The Life and Death of Matonabbee: Fur Trade and Leadership Among the Chipewyan, 1736-1782‪.‬

In March 1771, Matonabbee, an important leader among the Chipewyan Indians, found himself on the shores of Wholdaia Lake in what is now southeastern Northwest Territories. For the last four months, he had been escorting a young Englishman named Samuel Hearne, an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), across the barrens of Canada's northern interior, searching for a copper mine that native rumours placed along the banks of a northward flowing river. Hearne had made two prior attempts to seek out this "coppermine" river, and both had been utter failures. But crossing frozen Wholdaia Lake, Hearne found something besides the mineral wealth for which he sought. In this most unlikely spot, on the shores of a frozen lake among people who his own countrymen would most likely dismiss as backwards and uncivilized, Samuel Hearne found paradise. Composing his journal a few years later, Hearne wrote of the Lake Wholdaia Chipewyan as living in a state of primitive plenty. The woodlands bordering the lake and nearby Dubawnt River teemed with such numbers of caribou that the Chipewyan hunters, using pounds constructed of bushy trees and snares made of rawhide, could easily provide enough meat for the entire community. Even the elderly in the community were well provided for and spared the deprivations that regularly faced other communities of the normally nomadic Chipewyan during their seasonal travels throughout what would later be northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba.