MENTAL AND MORAL CHARACTERISTICS. 119

and generally all the mountain or inter mediate Dénés, remained as chaste
in their private lives as the members of any civilized community, if not more
so. Others, and I regret to say perhaps the majority, had but little regard
for chastity, though they never quite stooped to the licentiousnes of the
allophylic North Pacific races.

Hearne is our best authority in this respect, because his very lack of
influence over those with whom he was in contact permitted him to see them
live and act without that degree of restraint which usually accompanies the
observation of foreign eyes. The revolting cases of abduction, rape and even
incest to which he was an eye-witness do not certainly tend to confirm the
popular notion of Arcadian innocence which is supposed to be the apanage
of all primitive peoples. Far from me the wish to unnecessarily blacken the
character of the aboriginal Dénés. Yet, to let the ethnologist have an inside
into their morals before the introduction of the beneficent influence of the
Gospel among them, I must have recourse to a quotation from Hearne. He
relates his falling in with a party of strange Dénés, who were so poor that
they did not posses one gun in their whole band, and writes:

“The villains belonging to my crew were so far from administering to
their relief that they robbed them of almost every useful article in their pos-
session; and to complete their cruelty, the men joined themselves in parties
of six, eight, or ten in a gang, and dragged several of their young women to
a little distance from their tents, where they not only ravished them, and that in
so barbarous a manner, as to endanger the lives of one or two of them’?

As to incest, while the same author declares that it was quite common
among the Crees, he admits that only the “Athapuscow and Neheaway” were
guilty of it, while all the other Dénés held that crime in abhorrence. My own
experience goes to confirm this last observation. As evidence, however, of the
really low standard of morality obtaining among the primitive Dénés, we must
not fail to mention that in the north the momentary exchange of wives was
regarded, not as a breach of propriety, but on the contrary as an unsurpassed
token of friendship and the nec plus ultra of hospitality.

It is not a little strange after this to see Hearne warm in his praise of
the Déné women, whom he declares to be “the mildest and most virtuous
females” he ever saw in any part of North America®. He adds that “‘it is very
uncommon to hear of their ever [having] been guilty of incontinency, not
even those who are confined to the sixth or even the eighth part of a man’’®.

As much could not unfortunately have been said of the Carrier women,
whose lewdness was unsurpassed, according to John McLean‘. Harmon also

' Op. cit., p. 285.

> Ibid., p. 126.

® Ibid., p. 128.

* “Notes of a Twenty-Five Years’ Service in the Hudson’s Bay Territory”, vol. I, p. 264.