them, except that they believe, undoubtedly, that they are the graves of their ancestors.  I do not know that any care has ever been exercised by any one in exhuming these skeletons so as to learn any particulars about them.  It is possible, however, that these persons were buried according to the (b) or canoe method, and that time has buried them where they now are.

     [Illustration:  FIG. 25—­Posts for Burial Canoes.]

(b) Formerly when a person died the body was placed in the forks of two trees and left there.  There was no particular cemetery, but the person was generally left near the place where the death occurred.  The Skokomish Valley is said to have been full of canoes containing persons thus buried.  What their customs were while burying, or what they placed around the dead, I am not informed but am told that they did not take as much care then of their dead as they do now.  I am satisfied, however, that they then left some articles around the dead.  An old resident informs me that the Clallam Indians always bury their dead in a sitting posture.

(c) About twenty years ago gold mines were discovered in British Columbia, and boats being scarce in the region, unprincipled white men took many of the canoes in which the Indian dead had been left, emptying them of their contents.  This incensed the Indians and they changed their mode of burial somewhat by burying the dead in one place, placing them in boxes whenever they could obtain them, by building scaffolds for them instead of placing them in forks of trees, and in cutting their canoes so as to render them useless, when they were used as coffins or left by the side of the dead.  The ruins of one such graveyard now remain about two miles from this agency.  Nearly all the remains were removed a few years ago.

With this I furnish you the outlines of such graves which I have drawn.  Fig 25 shows that at present only one pair of posts remains.  I have supplied the other pair as they evidently were.

     [Illustration:  FIG. 26—­Tent on Scaffold.]

     Figure 26 is a recent grave at another place.  That part
     which is covered with board and cloth incloses the coffin
     which is on a scaffold.

As the Indians have been more in contact with the whites they have learned to bury in the ground, and this is the most common method at the present time.  There are cemetaries everywhere where Indians have resided any length of time.  After a person has died a coffin is made after the cheaper kinds of American ones, the body is placed in it, and also with it a number of articles, chiefly cloth or clothes, though occasionally money.  I lately heard of a child being buried with a twenty-dollar gold piece in each hand and another in its month, but I am not able to vouch for the truth of it.  As a general thing, money is too valuable with them for this purpose and there is too much temptation for some one to rob the grave when this is left in it.

     [Illustration:  FIG. 27—­House-Burial]