132 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

woman... rendered absolutely frightful by famine and disease”, who dies
soon after of the effects of. provious starvation. On the next page of his book
he has the following entry: “October. Starving Indians continued to arrive
from every point of the compass, declaring that the animals had left the Barren
Lands where they had hitherto been accustomed to feed at this season; and
that the calamity was not confined to the Yellow Knives, but that the Chipe-
wyans also were as forlorn and destitute as themselves.” The third page tells
of the murder of the commander of a trading fort and of his interpreter, in
revenge for the refusal of the former to succour starving Indians who “reques-
ted a small proportion of his well-stocked store, to enable them to recruit
their strength for fresh efforts in the chase.”

Always in the same chapter he mentions that, in spite of the proies-
sional hunters in his employ, his “supplies again failed, distress was prevalent,
and the din and screeching of women and children plainly indicated the acute-
ness of their suffering’?. Then he records the arrival of four new Indians with
the usual remark that “they came for food”.

But this is nothing to the dismal events related but one page further.
Capt. Back writes: “To the westward... forty of the choicest hunters among
the Chipewyans had been destroyed by actual famine; many others had not
yet been heard of; and the scattered survivors, from the rigours of the climate
and the difficulty of procuring a single animal, had experienced the severest
hardships which even their hardy natures were capable of sustaining’.

And lest I should be accused of purposely choosing the gloomiest author,
I put Back’s volume aside and replace it by one wherein the optimistic note
is preponderant. In his valuable work on the Tuski of Asia and the natives
of Arctic America, Lieut. W. H. Hooper says that, even at Fort Good Hope
the Hudson’s Bay Company’s people “were without subsistence and the Indians
dying in crowds. The gentleman in charge of the station at that time heard
one night the blows of the axe in lodges near the Fort, by which the weaker
were killed to be devoured. The express-men...were met by a party of
starving Indians, who stole upon them at night, murdered and ate them and
their provisions, and, as report goes, were in their turn slaughtered and
devoured*.”

No wonder, then, if even people of our blood under such distressing
circumstances render themselves guilty of acts of which they blush, in spite
of the loud calls of the self-preservation instinct which prompts them. In
October 1851, there were at a certain post on the upper Yukon seven men
with two officers who were reduced to live on the skin of moose, reindeer,

1 “Narrative of the Arctict Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River’,
p. 193.

? [bid., p. 207.

3 Jbid., p. 209.

4 “Ten Months in the Tents of the Tuski’, p. 304.