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| ON THE NORTH-WESTERN TRIBES OF THE DOMINION OF CANADA. 701 
_ who has himself recorded this westward movement of the Crees, is dis- 
posed to question the fact of the corresponding movement of the Black- 
feet. In his last letter, in reply to my inquiries, he expresses a doubt as 
to their former sojourn in the Red River region, and adds : ‘ They affirm, 
on the contrary, that they came from the south-west, across the moun- 
tains—that is, from the direction of Oregon and Washington Territory. 
There were’ (he adds) ‘bloody contests between the Blackfeet and the 
Nez-percés, as Bancroft relates, for the right of hunting on the eastern 
slope of the Rocky Mountains.’ Mr. McLean, who mentions the former 
residence of the Blackfeet in the Red River country as an undoubted 
fact, also says in the same letter, ‘It is supposed that the great ancestor 
of the Blackfeet came across the mountains.’ 
Here are two distinct and apparently conflicting traditions, each 
having good authority and evidence in its favour. One of the best tests 
of the truth of tradition is to be found in language. Applying this test 
in the present instance, we are led to some interesting conclusions, It 
has been seen that Mackenzie, to whom we owe our first knowledge of 
the Blackfoot tribes, declared that their language had no affinity with that 
of any other Indians whom he knew of. He was well acquainted with the 
Crees and Ojibways, who speak dialects of the great Algonkin stock, but 
he recognised no connection between their speech and that of the Black- 
feet. Another traveller (Umfreville), whose book was published in 1791, 
gave a list of forty-four words of the Blackfoot language. The dis- 
tinguished philologist Albert Gallatin, whose great work, the ‘ Synopsis 
of the Indian Tribes’ (which still remains the best authority on North 
American philology), appeared in 1836, examined this list of Umfreville, 
and pronounced it sufficient to show that the language of the Blackfeet 
was ‘different from any other known to us.’ A few years later he 
received from an Indian trader a more extended vocabulary, and he then, 
in a second memoir on the subject, corrected his former statement, and 
showed that there was a clear affinity between the Blackfoot speech and 
the language of the Algonkin family. More recently the French mission- 
aries made the same discovery, which seems to have been to them equally 
unexpected. M. Lacombe writes to me: ‘The Blackfoot language, 
although far from, belongs to the same family as the Algic, Ojibway, 
Sauteux, Maskegon, and Cree. We discovered this analogy by studying 
the grammatical rules of these languages.’ 
Here will be noticed the rather remarkable fact that some of the 
ablest and most experienced of North American linguists have at first 
supposed the Blackfoot language to be distinct from all others, and have 
only discovered its connection with the Algonkin family by careful study. 
M. Lacombe has been good enough to send mea pretty extensive vocabu- 
lary of Blackfoot words, compared with the corresponding words in the 
Cree and Ojibway languages. He has added what, for the purpose in 
view, is equally important—many paradigms of grammatical forms in the 
Blackfoot, compared with similar forms in the Cree and Ojibway tongues. 
The Blackfoot language is thus shown to be, in its grammar, purely 
Algonkin. The resemblance is complete in the minutest forms, and in 
examining these alone it would seem incomprehensible that any doubt of 
the connection of this language with that stock could have been enter- 
tained. But when we turn to the vocabulary, by which the first judg- 
ment of a language is necessarily formed, the origin of the early error 
becomes apparent. Many of the most common words are totally different 
