﻿TRAFFIC. 353 



superior in numbers, would fly on their approach. 

 Nor do the firearms which the bolder Kutchin 

 have lately acquired enable that people to lord it 

 over the Eskimos, or encroach on their grounds. 



The populous and turbulent bands which inhabit 

 the estuary of the Mackenzie carry on a traffic 

 with the Western Eskimos from the neighbourhood 

 of Point Barrow and Beering's Straits, whom they 

 meet midway on the coast ; and though often at 

 feud with the Kutchin have occasionally com- 

 mercial relations also with them. But they who 

 dwell to the eastward of Cape Bathurst com- 

 municate with none of their own nation except 

 the families in their immediate vicinity, and speak 

 of the distant Eskimos as of a bad people. The 

 reputation of the Kabhmaht or Kahlmiet (white 

 men) is superior among them to that of the 

 remote tribes of their own nation. With the Al- 

 lani-a-wok, as they term the inland Indians, they 

 have no intercourse whatever. 



The Central Eskimos have had no traffic with 

 Europeans, except with those employed on the 

 recent voyages of discovery, until the last year 

 (1849), when a family from the coast to the west 

 of the Mackenzie, having gone inland with a party 

 of Kutchin, were visited at their tents by a trader 

 sent out from La Pierre's house, which is an out- 



VOL. I. A A 



