206 SYSTEMS OF CONSANGUINITY AND AFFINITY 



were settled upon the Detroit River. The largest number of them are now in 

 Kansas ; but there are small bands still upon the north shores of Lake Huron and 

 the Georgian Bay, and still other individuals intermingled with the Ojibwas. They 

 number collectively about two thousand. The Potawattamies occupied around the 

 south shores of Lake Michigan at the time the settlement was commenced at 

 Chicago, about 1830. The most of them are now established upon a reservation 

 in Kansas. They number collectively about three thousand. 



4. Crees. The Cree language is now spoken in three dialects, without any cor- 

 responding division of the people into three geographically distinct nations. They 

 are called the Cree of the Lowlands, the Cree of the Woods, and the Cree of the 

 Prairie, of which the former is the least and the latter is the most developed. 

 There is a belt of thick Avood country extending for about three hundred miles 

 from the southern circuit of Hudson's Bay, reaching to Lake Winnipeg on the 

 west, and on the south to the dividing ridge between this bay and Lake Superior 

 and the St. Lawrence, which has been the home country of the Crees from the 

 earliest period to which our knowledge extends. Sir George Simpson states, in 

 his testimony before a Parliamentary commission, that this thick wood country 

 "has a larger surface of water than of land."^ Their occupation of the prairie 

 regions upon the Red River of the North and the Siskatchewun was undoubtedly 

 comparatively modern. The prairie dialect, therefore, which is the speech of the 

 largest number of the Crees, represents that portion of the people who first emi- 

 grated from the thick wood country into the plains, and which may have been at 

 the time in the incipient stages of its development. Tlie differences among the 

 three are still very slight, as will be seen by comparing the terms in the Table. 

 Of the variations in the pronouns the following may be taken as illustrations : — 



The Crees speak of each other as belonging to one of these three branches of 

 the nation, although the dialects, colloquially, are mutually intelligible without the 

 slightest difficulty. In the terms of relationship in the Table other difi'erences will 

 be observed, but they are less in the aggregate than among any other dialects given, 

 not excepting the Dakota. This language is open and accessible to a greater 

 extent than any other upon the American continent, from the large number of 

 whites by whom it has been acquired, and from the unusually large number of 

 half-bloods speaking English, to whom the Cree is the mother tongue.^ Under the 



• Report from the Select Committee on the Hudson's Bay Company, made to the British Parlia- 

 ment in 1857, p. 55. 



' An exceedingly interesting experiment is now in progress at Selkirk, or Red River Settlement, 

 near Lake Winnipeg. Along the banks of this river, from the mouth of the Asiniboine River for 

 some twelve miles down towards the lake, there is a straggling village containing near ten thousand 

 people, made up chiefly of half-blood Crees, but showing all shades of color, from the pure white 

 Orkney Islander, through all the intermediate degrees of intermixture, to the full-blooded Cree. The 

 Hudson's Bay Company, at an early day, induced Orkney men to emigrate to their territory, to act 



