It seems fitting to reserve the next chapter for a consideration of who and what the tribes were at this time inhabiting the territories granted by its charter to the Great Company; together with their numbers, their modes of life and relations with the factories.
CHAPTER XIX.
1687-1712.
Hudson's Bay Tribes Peaceful—Effect of the Traders' Presence—Depletion of Population—The Crees and Assiniboines—Their Habits and Customs—Their Numbers—No Subordination Amongst Them—Spirituous Liquors—Effect of Intemperance upon the Indian.
Let us imagine for a moment that the Hudson's Bay Company had held traffic with the fierce and implacable Iroquois, the Mohawks or the courageous and blood-thirsty tribes of the Mississippi, instead of with the Crees and Assiniboines. How different would have been its early history! What frail protection would have been afforded by the forts and wooden palisades, often not stronger than that last fort of the Jesuits in the Huron country, the inmates of which were slaughtered so ruthlessly, or that other at Niagara, where the Chevalier de Troyes and ninety of his companions perished to a man.
But the Red men of the Company's territories, compared to these, were pacific. Occasionally want or deep injustice drove them to acts of barbarism, as we have seen in the case of the massacre at York Factory under Jérémie's régime; but on the whole they had no marked enmity to the white men, and long displayed a remarkable and extremely welcome docility.
Character of the Assiniboines.
"The Assinibouels," remarked Jérémie, "are humane and affable; and so are also all those Indians with whom we have commerce in the Bay, never trading with the French but as their fathers and patrons. Although savages, they are foes to lying, which is extraordinary in nations which live without subordination or discipline. One cannot impute to them any vice, unless they are a little too slanderous. They never blaspheme and have not even a term in their language which defines an oath."
If we are to believe the early traders and explorers, the Red man of Rupert's Land spoke a tongue by no means difficult for an Englishman to master. Yet if these same traders really took the trouble to master it, as they alleged, their knowledge certainly brought little order into the chaos of tribal nomenclature.
