NAME OF THE DENES AND THEIR HABITAT IN THE NORTH. 15

the chief physical characteristics of that race: almost globular heads, flat
noses, broad shoulders and rather short stature, in strong contrast to the oval
facies with an aquiline nose of the Alaskan Dénés, who, as to size, are cer-
tainly much above the average height.

Here is what Cook says of the people he met in the inlet called after
him: “These men in every respect resembled the people we had seen in
Prince William Sound, as to their persons and dress’”!. Now as to their
goods: “Referring to Cook’s River. About eight o’clock, we were visited by
several of the natives, in one large and several small canoes?, The latter
carried only one person each; and some had a paddle with a blade at each
end after the manner of the Esquimaux. In the large canoes were men,
women and children.... 1 could observe no difference between the persons,
dress, ornaments, and boats of these people and those of Prince William’s
Sound, except that the small canoes were rather of less size and carried only
one man’’,

Who has not already recognized here the umiaks and the kayaks of the
Eskimos with their well known double-bladed paddles? Let us now apply the
test of language, that unerring criterion of ethnological certitude in America.
Cook continues: “Their inclination led them especially to ask for large pieces
of iron; which metal, if I was not much mistaken, they called by the name
of gonne; though, like their neighbours in Prince William’s Sound, they seemed
to have many significations to one word. They evidently spoke the same
language, as the words keeta, naema, oonaka, and a few others of the most
common we heard in that sound were also frequently used by this new
tribe’ 4,

I think I can now safely leave it to the reader to draw his own con-
clusions >.

Real Boundaries.

On the other hand, Powell’s map gives the Déné stock no footing on
Hudson Bay, while the 1857 map of the fur traders grants it the littoral
between Egg River and a point slightly to the north of Port Nelson. Father
Legoff, a Catholic missionary who has passed over twenty years among the
Dénés of the far east, writes also in the Introduction to his Grammaire de
la Langue Montagnaise: “The Cariboo-Eaters people the environs of the large
Lakes Cariboo, Axe and Brochet, east of L. Athabaska, and the steppes which

" “A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean”, vol. II, p. 890. London, 1874. This volume was
by Capt. Jas. King.

* Dixon complements this information by stating that both kinds were “covered
with skins’.

* “A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean”, vol. II (by Cook himself), p. 392.

* Id., ibid.

* Of course, the population may have changed within the last century; but this is
hardly likely. See Appendix A, at the end of vol. I.