Next must be mentioned the very important and widespread ATHAPASKAN or Déné (Tinné) group, named after Lake Athapaska (or Athabaska), because that sheet of water became a great rallying place for these northern tribes. The Athapaskan group of Indians indeed represents the "Northern Indians" of the Hudson's Bay Company's reports and explorers. They drew a great distinction between the Northern Indians (the Athapaskan tribes) and the Southern Indians, which included all the other Amerindian groups dwelling to the south of the Athapaskan domain. But although nowadays so much associated with the far north and north-west of America, the Athabaskan group evidently came from a region much farther south, and has been cut in half by other tribal movements, wars, and migrations; for the Athapaskan family also includes the Apaches and the Navaho of the south-western portions of the United States and the adjoining territories of Mexico. The northern and southern divisions of the Athapaskan group are separated by something like twelve hundred miles. The following are the principal tribes into which the Northern ATHAPASKAN group was divided at the time of the first explorations of the north-west. There were the Chippewayan Indians[8] round about Lake Athapaska, and the Caribou Eaters or Ethen-eldeli between Lake Athapaska and Reindeer Lake. The "Slaves", or Slave Indians of the Great Slave Lake and the upper Mackenzie River; the Beaver and Sarsi Indians (known also as the Tsékehn), about the Peace River and the northern part of Alberta province; and the Yellow Knives, or Totsan-ottine (so called from their being found with light-coloured copper knives when first discovered by Europeans), north-east of the Great Slave Lake and along the Coppermine River: the Dogribs between the Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake, perhaps (except in Alaska) the most northern extension of the Amerindian type towards the Arctic regions. West of the Dogribs dwelt—and still dwell—the interesting tribe of Hare Indians, or Kawcho-Tinné. They extend northwards to the Anderson River, on the verge of the Arctic Ocean. West of the lower Mackenzie River, and stretching thence to the Porcupine or Yukon Rivers, are the Squinting Indians ("Loucheux", or Kuchin), who in former times were met with much farther to the south-east than at the present day. Finally, there are the Nahani Indians, who have penetrated through the Rocky Mountains to the Stikine River, reaching thus quite close to the Pacific Ocean. This penetration northwards of groups of Athapaskan Indians into districts inhabited for the most part by Amerindian tribes differing widely in language and customs from all those east of the Rocky Mountains, explains the way in which stories of the great western sea—the Pacific—reached, by means of trading intercourse, those Amerindian tribes of the middle-west and upper Canada, and so stirred up the French and English explorers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to make the marvellous journeys which are recounted in this book.
West of the Rocky Mountains, in British Columbia and Vancouver Island (besides southern Alaska), the Amerindian tribes form the Nūtka-Columbian group, which is markedly distinct from the Amerindians east of the Rocky Mountains, from whom they differ widely in language, type, and culture. They are divided into quite a large number of small separate groups—the Wakashan or Nūtkas of Vancouver Island and south-western British Columbia, the Shahaptian or "Nez percés" Indians of the Columbia basin, and the Chinūks of the lower Columbia River, the Salishan or "Flathead" group (including the Atnās) of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers and central British Columbia; and the Haida Indians of Queen Charlotte's Islands and the north-west coast of British Columbia. It must be remembered that these different groups are only based on the relationships of their component tribes in language or dialect, and do not always imply that the tribes belonging to them had the same customs and dispositions; but they were generally able to communicate with one another in speech, whereas if they met the Indians of another group the language might be so totally different that they could only communicate by means of signs.
AN AMERINDIAN TYPE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
Sign and gesture language[9] was extraordinarily developed amongst all the Amerindian races from the Arctic Ocean to the Antarctic. Not only that, but they were quick to understand the purpose of pictures. They could draw maps in the sand to explain the geography of their country, and Europeans could often make them understand what they required by rough drawings. They themselves related many events by means of a picture language—the beginning of hieroglyphics; and in the south-eastern parts of Canada, as in the United States, these signs or pictographs were recorded in bead-shell work—the celebrated "wampum".
All these tribes, of course, varied very much in personal appearance, though not in disposition. The vanished Beothiks of Newfoundland are described as having been a good-looking tall people, with large black eyes and a skin so light, when washed free from dirt or paint, that the Portuguese compared them to gipsies; and the writer of Fabian's Chronicle, who saw two of them (brought back by Cabot) at Henry VII's Court, in 1499, took them for Englishmen when they were dressed in English clothes. It was these people—subsequently killed out by the British settlers on Newfoundland—who originated the term "Red Indians", or, in French, Peaux Rouges, because their skins, like those of so many other Amerindians, were painted with red ochre.
Many of the British Columbian peoples made themselves artificially ugly by flattening the sides of the head. To press the skull whilst it was soft, they squeezed the heads of their children between boards; others, such as the warlike tribes of the upper Missouri, had a passion for submitting themselves to mutilation by the medicine man of the clan, in order to please the sun god. Such would submit to large strips being cut from the flesh of their shoulders, arms, or legs, or having their cheeks slashed. The result, of course, was to leave their limbs and features horribly scarred when they healed up. In some tribes, however, a young man could not obtain—or retain—a wife unless he had shown his bravery by submitting to this mutilation. Women often cut off one or more joints of their fingers to show their grief for the death of children.
In some tribes, especially of the far north-west and of the Rocky Mountains, the personal habits of men and women, or of the women only, were so filthy, and their dislike to bathing so pronounced, that they became objects of loathing to white men; in other tribes personal cleanliness was highly esteemed, especially on the seacoast of British Columbia or along the banks of the great rivers. Usually the men were better looking and better developed than the women—for one reason, because they were better fed.
Here is a description by PETER GRANT—a pioneer of the North-West Company—of the Ojibwé Indians dwelling near the east end of Lake Superior at the beginning of the nineteenth century:—