DCHP-1 Online

Mountaineer [so called because they lived in the highlands]

• 1 n. Hist. one of an Algonkian-speaking people of eastern Quebec and Labrador, the Naskapi.

  • The closely related Montagnais and Mountaineers were so named in colonial times by the French and the English respectively; the former people retain this name still; the latter are now generally known as Naskapi.

  • 1770  (1792)  I then landed on the south side, and saw very recent marks of Mountaineer Indians.
  • 1849  The Nascopies, or mountaineers of Labrador, speak a mixture of Cree and Sauteux, the former predominating.
  • 1907  They had probably heard, perhaps from the Mountaineer Indians of the Labrador, who are themselves a branch of the Algonquins, of the excellent trapping and hunting to be found in the island, and had come for that purpose

• 2a n. Obs. one of a group of woods Crees living to the northwest of Lake Superior.

  • 1832  During the past winter a band of Mushkegons, or Mountaineers, speaking a dialect of the Chippewas language fell upon a trading post, situated on the Nipigon river, belonging to the Hon. Hudson Bay Company, and murdered indiscriminately, all the traders occupying the post.

• 2b n. one of several Athapaskan-speaking peoples in the Northwest, as the Kasha, Sekani, Nahani, and, earlier, the western Chipewyans.

  • 1880  Ken-oo-say-oo, or The Fish, was a Chippewayan or mountaineer, a small band of whom are in this region [now south-central Saskatchewan].
  • 1932  The Sékanais, or Mountaineers . . . call them Arêtnê, which means Carriers, by allusion to the practice of their widows to carry on their back, those of the bones of their late husbands which may have withstood the flames of ritual cremation.