ECONOMIC CONDITIONS. 135

There now remain the old and the infirm. No respect was ever paid to
age as such. On they contraty, the mere mention of gray hair was enough
to silence any elderly man who may have had the presumption to proffer
advice to a younger generation. “Sit down, old man: your hair is gray’, is
the usual form assumed by the rebuke. It is equivalent to: you have lived;
your time is past. Even among the Hupas of northern California, a tribe of
Indians somewhat more humane because less savage, conditions in this
respect were not any more satisfactory, according to H. L. Knight, an attorney-
at-law who wrote in 1871 of his visit to their Reservation: ‘The oldest men,
or stout middle-aged fathers of families, were spoken to just as children
or slaves!.”

We have already seen that the Dénés age incomparably more slowly
than the whites. This in specially true of the men; but we should add that
when they do age, they generally become the very picture of wretchedness,
a heap of wrinkles without expression or meaning, especially in the case of
the women. The old Sarcee squaw I herewith introduce to my readers is but
a fair specimen of that class. The Indians realize themselves the ludicrous
appearance of such wrecks, and, as their mental faculties seem to decay at
least in the same proportion as their physique, the able-bodied members of
the tribes have some excuse for showing them but scant consideration.

Shall I, with some authors, extend that palliative even to the abandoning
of the same to certain death in times of penury? We read that, among the
Romans of old, when a guilty Vestal was left to die as a punishment for her
fall from virginity, lest the stain of actual murder should be incurred, a couch,
a lamp and a little food were left by her, though she was buried alive. When
in times of famine or simply in the course of their great hunting expeditions,
the northern Dénés were burdened with relatives broken with years and
infirmities, they left them some fire and water, with a little meat and an axe,
to which a pipeful of tobacco was sometimes generously added, and then
went their way never looking back at the victim of their inhumanity.

Instead of enlarging on this subject and quoting many instances when
even these last tokens of feeling were not bestowed on abandoned relatives,
I prefer to let Hearne give the last stroke to this part of the picture I am
endeavouring to sketch of the Déné sociology. “Old age”, he writes, is the
greatest calamity that can befal a Northern Indian; for when he is past labour,
he is neglected, and treated with great disrespect, even by his own children.
They not only serve him last at meals, but generally give him the coarsest
and worst of the victuals: and such of the skins as they do not chuse to
wear, are made up in the clumsiest manner into clothing for their aged
parents; who, as they had, in all probability, treated their fathers and mothers
with the same neglect, in their turns, submitted patiently to their lot, even

' Report of the Indian Commissioner, 1871, p. 158.