56 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

degrees of latitude from the parent tribe’. His vocabulary of their dialect,
which Dr. Boas published some years ago*, betrays more affinities with the
idiom of the Chilcotins than with that of any other tribe. It makes it quite
clear that those Déné remnants had, in the far north, nearer kinsmen west
than east of the Rocky Mountains.

The total of the known Pacific Dénés does not to-day exceed 865°.

The Connecting Link between South and North.

The last mentioned survivors of the original Déné stragglers on, or near,
the Pacific lived by about 48° N. lat. Scarcely more than one degree further
north, within British Columbia, we find the last link, just disappeared but
well remembered, which connected the southern with the northern Dénés. As
there can be no reasonable doubt that this was a Chilcotin colony from the
north, and becatise that circumstance is a new confirmation of my theory
concerning the southward tendency of the family, the question of its origin
and ethnic personality is not without importance to the ethnologist.

The late Dr. G. M. Dawson was the first to give an account of that
latest of the Déné migrations. According to information he received from a
reliable party‘, it appears that ‘a long time before the white man first came
to the country” (1858), a band of Chilcotins having undertaken, in company
with their wives and some children, a war expedition against the Salish of
ihe Lower Thompson, were led by the absence of those they had expected
to surprise as far south as the mouth of the Nicola River. There they were
discovered, and soon after intercepted by a strong force of Thompson Indians.
Which perceiving, the intruding marauders took to flight and ascended the
Nicola valley till they reached the Similkameen, where they presented a bold
front to their pursuers, who, noticing that the wives of the strangers “were
larger and better looking than their own’, finally made peace and inter-
married with them.

As late as 1888 eight men with some women and children, descendants
of that band, still remained in the Nicola valley. They claimed to own the
country by right of first occupancy, declaring that the other Indians there
were late arrivals on their land. One of the eight men personally told

‘ [bid., ibid.

* Tenth Report on the N. W. Tribes of Canada. B. A. A. S.

* * Nothing will be more conducive towards a proper estimate of the great strides which
ethnological science has made within the last half century than a perusal of Latham’s apology
lor a classification of the Déné tribes, such as contained in his “Ethnology of the British Co-
lonies”, pp. 224—227, London, 1851. Then, again, instead of “full nineteen-twentieths of the
Athabaskan population being British as he says, almost two-thirds of it live under the Stars
and Stripes.

* Mr. Mackay, Indian Agent, a man quite conversant with Indian affairs.

* “Notes on the Shushwap People of B. C.”. Trans. Roy. Soc. Canada, p. 24, 1891.