264 INDIANS OF NOVA SCOTIA — GILPIN. 



winter for which they could make no provision, and their inability 

 to cultivate the soil, always kept their numbers few. They made no 

 accumulations, and have left no records of the past save a few stone 

 weapons and shell mounds. 



Further south where a sunnier sky brought forth the maize and the 

 bean, there the same race grew in numbers and strength, and became 

 so powerful as to repel the Frenchmen who themselves would gladly 

 have made their settlements to the southward of Nova Scotia. 



This ends the first stage, the stone period, or prehistoric age of 

 our Mic-Mac. About two hundred and seventy years ago, or the 

 beginning of the seventeenth century, the age of Iron came down 

 upon them. They came under the influences of the French, who 

 held them for one hundred years, and whose kind and mild Govern- 

 ment may be called their French age. During this period they 

 must insensibly have cast off their coats of skin and clothed them- 

 selves in woollen clothes. They ceased to war with themselves, they 

 pointed their weapons with iron instead of stone, or exchanged them 

 for muskets, but they still remained living in wigwams, wandering 

 from sea to forest, and generally connecting themselves with the 

 French fishing stations and ports, where they bartered skins and furs 

 for bread and tobacco, and other things which they were fast learning 

 to call the necessaries of life 



We have no records of this period, but from incidental remarks 

 from time to time of various writers, we learn that the kind rela- 

 tions existing from the first betwixt them and their masters, never 

 altered. 



When a female prisoner stole from the Sagamos, Membertou, an 

 axe and tinder box to facilitate the escape of another captive, she was 

 condemned to die. The women of the tribe led her to the forest 

 and there killed her, the king's daughter, a comely maiden, striking 

 the first blow. The French officers, to show their disgust, ever 

 afterwards refused her as a partner at the dance. This anecdote 

 shows the iron age as a reformer, yet something may be said for the 

 stone, where men would not kill women. They may be said to have 

 accepted the Christian faith rather than to have been converted. 

 They had no faith to turn from. The Fathers of th Reecollet and 



