COMMERCE. 225

Aboriginal Middlemen.

All the aboriginal tribes near the source of supply of the foreign goods
soon came to act as middlemen between the skippers or traders and the
natives living at a distance. So did the Eskimos of Cook’s Inlet relatively to
the inland Dénés of Alaska, the Tlinget with regard to the Nahanais, the
Tsimpsians and the Kwakwiutl in connection with the Carriers, the Chilcotins
and, to a limited extent, the Sékanais. So did also the Hudson Bay tribes
act towards the Dénés ranging to the northwest of their own habitats.

The opportunity to make large profits was great. They improved it
without remorse. Thus the easternmost Dénés sold with a profit of a thou-
sand per cent. to their inland congeners, the Dog-Ribs and the Yellow-Knives,
hatchets for which they had themselves paid one beaver or lynx skin, or
again three common marten skins. Knives and other pieces of iron-work were
the occasion of similar extortion. For a small brass kettle of two pounds or
two pounds and a half weight, they exacted as much as sixty martens or the
value of twenty beaver skins; and if the vessels were in* good order, they
had the cheek to demand even more?. So that, finally, most of the furs
brought to the English trading posts on the bay were derived from other
interior tribes rather than from those who handed them to the white traders.

As this state of affairs was not to the advantage of the latter, since it
deprived them of the furs that might otherwise have been collected by their
immediate neighbours on their own hunting grounds, the English tried by
means of presents and pressing invitations to coax the northerners into visi-
ting their posts. But so interested were the middlemen in keeping them away
that they did their utmost to prevent them from even hearing of the invitation
tendered, intercepting and appropriating the presents sent them, and plun-
dering such of the strangers as were audacious enough to undertake the trip.

Were it only as a means of arriving at a still better understanding of
aboriginal ethics when untrammelied by the conventionalities of our civili-
zation, I shall mention after Hearne a case which shows how filthy lucre can
induce some Dénés to victimize their own congeners.

A certain Keelshies, belonging apparently to the tribe of the Cariboo-
Eaters, having come upon twelve of those benighted northerners that were
loaded with valuable furs, managed, in common with his followers, to pilfer
all their goods, which they took in payment of provisions they sold them at
exorbitant prices, after which they had the heart to force them to carry the
loads which they now claimed as theirs to the Fort on the bay. On his arrival
with that band, the leader Keelshies was highly praised for their coming
(which he represented as the result of his intervention) by the traders who
knew nothing of the previous transaction.

1 Cf, Hearne’s Journal, passim.