Page:The journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London. Volume 34, 1864. (IA s572id13663720).pdf/294

86 of the lime-felspar series. Large white birches, 18 inches in diameter, and white spruce of the same dimensions, and from 40 to 50 feet and more in altitude, were seen clothing the hill-sides of the valley of the north-east branch, at Bear Lake, about 90 miles from the gulf. A land-slide close at hand showed the rock to consist of a granitoid gneiss, probably a member of the Labrador Series.

The tripe de roche (Sticla pulmonariai) is also everywhere abundant, and is sometimes used, with the buds of the birch-tree, as an article of food by the Indians in times of scarcity. The Labrador tea-plant (Ledum palustre) was found growing everywhere after passing Coldwater River portage. On the portages the larch, the white birch, and the white spruce, were seen to grow wherever they could find nourishment, by sending their roots into fissures in the rocks; but in such an unkindly soil they rarely reached an altitude of more than 20 feet, and it was only in the valleys or on the sloping sides of the Labradorite rocks that they acquired the dimensions already given. In the valley of Coldwater River, near its mouth, where gigantic land-slides of Labradorite had occurred and where occasionally the iridiscent colours characteristic of certain varieties of this rock were seen, the forest growth was very luxuriant, and would have been no discredit to a more genial clime.

This now desolate country was formerly peopled with numerous bands of Montagnais tribes on the flanks of the table-land, and by a kindred tribe, the Nasquapees, whose hunting-grounds lay on the table-land itself. These tribes speak dialects of the Cree language; and among the Nasquapees who have not lost the ancient customs and habits of their forefathers by contact with white men, many peculiarities observable among the prairie tribes on the Saskatchewan, are recognised as practised by them. A peculiarity in the form of their stone pipes is worth remarking; and, by comparing the pipes of the Plain Crees, whose hunting-grounds lie on the south branch of the Saskatchewan, with those of the Blackfeet and the Nasquapees, a marked similarity will be noticed. A similar distinctive form of pipe belongs to the Ojibways, of Rainy Lake (the Lake of the Woods) and the Swampies, of Lake Winnipeg, who also speak the Ojibway language; and a third characteristic form of pipe distinguishes the Chipewyans, whose hunting-grounds lie to the north of the Great Cree nation.

The Nasquapees live in skin tents, like the Crees of the great Western plains. They also smoke the roasted leaves of the bearberry, the red-barked willow (Cornus sericeus), and another willow common on the borders of lakes. The people of this tribe are tattooed to a small extent. Short parallel lines are cut from the cheek-bone to the nostril, and the markings are made permanent