The Great Déné Race.

CHAPTER I.
Name of the Dénés and their Habitat in the North.

Introductory.

To many of us America has long been a name to conjure with. The
glowing, if not too faithful, pictures of Chateaubriand’s pages, and the
thrilling adventures of Jas. Fenimore Cooper’s heroes have filled our young
imaginations with distant visions of lordly trees and boundless plains, under
the shade, or over the vast expanse, of which noble-visaged aborigines, with
plumed heads held erect and busts bedecked with fringes of dyed porcupine
quills and other native finery, promenaded grave and silent, or accomplished
their sacred rites on the top of mounds or in ceremonial lodges. To our
benighted minds the American Indians were then the unspoiled children of
nature, simple as the air they breathed and pure as the crystalline water they
drank. Even Catlin’s paintings or their printed reproductions, completed through
the medium of the senses what those writers had done for our inexperienced
intelligences.

Alas and alack! Why should we have to confess that much of that
Arcadian innocence, that aboriginal high-mindedness and innate dignity existed
nowhere else than in the fertile brains of the romancers?

Yet, the study of the native inthabitants of the western continent cannot
fail to prove attractive especially to such as have outgrown the first cravings
of youthful fancy. A huge island isolated, except at an insignificant point of its
northern extremity, thousands of miles from the rest of the world and un-
known for centuries to the almost totality of mankind, America is by all
means the best field for the investigations of the anthropologist and of the
philologist. It is evident from the multiplicity of the various races which
have crowded one upon another, especially on its northwestern coast, that
it became, in ages now enshrouded in the mist of incertitude, the dumping
ground, as it were, whereon the exuvie of ill-starred humanity were led to
take refuge, either as a result of unforeseen accidents, or at the bidding of
the migratory instinct.

Thus segregated from the influences of the older world, these stray

remnants of our own kin must of necessity be suggestive to the thoughtful
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