68 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 30, 1928

But three pages farther, McLean shows himself scarcely more
reliable from an ethnological standpoint. Commenting on the
rapid decrease of the Indians, he writes: ‘I myself have seen
many villages and encampments without an inhabitant.’? So
have I; but, being familiar with the language of the survivors,
I could learn by merely listening to their disinterested talk, and
do know, that our fur trader’s conclusions do not flow from his
premises.

As I have stated in other papers, notably in my Notes on the

Western Dénés,®° the Carriers of old used to shift quite often their
winter quarters. I wrote in the latter work :2!
As nobody, however wealthy, sleeps in more than one blanket, a large fire
is kept night and day, and so the amount of dry wood kept available in one
place is soon exhausted. Since they are possessed of carrying conveniences
unknown in olden times, this necessity of shifting one’s abode from place
to place is not as much felt. But formerly, with their limited facilities for
felling trees and bringing the wood home, they had to change every year
their winter quarters.

So that Mr. McLean gives as a token of decrease in the native
population what is in reality nothing but a proof of its original
nomadic condition. i

As to that author’s qualifications as an ethnographer, let it
suffice to remark that, according to him,
the Loucheux have no affinity with the Chippewayan tribes, nor with their
neighbours the Esquimaux.”

Still more out of place would be a mention of the linguistic
accomplishments of one under whose pen such a simple word as
Mutih-yaz (or let us say with a few Indians of his time Meutih-yaz),
little chief, is transformed into eewidi-yazee.*

An earlier fur trader, Ross Cox, gravely assures us on the
authority of still another that “the Chilcotins speak the Carrier
language.” One will realize the amount of truth there is in this

°° Ap. Trans. Can. Inst., 184; Toronto, 1892-93.

1 Tbid., 184.

22 Notes, 2: 243.

* Thid., 1: 259. Vaz is the Carrier diminutive, which McLean probably mixes
up with the aze of the Eastern Déné.

*4 Adventures on the Columbia River, 2: 373; London, 1831.