436 HYBRIDITY AND ABSORPTION 



interests of the fur-trader to teach him any higher use of the rich 

 prairie land than that of a wilderness inhabited by fur-bearing 

 animals, or a grazing ground for the herds of buffalo which furnished 

 their annual supply of pemmican ; or to familiarise him with more of 

 the borrowed arts of civilization than helped to facilitate the accumu- 

 lation of peltries in the factory stores. Hence the intrusive Europeans • 

 and the native tribes have dwelt together for successive generations 

 on terms of comparative equality, and with results of curious interest, 

 hereafter referred to, in relation to the intermingling of the races. 



In the long-settled provinces of Upper and Lower Canada it has 

 been otherwise. There the aborigines had to be gathered together 

 on suitable reserves, and induced to accommodate themselves in some 

 degree to the habits of an industrious agricultural population ; or to 

 be driven out, to wander off into the great hunting grounds of the 

 uncleared West. The exterminating native wars, which preceded 

 the settlement of Upper Canada, greatly facilitated this ; and the 

 tribes with which the English colonists of Ontario have had to deal 

 have been for the most part emigrants, not greatly more recent than 

 themselves. As to the Six Nation Indians settled on the Grand 

 River and at the Bay of Quinte (the most numerous and the farthest 

 advanced in civilization of all the Indians in the British provinces), 

 they are a body of loyalist refugees who followed the fortunes of 

 their English allies on the declaration of independence by the 

 revolted Colonies ; and there is now in use, at the little Indian 

 Church at Tuscarora, the silver communion-plate presented to their 

 ancestors while still in the Valley of the Mohawk, in the State of 

 New York, the gift of Her Majesty Queen Anne, " to her Indian 

 Chappel of the Mohawks." 



But the civilization which has thus resulted from prolonged and 

 intimate relations with the Whites, has been accompanied by an 

 inevitable admixture of blood, of which the results are abundantly 

 manifest in the physical characteristics of the Indian settlers, both on 

 the Grand River and at the Bay of Quints. The system of adopting 

 members of other tribes, including even those of their vanquished 

 foes, to recruit their own numbers, was familiar to the Iroquois, or 

 Indians of the Five Nations, as they were styled, before the admission 

 of the Tuscaroras to their confederacy. In 1649, for example, the 

 svirvivors of two of the Huron towns which they had ravaged, 

 besought the favour of the victors, and were adopted into the Seneca 



