Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/273

Rh devices employed by those beyond the mountains; and some of these people north of Grays Harbor in the earlier days even used to pursue and capture the whale, it constituting a portion of their ordinary subsistence. Without question it required a far higher order of intellect and ability to launch out on the ocean in a small craft and to capture and compass the death of one of these monsters of the deep—the largest animal that ever lived and one of the most dangerous when aroused—and yet escape unharmed, than simply to shoot a buffalo after it had been chased down with a horse.

It is quite a fashion with some writers to institute comparisons between the Indians east of the Cascades and those on the west, and always to the great disparagement of those nearer the coast. They will speak of the squat bodies and bowlegs of the coast Indians, but in reality the bowlegs, so far as these people are concerned, are a myth. These Indians—and I speak of them as they were before the higher civilization of the whites began to interfere with their primitive customs—made it their aim to have the arms and legs of their children develop straight and shapely, even to the extent of binding the legs of the child together during its sleep if it were necessary to do so to constrain a correct growth of those members.

In the consideration of this subject the fact must not be overlooked that at all times there were two classes of people to be considered—the slave and the free. These tribes held as slaves members from the various tribes inhabiting the region north of the Straits of Juan de Fuca to nearly the Alaskan border, and also from those of Southern Oregon and Northern California, including the Rogue River Indians, Shastas, Klamaths, Modocs, and occasionally some from the Snakes. Almost every lead-