AN OLD STORY OF THE NEW WORLD. 19 



Americans, the first that he saw. They were large, 

 well-built people, with their skins painted red, clothed 

 in furs, their hair tied up in a knot, secured with a 

 bone pin, and ornamented with feathers. They used 

 canoes of birch bark, and were hunting seals, in search 

 of which they gave the French navigator to under- 

 stand they had come from a country farther to the 

 south. There can be little doubt that they were the 

 Eed Indians or Boeotics of Newfoundland, a race now 

 extinct, mercilessly exterminated by the European 

 settlers of that island, and by the Micmacs of Nova 

 Scotia, but who were of old most extensive hunters 

 of the reindeer, the seal, and the walrus, and skilful 

 carvers of ivory and fabricators of bone implements, 

 and who, in respect to their physical character, food, 

 and mode of life, were very like the men of the so- 

 called Eeindeer Age in France itself, subsisting like 

 them very much on the carriboo, or American reindeer, 

 then abundant in the interior of Newfoundland. There 

 is reason to believe that the Eed Indians were an 

 eastern extension of the Tinne or Chipewyan race, 

 which once extended across the continent between 

 the Esquimaux on the north and the Algonquins 

 and other Indian tribes on the south. The old Bre- 

 ton here stood in the presence of the precise equi- 

 valent of the Flint folk of his own country, just as 

 they would have appeared, if raised from their graves 

 in the French caverns, with their flint arrows, bone 

 spears, harpoons and shell ornaments. But Cartier 

 knew as little of these things as the Eed Indians did 



