NORTHERN OCEAN 201 



to the Company from this increase, the poor Northern Indians 1771, 

 reap innumerable benefits from a fine and plentiful country/"^* 

 with the produce of which they annually load themselves 

 for trade, without giving the least offence to the proper 

 inhabitants. 



Several attempts have been made to induce the Copper and 

 Dog-ribbed Indians to visit the Company's Fort at Churchill 

 River, and for that purpose many presents have been sent, 

 but they never were attended with any success. And though 

 several of the Copper Indians have visited Churchill, in the 

 capacity of servants to the Northern Indians, and were generally 

 sent back loaded with presents for their countrymen, yet the 

 Northern Indians always plundered them of the whole soon 

 after they left the Fort. This kind of treatment, added to the 

 many inconveniences that attend so long a journey, are great 

 obstacles in their way ; otherwise it would be as possible for 

 them to bring their own goods to market, as for the Northern 

 Indians to go so far to purchase them on their own account, 

 [180] and have the same distance to bring them as the first 

 proprietors would have had. But it is a political scheme of 

 our Northern traders to prevent such an intercourse, as it would 

 greatly lessen their consequence and emolument. Superstition, 

 indeed, will, in all probability, be a lasting barrier against those 

 people ever having a settled communication with our Factory ; 



implements and utensils of various kinds in exchange for furs, but who after- 

 wards found that they could buy such goods as they needed more advan- 

 tageously from the traders on the Athabasca River, very much nearer home, 

 vi'as a man known to those traders as " English Chief." This Indian accom- 

 panied Sir Alexander Mackenzie, one of the partners of the North-West Com- 

 pany, and one of those who would have been spoken of by Hearne as Canadians^ 

 on his journey from Lake Athabasca to the Arctic Ocean in 1789. 



This note also throws an interesting light on the date on which the journal 

 was written, for the first outbreak of small-pox, which swept off the Indians of 

 Western Canada, occurred in 1781, and therefore the journal itself was written 

 before that date, while Hearne was living as Governor at Fort Prince of Wales. 

 The note would appear to have been written about 1787, after the destruction of 

 Fort Prince of Wales, and while Hearne was living at Fort Churchill, five miles 

 south of the old fort, and before he finally returned to England.] 



