THE SOUTHERN DENES. 57

Dr. Dawson that the language of his ancestors — only a few words of which he
could remember — was the same as that of the Chilcotins!. In 1895 there were
only three survivors of the eight men referred to by Dr. Dawson.

As pari of the information recorded by that gentleman conflicted with
reports received by Dr. F. Boas, the latter then sent to investigate the case
Mr. Jas. Teit who has mastered the language of the natives of that region.
From some of the three old aborigines he gathered that, four generations
back, the tribe was divided into three camps or lodges, and that there were
not many people in each? Those people had, moreover, two fortified houses
in which they took refuge when attacked. The old man mentioned as
aggressors, who were successfully repulsed, parties of Okanagan, Thompson
and Shushwap Indians. Those skirmishes, he added, took place three or four
generations before his own time. Mr. Teit remarks that his informants were
“quite indignant” when he hinted at the possibility of their being of Chil-
cotin origin.

This leads Dr. Boas to the conclusion that, while the band was un-
doutedly Déné, the theory that they were the descendants of a Chilcotin war
party “seems very unlikely”. I beg to differ entirely from the learned ethno-
grapher’s opinion on this point. The short lists of words from the language
spoken by the original settlers of the valley collected by Dawson, Mackay
and Teit contain a few terms which are foreign to the Dénés, many which
are common to the Carriers and the Chilcotins, and several wich are distinct-
ively Chilcotin. Not one is proper to either the Carrier, the Babine or the
Sékanais dialects. Mu#f, for instance, is a word which means, not man as
stated, but animal, in no dialect but the Chilcotin; fet'-hutz, which Dawson
regards as synonymous with man, is evidently no other than tewyonz, which
has that signification (vir or masculinus, not homo) in Chilcotin exclusively,
and the term variously spelt sis-ya-né‘, si-si-aney and s@-sia‘ni is as certainly
the Chilcotin sésyan (pronounced séshyan), which means ram of the mountain
sheep only in that dialect.

The pious horror at the suggestion that they might have Chilcotin blood
in their veins manifested by Teit’s informants, who are admitted to have been
three-quarters Salish, is easily explained by the bad reputation the Chilcotins
enjoy among the natives of British Columbia, especially since five of them
were publicly hanged for their participation in the massacre of eighteen white
men. In fact, it is more natural under the circumstances than a ready acknow-
ledgement of such kinship.

As a recapitulation of the foregoing information, we wiil now present
the reader with a table of all

' [bid., p. 26.
* Tenth Rep. on the N. W. Tribes of Canada, p. 31.