DRESS AND PERSONAL HABITS. 93

Minor Details of the Wearing Apparcl.

The garters, as well as the cinctures which they occasionally wore, were
among the eastern Dénés embroidered with special skill and neatness with
porcupine quills and sinews. They were further adorned with fringes of leather
worked round with hair of various colours.

Over the breast practically all the tribes wore necklaces of material
varying according to the resources of their habitats. In the northwest, the
fine elongated shell, Dentalium Indianorum, to which we have repeatedly
referred, was in great demand for that purpose, and the quantity of it dis-
played on the wearing apparel afforded a safe gauge to the wealth of the
individual. The dentalium necklace affected different forms according to the
personal fancy, but it consisted generally of several rows of shells threaded
with sinews and reclining gracefully over the breast.

Beads replaced these in the east, and silver is to this day used in the
same connection in the far south. The Navahoes usually fashion this metal
into large heavy disks or oval plates, wherewith they decorate their belts
and other parts of their costume. Strings of turquoise, coral or globular silver
beads of their own manufacture are also much in evidence on their persons}.

The prehistoric Carriers had a more primitive kind of necklace, which
they called fi-netthan, “that [being heavy and cylindrical] which lies around
and below the head”. It was obtained by boiling and splitting off a thin
band of a cariboo horn, which was given when still pliable the desired form.
As an attempt at ornamentation, geometrical designs were scratched with the
stone knife, over which a pinch of diluted red ochre was rubbed with the
hand. The colouring matter passed over the smooth surface of the horn, but
remained in the light furrowings which were thus brought into greater pro-
minence. This primitive method of ornamentation is still in vogue among the
western Dénés. Charcoal is sometimes used instead of vermilion.

Persons claiming shamanistic powers very commonly replaced this by
a necklace of grizzly bear claws, beaver teeth, etc.

It now remains with us to describe two pieces of the personal attire
which, essential though they may seem to the European mind, were looked
upon as scarcely more important than the necklace. I mean the head dress
and the footgear. Both were quite often dispensed with. The former, especially,
was hardly known at all among the females. Yet Mackenzie mentions as being
worn by the eastern Dénés a kind of band encircling the head and ‘composed
of strips of leather one inch and a half broad, embroidered with porcupine
quills and stuck round with the claws of bears or wild fowl inverted, to which
are suspended a few short thongs of the skin of an animal that resembles
the ermine, in the form of a tassel”®.

1 See most illustrations representing Navahoes in this work.
2 «Voyages from Montreal”, vol. I, p. 236.