Cy\NADAS INDIAN PROBLEMS^ — JENNESS 375 



plan. Our Indians, on the contrary, numbered only two or three score 

 thousand individuals scattered through dozens of politically indepen- 

 dent hamlets, and speaking half a dozen mutually unintelligible lan- 

 guages. Politically, they were incapable of uniting and presenting a 

 common front, even if they could have found a leader. Moreover, they 

 were fishermen and hunters who had never tilled the soil until the 

 early Europeans taught them to grow a few potatoes. Hence when 

 the fishing companies monopolized the runs of salmon, which had been 

 their staff of life, each little community had to make its own adjust- 

 ment and either change its mode of existence entirely or disappear. 



If the Pacific coast with its abundance of fish was an extremely fa- 

 vorable area for human habitation, and indeed, before the coming of 

 Europeans, the most populous region in Canada outside of southern 

 Ontario, where the cultivation of corn permitted a greater concentra- 

 tion of population, the basins of the Mackenzie and Yukon Rivers, like 

 northern Ontario and northern Quebec, were very unfavorable. The 

 rigorous climate prohibited agriculture, even had it been known. Fish, 

 while comparatively plentiful in the lakes and rivers, did not run in 

 large shoals, like the salmon of the Pacific coast, and their capture 

 involved extreme hardship during 6 months of the year. The real 

 mainstay of the Indians was the caribou, wdiich supplied not only food, 

 but clothing and coverings for the tent; but in the forested areas the 

 caribou roamed singly, not in great herds like the species on the barren 

 lands, so that the Indians had to w^ander about in groups of two or 

 three families, that feasted when the chase and fishing were successful 

 and starved when they failed. Life thus alternated between plenty 

 and starvation. The weaklings perished on the trail, since there was 

 no fixed home where they could find shelter, or stable food supply 

 that could tide them over a critical period. Few social amenities 

 lightened the unending drudgery and hardships. It was a region of 

 poverty, material and spiritual. Nevertheless, it enjoyed one blessing. 

 It was a fairly peaceful region, because one area was scarcely prefer- 

 able to another and the tribes had no inducement to encroach on each 

 other's territories. 



The advent of the fur traders in the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries destroyed this peace without relieving the prevailing poverty. 

 The two tribes that bordered the fur posts on Hudson Bay, the Cree 

 and the Chipewyan, tried to monopolize for themselves all the benefits 

 of this trade. Equipped with guns, the Chipewyan reduced their 

 neighbors, the Yellowknives and the Dogribs, to a state of serfdom, 

 while the Cree pushed westward, drove out the Indians who inhabited 

 the upper waters of the Mackenzie River and took over the territory for 

 themselves. Turmoil and strife prevailed through the entire region 

 until a terrible epidemic of smallpox toward the end of the eighteenth 

 century carried off nearly half its inhabitants. Even then the tribal 



