last few years so many of the Indians have become Christians that public
opinion has frowned on it, and there is very little, if any, of it,
though some of the Indians who do not profess to be Christians, when
they visit other Indians, will gamble, although they do not when at
home.
The _Potlatch_ is the greatest festival that the Indian has. It is a
Chinook word, and means “to give,” and is bestowed as a name to the
festival because the central idea of it is a distribution of gifts by a
few persons to the many present whom they have invited. It is generally
intertribal, from four hundred to two thousand persons being present,
and from one to three, or even ten, thousand dollars in money, blankets,
guns, canoes, cloth, and the like are given away. There is no regularity
to the time when they are held. Three have been held at Skokomish within
fifteen years, each one being given by different persons, and during the
same time, as far as I know, a part or all of the tribe have been
invited to nine others, eight of which some of them have attended.
The mere giving of a present by one person to another, or to several, is
not in itself sinful, but this is carried to such an extreme at these
times that the morality of that part of them becomes exceedingly
questionable. In order to obtain the money to give they deny themselves
so much for years, live in old houses and in so poor a way, that the
self-denial becomes an enemy to health, comfort, civilization, and
Christianity. If they would take the same money, buy and improve land,
build good houses, furnish them, and live decently, it would be far
better.
But while two or three days of the time spent at them is occupied in
making presents, the rest of the time, from three days to two and a half
weeks, is spent in gambling, red and black tamahnous, and other wicked
practices, and the temptation to do wrong becomes so great that very few
Indians can resist it.
When some of the Alaska Indians, coveting the prosperity which the
Christian Indians of that region had acquired, asked one of these
Christians what they must do in order to become Christians, the reply
was: “First give up your potlatches.” It was felt that there was so much
evil connected with them that they and Christianity could not flourish
together. Among the Twanas, while they are not dead, they are largely on
the wane. Among a large part of the Clallams they still flourish.
Intemperance is a besetting sin of Indians, and it is about as much a
besetting sin of some whites to furnish intoxicating liquors to the
Indians. The laws of the United States and of Washington Territory are
stringent against any body’s furnishing liquor to the Indians, but for a
time previous to 1871 they had by no means been strictly enforced. As
the intercourse of the Indians with the whites was often with a low
class, who were willing to furnish liquor to them, they grew to love it,
so that in 1871 the largest part of the Indians had learned to love
liquor. Its natural consequences, fighting, cutting, shooting, and
accidental deaths, were frequent.