194 A JOURNEY TO THE 



1 77 1, confidence in those birds, and say they are frequently apprized 

 'by them of the approach of strangers, and conducted by them 

 to herds of deer and musk-oxen ; which, without their assist- 

 ance, in all probability, they never could have found. 



[173] The Esquimaux seem not to have imbibed the same 

 opinion of those birds ; for if they had, they must have been 

 apprized of our approach toward their tents, because all the time 

 the Indians lay in ambush, (before they began the massacre,) a 

 large flock of those birds were continually flying about, and 

 hovering alternately over them and the tents, making a noise 

 sufiicient to awaken any man out of the soundest sleep. 



After a sleep of five or six hours we once more set out, and 

 walked eighteen or nineteen miles to the South South East, 

 when we arrived at one of the copper mines, which lies, from 

 the river's mouth about South South East, distant about 

 twenty-nine or thirty miles. 



This mine, if it deserve that appellation, is no more than 

 an entire jumble of rocks and gravel, which has been rent 

 many ways by an earthquake. Through these ruins there 

 runs a small river ; but no part of it, at the time I was there, 

 was more than knee-deep.^ 



[} The exact locality here described does not appear to have been visited 

 by any white man since 1771, but Sir John Richardson visited the Copper 

 Mountains in 1821, and the following description by him will give some idea 

 of their character : 



"The Copper Mountains appear to form a range running S.E. and N.W. 

 The great mass of rock in the mountains seems to consist of felspar in various 

 conditions ; sometimes in the form of felspar rock or claystone, sometimes 

 coloured by hornblende, and approaching to greenstone, but most generally in 

 the form of dark reddish-brown amygdaloid. The amygdaloidal masses, con- 

 tained in the amygdaloid, are either entirely pistacite, or pistacite enclosing 

 calc-spar. Scales of native copper are very generally disseminated through 

 this rock, through a species of trap tuff which nearly resembled it, and also 

 through a reddish sandstone on which it appears to rest. When the felspar 

 assumed the appearance of a slaty claystone, which it did towards the base of 

 the mountains on the banks of the river, we observed no copper in it. The 

 rough and in general rounded and more elevated parts of the mountain, are 

 composed of the amygdaloid ; but between the eminences there occur many 

 narrow and deep valleys, which are bounded by perpendicular mural precipices 



