A short Description of the Northern Indians, also a farther Account of their Country, Manufactures, Customs, &c.
An account of the persons and tempers of the Northern Indians--They possess a great deal of art and cunning--Are very guilty of fraud when in their power, and generally exact more for their furs than any other tribe of Indians--Always dissatisfied, yet have their good qualities--The men in general jealous of their wives--Their marriages--Girls always betrothed when children, and their reasons for it--Great care and confinement of young girls from the age of eight or nine years--Divorces common among those people--The women are less prolific than in warmer countries--Remarkable piece of superstition observed by the women at particular periods--Their art in making it an excuse for a temporary separation from their husbands on any little quarrel--Reckoned very unclean on those occasions--The Northern Indians frequently, for the want of firing, are obliged to eat their meat raw--Some through necessity obliged to boil it in vessels made of the rind of the birch-tree--A remarkable dish among those people--The young animals always cut out of their dams, eaten, and accounted a great delicacy--The parts of generation of all animals eat by the men and boys--Manner of passing their time, and method of killing deer in Summer with bows and arrows--Their tents, dogs, sledges, &c.--Snow-shoes--Their partiality to domestic vermin--Utmost extent of the Northern Indian country--Face of the country--Species of fish--A peculiar kind of moss useful for the support of man--Northern Indian method of catching fish, either with hooks or nets--Ceremony observed when two parties of those people meet--Diversions in common use--A singular disorder which attacks some of those people--Their superstition with respect to the death of their friends--Ceremony observed on those occasions--Their ideas of the first inhabitants of the world--No form of religion among them--Remarks on that circumstance--The extreme misery to which old age is exposed--Their opinion of the _Aurora Borealis_, &c.--Some account of Matonabbee, and his services to his country, as well as to the Hudson's Bay Company 297