NORTHERN INTERIOR OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

chief, there were Joseph Landry, Charles Ducette, Baptiste
Bisson, Francois Courtois, Jacques Beauchamp, and Fran-
cois Beaulieu. These were accompanied by two Indians,
who were to act as hunters and interpreters.

Ascending the Parsnip River, the explorer met with
several elk and herds of buffalo, two noble animals which
have since disappeared forever from those quarters.1 Then
beaver succeeds to the larger game, and Mackenzie declares
that in no part of the world did he see so much beaver
work.

On the oth of June he meets with the first party of
undoubted Sekanais, a body of natives who had heard of
white men, but had never seen any. They immediately took
to flight, and on his sending his men to parley with them,
the latter were received with the brandishing of spears, the

1. The buffalo was never indigenous to the Carrier country, and the
Stuart Lake Indians call it by a Cree word; but they knew of the elk,
which went as yezth, a Carrier term. The Sekanais have a native name of
their own for the buffalo, which circumstance confirms Mackenzie’s account as
to its originally being found west of the Rockies. He also mentions having
seen several enclosures to drive in and capture the larger game, contrivances of
which the present writer had given a description long before he had seen
Mackenzie’s Journal.

Mr. Malcolm McLeod is no doubt mistaken when, in the course of his note
xlvii to McDonald’s ‘‘ Peace River,” he claims that Sir Alexander Mackenzie
confounds the moose with the elk. These are two very distinct animals, the
first of which (¢0en2, in Carrier) is still to be found within the territory of our
Indians, while as to the latter (yezz#, in Carrier), the oldest aborigines claim
to have seen or heard of specimens of it long ago on the west side of the Rocky
Mountains. That this kind of deer did really exist at one time within reach
of their arrows is shown by the fact that when they first saw a horse they
called it a domestic elk (yezth-/hz, elk-dog), a name it has retained to this day.
Mackenzie was also evidently of that opinion, since on p. 205 of his Journal
he distinctly mentions the ‘‘ moose, elk and reindeer.” Harmon is no less
explicit in his ‘‘Concise Account of the Principal Animals which are Found
in the North-Western Part of North America.” After mentioning the buffalo
and the deer, he comes to the elk, which, he says, ‘‘is about the size of a
horse,” after which he describes separately the moose and the cariboo.

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