The distinctions of rank or wealth in all cases were very marked; persons of no consideration and slaves being buried with very little care or respect. Vancouver, whose attention was particularly attracted to their methods of disposing of the dead, mentions that at Port Discovery he saw baskets suspended to the trees containing the skeletons of young children, and, what is not easily explained, small square boxes, containing, apparently, food. I do not think that any of these tribes place articles of food with the dead, nor have I been able to learn from living Indians that they formerly followed that practice. What he took for such I do not understand. He also mentions seeing in the same place a cleared space recently burned over, in which the skulls and bones of a number lay among the ashes. The practice of burning the dead exists in parts of California and among the Tshimsyan of Fort Simpson. It is also pursued by the “Carriers” of New California, but no intermediate tribes, to my knowledge, follow it. Certainly those of the Sound do not at present. It is clear from Vancouver’s narrative that some great epidemic had recently passed through the country, as manifested by the quantity of human remains uncared for and exposed at the time of his visit, and very probably the Indians, being afraid, had buried a house, in which the inhabitants had perished with the dead in it. This is frequently done. They almost invariably remove from any place where sickness has prevailed, generally destroying the house also. At Penn Cove Mr. Whidbey, one of Vancouver’s officers, noticed several sepulchers formed exactly like a sentry-box. Some of them were open, and contained the skeletons of many young children tied up in baskets. The smaller bones of adults were likewise noticed, but not one of the limb bones was found, which gave rise to an opinion that these, by the living inhabitants of the neighborhood, were appropriated to useful purposes, such as pointing their arrows, spears, or other weapons. [Illustration: FIG. 29.--Canoe Burial.]