0\ THE ETHXOLOGTCAL SURVEY OF CANADA. 473 



strong and populous tribe, numbering, when white men first carae^ into 

 contact with them, many thousands. Some of their larger o'laimmitq, or 

 villages, contained as many as seven hundred people, and that less than 

 fifty years ago. We gather this from the early white settlers themselves. 



The original home and territory of the Sk-qo'mic seems to have been 

 on the banks of the river which gives them their tribal name, and 

 along the shores of Howe Sound, into which the Skuamish runs. Their 

 settlements on the river extended for upwards of thirty miles along the 

 banks. Their northern neighbours were the Lillooets or Stktlumn tribe 

 and the Tcilkotin division of the Dene stock. Their southern neighbours 

 were the Lower Fraser tribes. According to one of my informants the 

 Indian villages that used to exist on English Bay, Burrard Inlet, and 

 False Creek were not originally true Sk-qo'mic. They were said to be 

 allied by speech and blood to the Lower Fraser tribes. How far this is 

 correct seems impossible now to say. SkqO'raic is everywhere spoken 

 throughout this territory, and has been as far back as our knowledge of it 

 goes ; and the Sk-qo'mic villages, according to my informants, extend to 

 and include Ma'li, at the mouth of the Fraser, which place Dr. Boas was 

 informed by the River Indians belonged to them, and which he has 

 accordingly included in their teiritory. It was probably the dividing 

 line, and, like Spuzzum, farther up the river, was composed partly of the 

 one division and partly of the other. 



Our first knowledge of the Sk-qo'mic dates back to rather less than a 

 century ago. The first white man to sail into English Bay and Howe 

 Sound and come into contact with them was Captain Vancouver. He 

 recorded briefly his impressions of them in the diary of his voyage to this 

 coast, a short extract from which may be of interest in this first formal 

 account of the tribe. He writes thus : — 



Friday, June 15, 1792.' 

 ' But for this circumstance we might too hastily have concluded that 

 this part of the Gulf was uninhabited. In the morning we were visited 

 by nearly forty of the natives, on whose approach from the very material 

 alteration that had now taken place in the face of the country we 

 expected to find some difterence in their general character. This conjec- 

 ture was, however, premature, as they varied in no respect whatever, but 

 in possessing a more ardent desire for commercial transactions, into the 

 spirit of which they entered with infinitely more avidity than any of our 

 former acquaintances, not only bartering amongst themselves the diflerent 

 valuables they had obtained from us, but when that trade became slack 

 in exchanging those articles again with our people, in which traSic they 

 always took care to gain some advantage, and would frequently exult on 

 this occasion. Some fish, their garments, spears, bows and arrows, to 

 which these people wisely added their copper garments, comprised their 

 general stock-in-trade. Iron in all forms they judiciously preferred to any 

 other article we had to ofier.' 



They have not altered much in these points of their character .since 

 Vancouver's visit, and many of them have to-day, I am told, snug little 

 sums judiciously invested by their good friend and spiritual director, the 

 late Bishop Durieu, in safe paying concerns. It is only fair to say, how- 

 ever, that they deserve to be prosperous. They are probably the most 



' yol. i. p. 305. 



