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abounded. They manned tlie canoes of explorers and fur traders, 
served them as jiiiides and hunters through the wilderness, and 
showed them the trails and the canoe routes. Many of our highways 
in Ontario follow the routes of ancient trails, ami our railroads cross 
the mountains over passes first used and pointed out by the Indians. 
They and their half-breed descendants have always been the mainstay 
of the fur trade, which, expanding rapidly into the remotest corners 
of the Dominion, led to the discovery of fertile lands and mineral 
wealth, with subsequent colonization and development. We may 
safely say that large tracts of the Dominion would either be little 
known to-day, or entirely unknown, if the country had not been 
inhabited at the time of its discovery. 
Many tribes acquiesced quietly in the invasion of tlieir territories, 
others, particularly the Iroquois and the natives of the plains, offered 
strong opposition. Whether they resisted or submitted, all alike paid 
the same heavy price for their contact with civilization, some even 
before they had actually encountered Europeans. The first plague 
that afflicted them was smallpox, which decimated them periodically 
from the early seventeenth century until the second half of the nine- 
teenth. Nearly all the early writers describe its ravages. “ None of 
us,'’ says Thompson in 1781, “ had the least idea of the desolation this 
dreadful disease had done, until we went up the bank to the camp 
and looked into the tents, in many of which they were all dead, and 
the stench was horrid; those tliat remained had pitched their tents 
about 200 yards from them and were too weak to move away entirely, 
which they soon intended to do; they were in such a state of despair 
and despondence that they could hardly converse with us, a few of 
them had gained strength to hunt which kept them alive. From what 
we could learn three-fifths had died of the disease. They informed us 
that as far as they kncnv all the Indians were in the same dreadful 
state as themselves.”^ 
A medical historian states that “ the path of smalli^ox, from the 
time it was introduced among the Montagnais in eastern Canada, 
until it reached the most westerly tribes both in Canada and the 
United States, may be followed only too easily. It left behind it a 
broad and a well-blazed trail. Appearing in 1635 among the IMontag- 
nais, who dwelt near Tadoussac on the lower St. Lawrence, it spread 
1 Thompson: Op. cit., ]i, 32l f. 
