The charge made up to 1849 that the Hudson's Bay Company had done little for the education and religious training of the Indians was probably true enough. Outside of Red River and British Columbia they did not sufficiently realize their responsibility as a company. Since that time, with the approval and co-operation in many ways of the Company, the various missionary societies have grappled with the problem. The Indians about Hudson Bay, on Lake Winnipeg, in the Mackenzie River, throughout British Columbia, and on the great prairies of Assiniboia, are to-day largely Christianized and receiving education.
The Saulteaux, or Indians who formerly lived at Sault Ste. Marie, but wandered west along the shore of Lake Superior and even up to Lake Winnipeg, are a branch of the Algonquin Ojibways. Hardy and persevering, most conservative in preserving old customs, hard to influence by religious ideas, they have been pensioners of the Hudson's Bay Company, but their country is very barren, and they have advanced but little.
Very interesting, among their relations of Algonquin origin, are the Muskegons, or Swampy Crees, who have long occupied the region around Hudson Bay and have extended inland to Lake Winnipeg. Docile and peaceful, they have been largely influenced by Christianity. Under missionary and Company guidance they have gathered around the posts, and find a living on the game of the country and in trapping the wild animals.
Related to the Muskegons are the Wood Crees, who live along the rivers and on the belts of wood which skirt lakes and hills. They cling to the birch-bark wigwam, use the bark canoe, and are nomadic in habit. They may be called the gipsies of the West, and being in scattered families have been little reached by better influences.
Another branch of the Algonquin stock is the Plain Crees. These Indians are a most adventurous and energetic people. Leaving behind their canoes and Huskie dogs, they obtained horses and cayuses and hied them over the prairies. Birch-bark being unobtainable, they made their tents, better fitted for protecting them from the searching winds of the prairies and the cold of winter, from tanned skins of the buffalo and moose-deer. For seven hundred miles from the mouth of the Saskatchewan they extend to the foot hills of the Rocky Mountains. Meeting in their great camps, seemingly untameable as a race of plain hunters, they were, up to the time of the transfer to Canada, almost untouched by missionary influence, but in the last thirty years they have been placed on reserves by the Canadian Government and are in almost all cases yielding to Christianizing agencies.
North of the country of the Crees live tribes with very wide connections. They call themselves "Tinné" or "People," but to others they are known as Chipewyans, or Athabascans. They seem to be less copper-coloured than the other Indians, and are docile in disposition. This nation stretches from Fort Churchill, on Hudson Bay, along the English River, up to Lake Athabasca, along the Peace River into the very heart of the Rocky Mountains, and even beyond to the coast. They have proved teachable and yield to ameliorating influences.
Probably the oldest and best known name of the interior of Rupert's Land, the name after which Lord Selkirk called his Colony of Assiniboia, is that belonging to the Wild Assiniboines or Stony River Sioux. The river at the mouth of which stands the city of Winnipeg was their northern boundary, and they extended southward toward the great Indian confederacy of the Sioux natives or Dakotas, of which indeed they were at one time a branch. Tall, handsome, with firmly formed faces, agile and revengeful, they are an intelligent and capable race. These Indians, known familiarly as the "Stonies," have greatly diminished in numbers since the time of Alexander Henry, jun., who describes them fully. In later years they have been cut down with pulmonary and other diseases, and are to-day but the fragment of a great tribe. They have long been friendly with the Plain Crees, but are not very open to Christianity, though there are one or two small communities which are exceptions in this respect.
Very little under Hudson's Bay Company control were the Blackfoot nation, along the foot hills of the Rocky Mountains, near the national boundary. Ethnically they are related to the Crees, but they have always been difficult to approach. Living in large camps during Hudson's Bay Company days, they spent a wild, happy, comfortable life among the herds of wandering buffalo of their district. Since the beginning of the Canadian régime they have become more susceptible to civilizing agencies, and live in great reserves in the south-west of their old hunting grounds.
A perfect chaos of races meets us among the Indians of British Columbia and Alaska, and their language is polyglot. Seemingly the result of innumerable immigrations from Malayan and Mongolian sources in Asia, they have come at different times. One of the best known tribes of the coast is the Haidas, numbering some six thousand souls. The Nutka Indians occupy Vancouver Island, and have many tribal divisions. To the Selish or Flatheads belong many of the tribes of the Lower Fraser River, while the Shushwaps hold the country on the Columbia and Okanagan Rivers. Mention has been made already of the small but influential tribe of Chinooks near the mouth of the Columbia River.
While differing in many ways from each other, the Indians of the Pacific Coast have always been turbulent and excitable. From first to last more murders and riots have taken place among them than throughout all the vast territory held by the Hudson's Bay Company east of the Rocky Mountains. While missionary zeal has accomplished much among the Western Coast Indians, yet the "bad Indian" element has been a recognized and appreciable quantity among them so far as the Company is concerned.