Читать книгу The Mythology of Cherokee, Iroquois, Navajo, Siouan and Zuñi - James Mooney - Страница 250

The Chinooks formerly dwelt on Columbia River, from the Dalles to its mouth, and on the Lower Willamette. With the exception of a few individuals, they are now extinct, but their myths have been successfully collected and preserved. They were the natives of the north-west coast, cunning in bargaining, yet dwelling on a communal plan. Their chief physical characteristic was a high and narrow forehead artificially flattened. Concerning this people Professor Daniel Wilson says:

"The Chinooks are among the most remarkable of the flat-headed Indians, and carry the process of cranial distortion to the greatest excess. They are in some respects a superior race, making slaves of other tribes, and evincing considerable skill in such arts as are required in their wild forest and coast life. Their chief war-implements are bows and arrows, the former made from the yew-tree, and the latter feathered and pointed with bone. Their canoes are hollowed out of the trunk of the cedar-tree, which attains to a great size in that region, and are frequently ornamented with much taste and skill. In such a canoe the dead Chinook chief is deposited, surrounded with all the requisites for war, or the favourite occupations of life: presenting a correspondence in his sepulchral rites to the ancient pagan viking, who, as appears alike from the contents of the Scandinavian Skibssaetninger and from the narratives of the sagas, was interred or consumed in his war-galley, and the form of that favourite scene of ocean triumphs perpetuated in the earth-work that covered his ashes."