MENTAL AND MORAL CHARACTERISTICS. 107
other races he takes at a disadvantage, the butt of all the buffetings prompted
by his childish fury.

The Dénés’ Fondness for Exaggerations.

It is foreign to my purpose to enter into anything like elaborate details
in corroboration of my assertions concerning each and every one of the above
mentioned traits of the Déné character. A few extracts from the relations of
the first explorers who came into contact with them will, however, be welcome
as explaining still further my meaning.

And first as to their inability to state the mere unvarnished truth and
their childish exaggerations. To this feature of their mental make up we owe
the very first adequate account of their country and themselves. The Dénés
who traded on Hudson Bay in the first half of the eighteenth century never
tired of extolling the richness of a copper mine, which was said to exist in
their hunting grounds. A? Dobbs, in his “Account of the Countries adjoining
to Hudson’s Bay”, constantly refers to it, and the report on the condition of
the same part of the world! published five years later (1749) also mentions
it more than once. And no wonder, since, according to Hearne, the Indians
“represented this mine to be so rich and valuable, that if a factory were
built at the river, a ship might be ballasted with the oar [sic for ore], in-
stead of stone, and that with the same ease and dispatch as is done with
the stones at Churchill River. By their account the hills were entirely com-
posed of that metal, all in handy lumps, like a heap of pebbles”. This was
indeed encouraging.

“But”, continues the disappointed explorer, “their account differed so
much from the truth, that I and almost all my companions expended near
four hours in search of some of this metal, with such poor success that, among
us all, only one piece of any size could be found.” And so the much coveted
factory or trading post, the expectation of which was mostly responsible for
the native exaggerations, never materialized.

The next explorer of the Dénés’ country was A. Mackenzie. The abori-
gines he found in the far north did not by any means differ in this respect
from their eastern congeners. “The information which they gave respecting
that river,” he writes in the first volume of his “Voyages,” “had so much of
the fabulous, that 1 shall not detail it: it will be sufficient just to mention
their attempts to persuade us that it would require several winters to get to
the sea, and that old age would come upon us before the period of our

return: we were also to encounter monsters of such horrid shapes and de-
structive powers as could only exist in their wild imaginations’’®.

1 «Report from the Committee appointed to enquire into the State and Condition of the
Countries adjoining to Hudson’s Bay”, London, 1749.

2 «A Journey from Prince of Wales Fort”, p. 173.
’ “Voyages from Montreal”, vol. I, p. 232.