Everywhere their tribes showed such evident signs of decadence that by this time some of them must be all but extinct. Still, as the whites had not come much in contact with them--though all of them asked us for "lum" (rum), but did not get it, it is clear enough what had been the traders' staple--the "diseases of civilisation" could not be blamed for their decay. Even then the practical extermination of two tribes was so recent that the facts were still fresh in their neighbours' memory. These were the Ekkalahts, who lived at the top of the Alberni Canal, but were all but killed off in the same massacre by which the Opechesahts were decimated. The only survivor was a man named Keekeon, who lived with the Seshahts, most of whom had forgotten even the name of this vanquished little nationality. The other tribe was the Koapinahts (or Koapin-ah), who at that time numbered sixty or seventy people, but at the period to which I refer they were reduced to two adults--a man and a woman--all the rest having been slaughtered a few years earlier by the Kwakiools from the other side of the island, in conjunction with the Neshahts of Woody Point. In after days I learned to know these tribes very familiarly, crossing and recrossing the island with or to them, hunting and canoeing with them, in the woods, up the rivers, or on the lakes, and gathering from their lips
"This fair report of them who dwell In that retirement."
At first sight these "tinkler loons and siclike companie" were by no means attractive. They were frowsy, and, undeniably, they were not clean. But it was only after penetrating their inner ways, after learning the wealth of custom and folk-lore of which they, all unconscious of their riches, were the jealous custodians, that one began to appreciate these primitive folk from a scientific point of view. Even yet, as the writer recalls the days when he was prone to find men more romantic than is possible in "middle life forlorn," it is difficult not to associate the most prosaic of savages with something of the picturesqueness which, in novels at least, used to cling to all their race. For, as the charm of such existence as theirs unfolded itself to the lover of woods and prairies, and lakes and virgin streams, the neglect of soap and of sanitation was forgotten. As Mr. Leland has remarked about the gipsies: "When their lives and legends are known, the ethnologist is apt to think of Tieck's elves, and of the Shang Valley, which was so grim and repulsive from without, but which, once entered, was the gay forecourt of Goblin-land."