f to
that were added a good school for the young.

The question of their trapping lands will have to be dealt with before
long. Each man regards his rights to his trapping area as
unimpeachable. They are recognised at present among themselves, but
they have no official sanction for their trapping lands either as a
community or as individuals, just as they have no official title to
the Reservation.

I was accompanied on this visit by the Honourable Eli Dawe, Minister
of Marine and Fisheries, who, as a member of the Government, will
himself take an interest in the settlement, and call the attention of
his colleagues to the condition of the Micmacs. I was also assisted by
Mr. James Howley, who has been on friendly terms with these people for
many years. I enclose photographs[A] of some of the Micmacs, taken by
Mr. Howley during this visit.

10. The Micmacs are held by ethnologists to be a branch of the
Algonquins, who inhabited Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. It
was from the last-named province that they extended to Newfoundland,
apparently not much more than a century ago. The fact that they did
not effect a lodgment on Newfoundland sooner may be at least partly
accounted for by supposing that the Beothuks, the aboriginal natives
of Newfoundland, were able to defend themselves and their country from
the Micmacs so long as both sides were unprovided with firearms, and
until the Beothuks were nearly destroyed by their French and English
aggressors.

A sufficiently accurate view of the arrival and early doings of the
Micmacs in Newfoundland may be had from the brief extracts from
official records enclosed herewith. Governor Duckworth reports in 1809
that the Micmacs were coming over, and that the Beothuks were keeping
to the interior in dread of them. The Governor followed up this Report
next year (1810) by a Proclamation to the Micmacs and other American
Indians frequenting Newfoundland, warning them that any person that
murdered a native Indian (Beothuk) would be punished with death.
Unfortunately this Proclamation it would appear had no restraining
effect, as Governor Keats reports to the Secretary of State in 1815
that the Micmacs had recently come over from Nova Scotia in greater
numbers, and had reached the eastern coast of Newfoundland; and he
expressed the fear that these newcomers would destroy the native
Indians of the Island, whose arms were the bow and arrow.

The Micmacs, it appears, have always po