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| APPENDICES

‘W.E. Traill was made a Junior Chief Trader in 1879 and a Chief
Trader in 1883.

None of his successors attained a commission.
We owe these last details to an old and well informed Hudson’s
‘Bay Company officer.

APPENDIX B.

Captain G. Dixon, wondering at the degree of perfection in the
art of carving attained by the aborigines of the North Pacific Coast
whom he visited in 1787, remarks that “this art s far from being in
its infancy ; a fondness for carving and sculpture was discovered
among this people by Captain Cook ; iron implements were then also
in use, ” before any contact with the whites. And he adds that ‘it
must doubtless be a considerable time ago” that iron was introduced
on that coast (“A Voyage to the North-West Coast of America,”
pp. 243-44). When, in 1741, Behring first reached the mainland of
America, he found among the inhabitants of the Fox or Eastern
Aleutian Islands “long iron knives, apparently their own manufac-
ture” (“Ten Months among the Tents of the Tuski,” p. 9). It is
open to question whether iron was then really indigenous to that
quarter ; it is much more likely that the supply of it was derived from
the Russian merchants of Eastern Siberia. As early as 1648 a trad-
ing expedition consisting of seven vessels, four of which seem to have
been lost and perhaps drifted to the coast of America, reached the
Gulf of Anadyr, opposite the mouth of the Yukon. Now, as the
natives of the coast of Eastern Siberia had from time immemorial in-
tercourse with America, directly by way of Behring Strait, or
through the Aleutian aborigines, “who seem to migrate from island to
island, and many to the mainland of America” (“Ten Months
among the Tents of the Tuski,” pp. 9-10), it becomes evident that
there is nothing extraordinary in the fact that in 1730 an iron axe
should have found its way to the basin of Lake Stuart, some 200
miles from the North Pacific Coast.

The American aborigines are proverbially nomadic, and, but a
few years ago, the present writer had a good instance of the possibility
of barter between natives from the remotest points in the circumstance
that, on Wrangell Island, in Alaska, he found a couple of Indians
from the distant Mackenzie side by side with a survivor of the
Chinook nation, whose seat was on the banks of the Lower Columbia,
perhaps 2,000 miles from the origina! home of the two Dénés.

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