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CHAPTER II 
LANGUAGES 
The highway of the St. Lawreiiee and Ottawa rivers, connecting 
with the Great Lakes, inevitably attracted the early settlers towards 
the vast expanse of the interior continental plain; and the Nelson 
river, flowing into LIudson bay, though of lesser importance, beck- 
oner 1 the early traders in the same direction. These rivers are 
neither iimiavigable like the Fraser in British Columbia, nor do 
they rise in a high range of mountains that blocks man’s passage 
into the interior. Between their headwaters and the Atlantic they 
embrace a wooded upland stamped with a network of lakes and 
rivers, a stretch of country uniform in character from tlie bound- 
aries of the prairies to New Brunswick and the Labrador main, 
excejh for a small area of fertile lowland in southeastern Ontario 
and the neighbouring portion of (Quebec. 
ddie linguistic features of this region closely correspond to the 
geographic, being indeed partly determined by them. Only one 
language, the Algonkian, prevailed from the Atlantic to the prairies, 
except that some time before history opened a colony of Indians 
speaking another tongue, Iroquoian, occupied part of the lowland of 
southeastern Ontario, The voyageur from Montreal, who journeyed 
westward up the Ottawa river to the Great Lakes, lake Winnipeg, 
and the Churchill river, encountered no tribes that did not speak 
the same tongue as the Indians from around his own home who 
were manning his canoe; and the same tongue served him if he 
pushed northward from the St. Lawrence river to James bay. Even 
after he passed the low watershed where the rivers flowing to the 
Atlantic took their rise, he often had occasion to use one of the 
dialects of this same Algoidvian language, the Cree, whether he 
followed the course of the Alackenzie river northward to the Arctic 
ocean, or, turning westward, ascended its tributary, the Peace, to 
the Rocky mountains; for some of the Crees, leaving their old 
homes in northern Ontario and northern Alanitoba shortly after 
the establishment of the first trading-posts on LIudson bay. blazed 
a trail into the far interior that the fur-traders followed later. 
