[AT] Since this Journal was written, the Northern Indians, by annually visiting their Southern friends, the Athapuscow Indians, have contracted the small-pox, which has carried off nine-tenths of them, and particularly those people who composed the trade at Churchill Factory. The few survivors follow the example of their Southern neighbours, and all trade with the Canadians, who are settled in the heart of the Athapuscow country: so that a very few years has proved my short-sightedness, and that it would have been much more to the advantage of the Company, as well as have prevented the depopulation of the Northern Indian country, if they had still remained at war with the Southern tribes, and never attempted to better their situation. At the same time, it is impossible to say what increase of trade might not, in time, have arisen from a constant and regular traffic with the different tribes of Copper and Dog-ribbed Indians. But having been totally neglected for several years, they have now sunk into their original barbarism and extreme indigence; and a war has ensued between the two tribes, for the sake of a few remnants of iron-work which was left among them; and the Dog-ribbed Indians were so numerous, and so successful, as to destroy almost the whole race of the Copper Indians.
While I was writing this Note, I was informed by some Northern Indians, that the few which remain of the Copper tribe have found their way to one of the Canadian houses in the Athapuscow Indians' country, where they get supplied with every thing at less, or about half the price they were formerly obliged to give; so that the few surviving Northern Indians, as well as the Hudson's Bay Company, have now lost every shadow of any future trade from that quarter, unless the Company will establish a settlement with the Athapuscow country, and undersell the Canadians.[82]
[82] In 1778 Peter Pond, a fur trader from Montreal, had built a trading post on the east bank of Athabasca River, about thirty miles up-stream from Athabasca Lake, and in 1786, after the formation of the North-West Company, Laurent Leroux and Cuthbert Grant, two of the employees of this Company, had descended Slave River to Great Slave Lake and had established a trading post on its southern shore. The Copper Indians traded at the latter post, while the Northern or Chipewyan Indians resorted to the more southern and older post on the Athabasca River. Among the members of this latter tribe, who had been accustomed to make long pilgrimages to Churchill in order to procure implements and utensils of various kinds in exchange for furs, but who afterwards found that they could buy such goods as they needed more advantageously from the traders on the Athabasca River, very much nearer home, was a man known to those traders as "English Chief." This Indian accompanied Sir Alexander Mackenzie, one of the partners of the North-West Company, and one of those who would have been spoken of by Hearne as _Canadians_, on his journey from Lake Athabasca to the Arctic Ocean in 1789.