This expedition was more ethnographic than geographic, dealing with Cree, Athabaskan, as well as natural history of the Mackenzie region, and venturing as far as Herschel and Wrangel.
p.31: “The missionary receives a small salary from the church missionary society of England, which also provides Bibles and hymn books, printed in the Cree language. Both the syllabic and the Roman characters are used in these publications and nearly all can read.”
p. 132: The “Mackenzie River Library” contained several hundred volumes, nearly all of which had been carried over miles of portages on men’s backs, by way of the long boat route to York Factory. I there read, for the first time, the account of the Journey to a Northern Ocean in 1771, by that excellent observer, Samuel Hearne. I had just visited the territory which he has so quaintly described, and was in a position to appreciate the accurate and truthful account which he has given of the “Northern Indians.”
p. 159: Indeed the children are now taught to read and write by the Roman Catholic missionary at Rae and both men and women can read their prayer books readily. But the use of denotive symbols has not yet affected their mode of thought. Their ideas are not capitalized, so to say, by recorded language.