Читать книгу The History of the Northern Interior of British Columbia - Rev. A. G. Morice - Страница 9

New Caledonia, the country to which we wish to introduce the kind reader, was the nucleus out of which the present province of British Columbia was evolved. Authors disagree as to its boundaries. Thus, while Alexander Begg, to whom we owe a "History of the North-West," assigns to that district rather too modest dimensions when he states [1] that it extended only from 52° to 55° latitude north—thereby excluding part of the Chilcotin region—his namesake, Alexander Begg, the author of the latest "History of British Columbia," sins the other way by stretching its southern limits as far as Colville, in the present State of Washington. [2] Although it included at one time Kamloops and the adjoining territory, it might suffice for the ethnographer to call it simply the region peopled by the Western Déné Indians; but as this statement would not probably add much to the knowledge of most readers, we will describe it as that immense tract of land lying between the Coast Range and the Rocky Mountains, from 51°30´ to 57° of latitude north.

This region is mostly mountainous, especially in the north, where lines of snow-capped peaks intersect the whole country between the two main ranges. Endless forests, mostly of coniferous trees, and deep lakes, whose length generally exceeds considerably their breadth, cover such spaces as are not taken up by mountains. The only level or meadow lands of any extent within that district lie on either side of the Chilcotin River, where excellent bunch grass affords lasting pasturage to large herds of cattle and horses. [3]

The Douglas fir preponderates in the southern half of the country, but cannot stand the cold prevalent north of 54°40´, while the three different species of spruce which cover the northern part of the district hardly appear within its more temperate zone. The black pine is fairly common all over the country, and it is always indicative of a dry, sandy, and usually level ground, just as the poplar and the aspen betoken a moist and rather rich soil. Apart from the animals to which they give shelter, these woods afford but very meagre resources adapted to the wants of man. These are reduced to some varieties of berries, prominent among which is the service berry, the fruit of the Amelanchier alnifolia, which the aborigines compress into flat cakes and keep in their larder for use in any emergency.

Lakes and rivers are practically numberless. The most important among the former are: Lake Stuart, with its tributaries Lakes Rey, Soullier, Tremblé and Tatla; Lakes Babine and Augier; Lakes Morice, Dawson, and Emerald, which are the head-waters of the Nechaco; Lakes Loring and McAulay, whence issues the Bulkley River; Lakes French and Fraser, Peters and Vowell, whose waters flow into the Nechaco; Lakes Cambie, St. Mary's, McLeod, Bell, Turner, Nation, Quesnel and Chilco. The map will show the respective position of each.

The chief streams, apart from the Fraser, are the Nechaco, which, some sixty-five miles from its mouth, receives the Stuart, which drains the lake of the same name, together with Lakes Tatla and Tremblé, through the Middle and the Thaché Rivers; the Blackwater, a stream of minor importance, called West River by Sir Alex. Mackenzie, who ascended its valley on his way to the Pacific; the Quesnel, which heads in the lake of the same name, and the Chilcotin (more properly Tsilhkhoh), which takes its source in the lake called Chilco by the whites, and waters the finest part of the country. Bear Lake and Babine Lake, with their outlets, as well as the Bulkley, belong to the basin of the Skeena, which may be said to form the north-western boundary of the district; while the Parsnip and the Finlay, with their tributaries the Pack, Nation, Omineca, etc., flow into the Arctic Ocean, after having forced their way through the Rockies under the name of Peace River.

Most of these lakes and rivers contain excellent fish, two (sometimes three or more) kinds of trout, whitefish, land-locked salmon, ling and a multitude of carpoides and other inferior fish. A few sturgeon are occasionally caught in Lake Stuart and outlet, but that fish is unknown in the other basins. These sheets of water become also annually the rendezvous of myriads of ducks, geese, and other aquatic fowls, some of which, as the grebe, abound to such an extent that, for a fortnight or so, they are daily taken by the hundred in a single locality.

As to the fauna, its representatives are fairly numerous. The natives class them into venison and fur animals. Among the former are the moose and the cariboo, whose habitat is mostly on the mountains of the north, while the deer, plentiful in the south, does not seem to cross the limits of the Douglas fir. The various fur-bearing animals are the grizzly and the black bears, [4] the beaver, foxes of different color, though they are the offspring of the same parents; the marten and fisher, the otter, the mink, and other game of minor value.

These, from time immemorial, have been trapped or chased by the American representatives of the human species who call themselves Déné (men), and are divided into four main tribes. From north to south these are: the Sekanais, on the west slope of the Rocky Mountains and throughout the adjoining territory, almost as far as the 53rd degree of latitude; the Babines, who inhabit the shores of the lake called after them and the Bulkley valley, though many of them hunt also in the vicinity of Lakes French and Cambie; the Carriers, who have villages all the way from Stuart Lake and tributaries to Alexandria, on the Fraser; and, finally, the Chilcotins, who now mainly occupy the valley of the river to which they have given their name.

These tribes, though all belonging to the same ethnic group of aborigines, differ not a little as regards language, manners, and customs, and even physical appearance. Thus the Sekanais, for instance, are slender and bony, with fairly delicate features, very small eyes, and thin lips. The Carriers are stouter and more heavily built, with coarser traits, thicker lips, and quite large eyes. The Babines and Chilcotins are shorter than the Carriers, with broader shoulders and, the former at least, with even thicker lips and flattish faces. A fifth tribe, that of the Nahanais, roams through the territory immediately to the north of the Babines and the Sekanais, though on great occasions they usually repair to their villages at Thalhthan and in the vicinity of the Rockies. Several of their women are almost fair complexioned.

These four or five tribes form what we call the Western Dénés. They have all very black and straight hair, dark eyes, small hands and feet, and a complexion of a swarthy brown, though they are, as a rule, fairer than their heterogeneous neighbors, the Shushwaps. [5]

None of them originally had any village chiefs in our sense of the word. Indeed, the Sekanais, who are quite nomadic and without houses or villages, were formerly destitute of any kind of chiefs, but kept wandering in quest of game under the nominal leadership of the older heads of related families. As to the Babines, the Carriers, and the Chilcotins, they possessed what they called tœneza, hereditary "noblemen," who owned the hunting grounds and were the honorary heads of various clans or gentes. Succession to rank or property invariably followed the female line among the Babines and the Carriers, while among the Chilcotins and the Sekanais heredity was, as amongst us, always on the side of the father.

These tribes concurred in their religious ideas. They believed in a future world, and had some confused notions of a Supreme Being who governed the universe through the instrumentality of spirits, whose object was to protect or injure the individual. In the first case, they were what is now called totems or tutelary genii, and the second were the immediate cause of disease, wherewith they were sometimes confounded. The latter had, however, to yield to the incantations of a certain class of men known among us as shamans, [6] who, supposedly endowed with supernatural powers, were regarded almost as the masters of life and death.

In case of death the bodies were buried among the Chilcotins and the Shushwaps, burned among the Carriers, the Babines and the Western Nahanais, but left uncared for among the Sekanais and some Nahanais, who simply dropped thereon the brush shelter used as a temporary residence in the course of their incessant wanderings. Only in the cases of prominent or much beloved members of a band were the remains placed on a rough scaffolding out of the reach of wild beasts, or encased within the hollow or hollowed trunk of an upright tree.

Among the Carriers, the widow of a deceased warrior used to pick up from among the ashes of the funeral pyre the few charred bones which would escape the ravages of fire and carry them on her back in a leathern satchel—hence the name of the tribe—until the co-clansmen of the deceased had amassed a sufficient quantity of eatables and dressed skins to be publicly distributed among people of different clans, in the course of an ostentatious ceremony called "potlatch," a ceremony which prevailed among all but the Sekanais and the Eastern Nahanais tribes.

To the customs in vogue among their congeners, the Babines added that of letting their women wear, from the time of their puberty, a labret or plug of bone or hardwood, perhaps half an inch and more in diameter, between the teeth and the lower lip, which was thus distended out of all reasonable proportions. This caused the French Cana dians in the employ of the early fur-traders to call the whole tribe Babines, or "Lippy People."

Hunting and fishing have always been practically the only means of subsistence of the Western Dénés, and their prospects in life are generally of the most precarious character, inasmuch as hunger and dire famine are not unknown to them, especially when the run of salmon, which is the daily bread of all but the Sekanais, has been a failure.

These aborigines are, for the most part, possessed of strongly religious instincts. The Sekanais are the most honest and moral; the Carriers the proudest and most progressive; the Chilcotins are violent and none too scrupulous, while for loquacity and conservativeness the Babines have few superiors. [7]

With regard to their origin, the short space at our command in this little sketch evidently debars us from entering into anything like an adequate discussion of that intricate question. All we are prepared to state, after a careful survey of their languages, manners and customs, is that: 1st, They are undoubtedly of a mixed origin; 2nd, they have come from the north-north-west; 3rd, they had, in their early history, commerce, perhaps through intermarriage, with peoples of Jewish persuasion or origin.

As it is, none but the Babines have any reminiscence of a home different from that they now occupy. If we are to credit the Ackwilgates (or Western Babines) and their neighbors, the Kitksons, a Tsimpsian tribe which has the same tradition, the original seat of the whole Babine tribe would have been on a flat along the left bank of the Bulkley, a short distance above the mouth of the Bear River.

Kitksons and Babines then lived in close proximity and intermarried freely, when a squirrel [8] having, one day, crossed the river on top of the weir erected for the capture of salmon, the natives, frightened at the sight of such an ominous occurrence, and dreading the sad fate it portended, immediately scattered in all directions. The Kitksons went down to the Skeena, and the Babines took refuge in the shelter of the woods, whence they subsequently emerged to settle, some on the lake now called after them, others near the fall in the Bulkley, at the place known to-day as Moricetown.

There they lived and thrived on the large supply of salmon which the impediment in the stream kept at their doors, until the year 1820, or thereabouts, when a large piece of the rocky cliff overhanging the same river at the place now called Ackwilgate, some thirty miles below, having fallen across the stream, this barred it so completely that it formed a cataract of sufficient height to prevent the fish from getting up to the Moricetown fall. Threatened with starvation, the Western Babines went in a body, armed cap-à-pie, and forcibly took the new terminus from its owners of Tsimpsian parentage.

In course of time, the rock, which was to give a name to the new place—Fallen Rock—wore away to such an extent that salmon could return to their former haunts up the river; but the Babines or Ackwilgates have since retained possession of both fisheries.

So much for the Babines and their traditions. We now come to the real history of their congeners, and the authentic account of their doings immediately before, and ninety years after, the advent of that superior race which was to revolutionize their ideas, manners and customs, and whose not always too edifying deeds we shall also have to record.