much in physical and mental type. {p.026}
East of the range, they lived by the chase. They were great horsemen
and famous runners, a breed of lithe, upstanding, competent men, as
keen of wit as they were stately in appearance. These were "the noble
Red Men" of tradition. Fennimore Cooper might have found many a hero
worthy of his pen among the savages inhabiting the fertile valley of
the Columbia, which we now call the Inland Empire. But here on the
Coast were the "Digger" tribes, who subsisted chiefly by spearing
salmon and digging clams. Their stooped figures, flat faces, downcast
eyes and low mentality reflected the life they led. Contrasting their
heavy bodies with their feeble legs, which grew shorter with disuse, a
Tacoma humorist last summer gravely proved to a party of English
visitors that in a few generations more, had not the white man seized
their fishing grounds, the squatting Siwashes would have had no legs
at all!

[Illustration: Great Crag on the ridge separating the North and South
Tahoma Glaciers, with Tahoma Fork of the Nisqually visible several
miles below. This rock is seen right of center on page 27.]

[Illustration: The Marmot, whose shrill whistle is often heard among
the crags.]

Stolid and uninspired as he seemed to the whites, the Indian of the
Sound was not without his touch of poetry. He had that imaginative
curiosity which marked the native {p.028} American everywhere. He
was ever peering into the causes of things, and seeing the
supernatural in the world around him.[1]

[Footnote 1: Among those who have studied the Puget
Sound Indians most sympathetically is the Rev. Mr.
Hylebos of Tacoma. He came to the Northwest in 1870,
when the census gave Tacoma a white population of
seventy-three. In those days, says Father Hylebos, the
Tacoma tideflats, now filled in for mills and railway
terminals, were covered each autumn with the canoes of
Indians spearing salmon. It was no uncommon thing to see
at one time on Commencement Bay 1,800 fishermen. This
veteran worker among the "Siwashes" (French
"_sauvages_") first told me the myths that hallowed the
Mountain for every native, and the true meaning of the
beautiful Indian word "Tacoma." He knew well all the
leaders of the generation before the railways: