8 and nettle. They used stone pestles for pounding roots and berries, and had special tools for digging roots, for stripping the bark from trees, and for scraping away the sap. TRAVEL AND TRANSPORT Wherever the rivers were navigable and flowed in the required direction, the Cordillera Indians travelled in bark canoes or in dugouts. The canoe used in the south of British Columbia, unlike all other Canadian canoes, ran out to a point under water at each end, and its bark was in many cases pine instead of either spruce or birch. The Yukon Indians generally used a flat-bottomed birch-bark canoe, but occasionally also a skin-covered one not unlike the Eskimo umiak. Most of the rivers were so full of rapids and canyons that the natives had to travel mainly on foot, carrying their posses- sions in bags or baskets with the aid of tump-lines. The Yukon Indians employed sleds and snow-shoes when the snow lay on the ground, having learned the use of sleds from the Eskimo. Farther south neither the sled nor the toboggan was known, although the Indians of Stikine River sometimes made a crude “trailer” from the leg skins of the caribou. Even the snow- shoe was lacking except in the extreme south, where some of the Salish Indians made a small, round-headed type, without crossbars, that was much inferior to the snow-shoes of the Mackenzie River Basin or of eastern Canada. SOCIAL LIFE With the exception of the Kootenay, who preserved in their new home west of the Rockies the characteristic organiza- tion of a plains tribe, the Cordillera Indians copied the social system of their nearest neighbours on the Pacific coast; they separated themselves, that is to say, into nobles and commoners (slaves were rare), grouped into “Houses” in the south of the province, and into intermarrying clans in the north. Along with this coast organization they adopted also many of the customs of the coast tribes. The nobles gave great feasts or ‘‘potlatches,”’ and in some districts held ceremonies similar to the winter dances on the coast. Their nomadic hunting life, however, impelled them to retain many more ancient practices, particularly in relation to game. Thus their adolescent girls