DRESS AND PERSONAL HABITS. 89

The Loucheux costume.

In the north, lightness of attire was hardly compatible with the prevailing
climatic conditions. While in the east the dress was hardly uniform enough
to permit of a short description and was characterized chiefly by dinginess
and poverty of material, the more manly and industrious Loucheux were
vested in the glory of a costume which was certainly not devoid of elegance.
The most noticeable point of it consisted in the peaked frock or outer gar-
ment worn by men and women.

This particularity was, according to Bishop Taché', proper to the original
garb of all the northern Déné tribes, and practically all ethnologists have
since followed his opinion and made his statement theirs. But Richardson
evidently differs therefrom when he writes that “the Kutchin also wear these
pointed skirts, but they have not been adopted [italics mine] by the Hare
Indians or any of the Chepewyan tribes who, in common with the more
southern Indians, cut their shirts or frocks evenly round at the top of the
thigh2”. He then judiciously remarks that the long pointed garments of the
Loucheux probably gave origin to the accounts of men with a tail, who where
thought by the North Pacific coast aborigines to inhabit the interior of Alaska
and what is now the Yukon Territory. The reports were reliable enough, but
understood in too literal a sense.

The Eskimos wear similarly shaped frocks, and when the student is
familiar with the Dénés’ main characteristics, which is a wonderful receptiveness
and power of imitation, very little doubt will remain in his mind that either
the Loucheux copied in this respect the costume of the Eskimos — which
to me seems the more probable hypothesis — or the immense majority of
the northern Dénés discarded it in favour of the simpler dress of their southern
neighbours of Algonquin parentage.

The annexed plate, which is reproduced from Richardson’s “Arctic
Searching Expedition”, will explain better than words the nature of the
Loucheux national costume. The upper or coat like garment was made with
the skins of cariboo fawns dressed with the hair on. Its peculiar peaked appen-
dages were double, one before the other behind, in the dress of the men,
but that of the women was cut even in front, though it had behind a tapering
tail-like point even longer than in that of the men.

On the lower Mackenzie these flaps do not seem to have been quite
so sharply peaked. Thomas Simpson says® that there they almost reached
the ground and where shaped like beaver tails. This is the exact pattern
obtaining among the Eskimos of the Mackenzie delta, who were closer
neighbours to the Loucheux seen by Simpson than those whose costume

1 Esquisse sur le Nord-Ouest de I’ Amérique, 2nd edition, p. 102.
2 “Arctic Searching Expedition”, vol. I, p. 357.
3 “Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America”, p. 103.