The name Tshugatsi is so like that of the northern Koriaks (Tshuktshi) that it is unlikely that both are native. In which quarter it is applied correctly, is a point that some future investigator must decide.
The Kuskokwim.—Locality from Cape Rodney to the Peninsula of Aliaska. Numbers, according to Baer, about 7,000.
Such is the direction of the Eskimos of the Asiatic side of America. It is, however, inconvenient to say that they form the eastern branch of the stock, because, when we begin with the Atlantic side of America, we find that they become western; indeed, they are either one or the other, according to the point from which we begin to describe them.
We now take the other extremity of the Eskimo area, which is the southernmost point of Greenland, Cape Farewell, within a few days' sail of the European island of Iceland. Doing this, we move from east to west, and determine where the two divisions meet.
Greenlanders.—The language of the natives of Greenland, and those of the coast of Labrador, is mutually intelligible; the similarity in physical appearances and in manners being equally close.
Proper Eskimo.—These are the inhabitants of the shores of Hudson's Bay, and the coast of Labrador. Their dialect is understood at least as far as the Mackenzie-river, in 137° W. L.; where Captain Franklin's interpreter, who came from Hudson's Bay, found no difficulty in being understood by the natives of the parts last mentioned. About three degrees westward, however, the Eskimo of Greenland and Labrador comes to be understood with difficulty at first. Here, then, it is, where the two divisions of the Eskimo dialects meet.
THE KOLÚCH.
I adopt this term in deference to the usage of ethnologists, without professing to give a value to it in the way of classification, since I think it much more likely that the so-called Kolúch languages form a sub-division of the Eskimo than a separate substantive class of their own. Geographically, however, the term means the languages spoken along the coast of the North-Pacific from Cook's Inlet to the parts immediately north of Queen Charlotte's Islands; languages which are distinguished from the Eskimo to the north, the Athabascan to the east, and the Nas and Haidah to the south, and languages which politically belong to Russian America; since the Tungaas, which is the southernmost (so-called) Kolúch dialect, is the most northern with which the traders of the Hudson-Bay Company come in contact. The extension towards the interior seems limited. The particular Kolúch dialect best known is that of Sitka, which, in Lisiansky's Voyage, is compared with the Kenay, Kadiak, and Unalashkan. Now it is a fact upon which the present author lays considerable stress, that the affinities between the Sitka and Kenay, which are both considered as Kolúch, are but little more numerous than those between the Sitka and Kadiak, the Kenay and Unalashkan, &c., where only one is considered as Kolúch. The chief Kolúch dialects are as follows:—
The Kenay of Cook's Inlet.—These are about 460 families strong. They assert that they are derived from the hills of the interior, whence they moved coastwards. In the way of mythology, they are descended from the raven.