The clothing of these people is as a rule made entirely of skins, though of late years drilling and calico are used for some parts of the dress which will be afterwards described. Petroff[N203] makes the rather surprising statement that “a large amount of ready-made clothing finds its way into the hands of these people, who wear it in summer, but the excessive cold of winter compels them to resume the fur garments formerly in general use among them.” Fur garments are in as general use at Point Barrow as they ever were, and the cast-off clothing obtained from the ships is mostly packed away in some corner of the iglu. We landed at Cape Smyth not long after the wreck of the _Daniel Webster_, whose crew had abandoned and given away a great deal of their clothing. During that autumn a good many men and boys wore white men’s coats or shirts in place of the outer frock, especially when working or lounging about the station, but by the next spring these were all packed away and were not resumed again except in rare instances in the summer. [Footnote N203: Report, etc., p. 125.] The chief material is the skin of the reindeer, which is used in various stages of pelage. Fine, short-haired summer skins, especially those of does and fawns, are used for making dress garments and underclothes. The heavier skins are used for everyday working clothes, while the heaviest winter skins furnish extra warm jackets for cold weather, warm winter stockings and mittens. The white or spotted skins of the tame Siberian reindeer, obtained from the “Nunatañmiun,” are especially valued for full-dress jackets. We heard no mention of the use of the skin of the unborn reindeer fawn, but there is a kind of dark deerskin used only for edgings, which appears to be that of an exceedingly young deer. This skin is extremely thin, and the hair so short that it is almost invisible. Siberian deerskins can always be recognized by having the flesh side colored red,[N204] while American-dressed skins are worked soft and rubbed with chalk or gypsum, giving a beautiful white surface like pipe-clayed leather. [Illustration: FIG. 51.--Man in ordinary deerskin clothes]