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the Indians, weakened every family and tribal tie, and made them, 
willing or unwilling, the slaves of the trading-posts where liquor was 
dispensed to them by the keg. Even the fur traders recognized its 
evils and gladly supported the government when it finally prohibited 
all sale to the Indians under penalty of a heavy fine. 
Disease and alcohol demoralized and destroyed the Indians just 
when they needed all their energy and courage to cope with the new 
conditions that suddenly came into existence around them. The old 
order changed completely with the coming of Europeans. Stone tools 
and weapons gave ]>lace to tools and weapons of iron; cooking ves- 
sels of clay, skin, bark, and wood to metal pots; the fire-stick to the 
flint and steel, and bows and arrows to firearms. Once a tribe had 
made these changes it could not revert to its former condition because 
it had lost most of its earlier skill in chipping knives and arrowheads 
of flint, in gi-inding out stone axes, and fashioning serviceable bows. 
Any withdrawal of the trading-posts upon which the Indians were 
now dependent would have caused endless hardships and widesi)read 
starvation. Firearms in particular could not fail to cause a complete 
revolution in a country so rich in game as Canada, for even the old 
muzzle-loading gun greatly simplified the food-quest. “ With an 
arrow they killed only one Wild Goose; but with the shot of a gun 
they kill five or six of them. With the arrow it was necessary to 
approach an animal closely; with the gun they kill the animal from 
a distance with a bullet or two.”^ 
This was only one result of the introduction of firearms, and 
perhaps not the greatest. The gun was superior for warfare also, 
and the tribes that first acquired the new weapon immediately 
employed it against their less fortunate neighbours. So tlie seven- 
teenth, eighteenth, and, on the plains, the first half of the nine- 
teenth, century were periods of constant strife and unrest. In east- 
ern Canada the Algonkians and Hurons, assisted by the French, 
assaulted their old enemies the Iroquois until the latter obtained fire- 
arms from the Dutch, vigorously assumed the offensive, and more 
than evened up the score. Micmac Indians crossing from Xova 
Scotia to Newfoundland completed the annihilation of the unfortun- 
ate Beothuk, and the Cree raided south and west over the Prairies, 
down the Mackenzie to its delta, and up the Peace river into the 
1 Denys : Op. cit., ji. 
