100 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

CHAPTER VII.

Mental and Moral Characteristics.

It is especially while dealing with the mental or moral make up of a
people that the ethnographer feels a degree of satisfaction who has not to
depend, in forming an estimate on the object of his studies, on the discon-
nected accounts of travellers, who are generally more or less biassed by
the circumstances which accompanied their passage through the countries whose
inhabitants they strive to describe. Nothing short of a long sojourn in the
midst of that people and the perfect possession of its language can enable
one to understand its psychic characteristics. Language is the mirror of the
soul. Therefore you cannot obtain an authoritative knowledge of a race of
human beings without being conversant with their language.

We shall soon see that the same traits of the northern Dénés’ mental
conformation have been described in directly opposite terms by different
authors who were either prejudiced one way or another by personal reasons,
or unjudiciously applied the old axiom ab uno disce omnes. | am even
presumptuous enough to imagine that a thoroughly correct conception of the
character of the northern tribes will help considerably towards forming an
accurate idea of the southern group, different though it is in many ways.

Apparently, the two extremes of indomitable ferocity and pusillanimous
meekness are to be found within the Déné nation. Two names are by them-
selves sufficient to prove this. I need only mention the Apaches on the one
hand, and the Hare Indians on the other, to make even the general reader
realize the unbridgeable gulf that separates the southernmost from the northern-
most division of the family.

The terrible Apaches.

Of the former Miguel Venegas, the Spanish historian of California,
gave in 1758 a portrait which could not be improved upon at the present
day. ‘Within a circuit of three hundred leagues’, he wrote, “the Apaches
reside in their small rancherias erected in the valleys and in the breaches
of the mountains. They are cruel to those who have the misfortune to fall
into their hands; and amongst them are several apostates... They have
not naturally any great share of courage; but the little they can boast of is
extravagantly increased on any good success. In war they rather depend upon