the great rivers, they
no doubt killed, mingled with, or pushed back the Eskimo. At last
their northernmost extensions reached to the Mackenzie River, the
vicinity of Hudson's Bay, Labrador, and Newfoundland. But in all the
middle, west, and even east of Canada they seem to have been
_relatively recent arrivals_,[1] not to have inhabited the country for
a great many centuries before the white man came, and all their
recorded and legendary movements in North America have been from the
south-west towards the north-east (after they had got across the Rocky
Mountains). The few cultivated plants they had, such as maize (Indian
corn), tobacco, and pumpkins, they brought with them or received from
the south.

[Footnote 1: There may have been an earlier race inhabiting north-east
America which was killed out or driven away by the last Glacial
period.]

The only domestic animal possessed by either Eskimo or Amerindian was
the dog. We are most of us by now familiar with the type of the Eskimo
dog--a large, wolf-like animal with prick ears and a bushy tail curled
over its back. In this carriage of the tail the Eskimo and most other
true dogs differ from wolves, with whom the tail droops between the
hind quarters. But there is a small wild American wolf--the
coyote--which carries its tail more upright, like that of the true
dog; and the coyote seems indeed an intermediate form between the wolf
and the original wild dog. Most of the domestic dogs of the
Amerindians[2] (as distinguished from those of the Eskimo) seem to
have been derived from the coyote or small wolf of central North
America.

[Footnote 2: "The dogs of the Northern Indians are of various sizes
and colours, but all of them have a foxy or wolf-like appearance,
sharp noses, bushy tails, and sharp ears standing erect." (Samuel
Hearne).

Hearne also remarks that the northern Indians had a superstitious
reverence and liking for the wolf. They would frequently go to the
mouth of the burrows where the female wolves lived with their young,
take out the puppies and play with them, and even paint the faces of
the young wolves with vermilion or red ochre.

When first observed by Europeans the unhappy Beothiks (of
Newfoundland) had apparently no domestic dogs, only "tame wolves",
whom they distinguished from the wild wolves by marking their ears.
They were made more angry by the European seamen attacking and killing
the wolves than by anything else they did. Apparently so