The forests in their turn furnished berries and seeds, as well as
bears, mountain goats, and other game.

Moreover the people of the northwest coast had the advantage of
not being forced to move from place to place in order to follow
the fish. They lived on a drowned shore where bays, straits, and
sounds are extraordinarily numerous. The great waves of the
Pacific are shut out by the islands so that the waterways are
almost always safe for canoes. Instead of moving their dwellings
in order to follow the food supply, as the Eskimo and the people
of the pine forest were forced to do, the Haidas and their
neighbors were able without difficulty to bring their food home.
At all seasons the canoes made it easy to transport large
supplies of fish from places even a hundred miles away. Having
settled dwellings, the Haidas could accumulate property and
acquire that feeling of permanence which is one of the most
important conditions for the development of civilization.
Doubtless the Haidas were intellectually superior to many other
tribes, but even if they had not been greatly superior, their
surroundings would probably have made them stand relatively high
in the scale of civilization. Southward from the Haidas, around
Puget Sound and in Washington and Oregon, there was a gradual
decline in civilization. The Chinook Indians of the lower
Columbia, beyond the limits of the great northern archipelago,
had large communal houses occupied by three or four families of
twenty or more individuals. Their villages were thus fairly
permanent, although there was much moving about in summer owing
to the nature of the food supply, which consisted chiefly of
salmon, with roots and berries indigenous to the region. The
people were noted as traders not only among themselves but with