The
tradition was authentic in Dr. (afterwards Sir John) Richardson's
time. Writing on the Saskatchewan eighty-eight years ago he places
the Eascabs, "called by the Crees the Assinipoytuk, or Stone
Indians, west of the Crees, between them and the Blackfeet." The
Assiniboines are an offshoot of the great Sioux, or Dakota, race
called by their congeners the Hohas, or "Rebels." They separated
from their nation at a remote period owing to a quarrel, so the
tradition runs, between children, and which was taken up by their
parents. Migrating northward the Eascabs, as the Assiniboines called
themselves, were gladly received and welcomed as allies by the
Crees, with whom, as Dr. Richardson says, "they attacked and
drove to the westward the former inhabitants of the banks of the
Saskatchewan." "The nations," he continues, "driven westward by
the Easeabs and Crees are termed by the latter Yatchee-thinyoowuc,
translated Slave Indians, but properly 'Strangers.'" This word
Yatchee is, of course, the Iyaghchi of the Crees in their name for
Lesser Slave River and Lake. Richardson describes them as inhabiting
the country round Fort Augustus and the foot of the Rockies, and "so
numerous now as to be a terror to the Assiniboines themselves." They
are divided, he says, into five nations, of whom the Fall Indians,
so called from their former residence at Cole's Falls, near the
Forks of the Saskatchewan, were the most numerous, consisting of 500
tents, the Piegans of 400, the Blackfeet of 350, the Bloods of 300,
and the Sarcees of 150, the latter tribe being a branch of the
Chipewyans which, having migrated like their congeners, the Apaches,
from the north, joined the Crees as allies, just as the Assiniboines
did from the south.
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