140 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. ix. 



would probably long since have ceased to be known as such, but 

 for their claim to share in the distribution of certain tribal funds 

 administered by the Government, which have now ceased to be 

 of real benefit, and act instead as a deterrent to the complete 

 independence and self-reliance of the members of the community. 

 Similar statements might be made with regard to other tribes, 

 and many of the more advanced Indians begin to show a wish to 

 emancipate themselves from their state of pupilage. This they 

 are now enabled to do on easy terms by the Act of 1876. 



The discovery of the great North-west and contact of its Indian 

 tribes with the whites did not occur till long after that of the 

 older provinces of Canada ; and our knowledge of the west coast 

 and British Columbia is almost an event of yesterday. The 

 famous journey of Joliet and Marquette to the Mississppi was 

 made in 1672, followed, ten years later, by that of La Salle. In 

 1727, a Canadian fur company had advanced trading posts to 

 Lake Pepin on the Mississippi ; but we find Charlevoix writing 

 from Montreal, in 1721, with nothing more definite than the 

 vague rumours of the existence of the " Lac des Assiniboils " 

 and surrounding region now forming part of Manitoba. Not till 

 1731 was this country and the valley of the Red River of the 

 north, discovered by Varennes de la Verandrye, accompanied in 

 his expedition by his sons, and a missionary Jesuit. By 1748, 

 the French, with the wonderful energy in discovery characteristic 

 of them at this time, -had pushed their explorations far up the 

 valley of the Saskatchewan ; and they had already crossed the 

 water-shed separating this valley from the Arctic basin, when Sir 

 Alexander Mackenzie, an officer of the North-west Fur Company 

 of Canada, in 1789, began his voyages of discovery in that 

 region. This intrepid traveller, in that year, traversed the en- 

 tire length of the river now bearing his name, reaching the 

 Frozen ocean, and, in 1793, only 85 years ago, was the first Eu- 

 ropean to set foot in the great interior of British Columbia. 



The wide-stretching Algonkin family of Indians already des- 

 cribed as filling so large a part of North America, extended far 

 into the western country. The Sioux, touching, in the early his- 

 torical years, the west end of Lake Superior, were then being 

 dispossessed of these regions, and their hunting grounds about 

 the sources of the Mississippi by the Algonkin Chippeways, who 

 before settlement began in the Red River valley appear to have 

 usurped a part of that region, and the Lake of the Woods coun- 



