162 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

pints or three quarts’!. But when the same aborigines made their meals on
boiled fish, they very generally used the broth as a beverage, and to this
day they have remained quite partial to it.

Then, either as a common drink or in the guise of medicinal potions,
they had often recourse to decoctions of some plants or herbs. Almost any
one would suit them: the stronger tasted the better. On that account wild
mint (Mentha Canadensis) was, and is to-day, in great demand for that purpose.
Later on, probably as a result of intercourse with the whites, they took to
potions of Labrador tea (Ledum palustre). They now use it rather extensively
when short of the imported article.

As to spirituous liquors, the northern Dénés have been represented as
forming by their repulsion therefor a pleasant contrast with their neighbours
of Algonquin descent. The truth is that they share with all inferior races a
pronounced appetite for anything that acts strenuously on their system and a
regretiable lack of control over themselves when the first fumes of strong
drinks are felt. If early authors compare them so favourably with other
aboriginal races in this respect, it is simply because distance kept the curse
of intoxicants longer away from them than was the case with Indians nearer
to the dispensers of the baneful fluid.

Harmon initiates us to the very first drinking bout witnessed by the
western Dénés and the impression it made on them. In view of the respective
social position and unequal degree of enlightenment of the two races, his
simple narrative makes pathetic reading.

“Tuesday, January 1, 1811. — This being the first day of another year,
our people have passed it, according to the custom of the Canadians, in
drinking and fighting. Some of the principal Indians of this place desired us
to allow them to remain at the fort, that they might see our people drink.
As soon as they began to be a little intoxicated and to quarrel among
themselves, the Natives began to be apprehensive that something unpleasant
might befal (sic) them also. They, therefore, hid themselves under the beds
and elsewhere, saying that they thought the white people had run mad, for
they appeared not to know what they were about. They perceived that those
who were the most beastly in the early part of the day became the most
quiet in the latter part, in view of which they exclaimed ‘the senses of the
white people have returned to them again’, and they appeared not a little
surprised at the change; for, it was the first time that they had ever seen a
person intoxicated” ?.

The eastern Dénés had not been left so long uncontaminated by the
plague. So keen was, at the end of the eighteenth century and the two first
decades of the nineteenth, the competition between the representatives of

* “An Account of the Indians on the E, side of the R. M.”, p. 284.
* Journal, p. 162.