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