The Native Races (Complete 5 Part Edition). Hubert Howe Bancroft

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      CHAPTER III.

       COLUMBIANS.

       Table of Contents

      Habitat of the Columbian Group—Physical Geography—Sources of Food-Supply—Influence of Food and Climate—Four extreme Classes—Haidahs—Their Home—Physical Peculiarities—Clothing—Shelter—Sustenance—Implements—Manufactures—Arts—Property—Laws—Slavery—Women—Customs—Medicine—Death—The Nootkas—The Sound Nations—The Chinooks—The Shushwaps—The Salish—The Sahaptins—Tribal Boundaries.

The term Columbians, or, as Scouler228 and others have called them, Nootka-Columbians, is, in the absence of a native word, sufficiently characteristic to distinguish the aboriginal nations of north-western America between the forty-third and fifty-fifth parallels, from those of the other great divisions of this work. The Columbia River, which suggests the name of this group, and Nootka Sound on the western shore of Vancouver Island, were originally the chief centres of European settlement on the North-west Coast; and at an early period these names were compounded to designate the natives of the Anglo-American possessions on the Pacific, which lay between the discoveries of the Russians on the north and those of the Spaniards on the south. As a simple name is always preferable to a complex one, and as no more pertinent name suggests itself than that of the great river which, with its tributaries, drains a large portion of this territory, I drop 'Nootka' and retain only the word 'Columbian.'229 These nations have also been broadly denominated Flatheads, from a custom practiced more or less by many of their tribes, of compressing the cranium during infancy;230 although the only Indians in the whole area, tribally known as Flatheads, are those of the Salish family, who do not flatten the head at all.

      COLUMBIAN FAMILIES.

In describing the Columbian nations it is necessary, as in the other divisions, to subdivide the group; arbitrarily this may have been done in some instances, but as naturally as possible in all. Thus the people of Queen Charlotte Islands, and the adjacent coast for about a hundred miles inland, extending from 55° to 52° of north latitude, are called Haidahs from the predominant tribe of the islands. The occupants of Vancouver Island and the opposite main, with its labyrinth of inlets from 52° to 49°, I term Nootkas. The Sound Indians inhabit the region drained by streams flowing into Puget Sound, and the adjacent shores of the strait and ocean; the Chinooks occupy the banks of the Columbia from the Dalles to the sea, extending along the coast northward to Gray Harbor, and southward nearly to the Californian line. The interior of British Columbia, between the Cascade and Rocky Mountains, and south of the territory occupied by the Hyperborean Carriers, is peopled by the Shushwaps, the Kootenais, and the Okanagans. Between 49° and 47°, extending west from the Cascade to the Rocky Mountains, chiefly on the Columbia and Clarke Fork, is the Salish or Flathead family. The nations dwelling south of 47° and east of the Cascade range, on the Columbia, the lower Snake, and their tributary streams, may be called Sahaptins, from the name of the Nez Percé tribes.231 The great Shoshone family, extending south-east from the upper waters of the Columbia, and spreading out over nearly the whole of the Great Basin, although partially included in the Columbian limits, will be omitted in this, and included in the Californian Group, which follows. These divisions, as before stated, are geographic rather than ethnographic.232 Many attempts have been made by practical ethnologists, to draw partition lines between these peoples according to race, all of which have proved signal failures, the best approximation to a scientific division being that of philologists, the results of whose researches are given in the third volume of this series; but neither the latter division, nor that into coast and inland tribes—in many respects the most natural and clearly defined of all233—is adapted to my present purpose. In treating of the Columbians, I shall first take up the coast families, going from north to south, and afterward follow the same order with those east of the mountains.

      HOME OF THE COLUMBIANS.

      No little partiality was displayed by the Great Spirit of the Columbians in the apportionment of their dwelling-place. The Cascade Mountains, running from north to south throughout their whole territory, make of it two distinct climatic divisions, both highly but unequally favored by nature. On the coast side—a strip which may be called one hundred and fifty miles wide and one thousand miles long—excessive cold is unknown, and the earth, warmed by Asiatic currents and watered by numerous mountain streams, is thickly wooded; noble forests are well stocked with game; a fertile soil yields a great variety of succulent roots and edible berries, which latter means of subsistence were lightly appreciated by the indolent inhabitants, by reason of the still more abundant and accessible food-supply afforded by the fish of ocean, channel, and stream. The sources of material for clothing were also bountiful far beyond the needs of the people.

      Passing the Cascade barrier, the climate and the face of the country change. Here we have a succession of plains or table-lands, rarely degenerating into deserts, with a good supply of grass and roots; though generally without timber, except along the streams, until the heavily wooded western spurs of the Rocky Mountains are reached. The air having lost much of its moisture, affords but a scanty supply of rain, the warming and equalizing influence of the ocean stream is no longer felt, and the extremes of heat and cold are undergone according to latitude and season. Yet are the dwellers in this land blessed above many other aboriginal peoples, in that game is plenty, and roots and insects are at hand in case the season's hunt prove unsuccessful.

      Ethnologically, no well-defined line can be drawn to divide the people occupying these two widely different regions. Diverse as they certainly are in form, character, and customs, their environment, the climate, and their methods of seeking food may well be supposed to have made them so. Not only do the pursuit of game in the interior and the taking of fish on the coast, develop clearly marked general peculiarities of character and life in the two divisions, but the same causes produce grades more or less distinct in each division. West of the Cascade range, the highest position is held by the tribes who in their canoes pursue the whale upon the ocean, and in the effort to capture Leviathan become themselves great and daring as compared with the lowest order who live upon shell-fish and whatever nutritious substances may be cast by the tide upon the beach. Likewise in the interior, the extremes are found in the deer, bear, elk, and buffalo hunters, especially when horses are employed, and in the root and insect eaters of the plains. Between these four extreme classes may be traced many intermediate grades of physical and intellectual development, due to necessity and the abilities exercised in the pursuit of game.

      The Columbians hitherto have been brought in much closer contact with the whites than the Hyperboreans, and the results of the association are known to all. The cruel treacheries and massacres by which nations have been thinned, and flickering remnants of once powerful tribes gathered on government reservations or reduced to a handful of beggars, dependent for a livelihood on charity, theft, or the wages of prostitution, form an unwritten chapter in the history of this region. That this process of duplicity was unnecessary as well as infamous, I shall not attempt to show, as the discussion of Indian policy СКАЧАТЬ