16 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

- extend from these sheets of water to the land of the Eskimos in the north,
and in the east as far as Hudson Bay’”!. That this is no slip of the pen is
made clear by the fact that Hearne expressly states that the country of the
“Northern Indians” is bounded “by Hudson’s Bay in the east®.” Richardson
similarly writes: “Other members of the Tinne nation inhabit the country at
the mouth of the Missinipi [Churchill River], and carry their furs to Fort
Churchill, where they meet the Eskimos that come from the north’?.

Having thus, to the best of our ability, cleared the ground from any
possible objection to our general statement concerning the habitat of that
great aboriginal family in the north, we may say that its ancestral domains
extend: — in the far east, from Hudson Bay, their southern boundaries being
the height of land between the Churchill and the Nelson Rivers, following
the former in a southwestern direction until Cold Lake is taken in and passed
by. Then, along the ridge dividing the basin of the Athabaska from that of
ithe North Saskatchewan, where the line crosses the Rockies slightly north of
Téte Jaune Cache. Thence it runs due south to a point between the head of
the North Thompson and Quesnel Lake, whence it reaches the Fraser half-
way between Alexandria and Soda Creek, on that stream, which then forms
the eastern boundary of the stock as far as latitude N. 51° 30°. The Lillooet
mountains in the south and the Coast range in the west then form its natural
frontiers until the Territory of Alaska is in sight.

All the immense region to the north of that line, including the whole
of Alaska, with the exception of a narrow strip of land on the sea coast
occupied, first, by the Kwakwiutl and the Bilqula, then by the Tsimpsians,
the Tlinget, and finally the Eskimos, until we revert to our original starting
point at the mouth of Egg River, on Hudson Bay, is peopled in a way by
Déné tribes. The British Isles, France, Spain and Portugal, Italy, Switzerland,
Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Austria could easily be accommodated
within that area, and still leave room for some of the southeastern Euro-
pean states.

And no wonder, since, by 120° of longitude west of Greenwich, the
Dénés roam over a territory equal to some nineteen degrees of latitude, while,
in its greatest breadth, the extent of the same is not less than sixty degrees
of longitude, the whole without a break or the intrusion of any alien race.
And yet this represents the habitat of only the northern half of the family.
That of its southern members being mostly made up of disconnected parts
of the United States, now much reduced in extent and converted into Go-
vernment reservations, it is more logical to leave it to a subsequent chapter
to detail its boundaries.

1 P, 9. Montreal, 1899.
? “A Journey from Prince of Wales Fort”, p. 327.
3 “Arctic Searching Expedition”, vol. Il, p. 4.