4

and similar roots; and throughout the whole of the Cordillera
region they eagerly collected service-berries and other wild
fruits during the summer months. Nevertheless, they were
often short of food during the long winter, and compelled to
resort to the inner barks of the hemlock and the pine.

FISHING AND HUNTING

The Cordillera Indians employed the same hunting methods,
and used the same weapons, as other Canadian Indians, but
were particularly adept in setting deadfalls and spring-traps.
Some of them attached a stone blade to the end of the bow,
thus converting it into an emergency spear.

Their fish-hooks and fish-spears, dip-nets, and basket traps
resembled those used elsewhere; but whether they employed a
seine in pre-European times is doubtful. A novel sight in
certain canyons were the huge wicker cages that they lowered
into the foaming water to catch the migrating salmon.

DRESS

In their dress the Cordillera Indians copied their neighbours
to the eastward rather than those on the Pacific coast. Men
wore a skin shirt with leggings and moccasins, and in some, but
not all, districts a breech-cloth. Women wore a longer shirt,
which was practically a dress, and shorter leggings. In winter
both sexes wrapped about their shoulders robes of marmot and
other furs, or else blankets of woven rabbit-skin. Some of the
Interior Salish had also capes or ponchos of skin or silverberry
bark, similar to the cedar-bark ponchos that were worn on
the coast.

The Kutchin Indians of the Yukon basin, influenced by
the Eskimo to the north, pointed their caribou-skin shirts in
front and behind and cut them away at the sides just below the
level of the waist. They joined, too, the moccasins to the
leggings, and filled out and lengthened the leggings until they
were practically trousers. Their children, and a few adults,
even added hoods to their shirts. This attractive costume
disappeared completely, however, in the middle of the nineteenth
century.

ORNAMENTS

The Cordillera Indians specialized in necklaces, which they
made from a great variety of materials, berries and seeds pre-
dominating in the arid south, animal bones and claws farther