276 
also in their ciistoins and beliefs, they held an intermediate place 
between the peoples that flanked them on either side: they had the 
wooden cratlle-board, the double-headed drum, and, in the western 
baiuls at least, the annual festival to the dead and the totemic clan 
system of the Ojibwa, but they lacked, like the Montag;nais, the rice 
and maple-syrup industries and the secret medicine-society of the 
western tribe. A few bands along the Ottawa, through their 
proximity to the Hurons, learned to grow a little maize, and a few 
squaslies and beans; but their methods were so primitive, and their 
dread of Iroquois raids so constant, that agriculture added but little 
to their food suppl}^ In the seventeenth century the froquois drove 
them to the north and east away from the lower Ottawa and St. 
Lawrence rivers, but when the power of the Iroquois declined they 
gradually drifted back to their old tei’ritories. Few in numbers, and 
scattered in small bands over a large, densely wooded area where 
the best hunting and trapping districts lay in tlie hills away from 
the main routes of travel and settlement, they exercised hardly any 
influence and received very little attention throughout historical 
times. Many of their women married white trappers, lumbermen, 
and pioneer farmers, and their descendants have merged imper- 
ceptibly into the civilized communities that now occupy their terri- 
tory. The remainder, numbering a little over 2,000 (the majority, 
perha]is, of mixed blood), are restricted to a few reserves in eastern 
Ontario and western Quebec. There, some raise a little gai'den pro- 
duce, and serve as licensed guides to the sportsmen who visit their 
districts to fish aiul hunt. Others, notably the Tete-de-Boule band 
on the up])er waters of the St. Maurice river, still support them- 
selves in their old nomadic fashion by hunting and trapping, but pur- 
chase with their furs, at the trading-posts, most of the necessities of 
life except food. 
It is difficult to estimate the numbers of the Algonkin in the 
early sixteenth century when Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence, for 
before the French missionaries and fur traders had visited all their 
bands, more than a century later, the tribe had suffered heavy losses 
from introduced diseases, and some of its bands had been scattered 
by the Iroquois. A reasonable estimate of the pre-European popula- 
tion would place it between 3,000 and 4,000. 
