49 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

Moreover, if those bands remained willingly in their new homes, their
very weakness must evidently have made them the butt for relentless oppression
at the hands of the previous occupants of the soil among whom, as with all
primitive races, might is right. Now it is inconceivable that such natural
rovers as the new recruits were should have consented to live practically in
a state of vassalage and confined within such narrow limits, if they had
already the experience of a long sea voyage to point out to them an easy
way of escape.

Effects of the Exodus.

As a matter of fact, these small communities soon degenerated, losing
many of their family traits, and even, owing to their helplessness, allowing
their language to undergo very material alterations. As could well be ex-
pected, though the bulk of the emigrants owe to-day many of their customs
and most of their mythology to the foreign tribes with which they have so
long been in contact, they have remained remarkably Déné in their chief
physiological features, and, when the transmutability of some consonants is
borne in mind, their language has retained a wonderful purity, considering
the usual influence of environment and the natural growth of tongues, which
invariably follows different lines according to the different geographical and
economic status of the separated ethnic elements.

This statement, however, should not be construed as claiming for the
Navaho stock an absolute freedom from admixture of blood with heterogeneous
races, as it is well known that Utes and representatives of less prominent
tribes have occasionally intermarried with them. Nay, they even claim that
the members of one of their clans are descended from a Spanish woman,
who was taken prisoner in one of their marauding expeditions’. But on the
whole they still exhibit the Déné physique and some of the traits of the
Déné moral characteristics with a surprising fidelity.

On the other hand, the fragments of tribes on the Pacific, though much
nearer to the parent tree in the north, are immeasurably less Déné in lan-
guage or bodily features than the Navahoes.

As if to confirm this theory of the general march of the migratory
bodies, we will see further on that, at a comparatively late date, a portion
of the Chilcotins, who are in the north what the Apaches are in the south
— restless and ever ready to invade a neighbour’s country — did actually move
south, as their congeners had done in prehistoric times; but, being too few
and unable to stand their ground against vastly superior forces, their progress
was checked, and they were gradually absorbed by the Salish race among
which they had ventured.

The case of the Sarcees, recorded in the preceding chapter, is another
instance of this tendency to make for the south. Nay, the very Apaches, who

‘ “Navaho Legends”, by W. Matthews, p. 146.