226 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

So pleased, indeed, were they that they loaded the Strangers with pre-
sents for themselves and their countrymen at home, in the hope that they
would not only repeat their visit, but that many of their co-tribesmen would
thereby be induced to imitate them in coming to trade at headquarters. But
the poor innocent creatures, who had already been despoiled of all their furs
by the greed of Keelshies and his gang, had to pay dearly for this well-meant
generosity. On their way back, they were treacherously conveyed to an island,
whence their goods were ferried across to the mainland by their persecutors
who, after they had appropriated even those parts of their clothing which they
thought worthy of their notice, went off in their canoes, leaving them to perish
on the island. In 1772 Hearne saw himself the bones of those poor people.

From this inglorious occurrence the reader will no doubt gather that the
auri sacra fames has not all its victims in the land of the Latins or their
descendants.

Nor were the native middlemen on the Pacific coast much more generous
in their dealings with the Nahanais and other Déné tribes. Not only did they
cheat them shamelessly, but when commercial competition arose in the per-
sons of the Hudson’s Bay Company traders from the east, they mercilessly
destroyed their forts, thereby forcing the white intruders to retire}.

For a like reason no trading post could be established within the Skeena
basin, though one had for some time stood on the sea coast, not far from
the mouth of the river itself. Certain clans of maritime Tsimpsians went even
so far as to claim and enforce the exclusive tight of trading annually with
the Babines and the Sékanais, ascending the stream and one of its tributaries
as far as Bear or Connolly Lake. Every summer, at the foot of the Rocher
Déboulé Mountain? at the confluence of the Bulkley with the Skeena, regular |
fairs attended by immense crowds of Indians of Tsimpsian and Déné extrac-
tion enlivened the forest, in the course of which the maritime aborigine
offered to the inlander the resources of his own habitat and personal industry,
fish-oil, sea-weeds, copper goods, &c., side by side with the products of a
Superior Civilization, iron tools, beads, silver bracelets, and the like.

Native Currency.

In spite of the fact that much of the trading consisted in a mere exchange
of goods for others of no fixed value, there was, west of the Rocky Mountains,
some sort of currency in the shape of the hiaqua, or Dentalium Indianorum,

* Near the mouth of the Stickine, both western Nahanais and Tlinget are popularly known
as Stickine Indians. Hence, reading that the Stickines were acting as middlemen between the
white skippers and the natives of the interior, Latham thought that the Nahanais were thereby
meant, and this erroneous idea prompted him to write of them that “in the winter they range
the country in the interior for the purpose of bartering or plundering furs from the inland
tribes, acting as middlemen between them and the Russian traders” (“The Native Races of the
Russian Empire”, pp. 295—296). Most writers on the subject have since copied Latham’s mistake.

* See illustration “Rocher Déboulé” in Chapter I.