BULLETIN OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 
38 
THE MI CM AC INDIANS. 
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 Atlantic, 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 estimates of the early missioners, LeClerq 
and Baird, to guide us, but the fact seems well established. 
Father LeClerq, 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 Baird at an earlier 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 doubt- 
ful 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 in Canada and 200 in Newfoundland. Today, 
according to Father Pacifique and the last official census, 
there are 4319 members of the tribe, of whom only 230 live 
in Newfoundland, and about 15 in the United States. 
It is thus very evident that the tribe has been one of 
extraordinary vitality and has perpetuated itself and even 
multiplied in the face of much the same conditions which 
brought about the depopulation of every other aboriginal 
people of this hemisphere. 
The Micmacs, too, hold to their original soil. Too many 
of our aborigines have been shifted about, the shuttlecock 
of the white man’s designs, and find themselves today far 
away from their old hunting grounds. The Micmac country 
was the extreme orient of the Algonquins, and in the historic 
confederacy of this Algic stock which once covered half the 
continent, they were the “youngest brother,” their land 
Migmagig, the “country of friendship.” The elder brother 
was the Abenaki to the south and west, while the “father 
tribe” was the Ottawa, their land the “land of their origin.” 
— Extract from “ The Micmac Tercentenary ” by John M. 
Clarke , in New York State Museum Report , 1911. 
