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Updated: June 24, 2025
"Indeed I had rather have fifty drunken Indians in the fort than sixty-five drunken Canadians", writes Alexander Henry in 1810. And yet the extracts I have given from his journal show that it would be hard to beat the Amerindians for disagreeable ferocity when intoxicated. Henry, summing up his experiences before leaving for the Pacific coast in 1811, writes these remarks in his diary:
The Amerindians of North America were religious and superstitious, and had a firm faith in a world of spiritual agencies within or outside the material world around us. Most of them believed in the existence of "fairies", woodland, earth, mountain, or water spirits whom they declared they could see from time to time in human semblance.
Henry thought that the cave had been an ancient receptacle for the bones of persons who had been sacrificed and devoured at war feasts; for, however contemptuous they may be of the flesh, the Amerindians paid particular attention to the bones of human beings whether friends, relations, or enemies preserving them unbroken, and depositing them in some place kept exclusively for that purpose.
The chief diminution has taken place in Newfoundland, Lower and Upper Canada, New Brunswick, Assiniboia, and British Columbia. There may even have been an increase in the north and north-west. The first great blow to the Amerindians of these regions was the smallpox epidemic of 1780.
Accompanied by John Stuart and Jules Quesnel, he left the Fraser River at its junction with the Nechaco on May 22, 1807, and, keeping as near as he could to the course of the river, found himself in the country of the Atna tribe, Amerindians of a diminutive size but active appearance, from whom he obtained an invaluable guide and faithful interpreter, Little Fellow, but for whose bravery, wise advice, and clever diplomacy the journey must have ended in disaster or disappointment a remark which might be made about nearly all the Amerindian guides of the pioneers.
He was in such a hurry to try a trading adventure in the country of the great lakes that he ventured into central Canada before it was sufficiently calmed down and reconciled to British rule. The hostility, curiously enough, manifested itself much more among the Amerindians than the settlers of French blood.
It is obvious, indeed, from our study of the conditions of life amongst the Amerindians, that one reason why the New World was so poorly populated at the time of its discovery by Europeans was the wars of extermination between tribe and tribe; for America between the Arctic regions and Tierra del Fuego is marvellously well supplied with natural food products game, fish, fruits, nuts, roots, and grain much more so than any area of similar extent in the Old World.
The local remedy was a drastic one: it was to place a piece of lighted touchwood on the most inflamed part, and to leave it there till the flesh was burnt to the nerve! In the north and the regions round Hudson's Bay, and also in the far west British Columbia and Alaska there were dogs, more or less of the Eskimo breed, trained by Eskimo or by Amerindians to drag the sledges.
So, before all these beaver-clad Amerindians had departed on their westward journey, he told the rearguard that he had noticed the thefts, and scarcely thought their relations who were guilty of stealing realized the awful mischief that would result from this dishonesty; that they were on their way now to the sea to procure large quantities of salmon from the rivers, but the salmon, which was absolutely necessary to their existence, came from the sea which belonged to the white men, and it only needed a message from the white men to the powers of nature to prevent the fish coming up from the sea into the rivers; and if this word were spoken they and their children might starve.
Subsequent expeditions of English ships explored and mapped the coast of Maine, and took on board Amerindians for exhibition in England.
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