l68 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VOL. V. 



sides, although the labors of Fathers Petitot and Morice have done much 

 to fill up gaps on the American side. Writers on Siberia have, unfor- 

 tunately, acted after the fashion of former describers of the American 

 Indian, by confounding the Tungus with the Tchuktchis and Yakuts, the 

 Koriaks and the Kamtchadales. Apart from Father Morice, and the 

 comparative vocabularies of the Dene dialects taken from the collections 

 of Petitot, Bancroft, Dawson, Tolmie and others, my authorities are 

 rather ancient, but their antiquity is really in their favor, as it represents 

 the two stocks in a native state, unaffected by external influences. For 

 the Tungus, I am indebted to Santini, Martin Sauer, Adelung, Klap- 

 roth, and Malte-Brun, and for the Den^s, to Mackenzie and Hearne. I 

 shall have occasion, in making the argument cumulative, to repeat some 

 facts stated by me in a paper entitled " Asiatic Tribes in North 

 America," which was published in the Proceedings of the Institute of 

 1 88 1, New Series, Vol. i. Part 2, p. 171. 



THE D£n£ tradition. 



Sir Alexander Mackenzie says, concerning the Chipewyans or Chippe- 

 wyans, who are now called Athapascans and Montagnais : " The}' have 

 also a tradition amongst them, that they originally came from another 

 country, inhabited by very wicked people, and had traversed a great lake 

 which was narrow, shallow, and full of islands, where they had suffered 

 great misery, it being always winter, with ice and deep snow. At the 

 Coppermine River, where they made the first land, the ground was 

 covered with copper, over which a body of earth had since been collected 

 to the depth of a man's height." Father Petitot has a larger version. " In 

 1 863, the Denes of Great Slave Lake, whom I questioned as to the place of 

 their origin, told me,' This is what we know : In the beginning, there lived 

 a great giant named Jakke-elt-ini (he whose head sweeps the sky), w ho 

 barred our entrance to this desert and yet uninhabited land. The men 

 (Denes), pursued him and killed him. His dead body fell across the two 

 continents, became petrified, and served as a bridge over which reindeer 

 have passed and repassed until our days, from one shore to the other. 

 The feet of the giant rest on the west shore, and his head reaches to Cold 

 Lake." Who does not recognize, under the allegorical form, the 

 narrative of the arrival of the Denes in America, and the struggles they 

 had to endure there against the barrenness of the soil, and the harshness 

 of the climate ? For proof in support, the Denes call the long Cordillera 

 of the Rocky Mountains, Ti-Jionan-kkwene (the back-bone of the earth), 

 which they observe to run down the length of the continent, and which 

 they regard as the back of the giant that has served as a bridge to these 



