24 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

group of the Loucheux tribes. To accomplish a classification based on an
actual ethnological basis, we must have recourse io an eclectic process,
whereby all second-hand information shall be, as far as practicable, relegated
to the back-ground.

No less than five different authors furnish us with lists, partial or
supposedly complete, of the tribal divisions of that group, and hardly two
of them agree as to the names or the number of the same. Following the
chronological order, we find that Sir John Richardson gives us! no less
than fourteen tribes; Fred. Whymper enumerates only eight in his book® for
the same area, though he names ten on his map of the Yukon; W. H. Dall
in one of his works? locates nine within Alaska, while in his “Tribes of the
Extreme Northwest’! he counts no less than thirteen, one of which he further
subdivides into six®; E. Petitot mentions® thirteen on either side of the Rocky
Mountains, and Prof. Otis T. Mason, of the Smithsonian Institution, quotes?
a brief list of seven so-called tribes, to which we should add three others
whose habitat, though not determined any more precisely than by the caption
“Western Tinneh”, must evidently be ascribed to the Territory of Alaska’.

Prof. Mason’s nomenclature is merely a résumé of Dall’s. It must there-
fore be eliminated from our review of the northwestern tribes. On the other
hand, Richardson admits that he owes to a third party most of his information
on the same. But as his authorities, an old Hudson’s Bay Company trader
and J. Bell, the first white man who ever penetrated into Alaska from the east,
were presumably familiar with the tribes they enumerated, his data must
occasionally be useful to help us solve problems created, or left unanswered,
by others. As to Father Petitot, though he did cross the Rocky Mountains
into the Yukon, he never went so far as Alaska. Then Dall and Whymper
personally explored together the Yukon basin as far as the confluence of
the Porcupine River, whence they sent up a scouting party to reconnoitre

-

“Arctic Searching Expedition”, vol. I, p. 397 e¢ seq.
“Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska’, passim.
“Travels on the Yukon”, passim.
Contr. to N. A. Ethnol. vol. I.
pp. 32-383. The habitat of that tribe, the Nahanais, is not in Alaska.
Monographie des Déné-Dindjié, p. XX.
Smithsonian Report for 1885, p. 882.

® These are the tribes which I declared in 1889 (“The Western Dénés’, p. 110) to
“have no existence but on paper”. As an excuse for that mistake ] must say that those tribes
were given simply as “Western Tinneh”, and without a word of explanation as to their habitat.
I was then studying what / called the Western Dénés, and was already conversant with two
of their dialects. This knowledge made me sure, through the medium of Indians whom I could
not misunderstand, that there were no such tribes within hundreds of miles of my place of
residence west of the Rocky Mountains. Hence my remark. A single mention of Alaska by
the side of the names of those tribes would have prevented it.

i)

w

~

o

C)

a1