10 THE LABRADOR PENINSULA. CHAP. i. 



in the country of the Hare Indians and the Loucheux. 

 The old and well-worn portage paths, round falls and 

 rapids and over precipitous mountains on the Upper 

 Moisie, testify to the antiquity of the route, indepen- 

 dently of the traditions of the Indians who now hunt 

 on tliis river and on the table land to which it is the 

 highway. 



My attention was first drawn to the Moisie by the Abbe 

 Ferland, of Laval University, Quebec, who showed me a 

 chart constructed by seven Montagnais Indians at the 

 request of Pere Arnaud, a zealous missionary among the 

 aborigines of this part of British America. The chart 

 exhibited the route followed by these Indians from 

 Hamilton Inlet on the Atlantic coast up Esquimaux River, 

 a continuation of the Ashwanipi, to a great lake in the 

 interior called Petshikupau thence by an unbroken 

 water communication through the Ashwanipi Eiver and 

 a lake of the same name to near the head waters of the 

 east branch of the Moisie, which they reached by crossing 

 a low water parting, and descended to the Gulf of 

 St. Lawrence. According to the Indian chart, the Ash- 

 wanipi must flow through five degrees of longitude, 

 traversing the elevated table land of the Labrador Penin- 

 sula in a direction roughly parallel to the coast of the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence. 



The chart is a curious and instructive illustration of 

 the remarkable capabilities possessed by Indians to 

 delineate the general features of a country through which 

 they have passed ; and as far as we were able to com- 

 pare it with our own surveys, it is singularly exact and 

 accurate. 



