ee | 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. 346