The clothing of these people is as a rule made entirely of skins,
though of late years drilling and calico are used for some parts of
the dress which will be afterwards described. Petroff[N203] makes the
rather surprising statement that “a large amount of ready-made
clothing finds its way into the hands of these people, who wear it in
summer, but the excessive cold of winter compels them to resume the
fur garments formerly in general use among them.” Fur garments are in
as general use at Point Barrow as they ever were, and the cast-off
clothing obtained from the ships is mostly packed away in some corner
of the iglu. We landed at Cape Smyth not long after the wreck of the
_Daniel Webster_, whose crew had abandoned and given away a great deal
of their clothing. During that autumn a good many men and boys wore
white men’s coats or shirts in place of the outer frock, especially
when working or lounging about the station, but by the next spring
these were all packed away and were not resumed again except in rare
instances in the summer.
[Footnote N203: Report, etc., p. 125.]
The chief material is the skin of the reindeer, which is used in
various stages of pelage. Fine, short-haired summer skins, especially
those of does and fawns, are used for making dress garments and
underclothes. The heavier skins are used for everyday working clothes,
while the heaviest winter skins furnish extra warm jackets for cold
weather, warm winter stockings and mittens. The white or spotted skins
of the tame Siberian reindeer, obtained from the “Nunatañmiun,” are
especially valued for full-dress jackets. We heard no mention of the
use of the skin of the unborn reindeer fawn, but there is a kind of
dark deerskin used only for edgings, which appears to be that of an
exceedingly young deer. This skin is extremely thin, and the hair so
short that it is almost invisible. Siberian deerskins can always be
recognized by having the flesh side colored red,[N204] while
American-dressed skins are worked soft and rubbed with chalk or
gypsum, giving a beautiful white surface like pipe-clayed leather.
[Illustration: FIG. 51.--Man in ordinary deerskin clothes]
The skins of the white mountain sheep, white and blue fox, wolf, dog,
ermine, and lynx are sometimes used for clothing, and under jackets
made of eider duck skins are rarely used. Sealskin dressed with the
hair on is used only for breeches and boots, and for those rarely.
Black dressed sealskin--that is, with the epidermis left on and the
hair shaved off--is used for waterproof boots, while the white
sealskin, tanned in urine, with the epidermis removed, is used for the
soles of winter boots. Waterproof boot soles are made of oil-dressed
skins of the white whale, bearded seal, walrus, or polar bear. The
last material is not usually mentioned as serving for sole leather
among the Eskimo. Nordenskiöld,[N205] however, found it in use among
the Chukches for this purpose. It is considered an excellent material
for soles at Point Barrow, and is sometimes used to make boat covers,
which are beautifully white. Heavy mittens for the winter are made of
the fur of the polar bear or of dogskin. Waterproof outer frocks are
of seal entrails, split and dried and sewed together. For trimmings
are used deerskin of different colors, mountain-sheep skin, and black
and white sealskin, wolf, wolverine, and marten fur, and whole ermine
skins, as well as red worsted, and occasionally beads.
[Footnote N204: Compare Nordenskiöld, Vega, vol 2. p. 213.]
[Footnote N205: Vega, vol. 2, p. 98.]