No. 3.] G. M. DAWSON — INDIANS OF QUEBEC. 141 



try, and made of them their we>tern stronghold. With fish and 

 berries in abundance, and lake strung to lake, forming an amaz- 

 ingly complicated water communication through all the forest 

 country, the woodland Indian may here be seen to the greatest 

 advantage ; and, as in the summer he lazily paddles his bark 

 canoe from island to island, sets his nets in the narrows, or joins 

 in the harvesting of wild rice in the creeks and swamps of the 

 lake margin, one may still almost imagine that his tenure is un- 

 disputed, and his life a realization of Hiawatha. But winter is 

 at hand, and many too are the legends still associated with the 

 landscape of fierce conflicts, and massacres by the dreaded Sioux. 



West of the Chippeways, but inosculating with them, and 

 spreading far up the valley of the Saskatchewan, were the Criste- 

 neaux or Crees, who speak a language only dialectically different 

 from that of the Chippeways, but exhibit some dilterent traits, 

 being in great part Flain Indians. South of the Crees, and in- 

 habitins: the river of the same name, where the Assineboines, a 

 tribe which separated from the Dakotas or Sioux, almost within 

 the limit of authentic history, and, like the parent stock, differed 

 much in physical characteristics, and altogether in language from 

 the Crees. Though thus the offspring of the Dakotas, they 

 were bitterly hostile to them, much as occurred further east with 

 the Iroquois. South and west of these, but scarcely stretching 

 far north of the forty-ninth parallel in early times, were the 

 various bands of the Sioux, or Nadouessioux of the early travellers, 

 the first name, by which they are now most commonly known, 

 being an abbreviation of the second, wliich is a Chippewa word, 

 meaning enemies, and was sometimes also applied by these people 

 to the Iroquois; the Sioux calling themselves D.ikotas. Still 

 farther west were the different tribes of the Blackfoot confederacy, 

 roaming between the head-waters of the Missouri, the Rocky 

 Mountains and upper Saskatchewan. 



The Indians thus classified according to race, were, however, 

 naturally divided, from the earliest times, by the character of 

 th'^ir environment, into two great groups, — those of the plains 

 and those of the forests. The former, typically exhibited in the 

 Sioux. Assineboines, and Blackfeet, were and are physically and 

 mentally better developed than the latter. Their lives were more 

 active, and, with abundance of food in the innumerable herds 

 of buffalo which then covered the plains from the Red River to 

 the foot of the Rocky Mountains, while fierce, treacherous and 



