426 
depeiident bands; some, like Matonabbee’s and Keelshie's, wandered 
from the Copjiermine river to the Cdiurchill and from the coast to the 
Athapuscow (Cree) country at the soutlieast end of Great Slave 
lake; others wandered but little, like the isolated band on the Thelon 
river. The smallpox epidemic of 1781 must have wiped out some 
of these bands; and the establishment of trading posts in the Mac- 
kenzie l:>asin, and on Jleindeer lake, drew the survivors away from 
Ghurchill and anchored them to other districts. The Caiibou-eaters 
of Reindeer and Wollaston lakes, who are sometimes regarded as a 
separate tribe, are one of these newer subdivisions unknown to 
Hearne, Mackenzie, and Thompson, and, consequetitly, are not 
marked on the ma]i. 
Dogrih. It is barely possible that tlie Dogrib lived southeast 
of Great Slave lake ti.e. between that lake and the Dubawnt idver) in 
the sevamteenth century, for Kelsey travelled north of ('hurchill in 
1689 to look for “ northern Indians inhabiting to y" Northward of 
Ghurchill river and also ye dogside Nation ( Kelsey Papers, page 25). 
Hoth Jeremie and Dobbs state that Seal river originated in the 
country of the Dogrib, who made war on the Maskegons (Cree) and 
had a inine of pure copi^er in their teri’itory (Douglas, R., and 
Wallace, J. N.: “Twenty Years of York Factory, 1694-1714”; 
Jeremie’s Account of Hudson Strait and Bay, jmge 20, (dttawa, 1926; 
Dobbs, Ai’thur: “An Account of the (h>unt!'ies Adjoining to Hudson’s 
Bay, in the North-west Part of America,” page 19, London, 1744). 
Doubtless tlie statements of these last two authors are inaccurate, 
for the cop])er came fi'om the vicinity of the Coppermine river, 
the country of the Yellowknife or Copper Indians, and Seal river 
was certainly controller! by the Cliipewyan at the end of the seven- 
teenth century; yet the fact that the Dogrib should be known even 
by name to the early traders suggests that their home may have been 
nearer to Hudson bay at that time than it was three-riuarters of a 
century later, when the fugitive whom Hearne’s party encountered 
somewhere near the southeast shore of Great Slave lake was far 
distant from her home (Hearne: Op. cit., page 268). On the other 
hand, if the Chipewyan living north of Churchill river possessed a 
few Dogrib captives, or if some Dogrib families accompanied the 
Chipewyan who gathered iron fi'om Munck’s old wintering-place 
