134 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

assisted in the consumption of eighteen Indians during periods of starvation,
and he was said to prefer human flesh to any other'.

This is unfortunately but too often the case: the aborigine who becomes
a cannibal out of sheer necessity acquires an unwholesome taste for his new
food. Hence, once known as such, his life is generally unsafe, even among
his countrymen, who value their own lives above that of a man-eater. A sly
bullet or an arrow from behind, if not during the dark hours of sleep, usually
prevents him from further gratifying his unholy appetite.

Such unfortunate cases seem to have been less common west of the
Rocky Mountains, probably because the staple food, dried salmon, being there
of a less precarious character, occasions for the manifestations of the same
were correspondingly scarcer. Hooper even relates that a Beaver Indian
happening to visit Fort Dunvegan on Peace River in the spring of 1850, denied
himself and others the ordinary sign of salutation and amity because he con-
fessed having eaten man’s flesh. He even asserted that the thought of his
horrible deed would soon kill him. As a matter of fact his death took place
shortly after. Hooper avers that neither the Slaves, nor the Dog-Ribs were so
scrupulous. Nor are, according to Th. Simpson, those Mountain Indians to
whom a somewhat lengthy reference has been made in the course of our
second chapter. If his Dog-Rib informants were not unduly crediting others
with their own foible, that tribe was originally composed of almost regular
cannibals who, immediately on any scarcity of food arising, would cast lots
for victims. So claimed an old man who, while yet a stripling, fled from the
tribe and joined himself to the Dog-Ribs in consequence of his finding his
mother, on his return from a successful day’s hunting, busy roasting the body
of her own child, his youngest brother?.

Treatment of the Weak.

A point in connection wherewith the conscience of no tribe was ever
weighed down with any scruple is the treatment meted out to the weak, the
old and the infirm. The orphan, the widow and the aged form categories of
beings who, among the primitive Dénés, were regarded as possessing hardly
any of those rights which are now considered as inherent to humanity. The
orphan became not only the factotum, but the regular slave of his new
masters, that is, such of even his own relations as may have adopted him.
Ill-treated, ill-fed, half-clad and ever urged to greater exertion, though he may
have been working himself to death, such was invariably his lot. His very
name is to this day an offensive epithet.

As to the widow, we will see in its proper place that her fate was even worse.

* «Ten Months”, p. 405.
* “Narrative of the Discoveries’, p. 188, footnote.