CHAP. sxi. DIMINUTION OF POPULATION. 19 



when the primitive implements used in their manufacture 

 are regarded. 



Their winter hfe was continually varied by change of 

 camp-ground. Every few days they would move camp 

 in search of game, subsisting upon moose, caribou, bear, 

 porcupine, and rabbits, hke the wild Montagnais, Nasqua- 

 pees, and Ojibways of the present day. 



In 1645 the Montagnais nation, in conjunction with 

 their alhes the Algonkins, made peace with the Mohawks 

 at Three Eivers. They began even then to complain that 

 the game was getting scarce, in consequence of the 

 encroachments of the French, and that they would be 

 better off if they abandoned their wandering mode of life 

 and cultivated the soil hke the Mohawks and the Hurons. 

 But the Montagnais were then, as now, whoUy unfitted 

 for a settled mode of life ; hence they have never suc- 

 ceeded in rising above the level of first-rate hunters in 

 the woods. 



The year preceding their wars with the Mohawks, in 

 1644, disease and famine had so reduced the number of 

 Indians in the neighbourhood of the Lower St. Lawrence, 

 that in places where, eight years before, the missionaries 

 had been accustomed to see from eighty to one hundred 

 lodges at the different wintering stations, they then saw 

 only five or six. Notwithstanding this great dimmution 

 in their numbers, Barthelmy Vimont, a Superior of the 

 French Jesuit Missions in Canada, writing from Quebec, in 

 1644, an accoimt of the state of the missions, refers to 

 the vast population of Indians of Algonkin origin which 

 peopled the valley of the St. Lawrence. His account is, 

 no doubt, greatly exaggerated. He speaks not of tens of 



c 2 



