, so that it laps round the leg, bringing the seam on the outside. The leg is enlarged to fit the swell of the calf by a large triangular gusset from the knee to the midleg, meeting the inside piece in an oblique seam across the calf. Instead of a hem, the top of the leg has a half-inch band sewed round it and a binding for the drawstring above this. Edging is inserted in the front seam, and obliquely across the outside of the leg. That in the front seam is three narrow strips of deerskin, dark in the middle and light on each side. The other is of mountain-sheep skin in three strips, piped with fawnskin and tagged with worsted.
Fig. 79.—Man’s dress boot of skin of mountain-sheep.