Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 August 1893 — The Haidah Indians. [ARTICLE]

The Haidah Indians.

At Victoria, British Columbia, there are many Haidah Indians from the Queen Charlotte Islands who came down the Gulf of Georgia in canoes hewn from single cedar trees and oapable of holding a hundred persons. The Haidah women, like the women of Alaska, wear pieces of bone or pearl stuck through their ■ lower lips. They are clever workers, making ornaments of chased silver and baskets of birch fibre, woven closely enough to hold water. The Haidahs also carve polished columns of coal slate, soft when first cut, but hardening- on exposure to the air. Tho figures are bears, crows, frogs, and lizards. They have a curious mythical bird called the thunder bird, which, when he flaps his wings, makes thunder, and when he winks his eye, lightning. They are great gamblers, using round polished sticks of yew, sometimes inlaid with bits of pearl. The sticks are shuffled under a covering of cedar bark, the gamblers crooning a low chant the while. They will gamble away all they possess and become so much absorbed that they sit through a whole day and night without food. Aa warm clothing they wear blankets woven of dog's hair. —[San Francisco Chronicle.