DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER 13 



the Indians were fewer they used to flee, but occasionally 

 it happened that a large number of Indians came upon a 

 few Eskimos who had become separated from the main 

 party. In those cases the Indians would kill the Eskimos. 

 I had read stories of just this kind in the books of the 

 early explorers, such as Sir John Richardson. It was 

 impressive to hear them from the lips of a gentle old man 

 like Macfarlane who had himself been in the country 

 towards the end of this period of hostility while the fear 

 of bloodshed still prevailed though the battles themselves 

 no longer occurred and although the Hudson's Bay Com- 

 pany was now supplying the Eskimos with iron in place 

 of their stone implements, so that they no longer had any 

 occasion to make long journeys to the stone quarries at 

 Good Hope. It had been one of the earliest tasks of the 

 Company to make peace between the Indians and Eski- 

 mos. In this they had succeeded pretty well even be- 

 fore Macfarlane's time, and still not completely, for Mac- 

 farlane himself was once robbed by the most pugnacious 

 of all the Eskimo "tribes," the Kupagmiut, or people of 

 the Great River, who lived at certain seasons of year on 

 a branch of the Mackenzie delta but who wandered far 

 afield either in large or small groups. It was with this 

 very group I was destined to spend the coming winter, 

 though I did not know it when I was talking with 

 Macfarlane. 



As interesting as the scholarly Macfarlane was John 

 Anderson, who under the title of "Chief Trader of the 

 Mackenzie District" was in effect viceroy over a northern 

 empire. This was a position which Macfarlane had held 

 before him. Although younger in years, Anderson be- 

 longed to an older school of thought. He had come as a 

 boy from the north of Scotland directly into the Com- 



