Mountains were called "the
Mountains of Bright Stones"--yet these brilliant patches were nothing
more wonderful than unmelted snow.

A few days later the party encountered Amerindians of the Slave and
Dog-rib tribes, who were so aloof from even "Indian" civilization that
they did not know the use of tobacco, and were still in the Stone Age
as regards their weapons and implements. These people, though they
furnished a guide, foretold disaster and famine to the expedition, and
greatly exaggerated the obstacles which would be met with--rapids near
the entrance of the tributary from Great Bear Lake--before the salt
water was reached.

The canoes of these Slave and Dog-rib tribes of the Athapaskan (Tinne)
group were covered, not with birch bark, but with the bark of the
spruce fir.

The lodges of the Slave Indians were of very simple structure: a few
poles supported by a fork and forming a semicircle at the bottom, with
some branches or a piece of bark as a covering. They built two of
these huts facing each other, and made a fire between them. The
furniture consisted of a few dishes of wood, bark, or horn. The
vessels in which they cooked their victuals were in the shape of a
gourd, narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, and made of _watape_.

This was the name given to the divided roots of the spruce fir, which
the natives wove into a degree of compactness that rendered it capable
of containing a fluid. Watape fibre was also used to sew together
different parts of the bark canoes. They also made fibre or thread
from willow bark. Their cooking vessels made of this watape not only
contained water, but water which was made to boil by putting a
succession of hot stones into it. It would, of course, be impossible
to place these vessels of fibre on a fire, and apparently none of the
Amerindians of temperate North America knew anything about pottery.
Those that were in some degree in touch with the Eskimo used kettles
or cauldrons of stone. Elsewhere the vessels for boiling water and
cooking were made of bark or fibre, and the water therein was made to
boil by the dropping in of red-hot stones. The arrows of these Slave
Indians were two and a half feet long, and the barb was made of bone,
horn, flint, or copper. Iron had been quite lately introduced,
indirectly obtained from the Russians in Alaska. Their spears were
pointed with barbed bone, and their daggers were made of horn or bone.
Their great club, the _pogamagan_, w