NORTHWEST COAST OF AMERICA 161 
for their houses or hollowed with fire and adzes for 
canoes, they held close to the waterways. They knew no 
transportation except by water, and every tree was cut 
cose enough to a stream or inlet so that it could be floated 
down to the village. 
They kept up constant intercommunication by means of 
seagoing canoes. They were adventurous, and expeditions 
pushed far to the north and south. Marriages, for persons 
of prestige, were arranged with the nobility of other 
tribes, and invitations to great feasts, the potlatches, were 
sent hundreds of miles up the coast and answered by 
canoe-loads of the distant tribes. The languages of these 
peoples belonged to several different stocks, and it was 
necessary therefore for most people to speak a number of 
unrelated languages. Certainly the differences in language 
formed no obstacle to the diffusion of minute details of 
ceremonial or of whole bodies of folklore the funda- 
mental elements of which they shared in common. 
They did not add to their food supply by means of 
agriculture. They tended small fields of clover or cinque- 
foil, but that was all. The great occupation of the men, 
aside from hunting and fishing, was woodworking. They 
built their houses of wooden planks, they carved great 
totem poles, they fashioned the sides of boxes of single 
boards and carved and decorated them, they dug out sea- - 
going canoes, they made wooden masks and household 
furniture and utensils of all kinds. Without metal for axes 
or saws they felled the great cedars, split them into boards, 
transported them by sea without any use of the wheel to 
the villages and made of them their great many-family 
houses. Their devices were ingenious and admirably cal- 
culated. They guided accurately the split of the logs into 
planks, raised tremendous tree trunks as house-posts and 
house-beams, knew how to sew wood through slanted awl- 
holes so that no sign of the joining remained upon the