DISTRIBUTION AND POPULATION OF THE NORTHERN DENES. 29

Mackenzie and as far towards the coast of the Arctic Ocean as the Eskimos
will let them go; the Sa-tso-thu-go’tinne, people of Great Bear Lake, whose
name betrays the habitat, and lastly the Nne-la-go’tinne, people of the end
of the world, who are coterminous with the Eskimos. Petitot calls them
Batards Loucheux, a designation which seems Suggestive of mixed blood.

The Hare Indians do not number more than 600 souls. They are a
timorous and kindly disposed set of people, whose innate gentleness long
made them and their hunting grounds, bleak and desolate as they are, a fair
field for exploitation by their bolder neighbours in the west and the southeast.
Yet their medicine-men or shamans were formerly feared and famous for the
elfectivenes of their ministrations and the wonderiulness of their tricks. They
are the Ka-cho-'dtinne of Richardson, and owe their tribal name some say to
their natural timidity, others, apparently with more reason, to the large number
of arctic hares (Lepus timidus arcticus) found in their primeval forests. The
Hares, as a tribe, are Kancho, or “Big Arms” (!) to Latham?,

16th. Similar to the Hares as regards peaceful dispotitions are the Dog-
Ribs (Duné), the Plats-Cétés-de-Chien or Flancs-de-Chien of the French Cana-
dians, who translate by this rather unflattering epithet the name, #intcanre,
given them by their cogenereous neighbours, a nickname which Franklin spells
Thlingcha-dinneh. They form the only Déné tribe which A. Dobbs called by
its specific name as early as 1744. Of the Plascotez de Chiens the old author
very considerately wrote: “This Nation has a sweet, humane Aspect, but their
Country is not good. They have no beaver, but live by Fishing, and a kind
of Deer they call Cariboux (Rein-Deer). The Hares grow white in Winter’ ?,

According to a tradition current among them, their first ancestor was
a big dog: hence the tribal appellation. Petitot says of them that ils son
tous bégues, “they all stutter’. For some time I thought this might have
been a careless use of words on the part of the learned author, who | sup-
posed must have meant that they all disp. But, as he has consigned that
identical statement in two of his publications®, once very emphatically, we
have no choice but to take his words with their obvious import. Cases of
Babines who cannot pronounce the s sound and invariably transform it into
an English sh are frequent in the west.

Be this as it may, the habitat of the Dog-Ribs is a stretch of land be-
tween Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes, and to the east of the latter as far
as the basin of the Coppermine River, according to Petitot*, while Richardson

* “The Ethnology of the British Colonies”, p. 226.

* “An Account of the Countries Adjoining to Hudson’s Bay”, p. 19. London, 1744.

° [bid., ibid., and Memoire abrégé sur la Géog. de L’Athabaskaw-Mackenzie, p 246.
Richardson has the following remark on this subject: “A Dog-rib or Athabaskan appears, to
one unaccustomed to hear the language, to be stuttering” (“Arctic Searching Expedition”,
vol. Il, p. 28).

* Monographie, p. XX.