14 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

and others acquainted with them, to be of the Eskimo stock”!. But Prince
William’s Sound is to the east of Cook’s Inlet, and Cook’s Inlet is implicitly
comprised in this enumeration.

Nor will the strength of our conclusions be impaired if we turn to the
travellers or skippers who first came in contact with these aborigines. The
chronicler of Dixon’s voyage in 1786 speaks of ‘“Codiac Indians” they met
there who “had frequently quarrelled and fought with the natives”®. Kodiaks
could, without any difficulty, converse with Eskimos; how they could under-
stand a singie word of Déné, let alone quarrel with the people who speak
it, I fail to discover.

Then again, as all along the coast, we see the heterogeneous race of
that inlet acting as middlemen between the skippers and the Dénes. Dixon’s
narrative goes on to say: “Our friends... gave us to understand that their
own furs were all sold, and that they were obliged to trade with tribes in
distant parts of the country in order to supply us”®. This circumstance could
by itself account for the “cloaks made of marmot skins” noticed as being
plentiful among them. Marmots, except those of the smaller kind (Arctomys
monax), are denizens of the mountains, where they burrow almost invariably
above the timber limit. The use of their spoils would therefore seem to
predicate a mountaineering race, such as the Eskimo at large has not been
credited with being. But it so happens that we have the best of authorities
in the late book of a man “who was there” for stating that, on the western
coast of Alaska, “the ground-hog [to this day] supplies all the clothing, and,
after the salmon run is over, every Innuit woman makes a summer’s expe-
dition to the nearest mountain range to snare ground-hogs for the yearly
wants of her family’’+.

Captain James Cook is the very first Englishman who met the natives
of the inlet now called after him. He was a close observer, though no ethno-
logist. If at times he seems to differentiate them from the Eskimos, he thereby
simply follows the practice of travellers speaking of aborigines whose racial
identity they do not feel qualified to determine. It is but lately that the
Aleuts, for instance, have been identified as Eskimos, and in common par-
lance their name has not, on that account, been modified in the least. The
aborigines of Greenland, though generally known to be Eskimos, are none
the less called Greenlanders.

Before we see what the famous navigator has to say of the natives of
that coast, let the reader kindly bear in mind that the inhabitants of Prince
William Sound are admitted by all to be Eskimos. Everybody is familiar with

* “Arctic Searching Expedition”, vol. 1, p. 362.

2 “A Voyage round the World; but more particularly to the North-West Coast of America”,
p. 60. London, 1789.

° Ibid., p. 63.
4 «Through the Subarctic Forest”, by W. Pike, p. 259.