What kinds of clothes did the Clatsop people wear?

Answer 1

The Clatsop of the North Oregon coast were influenced both by their neighbours to the north (the Northwest Coast culture) and by the Plateau peoples of the interior.

Men often went completely naked, or wore aprons or breechclouts, sometimes covered with colourful feathers. In cool weather they added closely fitting deerskin or elk-hide leggings and shirts, belted at the waist. Men often wore headbands to keep their long hair out of their eyes. Warriors made thick leather armour from many layers of elk hides - perhaps the most effective armour of the region.

Women generally wore a skirt of shredded cedar bark with a short cape added in cool weather. Lewis and Clark reported some of the women in wrap-around deerskin skirts. Basket hats with flat tops were favoured by Clatsop women.

Both sexes routinely went barefoot, but men would have deerskin moccasins for travelling or hunting. Snowshoes were also used when needed when hunting in the mountains.

Clatsop men and women always removed all facial hair using freshwater clams as tweezers; tribes further south tended to allow moustaches and sparse whiskers.

Children's heads were flattened in their cradleboards, producing a distinctive deformity of the skull (see link below).

The other link below takes you to an image of a Clatsop family by the artist George Catlin: