or tomahawk. It appears to have been obtained by perpendicularly halving the Masonic design. Looking at it in this way, one leg of the compasses, the joint, and one arm of the square may be seen, while the blade of the tomahawk may or may not be derived from the arc of the circle.

This series of brooches affords a good illustration of how an original motif may become conventionalized and modified by other similar objects until the original design becomes almost unrecognizable.

Among other styles of Iroquois brooches are various forms of the star and circle. Ornamented stars of five, six, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve points are enclosed in a decorated circular border, generally with scalloped edges. Hardly two brooches of similar pattern appear identical when the details of fretwork and engraving are closely examined. When stars appear without the enclosing band the points terminate in knobs or hemispheres. The circular or disk brooches are most frequently convex on the front surface and the pin hole is usually circular, though heart-shaped, and square openings occur in some instances. The square central opening is most often found in brooches where the "council square" motif is worked inside a circular border.

Iroquois circular and disk brooches are different from the so called "Algonquin" or "Delaware" types. Such are saucer-shaped, sometimes quite deep, or simply convexed on the upper surface. The former are generally small and plain with the central opening at the bottom of the saucer. The disk type is often large, those six inches in diameter being frequent. Brooches of this form, however, are stamped and engraved and seldom fretted. The workmanship of the Iroquois-made brooch is superior to the products of other tribes and may easily be distinguished.

Purely native patterns are extremely rare and the occasional example is found to be zoömorphic. The Iroquois silversmith preferred to cling to a motif as he found it and though he had ample opportunity to create his own designs few examples have been discovered. There seem to be certain reasons for this and the circumstance affords a text for more than a single venture.

If brooches of the loose-tongued buckle type were common

in Great Britain at the time of the discovery of America there is a possibility that they might have crept into the trader's store of more precious things and thus have worked their way into the esteem of the Indians at a comparatively early period. If the painting of Pocahontas is contemporaneous, as I am assured it is, the brooches represented on her dress would seem to confirm this and indicate that the Indians might have had brooches from traders and colonists as early as 1607. As a matter of fact, however, they do not appear to have become familiar articles with the Indians until after the beginning of the eighteenth century, and then not until the end of the first quarter. They are not found in Indian graves before this period as far as I have been able to discover.

NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM,

ALBANY, N. Y.

NATIVE ACCOUNT OF THE MEETING BETWEEN

L

LA PEROUSE AND THE TLINGIT

By G. T. EMMONS

ITUYA BAY is a deep, narrow inlet penetrating the American

mainland just beyond that point where the broken, rocky part of the north Pacific coast gives place to the broad, sandy shore of the Gulf of Alaska. Originally the bed of a great glacier it has long since been taken possession of by the sea, that floods and ebbs through its restricted entrance with a force that makes it the most justly dreaded harbor on the Pacific coast. At its head it branches into two arms, at right angles to the original course, which receive much ice from a number of active glaciers. The narrow mouth is still further contracted by half submerged ledges and sand spits that extend from either shore, and the constant warfare of the ocean waves and tidal currents have formed a bar, over which the rollers break with terrific force, and, except in fair weather, at slack water, the passage is fraught with extreme peril. Within, the calm is almost supernatural, the mirror-like surface of the water, protected by steep, high shores, is unaffected by winds from any quarter, and reflects with the truth of reality the translucent ice tints of the floating bergs as they are carried hither and thither by each recurring tide. These peculiar conditions in times past attracted the sea otter in great numbers, and, notwithstanding the dangerous waters, this has always been a favorite hunting ground of the natives from Chatham Straits to Dry Bay.

Lituya is a compound word in the Tlingit language meaning "the lake within the point," and the place is so called from the almost enclosed water within the extended spit. On the maps of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it appears variously as Port Française, Altona, Alituya, Ltooa, as well as Lituya.

Like primitive peoples elsewhere the Tlingit endowed all nature with spirit life, and so accounted for the many mysteries that compassed them about. In their imagination, the glacier

was the child of the mountains, born in regions of eternal snow, and, when its arch-enemy the sun looks down to destroy it, the parents tear the rocks from their sides and scatter them over the surface for protection; in the scintillating aurora they saw the warrior spirits at play in the highest heaven; and when nature was at its best the spirit of the tree and the rock came forth as the shadow and slept upon the calm waters. And so the legend of Lituya tells of a monster of the deep who dwells in the ocean caverns near the entrance. He is known as Kah Lituya, "the Man of Lituya." He resents any approach to his domain, and all of those whom he destroys become his slaves, and take the form of bears, and from their watch towers on the lofty mountains of the Mt Fairweather range they herald the approach of canoes, and with their master they grasp the surface water and shake it as if it were a sheet, causing the tidal waves to rise and engulf the unwary.

It can be seen how this phenomenon appealed to the Tlingit, as of all deaths that by drowning was alone dreaded. The end might come in any other way and he met it unflinchingly, with perfect resignation. But his crude belief in a future life of comfort and warmth required that the body be cremated, while, if lost in the water, its spirit must ever remain in subjection to some evil power. This legend of Lituya is illustrated by a carved wooden pipe (fig. 50),1 of splendid proportions, which was obtained in 1888 from the chief of the Tuck-tane-ton family of the Hoon-ah Kow, who claimed this bay as his hereditary sea-otter hunting ground. It was used only upon occasions of particular ceremony-when the clan assembled to honor the dead, or to deliberate upon some important question of policy. At one end is shown a frog-like figure with eyes of haliotis shell, which represents the Spirit of Lituya, at the other end the bear slave sitting up on his haunches. Between them they hold the entrance of the bay, and the two brass-covered ridges are the tidal waves they have raised, underneath which, cut out of brass, is a canoe with two occupants, that has been engulfed.

In 1786 La Perouse, the French navigator, in his exploration of the Northwest Coast to the southward of Bering Bay, when abreast of the Fairweather Mountains, descried an opening in the

1 This illustration was furnished through the courtesy of Mr George G. Heye, in whose collection the pipe now is.

shore which his boats entered and reported as an available anchorage. The following day he stood in for the entrance, which he had hardly gained, when the wind hauled ahead, and, notwithstanding he shivered his sails and threw all aback, he was carried in by the irresistible force of the flood, and narrowly escaped shipwreck. He

remained here twenty-six days making observations, surveying, and trading with the natives. He gave to the bay the name of Port des Françaises and his minute description of the country and its inhabitants forms one of the most pleasing and exact records that has come down to us from any of the early narrators. But his visit was made most memorable by the loss of two of his boats and their crews of twenty-one officers and men, in their attempted reconnaisance of the mouth of the bay.

In 1886, one hundred years after this event, Cowee, the principal chief of the Auk qwan of the Tlingit people, living at Sinta-kaheenee, on Gastineaux Channel, told me the story of the first meeting of his ancestors with the white man, in Lituya Bay, where two boats of the strangers were upset and many of them were drowned. This narrative had been handed down by word of mouth for a century. These people possess no records nor had the chief, who spoke no word of our tongue, ever heard of La Perouse from