COOKING AND EATING. 163

rival companies that they stooped to the vilest means to increase their clientéle.
Asa result, the meeting of the native hunters with the traders was, as Franklin
remarks, “generally a scene of much riot and contusion, as the hunters
receive such quantities of spirits as keep them in a state of intoxication for
several days’ !.

Later on, when the infamous traffic was partially discontinued, the
attachment of the Chippewayans, for instance, to the poisonous beverage
“remained so strong that, every season, parties of the tribe traversed the
continent to Churchill on Hudson’s Bay, with no other purpose than to
obtain it’ 2.

Smoking and Snuffing.

When I first wrote® that smoking was originally unknown to the northern
Dénés, my remarks seemed to elicit incredulous comment in some quarters.
Many aboriginal tribes had, even in prehistoric times, some sort of substi-
tute for our tobacco. In fact, the calumet or peace pipe has become in the
popular mind inseparably connected with the make up of the American Indian.
Yet, as I wrote some twenty years ago, the very act of smoking was unknown
to ithe Sékanais and the Carriers prior to 1792 and 1793 respectively. When
I penned that statement, I was simply repeating the emphatic declarations of
my native informants, and had not as yet read Mackenzie’s account of the
eastern Dénés, Slaves and Dog-Ribs, whom he was the first white man to
visit. This was in the summer of 1789, and the explorer explicitly states that
“it was evident they did not know the use of tobacco”. -

When this was first profferred to the Carriers of Stuart Lake, as late as
1806, those Indians were still so ignorant of its nature that they tasted it as
one would a piece of food and, finding it too bitter, they threw it away.
Then to show its use the white men lighted their pipes, when, at the sight
of the smoke issuing from their mouths, the benighted Carriers wondered if
the strangers did not hail from the land of the ghosts‘.

Soon, however, they took to smoking, making to themselves pipes like
that of fig. 25, generally of serpentine or any other analogous material.
Owing to its exhilarating influence over the nerves, tobacco became a great
favourite with all the tribes. To-day men, women and children from fourteen
or fifteen smoke in the north. In fact, the Indians may go fasting for a
number of days at a time, but they must have their pipe.

When tobacco cannot be had, they use dried kinnikinik leaves, and
many women usually mix them with the imported article, even when there
is no dearth of the same. In the east the inner bark of a viburnum (V.
oxycoccos according to Petitot) serves a like purpose.

* “Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea”, vol. Il, p. 49.

* Th. Simpson’s “Narrative”, p. 73.

* “Notes on the Western Dénés” p. 36.

* Cf. my “History of the Northern Interior of British Columbia”, p. 62 of third edition.
11*