of 1837. Adoption and use The local Cree community quickly took to this new writing system. Cree people began to use it to write messages on tree bark using burnt sticks, leaving messages out on hunting trails far from the mission. Evans believed that it was well adapted to Native Canadian languages, particularly the Algonquian languages with which he was familiar. He claimed that "with some slight alterations" it could be used to write "every language from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains." Evans attempted to secure a printing press and new type to publish materials in this writing system. Here, he began to face resistance from colonial and European authorities. The Hudson's Bay Company, which had a monopoly on foreign commerce in western Canada, refused to import a press for him, believing that native literacy was something to be discouraged. Evans, with immense difficulty, constructed his own press and type and began publishing in syllabics. Evans left Canada in 1846 and died shortly thereafter. However, the ease and utility of syllabic writing ensured its continued survival, despite European resistance to supporting it. In 1849, David Anderson, the Anglican bishop of Rupert's Land, reported that "a few of the Indians [sic] can read by means of these syllabic characters; but if they had only been taught to read their own language in our letters, it would have been one step towards the acquisition of the English tongue." But syllabics had taken root among the Cree (indeed, their rate of literacy was greater than that of English and French Canadians), and in 1861, fifteen years after Evans had died, the British and Foreign Bible Society published a Bible in Cree syllabics. By then, both Protestant and Catholic missionaries were using and actively propagating syllabic writing. Missionary work in the 1850s and 1860s spread syllabics to western Canadian Ojibwe dialects (Plains Ojibwe and Saulteaux), but it was not often used over the border by Ojibwe in the United States. Missionaries who had learned Evans' system spread it east across Ontario and into Quebec, reaching all Cree language areas as far east as the Naskapi. Attikamekw, Montagnais and Innu people in eastern Quebec and Labrador use Latin alphabets. In 1856, John Horden, an Anglican missionary at Moose Factory, Ontario, who adapted syllabics to the local James Bay Cree dialect, met a group of Inuit from the region of Grande Rivière de la Baleine