Ethnological results of the Point Barrow expedition: Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1887-1888, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1892, pages 3-442Murdoch, John
History
Ethnological results of the Point Barrow expedition: Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1887-1888, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1892, pages 3-442
Murdoch, John
Eskimos -- Alaska -- Barrow, Point, Region
Boots of this style are the common everyday wear of the men, sometimes
made wholly of dark deerskin and sometimes variegated. They are often
made of a pattern like that of the lower part of the women’s
pantaloons; that is, with the uppers separate from the leg pieces,
which are brown, with four white gussets on the calf. Fig. 77, No.
56759 [91], is one of a pair of full-dress boots of a slightly
different pattern. The leg pieces are the same in number as in No.
56750, and put together in the same way, but 2 and 3 are of a
different shape.[N236] They are made of deer-leg skins, each piece
with a lighter streak down the middle. The soles are of white
sealskin, finely crimped, with the edge coming to a point at the toe,
and the five ornamental bands are of sealskin, alternately black and
white. A strip of edging three-fourths of an inch wide is inserted in
the seam between 2 and 3 on each side. The light stripes are
mountain-sheep skin and the dark ones the usual young fawnskin, tagged
with red worsted. The leg reaches to just below the knee, and is
hemmed over on the inside, to hold the drawstring, which comes out
behind. There are strings at the ankles as before.
[Footnote N236: See diagram, Fig. 78.]
[Illustration: FIG. 78.--Pattern of man’s dress boot of deerskin.]
Fig. 79, No. 89834 [770], is one of a pair of almost precisely the
same pattern as the last, but made of mountain-sheep skin. The soles
are more deeply turned up all round and have three ornamental bands of
sealskin around the edge, black, white, and black. Edging is inserted
into both the seams on each side. It is strips of mountain-sheep skin
and a dark brown deerskin, tagged with red worsted, with the edge
which laps over the side piece cut into oblique tags. There are no
tiestrings, as the soles are turned up high enough to stay in place
without them. These boots were brought from the east by one of the
Nuwŭk trading parties in 1882. Fig. 80, No. 56749 [110], is also a
full-dress boot, with soles like the last and no tiestrings. The leg
is of two pieces of dark brown deerskin with the hair clipped short.
These pieces are shaped like 2 in No. 56750, and the inner is larger,
so that it laps round the leg, bringing the seam on the outside. The
leg is enlarged to fit the swell of the calf by a large triangular
gusset from the knee to the midleg, meeting the inside piece in an
oblique seam across the calf. Instead of a hem, the top of the leg has
a half-inch band sewed round it and a binding for the drawstring above
this. Edging is inserted in the front seam, and obliquely across the
outside of the leg. That in the front seam is three narrow strips of
deerskin, dark in the middle and light on each side. The other is of
mountain-sheep skin in three strips, piped with fawnskin and tagged
with worsted.
[Illustration: FIG. 79.--Man’s dress boot of skin of
mountain-sheep.]
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