160 ASSIOTIBOIKE AND SASKATCHEWAN EXPEDITION. 



1855 is stated in the Annual Eeport of the Indian Bureau 

 of that year to include 314,622 souls. 



An approximation to the total Indian population of the 

 United States and British America will be as follows : — 



Indians of the United States 314,622 



Indians of British America (Colonel Lefroy) . . . 124,518 



Total . 439,140 



Or, 



Indians of the United States . . . . . . 314,622 



Indians of British America, according to the census of the 

 Hudson's Bay Company . ... 147,000 



Total 461,622 



The records of the early history of the Indians who 

 formerly occupied Canada and the northern States of 

 the Union prove that their numbers, during the first half 

 of the seventeenth century, must have at least quadrupled 

 the entire aboriginal population now occupying the vast 

 territories under the control of the Hudson's Bay Com- 

 pany. 



The extraordinary mutability of nations in the savage 

 state, and the rapidity with which one race supplants 

 another over large areas, is thus noticed by a recent 

 writer on the early discoveries of the French in North 

 America * : — " When Cartier arrived in the St. Lawrence, 

 he described large and permanent Indian villages at Sta- 

 dacona and Hochelaga ; but little more than half a cen- 

 tury afterwards, when Champlain visited the same locali- 

 ties, he apparently found few Indians about Quebec, and 

 none permanently settled at Montreal. There may have 

 been some exaggeration in Cartier's account, but the main 

 fact remains, and it may probably be accounted for by 



* " On the Early Discoveries of the French in North America," by John 

 Langton, M.A., Auditor of Public Accounts, Canada. A paper read before 

 the Canadian Institute, and published in the u Canadian Journal," New 

 Series, No. 12. 



