That which kept the Indian population down sprang from another source, which has sometimes been neglected.  The Indians had no reasonable or efficacious system of medicine.  They believed that diseases were caused by unseen evil beings and by witchcraft, and every cough, every toothache, every headache, every chill, every fever, every boil, and every wound, in fact, all their ailments, were attributed to such cause.  Their so-called medicine practice was a horrible system of sorcery, and to such superstition human life was sacrificed on an enormous scale.  The sufferers were given over to priest doctors to be tormented, bedeviled, and destroyed; and a universal and profound belief in witchcraft made them suspicious, and led to the killing of all suspected and obnoxious people, and engendered blood feuds on a gigantic scale.  It may be safely said that while famine, pestilence, disease, and war may have killed many, superstition killed more; in fact, a natural death in a savage tent is a comparatively rare phenomenon; but death by sorcery, medicine, and blood feud arising from a belief in witchcraft is exceedingly common.

Scanty as was the population compared with the vast area teeming with natural products capable of supporting human life, it may be safely said that at the time of the discovery, and long prior thereto, practically the whole of the area included in the present map was claimed and to some extent occupied by Indian tribes; but the possession of land by the Indian by no means implies occupancy in the modern or civilized sense of the term.  In the latter sense occupation means to a great extent individual control and ownership.  Very different was it with the Indians.  Individual ownership of land was, as a rule, a thing entirely foreign to the Indian mind, and quite unknown in the culture stage to which he belonged.  All land, of whatever character or however utilized, was held in common by the tribe, or in a few instances by the clan.  Apparently an exception to this broad statement is to be made in the case of the Haida of the northwest coast, who have been studied by Dawson.  According to him[3] the land is divided among the different families and is held as strictly personal property, with hereditary rights or possessions descending from one generation to another.  “The lands may be bartered or given away.  The larger salmon streams are, however, often the property jointly of a number of families.”  The tendency in this case is toward personal right in land.

[Footnote 3:  Report on the Queen Charlotte Islands, 1878, p. 117.]

Tribal land.

For convenience of discussion, Indian tribal land may be divided into three classes:  First, the land occupied by the villages; second, the land actually employed in agriculture; third, the land claimed by the tribe but not occupied, except as a hunting ground.