256 
heaver, once destroyed cannot be replaced; they were the fA'old coin 
of the country, with which the necessaries of life were purchased.”^ 
On the plains the advent of the fur trade and the introduction 
of horses produced a similar result. Firearms and horses converted 
the buffalo hunt into a royal sport that attracted tribes from far 
and near. “Last year,” wrote De Smet in 1848, “ 110,000 buffalo 
robes with skins of elk, gazelle, deer, bighorn, otter, beaver, etc., 
and 25,000 salted tongues, w'ere received in the warehouses of St. 
Louis.”- The tribes that jostled together on this amazing hunting- 
ground combined the buffalo chase with ceaseless wars, anri raided 
each other for firearms, horses, and scalps until the whole area from 
the Rockies to the Great Lakes became a perpetual battlefield. The 
Blackfoot confederacy ( Blackfoot proper, Blood, Piegan, and Sarcee), 
with its back to the Rockies, contested the field with the Assiniboine 
and Cree to the east and north, pushing its raids even to the gates 
of Fort Garry. The same confederacy fought with the Shoshone and 
other tribes of the United States, and repelled in its rear attacks 
from the Kootenay and Salish Indians who crossed the mountains 
to shaie the buffalo hunt. War and confusion reigned everywhere 
while the buffalo diminished apace. About 1879 the herds at last 
failed to appear, and the Indians, dying of starvation, had to accept 
unreservedly the conditions laid down by the white man. 
Contact with Europeans thus revolutionized the economic con- 
ditions in every part of the Dominion, although the changes did not 
always take place as siuldenly and completely as on the prairies.* In 
British Columbia the canneries that sprang up at the mouths of the 
Columbia, Fraser, and Skeena rivers depleted the salmon on which 
the Indians had depended for their daily food. The musk-ox disap- 
peared from the barren lands, and both there and in the Labrador 
peninsula the herds of caribou dwindled in numbers or changed their 
migration routes. Throughout the whole country, indeed, there was 
a serious diminution in the food resources of the tribes that depended 
on fishing and hunting, all the tribes, that is, except the Irociuois 
and some of their Algonkian neighbours who cultivated maize. No 
longer was each tribe a self-contained and self-supporting unit, but 
from the Arctic to the prairies and from the Atlantic to the Pacific 
all alike found themselves inextricably enmeshed in the economic 
1 Ttinnii>son : Op. rif., p, 29.5 f. 
2 De Smet: 0|t. cit., vol. ii, p. 63.5. 
