Many of the labourers and a great majority of the agents and clerks
employed by the two Companies have Indian or half-breed wives, and the
mixed offspring thus produced has become extremely numerous.
These metifs, or, as the Canadians term them, bois brules, are upon the
whole a good-looking people and, where the experiment has been made, have
shown much aptness in learning and willingness to be taught; they have
however been sadly neglected. The example of their fathers has released
them from the restraint imposed by the Indian opinions of good and bad
behaviour; and generally speaking no pains have been taken to fill the
void with better principles. Hence it is not surprising that the males,
trained up in a high opinion of the authority and rights of the Company
to which their fathers belonged and, unacquainted with the laws of the
civilised world, should be ready to engage in any measure whatever that
they are prompted to believe will forward the interests of the cause they
espouse. Nor that the girls, taught a certain degree of refinement by the
acquisition of an European language, should be inflamed by the
unrestrained discourse of their Indian relations, and very early give up
all pretensions to chastity. It is however but justice to remark that
there is a very decided difference in the conduct of the children of the
Orkney men employed by the Hudson's Bay Company and those of the Canadian
voyagers. Some trouble is occasionally bestowed in teaching the former
and it is not thrown away, but all the good that can be said of the
latter is that they are not quite so licentious as their fathers are.
Many of the half-breeds both male and female are brought up amongst and
intermarry with the Indians; and there are few tents wherein the paler
children of such marriages are not to be seen. It has been remarked, I do
not know with what truth, that half-breeds show more personal courage
than the pure Crees.*
(*Footnote. A singular change takes place in the physical constitution of
the Indian females who become inmates of a fort, namely they bear
children more frequently and longer but at the same time are rendered
liable to indurations of the mammae and prolapsus of the uterus, evils
from which they are in a great measure exempt whilst they lead a
wandering and laborious life.)
The girls at the forts, particularly the daughters of Canadians, are
given in marriage very young; they are very frequently wives at twelve
years of age and mothers at fourteen. Nay, more than once instance came
under our observation of the master of a post having permitted a voyager
to take to wife a poor child that had scarcely attained the age of ten
years.
