Note 25 — Chapter III · ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKANS.

This accounts for the puzzling appearance of ancient stone mortars and pestles in Alaska, throughout the Sitkan region. Ethnologists have endeavored to reason that certain extinct tribes must have cultivated grain up here of some kind and used it as food. I am indebted to the venerable Dr. W. F. Tolmie for this fact, he showing me the mortars and giving the reason of their use in December, 1866, at Victoria, B. C.