These people, though they furnished a guide, foretold disaster and famine to the expedition, and greatly exaggerated the obstacles which would be met with--rapids near the entrance of the tributary from Great Bear Lake--before the salt water was reached.
The canoes of these Slave and Dog-rib tribes of the Athapaskan (Tinne) group were covered, not with birch bark, but with the bark of the spruce fir.
The lodges of the Slave Indians were of very simple structure: a few poles supported by a fork and forming a semicircle at the bottom, with some branches or a piece of bark as a covering.

They built two of these huts facing each other, and made a fire between them.

The furniture consisted of a few dishes of wood, bark, or horn.

The vessels in which they cooked their victuals were in the shape of a gourd, narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, and made of _watape_.
This was the name given to the divided roots of the spruce fir, which the natives wove into a degree of compactness that rendered it capable of containing a fluid.

Watape fibre was also used to sew together different parts of the bark canoes.