COMMERCE. 227

which was to the Indians of northwestern America what the famous wampum
was to the eastern aborigines. This shell was known and highly prized, not
only among the natives “from Northern California to Puget Sound”, as the
Standard Dictionary has it, but as far as Alaska, and all along the intervening
coast and quite a distance into the interior. Though serving as a medium of
currency, those shells were also in great demand for all kinds of ornamen-
tation purposes, and their beautiful white colour and slightly curved form
lent themselves without much difficulty to that end.

Speaking of the commercial value of the Dentalium, J. K. Lord expresses
himself as follows: “The value of the Dentalium depends upon its length.
Those representing the greater value are called, when strung together end to
end, a ‘Hi-qua’; but the standard by which the Dentalium is calculated to
be fit for a ‘Hiqua’ is that twenty-five shells placed end to end must make
a fathom, or six feet in length. At one time a ‘Hiqua’ would purchase a male
slave, equal in value to fifty blankets, or about 50 pounds sterling’.

It will appear from this quotation that, though popularly known as hiaqua
shells, the Dentalium properly assumed that name only when strung together
so as to form a continuous line of a determined length. Needless to add
that their original value was many times doubled when they reached the first
spurs of the Rocky Mountains, after passing through numberless hands.

Harmon says that in the Carrier and Babine tribes “they constitute a
kind of circulating medium, like the money of civilized countries. Twenty ol
these beads they consider equal in value to a beaver’s skin’ *. Thos. Simpson
mentions Loucheux who brought in furs to trade at Fort Good Hope, on
the Mackenzie, ‘and were very anxious to obtain in exchange the shells
called ‘eyeaquaws’, a sort of cowries, which in the Columbia and New Cale-
donia® form the native currency’’+.

The Carriers call the shells /pai, “the white ones’, and put them to all
kinds of uses in connection with their ceremonial pieces of apparel. They
originated in the archipelago lying between Oregon and Cape Fairweather.

Though the trading companies in Alaska, Russian, American and English
concerns, furnished them to the natives at very high prices, these shells had
attained the status of currency long before the appearance of the whites.
Glass beads, blue, red and white, were, of course due to commerce with the
pale-faced strangers and soon came into popular favour though their relative
value could never compare with that of the dentalium.

Of all the Déné tribes the Loucheux are the fondest of that “jewelry”.
To be counted a chief among the Alaskans, one must possess beads to the
amount of two hundred beavers. Some of them go even so far as to secrete,

1 Quoted by Fr. Whymper, op. cit., pp. 223—224.
7 “An Account”, &c., p. 245.

? The land of the western Dénés.

4 “Narrative” &c., p. 190.