“A Babel of Languages” met the artist’s ears when he reached Fort Vancouver, as the inhabitants were a mixture of English, French, Iroquois from Eastern Canada, Crees from the Centre, and Chinooks of the west coast, with Sandwich Islanders from Hawaii. “The buildings,” he says, “are enclosed by strong pickets about sixteen feet high, with bastions for cannon at the corners.” The Company’s 200 voyageurs, with their Indian wives, lived in a little village of log huts near the bank of the river. “Ninety miles without stopping,” six Indians paddling his canoe, is Kane’s record of his crossing from Nasqually on the mainland to the four-year-old Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. Beside the harbor of the future capital stood an Indian village boasting 500 warriors, armed chiefly with bows and arrows. Some of their lodges were sixty or seventy feet long, and well built; the boards were split from the logs with bone wedges, but were very smooth and regular. Dogs were bred for their wool,—a peculiar breed with “long hair of a brownish black and clear white.” A winter suit consisted of a blanket made of dog’s hair, or dog’s hair and goose-down mixed, or frayed cedar bark, or wildgoose skin. The sea otter was then the most valuable fur animal on the coast—twelve blankets had to be paid for one skin. It has now been hunted out of existence. Like most barbarians, and many white folk who call themselves civilized, the Indians were great gamblers. They often spent two or three days and nights on end playing such simple games as “lehallum.” Ten small round pieces of wood, one being black, were shuffled rapidly between two bundles of frayed bark, by one player, and his opponent had to guess which bundle contained the black piece when the shuffling stopped. A player would often keep this up till he had lost everything, even his wife; and some of them had much wealth in blankets, furs and slaves. [Illustration] _Coast Indian Mask_ Any Indian caught by another tribe, even if there was no war between them, could be kept as a slave; and slaves had no rights, not even a right to live. Kane tells of a chief who “erected a colossal idol of wood and sacrificed five slaves to it, boastfully asking who else could afford to kill so many slaves.” Before going off to fish, or to fight, or even to gather camas, the tribe had a “Medicine Mask Dance.” Half a dozen men put on wooden masks “highly painted and ornamented, with the eyes and mouth ingeniously made to open and shut. In their hands they hold carved rattles, which are shaken in time to a monotonous song or humming noise (there are no words to it) sung by the whole company as they slowly dance round and round in a circle.”