to distant corners to pursue their winter hunts experienced all the horrors of famine.  One evening early in the month of January a poor Indian entered the North-West Company’s House, carrying his only child in his arms and followed by his starving wife.  They had been hunting apart from the other bands, had been unsuccessful and, whilst in want, were seized with the epidemical disease.  An Indian is accustomed to starve and it is not easy to elicit from him an account of his sufferings.  This poor man’s story was very brief; as soon as the fever abated he set out with his wife for Cumberland House, having been previously reduced to feed on the bits of skin and offal which remained about their encampment.  Even this miserable fare was exhausted and they walked several days without eating, yet exerting themselves far beyond their strength that they might save the life of the infant.  It died almost within sight of the house.  Mr. Connolly, who was then in charge of the post, received them with the utmost humanity and instantly placed food before them; but no language can describe the manner in which the miserable father dashed the morsel from his lips and deplored the loss of his child.  Misery may harden a disposition naturally bad but it never fails to soften the heart of a good man.

His account of the Cree Indians.

The origin of the Crees, to which nation the Cumberland House Indians belong, is, like that of the other aborigines of America, involved in obscurity; but the researches now making into the nature and affinities of the languages spoken by the different Indian tribes may eventually throw some light on the subject.  Indeed the American philologists seem to have succeeded already in classing the known dialects into three languages: 

1.  The Floridean, spoken by the Creeks, Chickesaws, Choctaws, Cherokees, Pascagoulas, and some other tribes who inhabit the southern parts of the United States.

2.  The Iroquois, spoken by the Mengwe, or Six Nations, the Wyandots, the Nadowessies, and Asseeneepoytuck.

3.  The Lenni-lenape, spoken by a great family more widely spread than the other two and from which, together with a vast number of other tribes, are sprung our Crees.  Mr. Heckewelder, a missionary who resided long amongst these people and from whose paper (published in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society) the above classification is taken, states that the Lenape have a tradition amongst them of their ancestors having come from the westward and taken possession of the whole country from the Missouri to the Atlantic, after driving away or destroying the original inhabitants of the land whom they termed Alligewi.  In this migration and contest, which endured for a series of years, the Mengwe, or Iroquois, kept pace with them, moving in a parallel but more northerly line, and finally settling on the banks of the St. Lawrence and the great lakes from whence it flows.