In his history he states:  “When the white traders first ventured into this country both tribes were numerous, but smallpox destroyed them.”  And, speaking of the region at large, he, perhaps, throws an incidental side-light upon the Blackfoot question.  “Who the original people were,” he says, “that were driven from it when conquered by the Kinisteneaux (the Crees) is not now known, as not a single vestige remains of them.  The latter and the Chipewyans are the only people that have been known here, and it is evident that the last mentioned consider themselves as strangers, and seldom remain longer than three or four years without visiting their friends and relatives in the Barren Grounds, which they term their native country.”

[It is a reasonable conjecture that these “original people,” driven from Athabasca in remote days, were the Blackfeet Indians and their kindred, who possibly had their base at that time, as in subsequent days, at the forks and on both branches of the Saskatchewan.  The tradition was authentic in Dr. (afterwards Sir John) Richardson’s time.  Writing on the Saskatchewan eighty-eight years ago he places the Eascabs, “called by the Crees the Assinipoytuk, or Stone Indians, west of the Crees, between them and the Blackfeet.”  The Assiniboines are an offshoot of the great Sioux, or Dakota, race called by their congeners the Hohas, or “Rebels.”  They separated from their nation at a remote period owing to a quarrel, so the tradition runs, between children, and which was taken up by their parents.  Migrating northward the Eascabs, as the Assiniboines called themselves, were gladly received and welcomed as allies by the Crees, with whom, as Dr. Richardson says, “they attacked and drove to the westward the former inhabitants of the banks of the Saskatchewan.”  “The nations,” he continues, “driven westward by the Easeabs and Crees are termed by the latter Yatchee-thinyoowuc, translated Slave Indians, but properly ‘Strangers.’” This word Yatchee is, of course, the Iyaghchi of the Crees in their name for Lesser Slave River and Lake.  Richardson describes them as inhabiting the country round Fort Augustus and the foot of the Rockies, and “so numerous now as to be a terror to the Assiniboines themselves.”  They are divided, he says, into five nations, of whom the Fall Indians, so called from their former residence at Cole’s Falls, near the Forks of the Saskatchewan, were the most numerous, consisting of 500 tents, the Piegans of 400, the Blackfeet of 350, the Bloods of 300, and the Sarcees of 150, the latter tribe being a branch of the Chipewyans which, having migrated like their congeners, the Apaches, from the north, joined the Crees as allies, just as the Assiniboines did from the south.]