e _Gooch-heat_, or the dwelling blazoned by the rude
heraldry with the wolf rampant. In the great social potlatches a wealthy
chief invites his friends from many villages and entertains them for a
week or more with dancing and feasting and makes presents varied and
valuable, from Hudson's Bay blankets to bolts of calico or of flannel,
and in primitive days, copper tows,[11] Chilkat blankets, and even
slaves were handed over with a lavish hospitality.

On special occasions in the olden time, with great ceremony the visitors
landed at a distance from the village, drew their canoes ashore and
proceeded to the village dressed in festive garments adorned with
sealion heads or other strange headdresses, in which they danced the
rare and picturesque "Beach Dance," in acknowledgement to the Spirit of
the Sea for the bountiful supply of salmon and herring of the past
season--for the native American is a thankful being and omits not to
show it when occasion offers to acknowledge it to the Giver of all good
and perfect gifts.

During the earlier years of the colony the Kolosh were implacable
enemies. War parties of young men constantly haunted the islands of the
bay, lying in wait for any unwary hunter or fisherman from the fort.
Later, when they were settled under the walls of the fort they became
more tractable, for their homes and families were commanded by the guns
of the fortress, but on the least provocation the savagery in their
blood would boil, from their great tribal houses they issued forth,
faces blackened to the semblance of devils, war masks grinning, and the
howling mob shouted defiance at their neighbor over the stockade. Many a
bloody tragedy was enacted in the "Ranche" for their code was primitive,
"an eye for an eye," and a life for a life.

Feuds raged between the different totemic families. About 1853 a party
of Wrangell Indians (Stikines) visited Sitka, and while being
entertained in the guest-house were murdered and their bodies piled into
a canoe which was then paddled to Japonski Island. On striking the shore
it was so heavily laden with the bodies of the dead that tradition says
the canoe split from end to end. It is said that the bones of the dead
are still to be seen in the undergrowth along the shore. In retaliation,
about 1855, the Wrangell Kolosh made an attack on the Hot Springs
settlement, burned the buildings, stripped the inhabitants of property
and clothing and left them to make their way over