34 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

deed, that he goes to the length of writing that they “probably belong to the
Carrier tribe of the west’?!

In a different work he states that they “frequent the range of the Peaks’’?,
thereby referring undoubtedly to the “Peak Mountains” of the H. B. Co. map.
That range, as represented on the old document, has no existence. The country
west of the Rockies where it should be found I have myself explored. It is
occupied by various detached mountains or short ranges of secondary im-
portance running in an opposite direction to that of the so-called Peak Moun-
tains and the entire region belongs to the Sékanais.

Richardson ‘states that those Indians “are ill understood by the Dog-rib
interpreters” at Fort Norman®. This remark, taken side by side with the state-
ment by Thomas Simpson to the effect that his party caused a panic among
the Dog-Ribs he met, because the latter took them for “Mountain Indians”,
makes it doubly certain that we are not mistaken in our identification, inas-
much as, when he encountered the Dog-Ribs, the explorer was nearing the
valley of the “Mountaineers”, quite close to Fort Norman‘.

According to Petitot that tribe does not contain more than 300 or
400 souls. Franklin, who almost invariably underrates the native population,
estimates them at 40 hunters?.

24th. In spite of Richardson’s reiterated insinuation that the “Mountain
Indians” and the “Strong Bows” of the maps are one and the same tribe,
we have now, always on the same range of mountains, a large band of Dénés
who must be identified as the “Strong Bows” or “Thick-wood Indians” of the
early explorers. They are the natives whom Richardson calls Tsilla-ta-ut-’tinne,
“or Brushwood People’, and none other than Petitot’s Etchare-ottine, “people
against (a shelter)”, probably so called because their main seat is close to the
stump or abrupt end of the Rocky Mountains’ main trunk. To the western
Dénés they are 7sé-loh-ne, people at the end of the rocks, because, being
slightly to the east of that range and beyond a great gap in the same, they
appear to my Carriers to dwell in a vast plain which is the termination of
all mountains? That region is drained by the Liard after it has forced its
way through the Rockies.

* Mémoire, p. 246.

? Monographie, p. XX.

3 “Arct. S. Expedition”, vol. II, p. 7.

4 “Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America”, p. 95.

’ Op. cit., vol. III, p. 54.

6 “Arctic S. Expedition”, v. II, p. 6. Franklin, who calls them 7si/law-daw-hoot-dinneh,
wrongly makes them a distinct tribe, though he admits that “they are but little known” (Op.
cit., Ill, p. 57).

7 This they claim is the general rendez-vous of the feathered and large venison game,
a statement which tallies remarkably well with Dawson's report on the upper Liard River,
where he found “the moose particularly plentiful” (Report on an Exploration made in 1887 in
the Yukon District”, p. 25 B).