40 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

visited by the priest, at McLeod’s Lake, the very
first post established within British Columbia, and,
farther north, at Bear Lake, where stood the Fort
Connolly of the early traders, without counting Fort
Grahame, on the Finlay, which never had any church.

From a religious standpoint, there were, at the
time of Father Morice’s advent in the country, fourteen
posts visited in rotation by the missionary and
endowed with a small, and usually very poor, church,
except the central one, built on land belonging to the
Mission, and by the side of which had congregated a
good-sized village with regular streets as among the
whites. That church, a monument to Father
Blanchet’s memory, is still extant under a slightly
improved form. It was even then quite decent, and
large enough to receive a big congregation on the
occasion of some of the greatest feast days of the year,
especially as there were no pews in all the native
churches,

Ethnographically speaking, three tribes claimed
those fourteen places, together with a few minor
outposts. They were the Babines, on the lake of the
same name’® and the Bulkley River, whose population
then consisted of about 525 persons, 274 of whom
lived on the lake and in its basin; the Sékanais, whose
various bands, difficult to count because so nomadic,
may have formed an aggregate of 380, if not more,
counting those who frequented Fort Grahame but had
no church, and the Carriers, the southernmost part of
whom we have already visited, and who, all together,

16 So called because, from the time of puberty, their women wore
between their lower teeth and lip a labret, or wooden plug, which most
disgraciously exaggerated the size of the latter, giving them a “‘big lip,”
or babine, as said the French employees of the early traders.

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