Travelling Over Such A Country, Except When Winter Has Fairly Set In,
Is Truly Laborious.
In about ten days we got a glimpse of this beautifully majestic and
splendid sheet of water.
The ravages of fire, which we saw in the
woods for the last two days, indicated that man had been near. We
looked down on the lake, from the hills at the northern extremity,
with feelings of anxiety and admiration: - No canoe could be discovered
moving on its placid surface in the distance. We were the first
Europeans who had seen it in an unfrozen state, for the three former
parties who had visited it before, were here in the winter, when its
waters were frozen and covered over with snow. They had reached it
from below, by way of the River Exploits, on the ice. We approached
the lake with hope and caution; but found to our mortification that
the Red Indians had deserted it for some years past. My party had been
so excited, so sanguine, and so determined to obtain an interview of
some kind with these people, that, on discovering, from appearances
every where around us, that the Red Indians - the terror of the
Europeans as well as the other Indian inhabitants of Newfoundland - no
longer existed, the spirits of one and all of us were very deeply
affected. The old mountaineer was particularly overcome. There were
every where indications that this had long been the central and
undisturbed rendezvous of the tribe, where they had enjoyed peace and
security. But these primitive people had abandoned it, after having
been tormented by parties of Europeans during the last eighteen [Sic:
thirteen] years. Fatal rencounters had on these occasions
unfortunately taken place.
We spent several melancholy days wandering on the borders of the east
end of the lake, surveying the various remains of what we now
contemplated to have been an unoffending and cruelly extirpated
people. At several places, by the margin of the lake, are small
clusters of winter and summer wigwams in ruins. One difference, among
others, between the Boeothick wigwams and those of the other Indians
is, that in most of the former there are small hollows, like nests,
dug in the earth around the fire-place, one for each person to sit in.
These hollows are generally so close together, and also so close to
the fire-place, and to the sides of the wigwam, that I think it
probable these people have been accustomed to sleep in a sitting
position. There was one wooden building constructed for drying and
smoking venison in, still perfect; also a small log-house, in a
dilapidated condition, which we took to have been once a store-house.
The wreck of a large handsome birch-rind canoe, about twenty-two feet
in length, comparatively new, and certainly very little used, lay
thrown up among the bushes at the beach. We supposed that the violence
of a storm had rent it in the way it was found, and that the people
who were in it had perished; for the iron nails, of which there was no
want, all remained in it.
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