REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I9II I9I 



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That meant a bond offensive and defensive with the Frenchman 

 who had instilled the new faith. If by the chance of adventure, 

 of geography or of discovery these Indians had been Iroquois in- 

 stead of the bitterest enemies of that great Confederacy, the whole 

 course of American history would have run in a very different 

 channel. But with the conversion of Membertou and his tribe to 

 the faith of the Frenchman, the die was cast. Mutual and historic 

 enmities alined themselves. The Micmacs first (the Souriquois, as 

 the early French called them), and then in the logical sequence of 

 history the entire Algonquin stock of which they formed a branch, 

 became the allies of the one culture ; their enemies, the Iroquois, by 

 very grace of this fact, became the enemies of that culture, and no 

 effort of colonization, of treaty, of conversion (though none was 

 spared) ever could turn the scales the other way. The great Con- 

 federacy of the Six Nations, holding the apex of the critical triangle 

 in New York at which converged the St Lawrence pathway of 

 the French and the Hudson-Mohawk pathway of the English, held 

 the balance of power between the two. If we analyze our history 

 down to its roots it is perfectly right to look back on the conversion 

 of Membertou, his squaw, his children, his children's children and 

 his tribe as the first step toward the ultimate supremacy of the 

 English culture in America. 



The student of Indian ethnology may look upon the Micmacs as 

 only a little tribe, of small moment in the sum of aboriginal 

 history, but, spread out along the northeastern shores of the Atlan- 

 tic, they were the first of all American Indians to come in close 

 contact with the whites, and today they are the only Indian tribe 

 in all America that has held its own in numbers; its members are 

 as many as when the Europeans first saw them. In this statement 

 there are, of course, only the estim.ates of the early missioners, 

 LeClerq. and Biard, to guide us, but the fact seems well established. 

 Father LeClercq, laboring in Gaspe, the northern reaches of their 

 hunting grounds where their number was always few, thought in 

 1680 that his " Gaspesians " numbered no more than 500, but- Biard 

 at an earher date (1611) and nearer the center of their settlements 

 in Acadia, estimated them at 3000 to 3500. In 1871 Hannay in 

 his history of Acadia, placed the number at " nearly 3000 " and 

 adds '' it is doubtful if their numbers were ever much greater." 

 Dr Dionne, the distinguished historian of Quebec, says that in 1891 

 the Micmacs numbered 4108; Father Pacifique in 1902 made a 

 personal enumeration of the tribe and placed the number at 3850 



