These People Are
So Happily Rich As To Have But Little Of A Perishable Kind To Keep,
Nothing Worth Fretting About.
They were away catching salmon, our
Indians said.
All the Indian villages hereabout are thus abandoned at
regular periods every year, just as a tent is left for a day, while
they repair to fishing, berrying, and hunting stations, occupying
each in succession for a week or two at a time, coming and going from
the main, substantially built villages. Then, after their summer's
work is done, the winter supply of salmon dried and packed, fish-oil
and seal-oil stored in boxes, berries and spruce bark pressed into
cakes, their trading-trips completed, and the year's stock of
quarrels with the neighboring tribe patched up in some way, they
devote themselves to feasting, dancing, and hootchenoo drinking. The
Takus, once a powerful and warlike tribe, were at this time, like
most of the neighboring tribes, whiskied nearly out of existence.
They had a larger village on the Taku River, but, according to the
census taken that year by the missionaries, they numbered only 269 in
all, - 109 men, 79 women, and 81 children, figures that show the
vanishing condition of the tribe at a glance.
Our Indians wanted to camp for the night in one of the deserted
houses, but I urged them on into the clean wilderness until dark,
when we landed on a rocky beach fringed with devil's-clubs, greatly
to the disgust of our crew.
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