FORT CHIPEWTAN TO FOET M'MURRAT 113 



Besides Mackenzie's, another name, renowned in the tragic 

 annals of science, is inseparably connected with this region, 

 viz., that of Franklin, who has already been incidentally 

 referred to. Others recur to one, but these two great 

 names are engrained, so to speak, in the North, and cannot 

 be lightly passed over in any descriptive work. The two 

 explorers were friends, or, at any rate, acquaintances ; and, 

 before leaving England, Franklin had a long conversation 

 in London with Mackenzie, who died shortly afterwards. 

 The record of his " Journey to the Shores of the Polar 

 Ocean," accompanied by Doctor Richardson and Midship- 

 men Back and Hood, in the years 1819-20-21 and '32, prac- 

 tically began at York Factory in August of the former year. 

 The rival companies were still at war, and in making the 

 portage at the Grand Rapids of the Saskatchewan, with a 

 party of Hudson's Bay Company traders, " they advanced," 

 he says, " armed, and with great caution." When he 

 returned on the llth July, 1822, to York, the warring com- 

 panies had united, and he and his friends were met there 

 by Governor Simpson, Mr. McTavish, and all the united 



The Assiniboines are an offshoot of the great Sioux, or Dakota, race 

 called by their congeners the Hohas, or " Rebels." They separated 

 from their nation at a remote period owing to a quarrel, so the tradi- 

 tion runs, between children, and which was taken up by their parents. 

 Migrating northward the Eascabs, as the Assiniboines called them- 

 selves, were gladly received and welcomed as allies by the Crees, 

 with whom, as Dr. Richardson says, " they attacked and drove to 

 the westward the former inhabitants of the banks of the Saskatche- 

 wan." " The nations," he continues, " driven westward by the 

 Eascabs and Crees are termed by the latter Yatchee-thinyoowuc, 

 translated Slave Indians, but properly 'Strangers.' " This word 

 Tatchee is, of course, the lyaghchi of the Crees in their name for 

 Lesser Slave River and Lake. Richardson describes them as inhabit- 

 ing the country round Fort Augustus and the foot of the Rockies, 

 and " so numerous now as to be a terror to the Assiniboines them- 

 selves." They are divided, he says, into five nations, of whom the 

 Fall Indians, so called from their former residence at Cole's Falls, 

 near the Forks of the Saskatchewan, were the most numerous, con- 

 sisting of 500 tents, the Piegans of 400, the Blackfeet of 350, the 

 Bloods of 300, and the Sarcees of 150, the latter tribe being a branch 

 of the Chipewyans which, having migrated like their congeners, the 

 Apaches, from the north, joined the Crees as allies, just as the 

 Assiniboines did from the south. 



