“Really and truly it is destruction to life and property, as we shall show. The first is that the women go from home to other places for immoral purposes, to get money or blankets to give away, or potlatch, as people call it. The second is that they sell their daughters to other men as soon as possible, sometimes twelve or thirteen years old, marriage they call it; the people do not care so long as they get blankets to potlatch with. And the third is that they hate each other so much because of their trying to get one above the other in rank, as it is according to how many times they potlatch that they get the rank, and keep it, too. If they could they would even poison one another. Even now they think they kill one another by witchcraft, with intent to kill, and they believe that they do kill. A man does not care for any relatives when the potlatch is in question. The potlatch is their god; they will sacrifice everything to it--life, property, relatives, children, or anything, must go for him to be a ‘tyee’ (chief) in the potlatch. “A man after giving a potlatch will sit down, his children, too, without knowing where he is going to get his food and clothes, as he has given away everything, and he has borrowed half of it, for which he has to pay back double. And another thing is, when they are mad with one another they will break canoes or tear blankets or break a valuable copper, to shame their opponent. The potlatch is one fight, with quarrelling and hating one another. “And another is the desecration of the dead. The hamatsa, or medicine man, when he first comes from the woods, carries a dead body in his arms, professing to have lived on such things when in the woods, and as soon as the hamatsa comes in the house the other hamatsas all get up and go and tear the body to pieces among them like dogs; besides all this they bite the arms of one another; and the other thing is that when a man gets ill he thinks he is witchcrafted, and then his relatives will go and take the dead body that they think he is fixed with: they cut and mutilate it to undo the work that they think has been done to him. We have just heard of such a case from Kurtsis, of a woman’s dead body having been taken out and cut, to undo the work that they think has been done to a certain man. All these things are pure facts, and we are prepared to prove them if need be, and could tell other evils, but we are afraid of tiring the public.” GAMBLING. The Indians are passionately fond of gambling. In olden times they gambled, not with cards, but usually with round wooden pins about three inches long, or with shells and pebbles.