NORTHERN INTERIOR OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

River,” which they reached in the course of the same day,
and which Mackenzie took to be the Columbia, though he
occasionally calls it Tacoutche-Desse, after his Eastern Déné
interpreter.’ This, as everybody knows, was nothing else
than the large stream which nowadays goes by the name
of Fraser River.

On the 19th of June his men saw, without being able to
entertain them, a small party of Carriers, who fled at their
approach, and by threatening signs with their arms (which,
besides the usual bows and arrows, consisted of spears and
large knives), deterred them from attempting anything like
friendly intercourse.

On the morrow he passed a house which seemed to him
so novel that he describes it minutely, along with “a large
machine . . . of a cylindrical form,’ which was none
other than a salmon basket. After meeting several other
lodges built on the same model, mostly on islands, he
cached in the ground ninety pounds of pemmican, and, on
June 21st, somewhere between what is now Quesnel and
Alexandria, he came upon the first party of Carriers with
whom he could hold intercourse. His account of his
experience with them is so graphic that, in spite of its
length and owing to the importance of the occurrence to
the historian and the ethnographer, we will reproduce it
almost in its entirety. It is but fair to fully notice the
risks the great explorer ran, and the wonderful tact with
which he came out of them without injury to himself or
his people.

“We perceived a small new canoe that had been drawn
up to the edge of the woods, and soon after another
appeared with one man in it, which came out of a small

1. The Carrier name is Litha-Khoh, which is no doubt responsible for the
word Tacoutche (‘che means mouth) the desinence of which (Ao) is the
Carrier equivalent of the Eastern Déné desse, river.

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