Indian Life on the Northwest Coast of North America as Seen by the Early Explorers and Fur Traders during the Last Decades of the Eighteenth Century

A reconstruction of the Haida and Tlingit cultures of the Pacific Northwest during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, this volume is a carefully researched investigation into the ethnohistory of the Pacific Northwest during the period of European exploration of the region. The book supplements the archeological evidence from the area with a detailed investigation of the journals, diaries, and sketchbooks of Russian, Spanish, and English explorers and traders who reached the region, as well as artifacts that those explorers and traders obtained on their expeditions and that are now held in museums worldwide. In doing so, Gunther’s research extends anthropological study of the region a century earlier, and sheds light on the understudied tribal cultures of the Haida and the Tlingit. The volume contains splendid reproductions of contemporary drawings, and appendices mapping the museum locations of artifacts and describing the processes of native technology.