Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/355

 the Irishman or Frenchman, on emigrating to America, becomes, in a generation or two, amalgamated with the general stock." Nor is it on the frontier settlements alone that he has observed the evidences of such interfusion. "I have recognized," he says, "the semi-Indian features in the gay assemblies at a Canadian Governor's reception, in the halls of the Legislature, among the undergraduates of Canadian universities, and mingling in selectest social circles." Dr. Wilson says, moreover, that "in Lower Canada half-breeds, and men and wommenwomen [sic] of partial Indian blood, are constantly met with in all ranks of life," and cites with approval the opinion that "in the neighborhood of Quebec, in the Ottawa Valley, and to a great extent about Montreal, there is hardly among the original settlers a family in the lower ranks, and not many in the higher, who have not some traces of Indian blood."

M. Benjamin Sulte, on the contrary, indignantly denies that the early Canadians intermarried (except in rare instances) with the Indian tribes. On this point, Abbé Tanguay, than whom no one should be better fitted to pronounce judgment on such a question, makes the following remarks: "For many years the proportion of women to the male immigrants was extremely small. The Carignan regiment alone added fifteen hundred to the population. Did those young soldiers marry native women, and are we to reckon the latter among our ancestors? Some of the colonists did certainly marry native girls, but those girls had been educated and civilized in the institutions of the Hôtel-Dieu and the Ursulines. We can cite several of the most respectable families in Canada who number among their progenitors the sons of the forest, and who should be proud to do so. Among others may be mentioned that of the late Commander Jacques Viger, one of whose ancestors was a daughter of Arontio, the disciple of Father Brebœuf, and like him a martyr to the faith. Nevertheless, we must regard such alliances as exceptional."

In the foregoing quotation Abbé Tanguay indicates the cause to which, in frontier settlements, the union of whites and squaws is mainly to be attributed—the dearth of white women. It was under the stress of such a famine that the half-breed population of the Canadian North-west, which has of late been so much before the world, grew to its present proportions. Its history carries us back to near the beginning of the eighteenth century. Arthur Dobbs, whose account of the countries adjacent to Hudson Bay was published in 1744, obtained his information almost wholly from a half-breed trader called La France—a proof that the métis was not unknown a century and a half ago. The explorations of the Verandryes, father and sons, lasted from 1731