ECONOMIC CONDITIONS. 133

bear and beaver, “half a moose skin being the allowance for six men for one
day'.” During the following summer one of the officers with two white
employees were again confronted by famine. ‘Having eaten up everything to
the very pack or bale cords made of green hide, leather and even their
mocassins, they began in the middle of December to singe and eat the
remaining furs#”’ The gentleman, after an absence of some time, having
unexpectedly returned with a raven he had chanced to kill for his men, was
horrified to find one of them missing and, on further examination, his liver
boiling in the kettle of his companion!

Cannibalism.

After reading the foregoing who will be surprised to be told that our
northern Dénés were but lately cannibals? Nothing else could be expected of
untutored savages under the circumstances. Nay, I am myself familiar with a
certain spot along the upper Fraser where, in 1862, of three shipwrecked
white men one killed and ate the weaker member of the band in company
with the other survivor, only to be afterwards similary trested by the remaining
cannibal, who later on did not the less fall a victim to hunger?.

Let me hasten to remark in palliation of the crime, if palliation be
possible, that, as a rule, only the direst straits and the irresistible desire to
prolong their lives at the expense of others will lead our Indians to such
extremities. However, the Slaves, the Dog-Ribs and the Hares have a specially
bad reputation in this respect. John McLean relates the case of a member
of the first tribe who, having first destroyed his wife, packed up her remains
as so much provision for his journey, helping himself regularly to part of
them as he went along. The supply proving insufficient, one of the children
was next sacrificed, and when the cannibal was finally left by the party he
was accompanying, only one child remained, a boy of seven or eight years,
whom he was afterwards found devouring at a moment when assistance was
being brought him‘.

Lieut. Hooper mentions another Indian, apparently of the same tribe,
who had eaten up eleven or thirteen persons, among whon were his own
parents, one wife and the children of two*. Long after, Fr. Petitot knew himself
another who had lived on the flesh of eleven individuals®. Another still, whose
trading post was Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie, was reported to have

+ Tbid., p. 329.

* Ibid., p. 330.

* Cf. “History of the Northern Interior of B. C.”, p. 301 of Zrd. ed.
4 “Notes of a Twenty-Five Years’ Service”, vol. Il, p. 248.

> Op. cit., p. 303.

* Missions des O. M. I.