18 
The early travellers who pushed westward from the settle- 
ments on the lower St. Lawrence river seem hardly to have realized 
how great an asset to their explorations was this far-flung currency 
of the Algonkian tongue; but Sir Alexander Mackenzie repeatedly 
mentions the aid he received from the equally wide distribution 
of Athapaskan, another of the Indian languages. It carried him 
from Great Slave lake to the Arctic ocean, and from the same lake 
again through the Peace and Upper Fraser River areas almost to 
the Pacific coast. It was on the frontiers of this language that he 
encountered the greatest obstacles to his explorations — on the 
Fraser river near Alexandria, where the Athapaskan-speaking 
Carriers and Cliilcotins adjoined Shuswap Indians who spoke the 
totally different Salishan tongue, and on the Bella Coola river 
and inlet, where another dialect of the Salishan language held 
sway. Everywhere else throughout Mackenzie’s long journeys liis 
Cliipewyan interpreters from Great Slave lake coukl make them- 
selves understood with little difficulty, and obtain valuable arlvance 
information concerning routes and portages. 
Eleven linguistic stocks were current in Canada, most of them 
subdivided into numerous dialects. The distribution of these 
languages is shown on the pocket map. No less than six were 
confined to British Columbia. Tliere the Tlinkit language of 
southern Alaska abutted on the Tsimshian of the Nass and Skeena 
rivers and confronted the Haida of the Queen Charlotte islands. 
Vancouver island was the home of the Wakashan tongue, separated 
into two dialects so divergent that they constituted almost distinct 
languages, the Nootka on the west coast and the Kwakiutl on the 
east. The tribes at the southern end of tlie island, and on the 
Fraser river as far up as Alexandria, used the Salishan language, 
other dialects of which prevailed at Dean and Burke channels and 
in the Okanagan valley. The Kootenay Indians possessed a lan- 
guage of their own, and throughout the northern interior of Britisli 
Columbia invading tribes from across the mountains introduced 
the Athapa.skan tongue. British Columbia, therefore, like the 
Pacific coast of the United States, was a ])abel of conflicting tongues, 
suggesting that it had been a cul-de-sac from which neither invaded 
nor invader could escape. In pre-European times contact between the 
tribes was so frequently hostile that no one language gained the 
