MQRICE] FUR TRADER IN’: ANTHROPOLOGY 63

on the contrary of a small and very narrow lake well denominated
Thutade, narrow water, by the natives.

Our trader further asserts that both “branches” of the western
Peace, as he calls quite erroneously two streams which have
nothing to do with one another, appear “to be of about the same
magnitude.”’® This is quite false, as any one can ascertain. His
north branch, namely the Finlay or the real Peace, carries at least
twice as much water as his south branch, the Parsnip river, a com-
paratively unimportant tributary. Mr. McLeod may refuse to
take as proof of this my own original map published in 1902 by
the Government of British Columbia; but he can repair to the
confluence of both streams and judge for himself, unless he prefers
to rely on McConnell’s map issued by the Geological Survey of
Canada.

This is so true that the Sékanais call the Finlay Tci-ict, or Big
Water.

Nor were Harmon’s data concerning even the region at his
very door much more correct. He claims that Fraser lake lies
‘nearly fifty miles due west from this’? Stuart lake,® while, by
the trail used in his time, the distance between the two sheets of
water was scarcely more than thirty, as a fellow trader, John
McLean, has it in his own book.!° Harmon likewise estimates at
twenty miles the distance between (old) Fort Fraser and Stella,"
two points which are hardly twelve miles apart.

Could one so much astray with regard to what was to him
rudimentary local geography be more accurate when it was a
question of ethnography? Scarcely. Hence we should not wonder
if we see him affirm, after his interpreter, of course, that the
language of the Fraser lake Indians

strongly resembles that spoken by the Sicannies, and [that] no doubt they
formerly constituted a part of the same tribe.”

8 Tbid., ibid.

9 Journal, p. 161.

10 Notes of a Twenty-Five Years’ Service in the Hudson’s Bay Territory, 1: 285.
London, 1849.

U Journal, 184.

2 Tbid., 161.