THE ALKATCHO CARRIER OF BRITISH COLUMBIA 343

the Kwakiutl, who might be regarded as an aristocratic society, the
Bella Coola were plutocratic. With the development of the White
fur trade on the coast, and with an increasing demand for furs
from the interior, the Alkatcho Carrier assumed new significance
in Bella Coola economy. In the competition for new sources of
wealth that characterized Northwest Coast economy a Carrier son-
in-law gave a Bella Coola man a virtual trade monopoly, particu-
larly in view of the Carrier concepts of bride-service.

Thus the increasing importance of trade between the Bella
Coola and the Alkatcho Carrier, as a result of the growing White
fur trade on the coast of British Columbia at the end of the eight-
eenth century, must have promoted intermarriage. The types of
social relationships involved in marriage resulted inevitably in the
integration of the potlatch-rank complex at Alkatcho.

This process of trade, intermarriage, and acculturation was by
no means a unique development in British Columbia, but, on the
contrary, was characteristic of coast-interior relationships. The
Bulkley River Carrier have intermarried with the Gitksan group
of the T’simshian with whom they have always had friendly trade
relations. The latter controlled the trade route down the Skeena
River. They traded shells and copper with the Carrier for moose-
hides and furs. Correlated with the trade and marriage relations
between the Bulkley Carrier and the Gitksan are similarities of
social organization and equation of phratries. The same thing
happened with Sekani. To quote Jenness:

When the Sekani were confined to the western side of the Rockies
through the hostility of the Cree and the Beaver they impinged upon
the Gitksan and Carrier. The Sekani not only fought, traded, and inter-
married with them, but assimilated many of their customs, and tried to
adopt their divisions into exogamous matrilineal phratries.12

The McLeod Lake band farthest from the Gitksan “abandoned
the phratry system before it could be well established.” 1° The
phratry system of the western divisions of the Tahltan were in-
troduced by marriage with the Tlingit; but the Nelson River
Indians well over to the east, out of the line of trade, never adopted
phratries at all. Trade between the Tahltan and the Tlingit de-

12D. Jenness, The Sekani Indians of British Columbia (manuscripts).
13 [bid.