FIRST FOUNDATIONS

supply of implements of European manufacture was merely
the tribes of Tsimpsian parentage stationed along the
Skeena, who obtained them from their congeners on the
coast. The Sekanais of that early period probably did not
even know of Babine Lake, and the only inaccuracy in
their report is that relative to the proximity of Bear Lake
to the Finlay, which, as the present writer has personally
ascertained, is one hundred and eighty miles instead of
“half the length of the Rocky Mountain Portage.”

This item of information seems to have preyed on
Fraser’s mind, and two days later he adds, after further
inquiry from new arrivals, the unwelcome circumstance
that, though that river seems to have nothing in common
with the Columbia (he means the Fraser), it is through
it that they get most of their goods, among which he
mentions guns and ammunition. One of the reasons
which prompted his superiors to send him west was to
forestall the Americans, of whom they seem to have
vaguely heard in the east. It must, therefore, not have
been without a pang that he had to chronicle the fact
that, according to his informants, “white people came
there in the course of the summer; but, as they came on
discovery, they had little goods. I have seen a pistol,”
continues Fraser, “brass-mounted, with powder and ball,
which they say they had from them.”

This was dismal intelligence indeed for a fur-trader who
was just on the point of setting out to establish new posts
where he thought he had not been preceded. Had he
been better acquainted with the ways of the Déné nation,
he would have known that its members call whites any-
body who conforms to the whites. Those who traded
occasionally at Bear Lake were only Tsimpsians from
the coast. Nay, the Skeena valley, precisely on account
of the monopoly claimed by the Tsimpsian adventurers,

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