122 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

CHAPTER VIII.

Economic Conditions.

General Condition of the Northern Dénés.

“Life among the Indians is a constant struggle with nature, wrestling
with hunger, cold and fatigue; the victory is ever uncertain, and always hard-
earned”!, Nothing could be truer than these words of W. H. Dall’s, and of
all the native tribes none are less sure of their daily subsistence than the
northern Dénés. It might be said that, hard and painfully laborious as is the
life of the Eskimo owing to the climatic conditions of his habitat, his alimen-
tary resources are less uncertain, because he has at his disposal the large
mammals and other denizens of the sea, in addition to the land game and
the sweet water fish.

As to the northern Déné, practically all his personal economic needs are
supplied by the animal kingdom such as established on land. The flesh of
the game he kills is his food, its hide his raiment, its fur the main object
of his trade, its dressed skin the material of his carrying implements, and of
the strings wherewith he weaves the trellis work of his snow-shoes and which,
singly or twisted together, form the snares on which he depends mostly for
his subsistence. Its bones and antlers, in their turn, furnish him with the
materia prima not only of his cutting tools, such as scrapers to clean the
hides or scrape off the sap of pines, which he relishes as an item of diet, and
awls to sew his clothing and the bark of his canoe, but also of his arrow
points, of his darts or harpoons which serve to procure new meat supplies in
connection with the bow, whose strings are neatly made of twisted tendon
shreds of the same animal. The inroads of our civilization on their economics
have somewhat modified his condition by making him share in the results
of our own industries, but he has remained what he was for ages immemorial,
namely a strictly carnivorous being, who lives almost entirely on the fruits of
his hunts, though some of the western tribes are as great fishermen as hunters.

As to tilling the soil, this was out of the question, first because the soil
was unfit for agriculture over practically the whole of his domains, but chiefly
on account of his own irresistable restlessness, which is one of the main causes
of his nomadic habits. So that, with the inclement climes under which the
threads of his wretched life unfold themselves, he has to put to as good

1 «Travels on the Yukon’, p. 200.