Volume 1

98 INDIANS ONLY HALF DRUNK TO-DAY.
I instantly sent for it ; the hunter, returning with the men,
killed another, and Maymiutch killed four more. Desmarais
this evening went to seine with the men in two small
canoes. They caught one sturgeon, two catfish, six brim,
and a number of other small fish. Bulls continued near
camp, but the cows kept at a distance. The Indians, proposing
to embark to-morrow, were gumming their
canoes.
Sept. i6th. I sent the men for the bears they killed yesterday
;
they returned at nine o'clock, and the Indians soon
decamped. I gave them one keg of mixed rum to encourage
them to hunt and pay their debts. I treated my men
also to a dram, as they had labored hard. I sent my hunter
in his small canoe to hunt above, with orders to bring
down the meat himself, as I found it too troublesome to
send my people daily for meat. The Indians having
camped not many miles above us, some of them returned
half drunk, and plagued me for liquor. I purchased three
trained dogs for three quarts of mixed liquor. They
remained all
night, and never ceased to tease us.
Sept. lyth. Early this morning I sent three men for a
bear that one of the lads shot yesterday ; they
returned
soon. I once more got all the Indians off to their camps.
One of our horses is missing. I have employed Indians
light thrown on his story by Henry—I find it possible to construct a Tanner
chronology so accurately that we are seldom a single year out of the way.
I find that Tanner tells a straight, coherent, and consecutive story, which can
now for the first time be shown up in its proper historical perspective, for all
the period of Henry's residence in the Red River region. Tanner's memory
must have been prodigiously tenacious for
events and incidents of his own life,
or he never could have told Dr. James such a story in after years, when he had
only gradually come into his white man's mind's estate after its Indianization
since childhood. Tanner slips mainly when he tries to adjust to his personal
history affairs in which he was not directly concerned. For example : p. 216,
he speaks of the murder of "a Mr. M'Donald, or M'Dolland," governor, etc.
But this was Governor Miles McDonnell, who was never murdered. Tanner
was thinking of the killing of Governor Semple ;
yet the circumstances of the
affair he gives are those of the murder of Owen Keveny, for which Charles
de Reinhard was convicted and condemned to death at Quebec in 1818.
Tanner's Ottawa name was Shawshawwabenase, translated Falcon ;
and in the
present work he will figure anew as one of Henry's Indian customers !