On our first visit to that country, the natives were seen in every part of the coast. We occupied the stations where they used to hunt and fish, thus reducing them to want, while we took no trouble to indemnify them, so that, doubtless, many of them perished by famine; we also treated them with hostility and cruelty, and “many were slain by our own people, as well as by the Micmac Indians,” who were allowed to harass them. They must, however, have been recently very numerous, since, in one place, Captain Buchan found they had “run up fences to the extent of 30 miles,” with a variety of ramifications, for the purpose of conducting the deer down to the water, a work which would have required the labour of a multitude of hands. It does not appear that any measures were taken to open a communication with them before the year 1810, when, by order of Sir. J. Duckworth, an attempt was made by Captain Buchan, which proved ineffectual. At that time he conceived that their numbers around their chief place of resort, the Great Lake, were reduced to 400 or 500. Under our treatment they continued rapidly to diminish; and it appears probable that the last of the tribe left at large, a man and a woman, were shot by two Englishmen in 1823. Three women had been taken prisoners shortly before, and they died in captivity. In the colony of Newfoundland, it may therefore be stated that we have exterminated the natives.[48] CANADIAN INDIANS. The general account of our intercourse with the North American Indians, as distinct from missionary efforts, may be given in the words of a converted Chippeway chief, in a letter to Lord Goderich: “We were once very numerous, and owned all Upper Canada, and lived by hunting and fishing; but the white men who came to trade with us taught our fathers to drink the fire-waters, which has made our people poor and sick, and has killed many tribes, till we have become very small.”[49] It is a curious fact, noticed in the evidence, that, some years ago, the Indians practised agriculture, and were able to bring corn to our settlements, then suffering from famine; but we, by driving them back and introducing the fur trade, have rendered them so completely a wandering people, that they have very much lost any disposition which they might once have felt to settle. All writers on the Indian race have spoken of them, in their native barbarism, as a noble people; but those who live among civilised men, upon reservations in our own territory, are now represented as “reduced to a state which resembles that of gipsies in this country.” Those who live in villages among the whites “are a very degraded race, and look more like dram-drinkers than people it would be possible to get to do any work.”