NORTHERN INTERIOR OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Kitksons and Babines then lived in close proximity and
intermarried freely, when a squirrel’? having, one day,
crossed the river on top of the weir erected for the capture
of salmon, the natives, frightened at the sight of such an
ominous occurrence, and dreading the sad fate it portended,
immediately scattered in all directions. The Kitksons
went down to the Skeena, and the Babines took refuge
in the shelter of the woods, whence they subsequently
emerged to settle, some on the lake now called after them,
others near the fall in the Bulkley, at the place known
to-day as Moricetown.

There they lived and thrived on the large supply of
salmon which the impediment in the stream kept at their
doors, until the year 1820, or thereabouts, when a large
piece of the rocky cliff overhanging the same river at the
place now called Ackwilgate, some thirty miles below,
having fallen across the stream, this barred it so completely
that it formed a cataract of sufficient height to prevent the
fish from getting up to the Moricetown fall. Threatened
with starvation, the Western Babines went in a body,
armed cap-d-pie, and forcibly took the néw terminus from
its owners of Tsimpsian parentage.

In course of time, the rock, which was to give a name to
the new place—Fallen Rock—wore away to such an extent
that salmon could return to their former haunts up the
river ; but the Babines or Ackwilgates have since retained
possession of both fisheries.

So much for the Babines and their traditions. We now
come to the real history of their congeners, and the authen-
tic account of their doings immediately before, and ninety
years after, the advent of that superior race which was to
revolutionize their ideas, manners and customs, and whose
not always too edifying deeds we shall also have to record.

1, The Kitksons say a double-headed squirrel.
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