The Indians of the Algonkian linguistic stock known in literature as the Montagnais, inhabit the vast region north of the St. Lawrence river from the coast of Labrador on the Atlantic, westward through to the St. Maurice river near Quebec, and northward to the height of land dividing the Arctic watershed from that of the St. Lawrence. They number not far from 3,000 souls widely scattered in small bands comprising certain dialectic and ethnical groupings. Within certain limits they are nomadic, subsisting entirely by hunting and fishing, never warlike except in their resistance to the Iroquois, docile and orderly. They were visited early in the 17th century by Jesuit missionaries who have left us the only specific literature dealing with their mode of life. Their culture is characterized by extreme simplicity, almost barren in its social, political and ceremonial aspects though rich in the field of activity concerned with hunting, fishing and traveling. Roughly speaking, the Montagnais group lends itself to a threefold division, the ethnological and dialectic peculiarities following somewhat the same limits: those of the coast, the typical so-called Montagnais; those of the interior of the northwestern part of the Labrador peninsula, and those of the northeastern interior. The latter have come to be known as the eastern Naskapi. The whole group is closely related to the Cree of Hudson’s Bay, outside of which area its next closest affinities lie with the Wabanaki group of the region south of the St. Lawrence, from New Hampshire to Newfoundland.