CHAPTER XV.

THE INDIANS OF THE LABRADOR.

The Indians of the interior are probably a diminishing people whose numbers it is difficult to compute, for they live for the most part withdrawn behind their fastnesses of wilderness and stony desert. According to the most reliable estimates they may be counted as some four thousand in all. The large majority of these hunt and trap in the southern part of the peninsula, coming out with their furs to the waters of the St. Lawrence.

In the central country are the lodges of two tribes—the Montagnais to the south and the Nascaupees further north. They have parcelled out certain districts of the interior into hunting grounds, each of which is regarded as a hereditary belonging, passing from father to son. They call no man master, and they live a life of hardship and freedom such as was more common in the world of a hundred years ago.

On their journeys their camps are set beside the waters of countless unrecorded lakes; for men, women and children follow the nomadic life. The Labrador is, as my readers will before this have recognised, a bitter mother; but all that she is unwilling to give the Indian wrings from her. In August he shoots the young Canada geese, spruce-grouse and ptarmigan. The month, in his picturesque language (on which, as on the whole subject of the Indians, Mr. William Cabot, of Boston, is incomparably the best authority) is called _O-pó-o Píishum_, that is, the Moon of Flight.

By hunting and fishing the Indian obtains his food from the country over which he travels, and about August he pitches his shifting _tepees_ deep in the interior, where the chief event of the year, the autumn killing of the migrating caribou, takes place.

Both to the Montagnais of the more wooded south and the Nascaupees of the Barren Ground, the caribou forms the main support of life. From time immemorial the Indians have gathered to slay them at this season, while they cross the lakes on their mysterious journeyings, the beginning and the end of which no man really knows. Even the path of the migration changes from year to year, and in some seasons the tribes fail to meet with the deer at all. At these times starvation visits the tents and sits, a grim shape, beside the fires. Such a year was 1893, when many of the people died, only half their number surviving to the spring.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Nascaupees depend for their very existence upon the caribou. They rely on the meat for their winter provision; with the sinews they sew; the clothes which protect them against the Arctic cold are fashioned from the pelts, the hair worn inside against the wearer’s flesh; their lodges are covered with hides of stags, and the very sparse store of civilised luxury which finds its way to the tents on the lake promontories is largely gained by barter of smoked skins and mocassins made from the same material.

About the season when the caribou may be expected in their long-drawn battalions many thousands strong, all becomes activity in the Indian camps. Up and down the George River the scouts are watching, and when the leading deer make their appearance, he who sees them signals to his fellows, for the first deer must not be turned.

All is quiet until the advance-guard has entered the water and a fair proportion of caribou have crossed; then the Indians flash out in their canoes and harry the herds, often slaying as many as a thousand. There is no sport in the killing—merely a massacre of helpless swimming creatures. But for days after the battle the hunters sit by their fires and enjoy the greatest of all the luxuries the wilderness provides—the marrow of the deer. Countless multitudes of caribou have been slain upon Indian House Lake; so many, indeed, that the place has become historic.

This raiding of the herds, with trapping, partridge and ptarmigan shooting and freshwater fishing, make up the Indian’s hunting for a successful year. But there are few years when one month or another of the twelve does not see these nomadic people face to face with famine. This is more especially the case with the Nascaupees, who pass their lives in the most remote part of the interior, some of them probably never coming into touch with white men.

The Montagnais are a far more civilised race, partly on account of local conditions; for Southern Labrador, having a less rigorous climate, possesses more settlers with whom the Indians come in contact. Further, they long ago passed under the teaching of the Oblate Fathers, and now profess the Roman Catholic faith. The Fathers keep up annual visits with their converts, who seldom move far to the north; and in fact (particularly of late years) they spend a part of each year encamped not very far from the coast settlements. During the winter of 1909-10 a lady of the Moravian Mission, while travelling by _komatik_ southwards from Nain, visited the tent of a Montagnais some distance behind Hopedale. The old Indian received her with much hospitality and apologised for not offering her tea, as his supply was exhausted.

[Illustration: The Home of the Nascaupees.]

[Illustration: The Children of the Barrens.]

There is a pronounced physical difference between the Montagnais and the Nascaupees, the former being much shorter, with somewhat broad faces and blunt features, while the Nascaupees retain the tall slender forms and high features of the typical Red Indian. The tribes intermarry, for I know of at least one intermarriage, though this may be a rare instance.

The head-quarters of the Nascaupees may be said to be on Indian House Lake, the shores of which are, in truth, a battleground over which an unrecorded but terrible struggle is fought out. This battle has endured for generations; the antagonists are Nature on the one side and the little tribe of Nascaupees on the other. The Indians can hope for no aid in their conflict. Shut in upon all sides by the mighty Barrens, help cannot reach them, nor have they sought it. Few people of white race have yet set eyes on Indian House Lake, and the half-dozen expeditions which have passed up and down the River have spent but half-an-hour at the Nascaupee camp before they boarded their canoes and voyaged on.

It is believed that the Nascaupees came from the far south, being driven north before the onslaughts of the Iroquois about the date when Canada was first occupied by the French. They fled through the wooded south of Labrador, still pursued by their remorseless enemies, who were not shaken off till they had pushed the flying tribe up to those naked tablelands that occupy so much of the central regions of the country. These are dented with innumerable lakes and marshes, and covered with gigantic boulders; enormous tracts being entirely timberless and exposed to the cruel forces of the Arctic.

After many wanderings the poor hunted creatures must have found in the valley of the Barren Ground River a true Land of Promise. Here all was changed indeed. Spruce, elder, juniper and birch grew in the sheltered hollows, and woods and marshes alike were crossed and seamed with the high-roads of travelling bear and caribou; the tangled bush hid coveys of willow grouse, while the very rocks yielded the crouching ptarmigan. All these they found, not to speak of other game—foxes, lynx, wolves, hares, Canada geese, black ducks, and many more. It can well be imagined that when the Nascaupees first entered this region they believed that the faces of their gods were indeed turned towards them. Game on the hills, fish in the river, wood for their fires, _teepee_ poles to be had for the cutting—what more could they desire?

In those days the country was virgin and the deer plentiful. The latter are so still, and it is certain that during many years the Indians must have fared well, for Indian House Lake appears to be the favourite crossing-place in all Labrador for the migrating caribou. Thus they learned to live by the deer; and so, while the herds held to the old migratory route, all went well on the George. After 1828, when McLean visited them, a veil dropped over their life by the Lake for more than seventy years. No one, save a single Roman Catholic priest, saw them in their home camps; the tribe lived secure behind their impenetrable ramparts. It can hardly be doubted that they gorged and starved alternately. At any rate, they survived in numbers not too much lessened; and so they continued to exist until the dreadful winter of 1893, when, as I have said, deer and game failed.

The Nascaupee families were for many years in the habit of coming out to the Atlantic at Davis Bay Inlet to barter at the post of the Hudson’s Bay Company which is situated there. But in 1910, for some reason, they made a change; and a trading party of fifteen, of whom some four or five were Montagnais, came out at Voysey’s Bay as usual; but there, abandoning their canoes, they hired the resident settlers to take them by trap-boat to Nain to transact their business at the Moravian Mission store. Some travellers have dwelt upon the Indian terror of salt water; but if this fear existed at one time, it would now appear to have passed away: the Indians who came to Nain showed no symptoms of any feeling of the kind, as in coming and going from Voysey’s Bay they must have covered some sixty miles of sea-water.

The old racial antagonism between the Indians and the Eskimo has also apparently quite died out—at any rate on the eastern coast. For something like two hundred years the feuds and battles between the two peoples were “continual and bloodthirsty to a terrible degree” (Gosling’s Labrador, p. 165). Tradition tells of a massacre, about the year 1640, in which the Indians slew a thousand Eskimo. Even so recently as 1890 Warburton Pike, in his travel book, “The Barren Grounds of Northern Canada,” says that while on the Great Fish River he could not obtain an Indian guide to the head of the river, “they have such a dread of the Esquimaux ... for many years they have not met, and although the Esquimaux seen by Anderson on the Great Fish River appear peaceful enough, the Yellow Knives hunting at the head of the river are in constant fear of meeting them.”

But no trace of this enmity was observable at Nain, where many of the Eskimo saw Indians for the first time in their lives in August, 1910. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon when the Eskimo raised loud cries and ran down to the little wooden jetty, as they always do on sight of an approaching boat. The excitement was greater than usual, for the two trap boats crossing the bay contained passengers the like of whom they had never before seen. In a short time the Indians landed and walked along the wharf in single file, with bundles upon their shoulders, to a house on the beach placed at their disposal by Mr. Schmitt of the Mission. They sat on the ground round the walls side by side, dumb and dirty, tired and wretched-looking, after their long weary journey from the interior.

A small crowd of Eskimo stood inside the doors staring curiously at them, but one or two others, bustling about with eager kindness, had lit the stove and put on water to boil, and presently Mr. and Mrs. Schmitt took them tea, sugar and biscuit, for they were undoubtedly very hungry. As far as one could learn the Indians had never brought their women to Davis Inlet, but three accompanied them to Nain. One of them was tightly wrapped in folds of creased white calico; another was muffled in a blanket; the third was a young girl. The men sat silent and sullen with handkerchiefs and cloths bound round their heads, and one had a piece of fur hanging from his shoulders.

[Illustration: A Mixed Marriage—Nascaupee and Montagnais.]

By next morning they looked rested and more cheery, and climbed up the stairs into the store with a good deal of eagerness. They had brought dressed deerskins, the pelt of a bear and of a wolverine, with a few wolf skins and some half-made mocassins embroidered on the uppers for barter. A Montagnais acted as interpreter and pointed out the various articles on the shelves that his companions desired to examine, each of which was carefully weighed in the hand before purchase, as the long portages on their homeward journey made every extra ounce of importance.

They bought a good deal of tea, one man taking no less than 16 lbs. Brightly coloured prints attracted them in the way of materials, red, striped blue and magenta, pink, clear dark blue, and so on, and later they invested in some store clothes. Besides these things they purchased tobacco, cartridges, boxes of caps, matches, fish-hooks of the largest size, a few reels of cotton, and spent some time in choosing skeins of brilliant Berlin wools for embroidery purposes, some packets of rather fine needles, and no less than twelve dozen pearl buttons, shirt size. These latter are used by the Montagnais to ornament their flat round caps. They bartered each pelt or bundle of deerskins for so much money, the price was handed to them and they then bought with the amount as far as it went. Mouth organs were very popular, and it was easy to see how they hankered after a concertina; but evidently the means of the party did not run to the necessary price.

At first they were all very silent and shy; but that mood soon wore off, and they laughed and talked gaily. The men, when they raise their voices, speak in a curious flat-toned falsetto. They spat freely all the time, though they were not allowed to smoke in the store. One boy who had acquired a clay pipe solemnly licked it all day long and went away in the trap boat two days later still licking.

One of the young women, a Nascaupee, was distinctly handsome and obviously much admired. She was given any number of pieces of bright-coloured stuffs: a red petticoat, kettles, cups and saucers; and finally a cake of scented soap and a bottle of Florida water! One young man—evidently very flush of cash—bought for her anything she fancied, and at each purchase the men laughed loudly. The second woman, a Montagnais, was very composed and quiet, but for every special article of personal luxury, such as soap and scent, lavished upon the Nascaupee belle, she extracted a counterpart from her tall fine-looking Nascaupee husband.

The wrapping up of the purchases was promiscuous; for example, several pounds of tea were tied up into the end of a length of cotton print—sugar was wrapped in new handkerchiefs. None of them appeared to have any idea of folding up their freshly acquired belongings, excepting the beauty, who arranged all that appertained to herself with neatness; the young settlers who had come with them in the trap-boats helping the remainder of the party.

[Illustration: Montagnais Indians.]

[Illustration: The Nascaupee Belle and two Montagnais women.]

The women wore store dresses but had handkerchiefs bound in something of a cone shape about their heads. Their hair was parted on the brow and braided in two plaits which were rolled up to the level of the cheeks and tied about with a band. The married women displayed beaded bands, but the young girl’s hair was tied with a piece of plain blue cloth. The men all had store trousers; one was accoutred in a bright red pair, ragged and dirty; another took no little pride in his magenta stockings—just such stockings as were worn on Big-Side at Fettes. Many sported Dutch fisherman’s caps with falling point and tassel, which can be obtained at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s posts. The more picturesque and more conservative wore a beaded band round the brow, worked in a pattern, white being the predominating colour.

Others again, who showed the Montagnais type of feature, wore flat round caps of cloth decorated with birds worked in white beads at each side and a symbol at the back [symbol] like this, of which no one seemed able to explain the meaning. In front the caps were variously dotted with shirt buttons, as can be seen in the photographs.

Some of the men were arrayed in baggy store jackets, but beneath hung tunics of deerskin, one under the other, of different lengths. The younger men wore tattered red and yellow sashes, the ends hanging down in front. The entire party were shod in deerskin mocassins.

They were all very merry and ready to be amused in spite of the very evident wear and tear of the exhausting travel they had undergone, the repetition of which lay before them. They only stayed for a couple of days, and departed as soon as their purchases were completed. Again they passed down the wharf with their tightly-tied bundles on their backs, as before in single file, and stood or sat in a picturesque group while the boats were being loaded. They seemed to be on the most friendly terms with the Eskimo, who crowded down to see them off. There was much warm hand-shaking, some of the people even kneeling down on the jetty-head to grasp the fingers of the Indians once more after they had entered the boats.

The Indians say “Bo-you” as a greeting—evidently a corruption of “bon jour;” at parting they cried out something that sounded like “Yomai!” They crouched on their heels in the trap-boats, and as these got out into the bay the sails were swung to the wind and they glided quickly out of sight round the point.

It was not hard to realise the pitilessness of the life to which they were returning. It may be that the Montagnais left them and went southwards to their own district, but the Nascaupees were bound for the more northerly latitudes of the interior. The former showed the difference of living, for they looked fairly well fed and strong; but the Nascaupees were one and all a gaunt race—unkempt sons of the wilderness, with the wildness of long ages in their eyes.

We say in civilisation that “a woman’s work is never done,” and far more is that true of the helpmate of the semi-savage man of the Barren Grounds. She makes and breaks camp, cooks, she cuts up and carries her husband’s kill; she dresses the skins of the deer; she is responsible for the fashioning of the foot-gear and the greater portion of the clothing; on a journey she often paddles the canoe, and on a portage she carries the heavier load.

In fact, it is easier to write down the duties _not_ expected of a squaw than those which immemorial custom demand of her. Indeed, the North-land is a country calling aloud for a “woman’s movement”—a crusade of emancipation! But such will never come, even in a thousand years; for in the wilderness the provider of food, Man the Hunter, has reigned, reigns now, and ever will reign. Having slain his deer or his bear, he will take his ease in the best place in the lodge, deputing all lesser offices to the mother of his children. It is a law, and the laws of the North-land do not change.

Yet the years are fast thinning out the numbers of this interesting race, but some are still left to carry on the age-long war with Nature; for the Nascaupees are a true hunter people, dependent upon game for life, the only inhabitants of the far interior of the Labrador. And the writer, at any rate, glories in their freedom and their picturesqueness.