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A somewhat similar method was adopted by the northern Kris and Athapascans for the capture of reindeer. As regards means of transport, the use of dogs as draught animals was by no means confined to the Eskimo: they were used in wintertime to draw sledges over the snow or ice by nearly all the northern Indian tribes, and by the people of the Rocky Mountains and Pacific coast.
Some tribes of the Athapascans, as we have seen, penetrated into British Columbia, but the greater part of the natives in that region were of wholly different races. Of course, we know hardly anything of these Indians during the first two centuries of European settlement in America.
Their name has since become connected with the geography of Canada alone, but in reality a number of the tribes of the plains, like the well-known Apaches, as well as the Hupas of California and the Navahos, belong to the Athapascans. In Canada, the Athapascans roamed over the country that lay between Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains.
These lowly people seem to have been so occupied with the severe struggle with the elements that they could not even advance out of savagery into barbarism. They were homeless nomads whose movements were determined largely by the food supply. Among the Athapascans who occupied all the western part of the northern pine forests, clothing was made of deerskins with the hair left on.
Immediately south of the Athapascans was the most extensive of all the families, the Algonquin. Their territory stretched without interruption westward from Cape Race, in Newfoundland, to the Rocky Mountains, on both banks of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. It extended southward along the Atlantic seaboard as far, perhaps, as the Savannah River.
They were found in the basin of the Mackenzie river towards the Arctic sea, and along the valley of the Fraser to the valley of the Chilcotin. Their language was broken into a great number of dialects which differed so widely that only the kindred groups could understand one another's speech. But the same general resemblance ran through the various branches of the Athapascans.
The general names of Chipewyan and Tinne are also applied to the same great branch of the Indian race. In a variety of groups and tribes, the Athapascans spread out from the Arctic to Mexico.
The Athapascans stood low in the scale of civilization. Most of them lived in a prairie country where a luxuriant soil, not encumbered with trees, would have responded to the slightest labour. But the Athapascans, in Canada at least, knew nothing of agriculture.
The Athapascans of Northwestern Canada asserted that a raven, whose eyes were fire, whose glances were lightning, and the clapping of whose wings was thunder, descended to the ocean. Instantly, the earth arose and remained floating on the surface of the waters. It was from this Being that the tribe traced its descent.
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