NORTHERN INTERIOR OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

River,” which they reached in the course of the same day, and which Mackenzie took to be the Columbia, though he occasionally calls it Tacoutche-Desse, after his Eastern Déné interpreter.’ This, as everybody knows, was nothing else than the large stream which nowadays goes by the name of Fraser River.

On the 19th of June his men saw, without being able to entertain them, a small party of Carriers, who fled at their approach, and by threatening signs with their arms (which, besides the usual bows and arrows, consisted of spears and large knives), deterred them from attempting anything like friendly intercourse.

On the morrow he passed a house which seemed to him so novel that he describes it minutely, along with “a large machine . . . of a cylindrical form,’ which was none other than a salmon basket. After meeting several other lodges built on the same model, mostly on islands, he cached in the ground ninety pounds of pemmican, and, on June 21st, somewhere between what is now Quesnel and Alexandria, he came upon the first party of Carriers with whom he could hold intercourse. His account of his experience with them is so graphic that, in spite of its length and owing to the importance of the occurrence to the historian and the ethnographer, we will reproduce it almost in its entirety. It is but fair to fully notice the risks the great explorer ran, and the wonderful tact with which he came out of them without injury to himself or his people.

“We perceived a small new canoe that had been drawn up to the edge of the woods, and soon after another appeared with one man in it, which came out of a small

1. The Carrier name is Litha-Khoh, which is no doubt responsible for the word Tacoutche (‘che means mouth) the desinence of which (Ao) is the Carrier equivalent of the Eastern Déné desse, river.

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