62 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 30, 1928

a Rev. Daniel Haskel, admits explicitly that he had “written it
wholly over.’ Unmistakable traces of that literary interference
which, of course, detracts not a little from its worth in the eyes
of the anthropologist, will shortly be pointed out.

In the second place, the bibliophile Field, ‘‘who was no mean
authority, also believed that the Account of the Indians living west
of the Rocky Mountains, to which Mr. McLeod attaches such
importance, and which he gives in italics as recording ‘‘his maturer

- observation,”* was “written by another hand.’ In full justice
to Harmon, it is only right that one should not lose sight of this
double drawback.

Now as to the real degree of reliability of that little work as
revised by Haskel and reprinted at Toronto,® surely if its author
can make mistakes of a geographical nature concerning the
country of his Indians, in connection with points which he more
than once passed by in the course of his travels, he can err when
it is a matter of the sociology of a tribe with which he was not,
after all, living, and which he knew chiefly by hearsay.

But let the investigator open his Journal at p. 158. He will
read that the would-be north branch of the Peace river, in reality
the true and only course of that stream west of the Rockies,
“runs out of a very large lake called by the natives Musk-qua-Sa-
ky-e-gun, or Bear’s Lake.”’ That lake, he adds, is so large that
“the Indians never attempt to cross it in their canoes,”’ and those
who reside at the east end of it affirm that “it extends to the
West Ocean.’’?

What truth is there in this statement? None whatsoever.
Harmon is here simply the victim either of a misunderstanding
or of a native mystifier, just as he would have been if he had really
stated that the Sékanais practised cremation. The headwaters
of the Peace, called the Finlay west of the mountains, consist

$ P. XIII of the Toronto reprint.

‘Ubi supra, 567.

5 Pp. VIII.

6 By George N. Morang and Co., 1904.

7 A Journal of Voyages and Travels in the Interior of North America. As to its
English name, it is evidence of a gross confusion whereby a small lake lying in a quite
different region is taken for the headwaters of the Finlay.