NORTHERN OCEAN 267 



this shocking story, which she delivered in a very affecting 1772. 

 manner, only excited laughter among the savages of my party. J^""^'y- 



In a conversation with this woman soon afterward, she 

 told us, that her country lies so far to the Westward, that 

 she had never seen iron, or any other kind of metal, till she 

 was taken prisoner. All of her tribe, she observed, made 

 their hatchets and ice-chisels of deer's horns, and their knives 

 of stones and bones ; that their arrows were shod with a kind 

 of slate, bones, and deer's horns ; and the instruments which 

 they employed to make their wood-work were nothing but 

 beavers' teeth. Though they had frequently heard of the 

 useful materials which the nations or tribes to the East of 

 them were supplied with from the English, so far were they 

 from drawing nearer, to be in the way of trading for iron- 

 work, &c. that they were obliged to retreat farther back, to » 

 avoid the Athapuscow Indians, who made surprising slaughter 

 among them, both in Winter and Summer. 



On the sixteenth, as we were continuing our course in the i6th. 

 South West quarter, we arrived at the grand [268] Atha- 

 puscow River,^ which at that part is about two miles wide, and 



inhuman women will accompany their husbands, and murder the women and 

 children as fast as their husbands do the men. 



When I was at Cumberland House, (an inland settlement that I established 

 for the Hudson's Bay Company in the year 1774,) I was particularly acquainted 

 with a very young lady of this extraordinary turn ; who, when I desired some 

 Indians that were going to war to bring me a young slave, which I intended to 

 have brought up as a domestic. Miss was equally desirous that one might be 

 brought to her, for the cruel purpose of murdering it. It is scarcely possible to 

 express my astonishment, on hearing such an extraordinary request made by a 

 young creature scarcely sixteen years old ; however,.as soon as I recovered from 

 my surprise, I ordered her to leave the settlement, which she did, with those who 

 were going to war ; and it is therefore probable she might not be disappointed 

 in her request. The next year I was ordered to the command of Prince of 

 Wales's Fort, and therefore never saw her afterward. 



[^ The map is very indefinite in this part of his course, and little dependence 

 can be placed on his positions. The place where he came to the Slave (Atha- 

 puscow) River must have been some distance south of Great Slave Lake, and 

 as he followed it upwards for forty miles to where it turned to the south, he 

 probably reached some place not far from the rapids at Fort Smith, in latitude 

 60° north, which is 15' south of the point indicated on his map as the place 

 where he left the river and struck into the country to the east.] 



