DISTRIBUTION AND POPULATION OF THE NORTHERN DENES. 37

dwindled to perhaps 450 souls, now roams along the Finlay, or upper Peace,
and the Parsnip Rivers. They also hunt through the region around McLeod’s
Lake as far west as Carp Lake inclusive, where they meet the Carriers, and
from the Rocky Mountains to the forks of Tatla Lake in the southwest;
thence north to Bear Lake and about 57° 30’, taking in all the mountainous
territory intervening between that sheet of water and the Finlay.

Forts Grahame, on the latter, and McLeod, on the lake of the same
name, are their chief trading resorts, since Fort Connolly, on Bear Lake, has
been abandoned. They are by necessity as much as by natural instinct in-
veterate nomads, and I know of no people so unsophisticated or more honest
among the various races of American aborigines I have ever met.

The Western Dénés.

The last group of northern or Canadian Dénés is composed of the
Babines, the Carriers and the Chilcotins. All of them are remarkable for their
non-Déné social organization and their semi-sedentary habits — and in this
respect the western Nahanais should also be included in this branch of the
family. Their dialects are also considerably richer than those of their eastern
congeners},

29th. The Babines (Teni), more generally known to the aborigines by
their tribal name Nato-’tinne?, are divided into lake Babines and river Babines
or Akwilgét®. The former dwell on the long sheet of water named after
them, and north thereof, until they meet the Sékanais in the northeast and
the Kitkson — a Tsimpsian tribe — in the north. The river Babines claim the
whole basin of the Bulkley to its sources, and the western halves of Lakes
French, Cambie and Dawson, in the south. They now muster only 530 souls;
but as late as 1812 the lake Babines alone boasted a population of no less
than 2.0004.

30th. The Carriers (Tene), whose meaningless cognomen 7akhet has
served as a theme for the display of the phonetic and graphic abilities of
ethnographers and others®, consider themselves an aggregate of seven sub-
divisions, namely: the 7’faz-’tenne, Lake Tremblay and upper end of L. Stuart;
Na kraztli-’ tenne, \ower half of the same body of water; Natlo-’tenne, Fraser

‘ This remark does not apply to the dialect of the Nahanais, even of Thalthan, which is
essentially an eastern idiom.

? Which however, applies only to the lake Babines.

’ A Tsimpsian name meaning “well-dressed”.

* «History of the N. I. of B. C.”, p. 92 (third edition).

°> The H. B. Co. map calls Takall the aborigines occupying the lake region of British
Columbia, and quite curiously shifts the Carriers to the littoral opposite Vancouver Island!
These Indians are Ta-cullies to Harmon, Takuli to Richardson, Tahkali and Tahcully to Ander-
son, Takellies to Hazlitt, Takulli to Dall, Teheili to Dawson, Talkcolis to Petitot, and Takully
or Tacully to others. They are the Porteurs of the French Canadians.