CANADA'S INDIAN PROBLEMS — JENNESS 369 



until two centuries later. The earliest French settlers in eastern 

 Canada were few in numbers, primitive in their manner of life, and 

 cut off entirely from the Old World except for the visits of one or two 

 ships each summer. Furthermore, the vast majority were men who 

 combined their simple farming with fishing and hunting, or neglected 

 farming altogether for a life in the woods similar to that of the 

 Indians. Yet Canada was their permanent home, not merely a place 

 of work and residence for a few years, after which they would return 

 to Europe, as did so many employees of the great fur-trading com- 

 panies who operated in the west and northwest a century or so later. 

 Nothing was more natural, therefore, than that many of these early 

 French settlers should marry Indian girls, especially girls who had 

 been educated in the mission schools; and that the free traders who 

 roamed the woods should take wives from the Indians who supplied 

 them with furs. We must remember that in the seventeenth century, 

 the period that witnessed the laying of the foundations of New France, 

 Indians and whites were on a more nearly equal footing economically 

 than they were a century later, when numerous industries such as 

 milling, weaving, and iron-working established themselves in the 

 Maritime Provinces and along the banks of the St. Lawrence. Hence 

 intermarriage occurred quite freely, half-breeds experienced no dis- 

 abilities of any kind, and both half-breeds and Indians received every 

 encouragement to participate with the white settlers in building up a 

 prosperous colony. How many actually merged with the whites we 

 shall never know, but the proportion was not inconsiderable. Many, 

 of course, found the drudgery of farm life too difficult and preferred 

 to maintain their old hunting and trapping existence, which was in- 

 deed the only existence possible north of the St. Lawrence watershed ; 

 and it is they, or rather their descendants, who occupy most of the 

 present-day Indian reserves in eastern Canada or roam over northern 

 Ontario and northern Quebec. Yet even they were witnesses, and 

 to a limited degree, participants in the slow rise of eastern Canada 

 from a few settlements of primitive colonists to a great agi'icultural, 

 industrial, and commercial area, and they were given ample time to 

 adjust themselves to the changing conditions that unfolded themselves 

 century after century. 



It was otherwise on the gi'eat plains, whose inhabitants had to with- 

 stand the shock of two sudden revolutions, both brought about by 

 whites directly or indirectly. We actually know very little about 

 the life of these Indians prior to the first revolution, because the only 

 explorer who visited them before that time was the youth Kelsey, 

 and his account of his journey is extremely meager. In his day (1690) , 

 apparently the only true plains' dwellers were the Blackfoot and the 

 Gros Ventres; for the other tribes that later disputed the area with 

 them, the Sarcee, Assiniboine, Cree, and certain bands of Ojibwa, 



