CHAPTER XII

"Behold, I sing a pagan song of old,

And out of my full heart,

Hold forth my hands that so I would enfold

The Infinite thou art.

What matter all the creeds that come and go,

The many gods of men?

My blood outcasts them from its joyous flow."

—A Pagan Hymn.

"The Eskimo is a short, squat, dirty man who lives on blubber," said text-books we had been weaned on, and this was the man we looked for. We didn't find him.

It was at Arctic Red River, one hundred and ninety miles of river-travel since we cut the Polar Circle, that we came upon our first Eskimo, the true class-conscious Socialist of Karl Marx, the one man without a master on the American continent. A little band of Kogmollycs they were, men, women, and kiddies, who had come in to trade silver-fox skins for tobacco and tea at the Post of the Hudson's Bay Company.

On the rocks they sat, waiting for the new steamer to make her landing, and much excited were they over the iron bowels of this puffing kayak of the white men. An Eskimo generally lets you know what he thinks, and this is a basic difference between him and the Indian. An Indian is always trying to impress you with his importance; he thinks about his dignity all day and dreams of it at night. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a man who commands your respect the moment you look at him, and yet he is withal the frankest of mortals, affable, joyous, fairly effervescing with good-humour. His attitude toward the world is that of a little half-Swiss, half-Chinese baby friend of mine who, in an ecstacy of good-will when she saw her first Christmas-tree, clutched me tightly round the neck with, "Everybody are my friend."

One of the Kogmollycs, rejoicing in the name of Wilfrid Laurier, strode on deck with the swing of a cavalryman and signified his willingness to trade. Loading down my hunting-coat with pictures, pipes, tobacco, looking-glasses, needles, files, knives, I climbed over the cliffs with him to his hut. Down on the floor we sat. Wilfrid put his treasures between his knees before him, I sat opposite, and the barter began. "What for this fellow, huh?" and he held up a piece of carved ivory, a little triangular mincing-knife, a fur mat that his wife had made, or the skin of a baby-seal. The first thing he asked for was scented soap, the ring that I was wearing, and my porcupine-quill hat-band which looked good to him; every exchange was accompanied with smiles, each bargain sealed with a handshake.

Wilfrid Laurier is doing his part toward bridging the old chasm of animosity existing between the Eskimo and their next-door neighbours, the Loucheux Indians to the South. Wilfrid, in taking to himself a Loucheux woman to wife, has done what the Seventh Henry of England did when he married Elizabeth of York. Wilfrid's son and heir holds the same place in Northern history as did Henry VIII, who united in himself the claims of the rival Roses of York and Lancaster.

A Kogmollye FamilyA Kogmollye Family

Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko asked us into her hut, where we reclined on fur mats while the whole family, wreathed in smiles, tumbled over themselves to do us honour. One by one they danced for us, stopping to tell their names and to ask ours. "Major Jabussy," "Missa Blown," they got the names all right but applied them promiscuously, and then went into roars of laughter at their blunder. The merriment was infectious. Let no one waste further sympathy over the poor benighted Eskimo of this Canadian North. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is, with perhaps the one exception of an Arab I fraternized with in Chicago at the World's Fair, the most splendid specimen of physical manhood I have ever seen; in physique he stood out in splendid contrast to the Europeans and Americans who were investigating him and his. Arrow-straight and six feet tall, mark him as he swings along the strand. His is the carriage and bearing of the high-bred Tartar. This man has "arrived"; he has an air of assuredness that in the drawing-rooms "Outside" you seldom see.

The Eskimo of the Arctic foreshore are of two tribes: the Kogmollycs to the east of the Mackenzie mouth, the Nunatalmutes, Dwellers in the Hills, or Deermen, originally from the interior to the West, but now for the great part making their home at Herschel Island, eighty miles from the Mackenzie delta, attracted there by the opportunity of working for the American whalers.

One of the striking figures of the North is Oo-vai-oo-ak, headman of the Kogmollycs, living in dignified happiness with his children and his two wives. This second wife was the cause of much comment among us. How did she happen? It was this way. Mr. Oo-vai-oo-ak married Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder when they were both young. Children were born to them, the big seal was plenty, succulent beluga-steaks graced the board, and the years followed one another as smoothly as glacial drift or the strip of walrus-blubber that the last baby drops down its red gullet as a plummet sinks in a well.

One day after a big hunt, as Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak placed before her lord the matutinal mess of whale-skin boiled to that particular rubber-boot consistency which was his taste, she said, "I'm not as young as I was, you entertain much, the household cares are heavy, I'd like you to get another wife to help me with the work." Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak chewed upon the whale-skin and the suggestion of his spouse. Out in his kayak, dodging the icebergs, he turned it over in his mind for half a day; and as the outcome of his cogitations Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger, a rollicking and comely maiden, joined the family circle.

How does it work out? For ten days I sat round their hospitable fire trying hard for the viewpoint of each member of this Farthest North family of fellow-Canadians. I have lived under many roof-trees, but never have I seen a more harmonious family, nor a ménage of nicer adjustment. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder, full of the mellow juice of life, waggish and keen, "quick at the uptak'," as the Scotch say, presides over her household with dignity, never for a moment relaxing her hold on the situation. Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak wisely leaves the interior economy of the household in the hands of the women. He is the quiet, dignified gentleman with an easy manner that courtiers and plenipotentiaries extraordinary might envy. His six feet two inches of height, magnificent physique and superb carriage would mark him out as a man of distinction at any race-course, polo-meet, or political reception where men of the world forgather.

Observing the small, strong, exquisitely-formed hands and feet of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, the almost-white complexions dashed with ruddy scarlet, the easy grace that even the children have, and, above all, the simple dignity which compels respect, one recognizes here an ancestry harking back to Old World culture and distinction.

Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak FamilyRoxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak Family

How does the young wife fit in? No suffragette need break a lance for her, demanding a ballot, dower-rights, and the rest of it. She is happy and busy. All day long she sings and laughs as she prepares the family fish and feast of fat things, she pays deference to her co-wife, romps with the children, and expands like an anemone under the ardent smile of her lord. When the grave question was under discussion regarding the exchange of her pendant bead-and-shell ear-rings for a pair we had brought from the shops of the white men, the two spouses discussed the matter in all its phases earnestly together, as chummy as two school-girls.

The Oo-vai-oo-ak family was a puzzle to the on-lookers, who sought in vain for some one of the three contracting parties to pity. They were all so abundantly happy, each in his or her own way, that Walking Delegate could find no crack here for the opening wedge of discord. If no one is to be pitied, then surely for this new departure in matrimony there must be some one for the virtuous to blame. But why?

Kipling declares, "There's never a law of God or man runs north of fifty-three." The Eskimo has worked out his life-problem independent quite from the so-called civilisations evolved to the south of him. He is his own man.

In the rest of America and in Europe we have formulated a rule of "One man, One wife," allowing an elasticity of the rule in Chicago and elsewhere, so that it may read, "One man, one wife at a time." Are we so sure of results that we are in a position to force our rule upon the Eskimo?

Following the animals that God has ordained shall be their daily bread, in little communal bands they thread the silent places of the North. On the Arctic foreshore we have a people different to all other peoples; here is no inherited wealth, no accumulation of property. A man's skill as a hunter determines his ability to support others, the pursuit of seal is the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now, the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and provide for one wife and three children, leaving on the community a floating sisterhood of unattached females, or is it more sane and generous for the Northland Nimrod to marry as many wives as he can comfortably support, and raise up olive-branches to save from extermination the men of the Kogmollycs, the honourable people of the Nunatalmutes?

The fact that the women prefer a vulgar-fraction of a man, an Eskimo equity in connubial bliss, to spearing walrus on their own account is a significant factor in the problem. And before we piously condemn either the lord or the lady in the case, it is well that we adjust our judgment to the latitude of 68° North and take cognizance of the fact that no seductive "Want Columns" in the daily press here offer a niche whereby unappropriated spinsters may become self-supporting wage-earners as chaste typewriters, school-teachers, Marcel-wavers, or manicurists. To keep the vital spark aglow you must kill walrus and seal in your own proper person or by proxy, for no other talent of body or grace of mind is convertible into that sustaining meat and heating blubber which all must have in order to live.

Economically, then, a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a man to hunt for her. Ethically, it works out beautifully, for each partner to the hymeneal bargain is fat and full of content, happiness fairly oozing out of every oily pore. And is not happiness the goal of human endeavour, whether a man seeks it amid the electric lights, subtle perfumes, and dreamy waltz-music of a New York ballroom, or finds it seated with his community wives on a hummock of ice under the Aurora?

I wouldn't like to picture our cousin the Eskimo woman as being always content with a circulating decimal of a husband instead of a whole unit, nor would such presentment be just. The shield, like most shields, has a reverse. Last winter, at the Mackenzie Delta, one Eskimo bride of seventeen took her fourth consecutive husband. She is dark but comely, but truth will not carry the analogy further. I have yet to see the Eskimo who is like a bunch of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Three winters ago, at Baillie Island, the three-times-widowed one had both her feet amputated as the result of exposure to cold.

In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes. The wedding breakfast consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat). The ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do's bungalow is ten by twelve, one needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as "odours of Edom and offerings Divine."

The festivities began to warm up about midnight. An old chap, with a retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance. His wife, a gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the air being confined to three notes. After each line came the chorus twice repeated,

"Ai, yea, yae! Yae, yae, ya—yae!"

Dancing was kept up to an early hour. Overcome by the air, respiratory and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride, pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.

By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America. The Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known but little of other bands than his own. Yet sometimes they met. There is an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty miles west of Herschel. For years this was a trading rendezvous for four peoples: the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo, and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of Barter Island. To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days brought their most precious medium of exchange,—a peculiar blue jade, one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins. And thereby hangs a tale. Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi's ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.

This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and merriment. In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and courtesies with their half-known kin. The barter consummated, these Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of delight. No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no red-hots nor "fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled and f-five a bag!", but the Arctic concomitants of these,—boiled beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that smells to high heaven. Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island. It is only the counters that are different.

Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the world forgot. The white men who reached the Eskimo land from the south were discoverers following to the sea the three great rivers that disembogue into the Polar Sea: the Mackenzie, Coppermine, Back or Great Fish. The first of these explorers was Samuel Hearne who, in 1771, followed the Coppermine to the Frozen Ocean. For the northern natives their first contact with white explorers was a disastrous one, for at Bloody Falls on the Coppermine Hearne's Indians set upon the only band of Eskimo they saw and almost exterminated them. Sir John Franklin in 1820 was more happy. He says, "The Eskimo danced and tossed their hands in the air to signify their desire for peace; they exhibited no hostile intention; our men saluted them by taking off their hats and making bows." Back, who explored the Back or Great Fish River in 1834, has this tribute of respect and appreciation. He says, "I called out 'Tima' (Peace), and putting their hands on their breasts they also called out 'Tima.' I adopted the John Bull fashion of shaking them each heartily by the hand; patting their breasts, I conveyed to them that the white man and the Eskimo were very good friends. They were good natured, and they understood the rights of property, for one of them having picked up a small piece of pemmican repeatedly asked my permission before he would eat it."

Through all these years, if we except the noble devotion of the Moravian missionaries on the northeast of Canada and the splendid Christianity of such men as Bishop Bompas who sought them from the south, no one visited the Eskimo from the outside with the purpose of doing him good, but rather with the idea of exploiting him. Yet, from the days of Sir John Franklin and Sir Alexander Mackenzie to the recent voyage of Amundsen, the spontaneous tribute of every man who has met them, talked with them, and received their hospitality is the same. The Eskimo is generous, and his word is worth its full face value. What we have done for the Eskimo is a minus quantity; what he has done for us is to point a splendid moral of integrity, manliness, and intrepid courage.

Indians beg and boast, the Eskimo does neither. With no formulated religion or set creed, he has a code of ethics which forbids him to turn the necessity of another to his own advantage. Amundsen's farewell to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, "Goodbye, my dear, dear friends. My best wish for you is that civilisation may never reach you."

The trite saying is that the Loucheux Indians forced the Eskimo north, "keeping them with patient faces turned toward the Pole." But the Eskimo has a better country than the Loucheux has, for it is less rigorous and it produces more food stuffs. The Loucheux at Fort Macpherson knows what it is to experience a temperature of 60 below Fahr., while at the coast it doesn't drop below 55.

The Eskimo has two fields in which to hunt food,—the land and the sea, with fish the great staple; and both fresh and salt-water fish are his, that in the mouths of the great rivers being better than what the Loucheux gets higher up. If the Eskimo wrote copy-book lines, the most insistent one would be, "Lose your matches, throw away your guns, but hang on to your fish-net."

Through the years there was bad blood and mutual distrust between Eskimo and Loucheux. The last pitched battle occurred in the 60's, when of the contestants only two Loucheux escaped and not one Eskimo was killed. The Hudson's Bay Company officer at the close of the fight called together the relatives of the slain Loucheux, upon whom rested the duty of revenge, and out of The Company's stores paid in trade-goods the blood-price of the slain. Since then both peoples have traded at Forts Macpherson and Arctic Red River, maintaining a sort of armed peace, but with no deeds of violence. The Loucheux Indian, his wives, his babies, and his slab-sided dogs suffer from starvation almost every winter. In the whole history of the Eskimo there is not an authenticated story of one of this people having starved to death. Once more we protest against misapplied sympathy. However it may have been in the past, the Eskimo stays on the coast to-day because it is to him "God's country" and not because any hostile Loucheux sends him there.

For the past twenty years the men on the American ships have employed the Eskimo to aid them in the whaling industry, picking up different bands all the way from Bering Sea eastward as they sail in from the Pacific, and depositing each group at their individual beaches as the ships take out their rich spoils of baleen and oil at the close of the season. The Eskimo has proven a valued aid to this industry; how has the intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the Eskimo?

Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of that number. The causes? White men's diseases: scarlet fever, consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling decrease. Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian, measles perhaps more than all. Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.

What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic, so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches. To the credit side of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.

The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the whaling-ships. Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its changed culture characteristics. But as a more far-reaching result of the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo mothers, and, for "floating fathers," marking their escutcheon with every nationality under the sun,—American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Portuguese, Lascar. This state of things startles one, as all miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is different from all others. In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one. There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo "wives" outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this. One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken "outside" by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior waterways south to some mission-school, Anglican or Roman. As a rule, the marriage-contract is "good for this season only," and the wife and children bid their quondam husband and father farewell, smiling at him with neither animosity nor reproach as the boats go out.

What is then the ice-widow's condition? Is she an outcast among her people? No, you must remember that neither the matrimonial standard of Pall-Mall nor Washington, D.C, obtains here. The trade-ticker of the erstwhile wife of the whaler ticks skyward in the hymeneal Lloyd's; she is much sought of her own people. Has she not gained in both kudos and capital? The knowledge which she must have acquired from the white man of whalers' ways of trading is supposed to be of monetary use to her second lord. Moreover, the tent, utensils, and cooking-kit which she shared with her spouse from the ships makes a substantial dower when she again essays Hymen's lottery.

Eskimo women are neither petulant nor morose. With the men they share that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a child which makes such a rare and winning mixture. In moving among the half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall below the standard of the thorough-bred natives. About the morals, the ethical, or mental standards, we venture no comparison, for heredity plays such strange tricks. The whole condition is formative, for the blending of races has been going on scarcely long enough for one to see and tabulate results. The influence of the mother will be longer applied and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in this is their hope. For years we have been repeating the trite, "The sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation;" it remained for Charles Dickens to ask, in his own inimitable way, if the virtues of the mothers do not occasionally descend in direct line.

We respect the Eskimo for many things: for his physical courage as he approaches the bear in single combat, for his uncomplaining endurance of hardships, for his unceasing industry, the cleverness of his handicraft, his unsullied integrity, sunny good-humour, and simple dignity. But, most of all, he claims my respect for the way he brings up his children. "A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure," is a pretty theory, but Charles Lamb reminds us that each child must stand on his own footing as an individual, and be liked or disliked accordingly. In the igloo and the tupik the child has his own accorded place and moves in and out of the home and about his occupations with that hard-to-describe air of assuredness that so distinguishes his father and mother.

The Eskimo child accepts himself as the equal of any created thing, but there is nothing blatant about him, nor is his independence obtrusive. He is born hardy, and lives hardy, trudging along on the march in his place beside the grown-ups. Each Eskimo man and woman is an independent entity, free to go where he pleases. There is no law, no tribunal, no power to limit or command him, but instinctively he observes the rule of doing as he would be done by, and he teaches his child the same Golden Rule. A boy or girl is never considered an encumbrance and is readily even eagerly adopted if his own parents die. The Eskimo child is ushered into the earthly arena with no flourish of trumpets, for his coming is but an incident of the journey if Fate has decreed that he should be born when the family is on the march. The hour's stop for the mid-day meal often sees a new little valiant soldier added to the ranks of the clan and starting his traverse of Arctic trails. If the baby is born while the family is in camp, mother and babe separate themselves from the rest of the family for a month, no one being allowed to look at, much less fuss over, the little stranger.

Naming an Eskimo baby is fraught with significance. If the last grown man who died in the band was one revered, one whose footsteps are worthy to be followed, the name of the departed clansman is given to the newborn child. The belief is that the spirit of the dead man hovers around the community and immediately upon the birth of the child takes possession, a re-incarnation in the baby-body. Withdrawing itself in twelve months' time, the spirit of the ghostly god-father lingers by to influence the character and destiny of the growing child.

We trace a well-known nursery rhyme to the igloo of the Eskimo. The summer-born baby dispenses with clothing for the first six months of its earthly pilgrimage, cuddling its little bare body close to its mother's back under herartikki, or upper garment, which has been made voluminous to accommodate him. But the husky babe who comes when King Wenceslaus looks out on the Feast of Stephen has his limbs popped into a bag of feathers before his mother takes him pick-a-back, or else he is wrapped in a robe of rabbit-skin. So we see that it was an Eskimo mother who first crooned in love and literalness,

"By-o, Baby Bunting,

Daddy's gone a-hunting,

To get a little rabbit-skin,

To wrap his Baby Bunting in."

Mother-love is a platform upon which even ancestral enemies can meet. While I sat cross-legged (and, like cotton, absorbent) last summer enjoying the hospitality of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, to us entered a beautiful-faced Loucheux Indian mother with a pair of twins pendant,—rollicking chaps. The younger Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak dropped on the floor her lord's boot which she had been dutifully biting into shape and jumped up to greet her visitor. There was no mistaking that smile of hospitality. Snatching from the visitor one of her baby boys, the young hostess kissed and cried out to it with an abandon of maternal joy, the culminating point of which was feeding it from her own breast. Thus, in one instance at least, has the ancient feud of Loucheux and Eskimo died.

A baby Eskimo is nursed until it is two years old or older, and learns to smoke and to walk about the same time. The family pipe is laid upon the couch, and papa, mamma, and the children take a solacing whiff as the spirit moves them. These pipes are identical with those used by the Chinese, and hold but half a thimbleful of tobacco, the smoke being inhaled and swallowed with dreamy joy.

The hardihood of Eskimo children is scarcely believable. It is not unusual for children of six years to trudge uncomplainingly for twenty-five miles by the side of their elders; and we came to know a little seven-year old chap who was quite a duck-hunter, and who went out every day alone and seldom came back without at least two brace. At eleven years, with his watertight boots, spear in hand, and coil of line on his back, he takes up the Innuit man's burden, and does it with an air both determined and debonair. If you ask a mother if she does not think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam, and says, "The First Innuits [Eskimo] did so."

These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North, as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was neither Rugby nor "Soccer," but there seemed to be a good deal of tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball, down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft parts of his anatomy. "You're angry, now," said a Major of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. "No, sir," said the under dog, with difficulty protruding his head, "I never get mad when I play."

The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders. It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy. All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a row of "heathen" Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind, for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball diamonds, and "sport" carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and out among the camps of the Eskimo,—"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control."

Farthest North FootballFarthest North Football

What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude imitations of their elders. And they play "house," and "ladies," and "visiting," just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas; but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up in her mother's long dresses.

Two Spectators at the GameTwo Spectators at the Game

When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in spring after the long six months' night, it is the pleased prerogative of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat's-cradle are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the anxiously-waiting Eskimo. The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game, help, too, to hasten its return. When the sun forgets you for six months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever. The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are finished and the new hunts not yet begun. "I'll eat my hat" is an empty threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.

At the Mackenzie delta last year, Roxi the Eskimo came in and told me this sad story. Six weeks before, a party of Eskimo had left Baillie Island with dogs for Kopuk. On their way they found a dead whale and cooked and ate of it; the next day they found another and again indulged. After travelling twenty-five miles, the whole party was taken violently ill, and six adults and two children died, leaving only one little girl alive. There for three days and four nights she remained, alone in the camp of the dead, until by the merest chance a young Eskimo, attending his line of traps from Toker Point, stumbled into the silent camp.

One can faintly glimpse at, but must utterly fail to grasp, what that little girlie suffered mentally. We picture her sleeping, sobbing, waiting in that snow-hut in the silences, surrounded by the still bodies of every one she loved on earth. The sequel of the story is as sad as its first chapter. The band of Eskimo to which the rescuer belonged went in their turn and ate of this stranded whale, with the result that A-von-tul and Ita-chi-uk, two youths of twenty or twenty-one, died, too, and with them a little four-year-old girl. The drift whale must have been poisoned either by ptomaine or by the remnants of the highly compressed tonite, the explosive used by the whale-hunters.

An Eskimo ExhibitAn Eskimo Exhibit

A—Eskimo woman's head-dress of reindeer skin.B—Skin of the baby seal, its shimmering whiteness used by the missionaries to typify the Lamb of God, the word "Lamb" having no meaning to an Eskimo.C—Ornamental skin mat, the work of an Eskimo woman.D—Quiver of arrows used by Eskimo boys.E—Model of Eskimo paddle.F—Skin model of theOomiakor Eskimo woman's boat.G and H—Eskimo pipes of true Oriental type, the bowl holding only half a thimbleful of tobacco.

A—Eskimo woman's head-dress of reindeer skin.

B—Skin of the baby seal, its shimmering whiteness used by the missionaries to typify the Lamb of God, the word "Lamb" having no meaning to an Eskimo.

C—Ornamental skin mat, the work of an Eskimo woman.

D—Quiver of arrows used by Eskimo boys.

E—Model of Eskimo paddle.

F—Skin model of theOomiakor Eskimo woman's boat.

G and H—Eskimo pipes of true Oriental type, the bowl holding only half a thimbleful of tobacco.

As we visit in friendly wise the Eskimo and their children, a feeling of loving admiration and appreciation tightens round our hearts. We had never heard a harsh word bestowed upon a child, no impatient or angry admonition. If a boy gives way to bursts of temper, and this is rare, he is gently taken to task, reproved, and reasoned withafterthe fit of passion is over. Certainly, without churches or teachers or schools, with no educational journals, and no Conventions of Teachers, with their wise papers on the training of "the child," the Eskimo children we saw were better behaved, more independent, gentler, and in the literal sense of the word, more truly "educated" than many of our children are. Instinctively you feel that here are boys and girls being trained admirably for the duties of life, a life that must be lived out in stern conditions.

Perchance, floating down on the Aurora, has come to the Eskimo a glint of the truth that has passed us by, the truth that God's own plan is the family plan, that there are life lessons to learn which, by the very nature of things, the parents alone can impart. Teaching children in the mass has its advantages, but it is the family after all and not the fifty children in a school grade which forms the unit of national greatness.

"I have drunk the Sea's good wine,

Was ever step so light as mine,

Was ever heart so gay?

O, thanks to thee, great Mother, thanks to thee,

For this old joy renewed,

For tightened sinew and clear blood imbued

With sunlight and with sea."

—

A Pagan Hymn

On July 14th, shortly after we leave Arctic Red River, an open scow passes us, floating northward with the stream. It comes in close to the steamer, and we look down and see that every one of its seven occupants is sound asleep. In traversing the Mackenzie, there is no danger of running into ferry-boats or river-locks, if you strike the soft alluvial banks here the current will soon free you and on you go. The voyagers in the scow may sleep in peace.

At Point Separation, 67° 37' N., the Mackenzie delta begins. Where the east and west branches diverge, the width of the river is fifty miles, the channel becoming one maze of islands, battures, and half-hidden sand-bars. The archipelago at the Arctic edge extends a full hundred miles east and west.

The two lob-sticks at Point Separation are full of historic interest. It was here, on the evening of July 3rd, 1826, that Sir John Franklin and Dr. Richardson parted, Franklin to trend west and Richardson east, in their mission of Arctic coastal exploration. Twenty-two years later, Richardson, this time concerned with thePloverRelief Expedition of the lost Franklin, again visited Point Separation. He records,

"July 30th, 1848, Point Separation. In compliance with my

instructions, a case of pemmican was buried at this place. We dug

a pit at a distance of ten feet from the best grown tree on the

Point, and placed in it, along with the pemmican, a bottle containing

a memorandum of the Expedition, and such information respecting

the Company's post as I judged would be useful to the

boat party of the

Plover

should they reach this river. The lower

branches of the tree were lopped off, a part of its trunk denuded

of bark, and a broad arrow painted thereon with red paint. In

performing these duties at this place, I could not but recall to

mind the evening of July 3rd, 1826, passed on the very same

spot with Sir John Franklin. We were then full of joyous anticipation."

As we look at these enduring lobsticks, we recollect that Commander Pullen, with two boats from thePloverin 1849, visited the depot and found the precious pemmican. We leave the Mackenzie proper for the present and enter the easternmost channel of its farthest north tributary, the Peel, and follow this considerable stream thirty-three miles to Fort Macpherson, the most northerly post of the Hudson's Bay Company.

Fort Macpherson has a striking site. To the east, spreads a rolling wooded plain of alluvial origin, containing thousands of lakes. The west aspect gives us an uninterrupted view of the wooded valley of the Peel, backed by a heathery slope with the northern Rockies on the far horizon. Due north, upstarts a peak of the Rockies known locally as Black Mountain—a dark barren spur two thousand feet in height. A winter trail from Macpherson to Arctic Red River cuts no fewer than thirty-three small lakes.

Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo TogsConstable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo Togs

On the beach to meet us are Mounted Police and Eskimo from Herschel Island, Church of England missionaries, traders of the H.B. Co., and Loucheux Indians. But here, as at Arctic Red River, it is that Polar gentleman the Eskimo who claims our attention. Let Sergeant Fitzgerald, R.N.W.M.P., stationed at Herschel Island, speak for the Kogmollye and Nunatalmute Eskimo. In his departmental report this officer states, "I have found these natives honest all the time I have been at Herschel Island. I never heard of a case of stealing among them." He has been there five years. Up here on the Arctic the bare word of an Eskimo is accepted of all men. If he states to an H.B. Co. factor that he has an order from a whaling captain to get certain goods for himself, that unwritten order is honoured though it may date back two or even three years, whereas an order presented by a white man must be in writing and certified.

Why should I enter the lists and take up icy spear for my Eskimo fellow British subject? Because he is so very worth while. Because through the years the world has conspired to libel him. Because within a decade or two he will have passed utterly off the map. And because it is so very much pleasanter to write appreciations than epitaphs. This man wins you at once by his frank directness; his bearing is that of a fearless child. The Indian, like Ossian's hero, scorns to tell his name, and on occasion will dodge the camera, but the Eskimo likes to be photographed. Young and old, they press to our side like friendly boys and girls round a "chummy" teacher, volunteering information of age, sex, and previous condition, with all sorts of covetable bits of intimate family history. You love the Eskimo because he is kind to his dogs and gentle to little children. His entire willingness to take you on credit is contagious, trust begets trust even in walrus latitudes.

Two Wise OnesTwo Wise Ones

The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a clever chap. With no school-teacher, no school, no modern appliances, he does many things and does each admirably. He is a hunter by land and sea, a fearless traveller, a furrier, a fisherman, a carver, a metal-smith, and he takes in every task the pride of a master mechanic,—"the gods see everywhere." The duties of the man and the woman are well-defined. The head of the Kogmollyc household is the blood-and-flesh-winner, the navigator of the kayak, the driver of dogs. It is he who builds the houses on the march, and when occasion requires he does not consider itinfra dig.to get the breakfast or mind the baby. The wife dresses the skins, prepares the food, makes all the clothing, and the lord of the igloo demands from her the same perfect work that he turns out himself.

Back to Index Next