h her during three years of servitude
in the family of her husband. At the end of that time a feast was held,
when she was released from thraldom and permitted to remarry if she
desired.

Poor and degraded as the people of the northern forests may have
been, they had their good traits. The Kutchins of the Yukon and Lower
Mackenzie regions, though they killed their female children, were
exceedingly hospitable and kept guests for months. Each head of a family
took his turn in feasting the whole band. On such occasions etiquette
required the host to fast until the guests had departed. At such feasts
an interesting wrestling game was played. First the smallest boys began
to wrestle. The victors wrestled with those next in strength and so on
until finally the strongest and freshest man in the band remained the
final victor. Then the girls and women went through the same progressive
contest. It is hard to determine whether the people of the northern
pine forest were more or less competent than their Eskimo neighbors. It
perhaps makes little difference, for it is doubtful whether even a
race with brilliant natural endowments could rise far in the scale of
civilization under conditions so highly adverse.

The Eskimos of the northern coasts and the people of the pine forests
were not the only aborigines whose development was greatly retarded
because they could not practice agriculture. All the people of
the Pacific coast from Alaska to Lower California were in similar
circumstances. Nevertheless those living along the northern part of this
coast rose to a much higher level than did those of California. This has
sometimes been supposed to show that geographical environment has
little influence upon civilization, but in reality it proves exactly the
opposite.

The coast of British Columbia was one of the three chief centers of
aboriginal America. As The Encyclopaedia Britannica * puts it: "The
Haida people constituted with little doubt the finest race and that most
advanced in the arts of the entire west coast of North America." They
and their almost equally advanced Tlingit and Tsimshian neighbors on the
mainland displayed much mechanical skill, especially in canoe-building,
woodcarving, and the working of stone and copper, as well as in making
blankets and baskets. To this day they earn a considerable amount of
money by selling their carved objects of wood and slate to traders and
tourists. Their canoes were hollowed out of l