192 LABRADOR 



fire of the Saguenay ran from west of Quebec some seven 

 hundred miles to the Romaine River, sweeping the country 

 from the Gulf to the height of land. Such damp grounds 

 as were spared could sustain little game, and afforded slight 

 protection from the hunters to such as survived. The 

 catastrophe, so far as resources for the Indians are con- 

 cerned, was nearly complete. 



Earlier still the plateau had become largely non-support- 

 ing. Hind, writing in the sixties of the country about 

 the Moisie, gives a saddening account of the misfortunes 

 of the Nascaupees. Many were forced to the shores. 

 There food was to be had, but the change to the damp of 

 the Gulf from the activity and sunshine of the high interior 

 brought its natural consequences, and consumption and 

 the unknown diseases of civilization soon brought their 

 end. 



Where the soil remains, gradual replacement of the forest 

 goes on, the higher ground most often turning to birch, 

 with quaking asp, and the gravel river levels of the south- 

 west to an open growth of Banksian pine, the ussishk of 

 the Indians, and the cypres of the French habitants. In 

 favourable places the original forestation of spruce and fir 

 succeeds, if poorly, in reestablishing itself. 



The cause of fires is generally the carelessness of border 

 whites, although Dr. Low's supposition that not a few have 

 begun with " wandering Indians, careful only in their own 

 hunting-grounds," is doubtless true enough. But it is to 

 be remembered that the fire code of the real Indian is very 

 rigid, and the fact that white advent found the country 

 forested to the subarctic barrens tells its own tale. The 

 people were far more numerous then, yet under their law 



