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ANTHROPOLOGICAL PAPERS
OP THE
American Museum of Natural History. .
Vol. XIV, Part I.
THE STEFANSSON-ANDERSON ARCTIC EXPEDITION
OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM: PRELIMINARY
ETHNOLOGICAL REPORT.
BY
V1LHJALMUR STEFANSSON
NEW YORK:
Published by Order of the Trustees.
1914.
American Museum of Natural History.
PUBLICATIONS IN ANTHROPOLOGY.
In 1906 the present series of Anthropological Papers was authorized by the Trustees of the Museum to record the results of research conducted by the Depart- ment of Anthropology. The series comprises octavo volumes of about 350 pages each, issued in parts at irregular intervals. Previous to 1906 articles devoted to anthropological subjects appeared as occasional papers in the Bulletin and also in the Memoir series of the Museum. A complete list of these publications with prices will be furnished when requested. All communications should be addressed to the Librarian of the Museum.
The recent issues are as follows: —
Volume X.
I. Chipewyan Texts. By Pliny Earle Goddard. Pp. 1-66. 1912. Price, $1.00.
II. Analysis of Cold Lake Dialect, Chipewyan. By Pliny Earle Goddard. Pp. 67-170, and 249 text figures. 1912. Price, $1.00.
III. Chipewyan Tales. By Robert H. Lowie. Pp. 171-200. 1912. Price, $.25.
IV. (In preparation) .
Volume XI.
I. Societies and Ceremonial Associations in the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota. By Clark Wissler. Pp. 1-99, and 7 text figures. 1912. Price, $.50.
II. Dance Associations of the Eastern Dakota. By Robert H. Lowie. Pp. 101-142. 1913. Price, $.25.
III. Societies of the Crow, Hidatsa and Mandan Indians. By Robert H. Lowie. Pp. 143-358 and 18 text figures. 1913. Price, $2.00.
IV. Societies and Dance Associations of the Blackfoot Indians. By Clark Wissler. . Pp. 363-460, and 29 text figures. 1913. Price, $1.00.
V. Dancing Societies of the Sarsi Indians. By Pliny Earle Goddard. Pp. 461^74. 1914. Price, $.25.
VI. Political Organization, Cults, and Ceremonies of the Plains-Ojibway and Plains-Cree Indians. By Alanson Skinner. Pp. 475-542, and 10 text figures. 1914. Price, $.75. VII. (In press.)
{Continued on 3d p. of cover.)
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PAPERS
OF THE
American Museum of Natural History.
Vol. XIV, Part I.
THE STEFANSSON-ANDERSON ARCTIC EXPEDITION
OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM: PRELIMINARY
ETHNOLOGICAL REPORT,
BY V1LHJALMUR STEFANSSON
NEW YORK:
Published by Order of the Trustees.
1914.
JMonogtapti
This paper is an advance section of a volume to be devoted to the obser- vations of Mr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Dr. Rudolph M. Anderson upon the Eskimo of Coronation Gulf and westward. It is the substance of Mr. Stefansson 's report to Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History, submitted June, 1913. Upon the completion of this volume, a permanent title page with table of contents and index will be provided.
As Mr. Stefansson is now on another expedition for the Canadian Govern- ment, he was unable to see the manuscript in its final form, or to select the illustrations; therefore for all arrangements and selections the Editor is alone responsible.
The Editor wishes to thank the Macmillan Company for permission to use the maps, illustrations, and other data in Mr. Stefansson's, "My Life ' with the Eskimo"; also, for Figs. 66 and 90, from plates in the Museum Journal originally published by permission of the above.
PRELIMINARY ETHNOLOGICAL REPORT. By Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION ....
THE CORONATION GULF ESKIMO
Range and Distribution
Climatic Conditions
Driftwood
Trees and Vegetation
Fuel ....
Food .... Vegetable Foods Animal Foods
Cooking and Handling Food
Dwellings and Furniture
Household Utensils
Methods op Travel
Hunting Implements and Weapons
Implements and Tools
Clothing ....
Ornaments and Charms
Hairdressing
Religion ....
General Conditions of Life THE MACKENZIE ESKIMO .
Food
Clothing
Work in Skins MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
The Mackenzie Delta, 1906-7
The Colville River, 1908-9
Cape Parry, 1909-10 .
Coronation Gulf and Victoria^Islan
The Horton River, 1911-12
To Point Barrow, 1912
d,'^19 10-11
Page.
7
33
33
40
42
44
45
47
47
48
59
61
68
78
84
98
114
121
121
126
129
133
133
139
141
151
151
196
211
224
305
379
Anthropological Papers Ann riant Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV.
ILLUSTRATIONS.
Text Figures.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 1-1. I.').
in.
17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 27.. 26. 27. 2s. 20.
30. 31. 32.
33. 34.
36. 37. 38.
Probes for Seal Holes, made of Bone, Coronation Gulf Seal Indicator of Ivory, Prince Albert Sound, Victoria Island Seal Indicator of Ivory, Coronation Gulf .....
Copper Probe for Seal Holes, Prince Albert Sound. Victoria Island . Pull for Cord used in Hauling Seals, Prince Albert Sound, Victoria Island Seal Harpoon from Mouth of the Coppermine, Coronation Gulf . Set of Seal Wound Pegs, Coronation Gulf .....
Stone Lamps ..........
Stone Kettle from about three miles off Parry Peninsula
Large Lamp and a Kettle from Prince Albert Sound. Victoria Island
Models of Vessels, Coronation Gulf ......
Model of a Horn Spoon, Coronation Gulf ....
Wooden Pail with Bail of Horn and Copper River-. Coronation Gulf
Small Spoon of Musk-ox Horn. Coronation Gulf
Fork made from the Metacarpal Bone of a Musk-ox, Coronation Gulf
Horn Spoon with Bone Handle. Coronation Gulf
Horn Dipper, Coronation Gulf .......
Models of Buckets. Coronation Gulf ......
Hag for Fire-making' Implements, Coronation Gulf
Bag of Moss for Tinder, Coronation Gulf ....
Frame for drying Clothe-. Coronation Gulf ....
Blubber Pounder of Musk-ox Horn, Coronation Gulf
Dipper of Musk-ox Horn. Coronation Gulf ....
Wooden Ware, Coronation Gulf .......
Wooden Snow Goggles, Coronation Gulf .....
Cupper Fish Hook and Reel. Coronation Gulf ....
Three-pronged Fish Spear with Copper Prongs, Coronation Gulf . Copper Fish Hook and Line. Coronation Gulf ....
Copper Pole Hook. From the Pallirmiut, mouth of Rae River. Corona
tion Gulf ...........
Bow, Prince Albert Sound, Victoria Island ....
Bow Case, Prince Albert Sound, Victoria Island
Types of Copper Arrow-Heads from the same Quiver as Fig. 34, Corona
tion Gulf
Bone and Ivory Arrow-Heads from the same Quiver, Kent Peninsula Iron and Bone Arrow-Heads from the same Quiver as Fig. 32, Corona
tion Gulf ...........
Copper Arrow-Heads selected from a single Quiver, Prince Albert
Sound. Victoria Island
Forms of Metal Arrow Points .......
Splices for Arrow-Shafts, Prince Albert Sound, Coronation Gulf . Form of Splice used in Spear and Harpoon Shafts, Coronation Gulf
1914.
The Slejdnsson-Anderson Expedition.
39. Contents of the Tool Bag attached to Bow Case. 60-6939, Kent Renin sula ............
10. Shaft Straightener, Coronation Gulf ......
41. Feathers for Arrows and Bag for the same, Kent Peninsula
42. Bone Thumb Guards, Kent Peninsula .....
43. General Form of the Ulu . . . . . .
44. Ulus with Iron Blades ........
45. General Form of Knife found West of Coronation Gulf
46. Copper Knife with Caribou Antler Handle, Mouth of Rae River, Corona
tion Gulf
47. Steel Knife with a Bone Handle .......
18. Copper Knife with Bone Handle, Basil Hall Bay, Coronation Gulf
49. Steel Knives ..........
50. Crooked Blade Knives, Coronation Gulf .....
51. Crooked Blade Knives of Iron, Coronation Gulf
52. Tool Bag and Contents, Coronation Gulf .....
53. Knife Sharpener, Bone Handle with Steel Insert, Coronation Gulf
54. Small Knives or Graver's Tools, Coronation Gulf
~)^. Saws, Coronation Gulf ........
56. Adze Head, Iron Blade, Antler Haft, Pallirmiut .
57. Whetstone from Coronation Gulf ......
58. Piece of Worked Copper from Rae River .....
59. Wooden Snow Shovel, Edged with Ivory, Coronation Gulf
60. Bowdrill Set from Coronation Gulf ......
61. Snow Knives made of Bone, Coronation Gulf ....
62. Bone Pin from Prince Albert Sound, Victoria Island
63. Bone Pegs from Coronation Gulf ......
64. A Sinew Stretcher, Knot Opener, and Awl from Coronation Gulf .
65. Decorated Toggles from Prince Albert Sound. Victoria Island
lit'. Prince Albert Sound Man in Winter Costume; (b) Victoria Island Cos tume .........
(57. Group of Prince Albert Sound Men
68. Woman's Boots, Coronation Gulf
69. Shoe of Sealskin, Coronation Gulf
70. Pattern for the Hood to a Woman's Coat , Fig. 71 .
71. Patterns for Front and Back of Woman's Coat, Coronation Gulf
72. Sleeve Pattern, upper and under, for Fig. 71
73. Skin Scraper with Copper Blade and Bear Tooth Toggle, Coronation
Gulf
74. Skin Scrapers from Coronation Gulf .....
75. Awls of Bone from Coronation Gulf .....
76. Steel Knife with Bone Handle, Coronation Gulf
77. Scissors with Bone Handles and Iron Blades, Coronation Gulf
78. Needle Case and Attachments, Coronation Gulf
79. Tool for working Sinew, Coronation Gulf
80. Guard made of Bone, Coronation Gulf
81. Copper Needles from Victoria Island .
82. Cup-and-Ball Game, Coronation Gulf
Page.
94 95 95 97 98 99
100 100 101) 101 104 105 106 107 107 107 108 108 108 109 109 110 110 110 111 111
114 115 116
116 US 118 119
120 120 122
1 22 ! '_"_' 123 li':;
1 23 L23 124
Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV
83. Needle Cases, Combs, and a Coat Ornament
84. Cup-and-Ball Game, Coronation Gulf ....
85. Drum from Twenty Miles west of Gray's Bay, Coronation Gulf
86. Steel Knife, Mackenzie River ......
87. Plan of a House
88. Plan of a House at Shingle Point .....
89. Ruins at Point Atkinson .......
90. Ancient Stone House, Simpson Bay, Victoria Island .
91. Kitchens of Summer Camps, East Edge of Mackenzie Delta .
92. Tent Frame, Langton Bay .......
93. Plan of a Caribou Drive, Point Barrow ....
94. The Caribou Snare
95. The Hoop Game, Upper Colville River ....
Page. 124 125 125 134 158 159 298 298 299 299 385 386 391
Maps.
Map showing the Distribution of the Eskimo between Point Barrow
and Cape Bathurst 11
Map showing the Distribution of the Coronation Gulf Eskimo . . 32
INTRODUCTION .
The district traversed by either Dr. Anderson or myself, singly or both of us together, between our reaching the mouth of the Mackenzie River in July, 1908, to our leaving the Arctic in September, 1912, is chiefly a stretch of the north shore of the North American continent, although we penetrated some distance inland on the Colville River in Alaska, in the Endicott Mountains on the Horton River, and on the Coppermine. We also visited Victoria Island and a score or more of the islands of Coronation Gulf; Banks Island we saw only from shipboard. In Alaska the western- most point visited by sled in winter by members of our expedition was Icy Cape although by water we also visited Cape Lisburne and Point Hope.1
The northern portion of Alaska is in general a low alluvial plain, rolling in some places, as level as a Dakota prairie in others, and everywhere covered by grass and moss in summer. There are many rivers, mostly sluggish, and therefore of an apparent size greater than justified by the volume of water they discharge. None of these, with the exception of a portion of the Col- ville, are represented on published maps with even an approximation of correctness, and some of the largest, such as the one falling into the foot of Smith Bay are unindicated on any chart known to me. The coastal plain is triangular in shape with its apex at Point Barrow and its base formed by a mountain range extending approximately straight from the point where it meets the sea at Cape Lisburne, Alaska, to where it again approaches within twenty miles of the ocean at the international boundary line on meridian 141 west. Just east of the Colville River we hunted nearly to the foothills of this mountain range and judge the distance from it to the sea to be about one hundred miles. At Point Barrow the mountains are probably nearly two hundred miles inland.
In general, all the larger rivers and even some of the smaller ones are well supplied with willow for fuel. On the Ikpikpuk, for instance, and on the Colville, these willows grow to a diameter of three or four inches and to a height of over twenty feet in some cases. Willows of this size, however, are found only at a distance of twenty or more miles from the coast. Appar- ently the cool winds that blow off the ice-filled ocean in summer tend to
1 A full narrative of our journeys lias been published in "My Life with the Eskimo." This report, therefore, gives more particularly the substance of our anthropological observa- tions, but does not duplicate much of the concrete matter in the book, it being taken for granted that the reader is already familiar with the contents of that volume. Most of the important photographs were also reproduced in the book, making them unnecessary in this report.
8 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
dwarf tree growth. As most of these rivers are also well stocked with fish and frequented in winter by ptarmigan their shrub-clad valleys were the homes of large bands of Eskimo until the disappearance of the caribou, to which the fish and ptarmigan are only of secondary importance, drove to the coast the small remnant of these people that had not been exterminated by measles and other contagious diseases brought in by white men.
The country itself being a low plain, it follows that the coast line is low, although there are in some places sea cliffs to the height of thirty or forty feet. The villages were strung along this coast and were built in locations determined by the food-gathering habits of the people. Between Point Hope and Point Barrow, the bowhead whale was of paramount importance. A village might therefore be located almost anywhere where the ice condi- tions in spring allowed the whales to approach within five miles or less from shore in an ordinary year. Next to the whale, the seal was the most important item at Point Barrow and even farther south, although the walrus increased in importance west of Icy Cape.
Everywhere along this coast were strewn huge quantities of driftwood, derived probably in the main from the Yukon River, at least on the coast section west of Point Barrow. East of Point Barrow, I am inclined to think the Mackenzie River is to be credited with the larger amount of drift- wood. There is a fairly steady current from the southwest along the coast to Point Barrow and this would bring wood even against the prevailing northeasterly winds, but at Point Barrow this current continues its course off shore and would therefore be ineffective in bringing wood to regions farther east. On the other hand, the prevailing winds between Flaxman Island and Point Barrow are northeasterly and these would bring driftwood as far up as the apex of Alaska.
In former times, villages were not located with any reference to the amount of driftwood, for wood was not used to any extent in winter for fuel, but only seal oil, which furnishes a much more satisfactory method of heating houses of the Eskimo style than any that could have been devised in the days antedating the importation of white men's stoves. When these stoves began to come in, however, and when the Eskimo began to live in flimsy frame houses into which the cold penetrated by induction, driftwood had to be used for fuel and the apparently inexhaustible deposits of driftwood gathered by the winds and tides, for centuries disappeared in a few years. Now the entire coast from Point Hope to Point Barrow may be considered devoid of wood that can be used for fuel, and as the modern houses are unsuited for heating with oil, the people are facing a serious fuel problem of which the local coal mines are the only solution, although an unsatis- factory one, and the supply of coal will therefore in the future have a con-
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 9
siderable influence on the locations of the habitations of the people. The two chief coal mines are at Cape Lisburne and Wainwright Inlet, although coal is found in other places.
It appears that east of Point Barrow, on the way to Herschel Island, the food supply has always been more uncertain than it was on the coast west of Point Barrow. We found no indication that there had been large perma- nent villages anywhere on this stretch, except on the Jones Islands just east of the Colville Delta. One hundred years ago there was, however, no doubt, a fair sprinkling of houses in groups of two or three or half a dozen, probably throughout all these four hundred miles of coast. We know that within the memory of the oldest men now living, it was common that trading- parties from either Herschel Island on the east or Point Barrow on the west would be overtaken by winter somewhere between these two locations and would build their houses and stay until spring at any one of a dozen or more places considered suitable for winter.
At Barter Island, about one hundred twenty-five miles east of the ( 01- ville, was one of the largest trading rendezvous and the indications are that every now and then some of the traders spent the winter there as well as the summer. Another large trading center was Nirlik, on one of the alluvial islands of the western part of the Colville Delta; but although there were hundreds gathered there in summer, no one seems ever to have wintered in that vicinity; in fact, the region is self -evidently unsuited to a hunting population in winter.
Going upstream, the first recognized wintering place is Itkilikpa, or as the name implies, the mouth of the river Itkillik, which empties from the east into the head of the Colville Delta. This river rises in the mountains to the south and is said to be the only branch of the Colville upon which coniferous trees are found and that only near its head. The mouth of this river was the site of our camp for a portion of the winter 1908-1909. There is excellent fishing in the autumn and several varieties of fish can be caught there in some number all winter. Now that the caribou are no longer numerous in the country, this is about the only place on the Colville which seems to have food supplies enough to make wintering safe.
While the number of recognized wintering places on the Colville and its tributaries is very large, the people of the Colville above the mouth of the Itkillik are by themselves considered to form three groups: the Kagmalir- miut who centered about the Kagmallik branch of the Colville; Killinermiut of the Killirk River; and the Kanianermiut, who, as the name signifies, occupied the headwaters of the Colville. Occasionally also, you hear the name Kupigmiut, the people of the Kupik, which is the name applied to the lower section of the Colville River above the Delta. The reason whv this
10 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
name has not the same recognized standing as the other three as a designa- tion of a group of people, seems to be that the population of the Kupik section of the river was more transient than that of the other sections and consisted, in fact, of people all of whom would fall under one of the other three designations.
The people of the Upper Colville associated on terms of intimacy with the Noatagmiut of the Upper Noatak and the Napaktogmiut and other groups of the Lower Noatak River as well as the Kuvugmiut of the Upper Kuvuk, and a good many families of the Colville people went annually to the trading rendezvous in Kotzebue Sound where they obtained Asiatic and other wares. North of the Kanianermiut was what seems to have been the largest of all the inland tribes, the Oturkagmiut, who occupied the country between the head of the Colville and the seacoast at Icy Cape and Wain- wright Inlet. Some members of this tribe were recognized as land dwellers and are said to have been the only people of Alaska who understood the use of heather for fuel in winter, and were therefore independent alike of the coast where the sea dwellers secured blubber or wood for fuel and of the inland valleys where the land dwellers got the willow they burned in open fireplaces. The}' obtained their seal oil for food and light as well as other coast products by purchase in exchange for caribou skins and Kotzebue Sound wares chiefly, while others went down to the coast each spring to do their own seal, Avalrus, and whale hunting. Others still, while recognized as members of the Oturkagmiut tribe, seem to have been fairly constant inhabitants of the coast.
Circled in by these larger tribes, there were near the head of the Colville River, the Nunatagmiut, a small group that seems to be now nearly extinct. For some reason the white men and coastal Eskimo alike, have seized upon the name of this tribe as the name for all the inland dwellers. I have always been curious to find one of them, but have never succeeded in doing so, although I have been told by some old Oturkagmiut men that there are three persons still living to their knowledge who belong to this group.
It seems fairly clear that the name of this smallest of all these inland tribes became recognized on the coast as the name for them all because they were centrally located. From the point of view of the Barrow people, the Nunatagmiut were south of the Oturkagmiut; looked at from Kotzebue Sound, they were north of the Noatagmiut; from the point of view of the traders who met in the Colville Delta, the Nunatagmiut were farther up- stream next beyond the Kanianermiut. The people of the north coast knew the name of no tribe farther south than the Nunatagmiut. The people of Kotzebue Sound knew the name of no tribe farther north than the Nunatagmiut. For each of these sections of the country, therefore. Nuna-
Fold-out Placeholder
rhis fold-out is being digitized, and will be inserted at a
future date.
I
I
191-4.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 11
tagmiut became the indefinite name that covered the people next beyond those who were personally known to the speakers, and thus the word ob- tained a comprehensiveness of meaning on the seacoast which it never had among the inlanders themselves. Now you find it in census reports and works of ethnology. In the summer of 1912 a group of old men in consulta- tion at Cape Smythe agreed on the following list of peoples who formerly inhabited the coast between Point Barrow and Point Hope. Most of the groups are still represented by some living individuals : —
1. Nuvugmiut (Pt. Barrow).
2. Utkiavigmiut (Cape Smythe).
3. Pinasugrugmiut (Beta Point, Belcher, and Pt. Franklin).
4. Atanirk (Atanirrmiut).
5. Sinarumiut or Uallinergmiut.
6. Nunariagmiut.
7. Kugmiut (Kungmiut) (Wainwright Inlet).
8. Kilavitarvingmiut.
9. Miliktarvik (Ugrug sealing place).
10. Nokolik.
11. Kaiakseravigmiut (Icy Cape, the village used to be on the main- land, now it is on sandspit).
12. Akearonat.
13. Uivarrmiut.
14. Tigiragmiut (Pt. Hope).
East of Point Barrow all the way to Herschel Island, there seem to have been in recent times no groups of people that had their separate names, although of course each would be designated any year by the name of the place where they happened to be encamped. This, however, is different from the names of tribes cited above, for these applied irrespective of where a man might happen to be at any particular time.
Roughly, the limits of the Mackenzie Eskimo are, Herschel Island on the west and Cape Bathurst or the Baillie Islands on the east. There were, however, settlements of these same people as far west as the international boundary line or a little beyond, but although I have known of men who lived in these settlements several years at a time, they do not seem to have had a really permanent character.
East of Cape Bathurst there was also a continuous line of settlements as far as Langton Bay probably up to 1840 and a little after. It is true that from an archaeological point of view, it seems fairly clear that the coast for- more than one hundred miles farther east still, was occupied by people of a cultural affinity with the Mackenzie group; but the feeling of the Baillie
12 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,,
Islanders themselves is, that the people farther east than Langton Bay were not of their kind.
At Hersehel Island the mountains approach within twenty or so miles of the coast and rolling low foothills come nearly down to the sea. The island itself is of irregular shape; its greatest diameters, if no reference be taken to the sandspits, are about eight by five miles. The island is about five hundred feet above sea level at its highest, is tundra-covered and of a clearly alluvial structure, for huge trees similar to those found as driftwood on the beach today may be seen sticking out of the seaward precipices of the island three hundred feet above tide level. The land at the foot of the bay between Hersehel Island and Cape Point is low but there are high bluffs in many places from Cape Point east to Escape Reef, which may be considered the western limit of the Mackenzie Delta proper, although in ordinary conditions of weather the sea water is fresh at King Point, twenty- five miles farther to the west. The delta of the Mackenzie is much like the deltas of the other great rivers of the world. It is over one hundred miles wide, filled with a multitude of low willow-covered and driftwood- strewn islands between which channels of unknown number flow northward into the polar sea. The huge volume of fresh water in the spring (the river usually opens between the fifth and twenty-fifth of May) not only melts away the sea ice, but also by its current drives away any that happens to be floating about, so that none but the strongest ones from seaward can fill the immediate vicinity of the delta with ice. The volume of fresh water is so large, that the whaling ships in passing outside of Mackenzie Bay take water for cooking and drinking purposes that has not a taint of brackishness even where land is not in sight from the masthead.
There are everywhere in the neighborhood of the Mackenzie, windrows of driftwood, thousands of cords to the mile in many places, and the most northerly growing spruce are found near the center of the delta at the limit of tidewater or even north of it. In this connection, it is interesting to point out that the tide proper ranges less than a foot and is scarcely ever noted by the natives, but a strong westerly wind will cause a "storm tide" that rises some six feet above the low level, produced by an easterly gale. At such places as Hersehel Island it is often possible to foretell many hours in advance the coming of a west wind by the rise of the sea.
One hundred years ago the territory definitely possessed by the Eskimo, as opposed to the Loucheux Indians, may be considered to have extended to the head of the Mackenzie Delta; in the vicinity of the Eskimo Lakes, it extended somewhat farther south. Had white men not come in just when they did, it seems likely that the Eskimo woidd have spread farther up- stream for their relation to the Indians was an aggressive one. Their own
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 13
memory as well as that of the Indians established the fact, which is also confirmed by the records of Franklin's and Richardson's expeditions, that they used to make armed expeditions as far upstream as two hundred miles beyond the head of the delta. These expeditions seem to have been for the purpose of obtaining stone for knives and missile points from the deposits at the foot of the cliffs and the Fort Good Hope ramparts. Even after one hundred years the Good Hope Indians are in such fear of the Eskimo that they do not dare to build fires or to camp openly on the Mackenzie River in the summer time, except immediately around the nail- ing- posts, and in the old days they seem to have entirely abandoned the river at the time the Eskimo were expected, not returning to it until the time the Eskimo were known to have returned to the sea.
It seems there were semi-friendly relations occasionally with the Lou- cheux Indians near the mouth of the Peel River. There are traditions of the employment of a trading method, consisting of suspending in trees or leaving in a pile on the ground, articles for the Indians to take. The Indians were expected to and did in fact, leave other articles in exchange. Parties also came into actual contact occasionally, but only for a few hours at a time, for neither trusted the other and even after the establish- ment of the Hudson Bay Company at Fort McPherson, there were cases when the suspended hostility of these meetings broke into open feud and killings took place. Between the Loucheux and the Eskimo there is no tradition of anything like formal hostile expeditions of one against the other, but as noted above we have definite accounts of organized expeditions into the country of the Good Hope Indians, not real war expeditions it is true, but still expeditions made in force with a show of arms and with no secrecy. The Indians of Good Hope tell that the Eskimo used to come in singing and shouting boatloads. They do not appear to have made incur- sions into the forest in search of Indians to kill or to plunder. On the other hand, they were so confident in their numbers and strength that they evi- dently feared no attack.
East of the Mackenzie River all the way to the Anderson, the country is in general low and flat with few or no exposures of rock in situ. In the Anderson, spruce trees come within a few miles of the ocean and on the Eskimo Lakes they extend up to the middle of the three lakes. If a line be drawn from the southern end of the Eskimo Lakes east to the Anderson River about ten miles from the sea, it will approximately mark the northern boundary of the forest north of which there is low and level tundra inter- spersed with many lakes. All this was in former years excellent caribou country and until the coming of white men, they were killed in large numbers both inland and on the seacoast as well as on Richard Island.
14 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV
Richard Island on the eastern edge of the Mackenzie Delta is apparently of alluvial formation and is probably of about the same height as Herschel Island although of a much greater area. This is the only island of the delta proper north of the tree line that seems to have been permanently occupied, although parties engaged in egging and fowling frequented the low islands to the west of Richard Island in early and middle summer. The settlements on Richard Island were chiefly on the east coast, facing the mainland and the main occupation as well as that of the mainland people opposite, was the hunting of the beluga, or white whale.
Seals were not hunted to any great extent by any of the people between Escape Reef on the west and Warren Point on the east. The first village of real sealers was that at Point Atkinson, called Nuvorak. A few white whales were occasionally caught in summer and sometimes a single family or two might go west to Kittegaryuit and join in a white whale hunt, al- though these seem to have been rare occurrences. The Nuvorugmiut hunted caribou towards the foot of Liverpool Bay and also spent part of the autumn there annually in fishing.
( ape Bathurst is a low peninsula nearly cut in two (much more nearly than the charts indicate) by Harrowby Bay. On the eastern or Franklin Bay side, the coast line of the peninsula begins to rise higher after one goes half way to the mouth of Horton River and the sea face rises into steep cliffs that are known as the Smoking Mountains, from the fact that smoke issues from them in various places apparently on account of the existence, deep below the surface, of deposits of coal that have been afire since imme- morial times.
Driftwood is very scarce between the tip of Cape Bathurst and Horton River on account of the absence of suitable beaches for it to lodge upon. Horton River has a much smaller delta than would be expected from the size of the river, which we found to be as large as the Coppermine in appear- ance, although the volume of water it discharges may not be so great. Upon exploration during the winter of 1910-1911, we found this river to come from the southeast. Crossing over from the northeast end of Great Bear Lake from the mouth of Dease River, we took a course northwest true and struck the Horton River some forty miles from the lake. At that point it is already a stream of considerable size coming from the east, and it is likely it may head not far from Dismal Lake and the length of it from its head to the sea is therefore probably over five hundred miles, as measured along the curves of the river. The main branch apparently rises in Barren Ground and flows through a treeless country for one hundred miles or more, but from a point some forty-five miles northwest of the northeast corner of Great Bear Lake, to a point about half way between the mouth of Horton
1914.J The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 15
River and Langton Bay, and about ten miles from the seacoast, there is a continuous fringe of trees which in most places are confined to the valley, although in some parts they spread up over the high land as much as ten miles east of the river. Some thirty miles south of Langton Bay the forest seems to be continuous; west from the Coppermine River to the Anderson, but further south again where the land gets higher, a district of Barren Ground separates these two rivers.
The Indians of Great Bear Lake seem to have regularly hunted north to the headwaters of Horton River, and those of the vicinity of Fort Good Hope hunted on its lower course, and since the days of the Hudson Bay Company, at least, made journeys across the river into the Barren Ground in search of musk-oxen. We have found ancient Indian lodges, the remains of their hunting campfires, within fifteen or twenty miles south of Langton Bay.
In this district the Eskimo occupation seems to have somewhat over- lapped that of the Indian, principally in the way in which a similar over- lapping takes place in the Coppermine region; for the country that is occupied by the Eskimo in summer during the caribou hunting, will be vacated by them in winter while they are sealing off on the sea ice and this gives the Indians a chance to make a winter hunting ground of the districts occupied by the Eskimo in summer. An old woman, Panigiok, who was born at Langton Bay and is still living at the Bell Island told us that there used to be Eskimo families living on the Barren Ground some fifteen miles southeast of Langton Bay near Horton River who never came to the sea except on short visits and who purchased seal blubber from the coast people, exactly as the inlanders of Alaska did at such places as Point Barrow.
There was semi-friendly contact, apparently with considerable fre- quency, between the various groups of Eskimo that hunted to the foot of Liverpool Bay and the head of Anderson River, and the Hare or other Indians of Fort Good Hope. Murders seem to have been frequent on both sides and captives were carried off by both, but occasionally marriages were voluntarily arranged, the woman going to the people of her husband. This is said to have' taken place with about equal frequency on both sides. At present there is no Indian woman living with the Eskimo, but one Eskimo woman to my knowledge is now with the Indians, having been transferred to them by her foster parents while she was a child.
East of Horton River begin the Melville Mountains which extend thence eastward parallel to the coast until they break up into isolated hills and disappear in the generally high land towards the west side of Coronation Gulf. From Langton Bay west for fifty miles or so, they have the character
16 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
of a coast range which bars the way to the ocean against the Horton River which, through this stretch, has to flow about parallel to the coast until an opening to the sea is secured at the west end of the mountains. Two miles or so west of Langton Bay, it is only perhaps a mile and a half from the ocean to the top of the mountains. From here east for some distance they have the character of the seaward face of a plateau; looked at from seaward you have mountains of a height of about 1500 feet, but when you climb to the top of them you find yourself on a plateau that slopes almost impercep- tibly southward to the Horton River ten or fifteen miles away.
The Parry Peninsula is high and rocky towards its north end and so cut up by fjords that it comes near being a group of islands instead of a peninsula. There is in fact more than one place where a stone can be thrown from the waters of one fjord to those of the next. The hills which form the north end of the peninsula rise to a height of two or three hundred feet, and from their tops in clear weather one can plainly see Banks Island sixty miles to the north, for the two thousand feet high hills immediately back of Nelson Head are well above the horizon.
The Booth Islands lie six or eight miles off shore west from the tip of ( ape Parry and consist of two small islands and some isolated rocks. Both these islands as well as the mainland of Cape Parry were in former times the site of numerous villages of people who no doubt lived chiefly by sealing, but also partly by bowhead whaling. These were too, no doubt, the occupations of the people all around the shore of Franklin Bay as is shown by the fact that bones of whales abound on the beach near the village sites and have been used in the construction of many of the houses.
Near the foot of ( ape Parry on the Franklin Bay side are numerous good fishing places, both in the sea and in the lakes that form a chain towards Darnley Bay. Through these lakes runs a river, the mouth of which is back of Point Stivens. In early summer this river with its system of lakes, furnishes a portage route for a boat drawing not more than a foot or eighteen inches of water to within about half a mile of Darnley Bay, while the total distance from Langton Bay to Darnley Bay is about twenty miles. Al- though the tip of Cape Parry is high and roeky, as before stated, the neck of the peninsula along the foot of the Melville Mountains is in general low and flat, though there are some groups of rolling hills. In one place, surrounded by large areas of level marsh tundra, is a volcano-shaped hill, about one hun- dred fifty feet high with a small lake in its crater.
The bottom of Darnley Bay has never been mapped. We found two hitherto unnamed rivers of considerable size flowing one into its southeast corner and the other into its east side some ten miles farther north. From the Bay south, it is but a day's journey to trees on a big branch of the Horton
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 17
River that heads in some lakes in the vicinity. Cape Lyon is a rocky prom- ontory where the coast turns a sharper angle than I have seen anywhere else. There is a change in direction of the coast line of more than a right angle in the space of half a dozen yards. Here there is the most westerly gull rookery that I have seen, although 1 suspect there may be some in the rocks found near the coast of Cape Parry, but which I have never had occa- sion to pass in the summer time. From here on east to ( 'oronation Gulf, as well as in parts of Victoria Island, these rookeries arc found at greater or less distances apart wherever there are suitable cliffs. They are not so extensive in any place, however, that they can ever have formed a con- siderable part of the food supply of the people at the time the coast was inhabited. The species found here is chiefly the glaucous gull.
On our way eastward from Cape Lyon we made a discovery of some possible importance to future navigators; we found an apparently excellent ship harbor in the tip of Point Pierce. Point Pierce is a high promontory, its two hundred foot cliff of stratified limestone being the highest and most picturesque that I have seen on the entire Arctic coast. Just east of this cliff, between it and a sandspit which connects a scries of granitic knolls, there is a harbor evidently deep, for there were big cakes of ice inside it, and sheltered from all winds. Continuing east from here, we found but two more ship shelters on the way to ( Oronation Gulf. The first is at Point Keats which is T-shaped so that a vessel can get shelter on one side or the other from any wind that blows, or so it seems, although this is apparently a fairly dangerous coast and there may be hidden reefs in the neighborhood, for there was no heavy ice near to give us an indication of the depth of water. The other harbor is behind a little island on the mainland shore of Dolphin and Union Straits and is so difficult to find that I doubt that I myself could locate it again, except by the compass bearings. From the west end of the island which shelters the harbor, I found the west end of Sutton Island bears west 338° 30' and the east end of Sutton Island 1°. This is certainly a good boat harbor and a very good one for ships, if it proves deep enough. In general, the coast line between Cape Lyon and Coronation Gulf is high with cliffs here and there usually of limestone, although there are some sandstone formations.
It was at Cape Lyon that Richardson saw the most easterly house of earth and wood and he therefore concluded that this was the eastern limit of the whale-hunting people who dwelt in permanent villages. This was by no means the most easterly village, however. It was merely Dr. Richard- son's method of travel which prevented him from finding similar villages or the ruins of them farther east. He stood along in boats well off shore usually, and had not the same chance of finding what human remains there
IS Anthropological Papers American Musi urn of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
are on the beach that we did through our method of sled travel, although of course even to us many things self-evident in summer may have been hidden by snow. We found the ruins of earth and wood villages, however, as far east as the west side of the delta of Crocker River, and in many places along the beach between there and Cape Lyon we found such quantities of the bones of whales that we were convinced whaling must have been one of the industries of this entire district.
Along this coast as far east as Crocker River the Melville Mountains run approximately parallel to the coast, from three to ten miles inland. In sonic cases the foothills proper come right to the coast, in others there are stretches of comparatively low although rocky and hilly country. Between Crocker River and Inman River the mountains get farther from the coast and apparently lower. Richardson estimates the Melville Mountains in general to be about five hundred feet high, but I found, in the spring of 191 1, that standing at sea level at Bell Island near the southwest corner of Vic- toria Island, I could see the mountains on the mainland up to Point De Witt Clinton, and even there it was apparently rather a fog or clouds that ob- structed the view down, after the mountains ran properly below the horizon. This means that the Melville Mountains should be not five hundred feet in height, but anything between fifteen hundred and two thousand feet.
On his first journey along this coast, our only predecessor, Sir John Richardson, saw to seaward near the mouth of ( 'rocker River, what he considered an island lying about twelve miles off shore. He named this Clerk Island. On his second voyage in 1848, apparently Sir John did not. see Clerk Island. No one else has traversed the coast, but both Collinson and Amundsen passed at a considerable distance out to sea and neither of them saw the island. In the spring of 1910, we were fortunate in the neighborhood of Crocker River, in having in general clear weather and with my field glasses I used to climb high hills near the coast every few miles and look to seaward hoping to see the island. Had there been an Eskimo village twelve miles to seaward where the island was supposed to lie, I should have been able to see it; but there was no sign of anything but sea ice. In the spring of 1911 we crossed by sled in a direct line from Bell Island for Point Tinney. This should have taken us across the corner of Clerk Island as it is plotted on our charts and again we saw no signs of it. I think it is clear, therefore, that either Clerk Island does not exist or else it is at some place remote from that laid down by Richardson.
Driftwood gets gradually scarcer as one goes east along the coast, al- though from the point of view of a traveling party that needs wood for fuel there is plenty to Cape Bexley and even beyond. There are few places where you can travel five miles at a stretch without finding a deposit of
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 19
driftwood sufficient to supply a camp for a week. The sticks you find, how- ever, get smaller as you proceed east and more waterworn. They are excellent for firewood, however, as they are dry through lying on a rocky beach. Only in the mouths of rivers, such as Inman River, did we have some trouble with wet and rotten wood where it was imbedded in sand or river mud.
Although they have knowledge of the coast farther west, it is not proba- ble that any of the Copper Eskimo go west beyond Crocker River. We saw signs of ancient occupation in the form of broken sleds and split sticks of driftwood all along the coast, but fresh signs (ones not over three or four years old) we did not find until we reached Point Wise.
It may be considered roughly that the territory of the mainland occupied by the Copper Eskimo is bounded on the west by the 118th meridian from the coast to where it intersects Dease River. The line of the extreme boundary will run a little west of south, thence to McTavish Bay of Bear Lake and from the east end of that Bay, straight east to the Coppermine River. It will probably continue about straight east from there until it reaches the longitude of Bathurst Inlet after which it will run southeast to Back River and to the Akilinik.
It is better to leave the eastern limit of these people undefined until our information shall become more complete than it is up to the present, but we can safely discuss their northward range. As stated elsewhere, they occupy regularly only the southeast coast of Banks Island east of Nelson Head. At Nelson Head the land rises rapidly to a height of at least two thousand feet two or three miles back from the beach. The south quarter of Banks Island may be considered high, although the extreme south appears to be the highest, and there is a gradual slope to the north, or at least that is what one gathers from what the Eskimo tell us, supplemented by the accounts of Collinson and M'Clure. Cape Kellett at the southwest corner of Banks Island is a long low sandspit and back of it to the eastward the land appears low. As far north on the west coast of Victoria Island as the Eskimo at present range, which need not be considered to be farther north than the latitude of 72°, the coast line is mountainous although the mountains are not very high. From the information of the Prince Albert Sound people this mountainous character is continued well into the country. We crossed the Wollaston Peninsula approximately in longitude 113° 30' west, and found it to be mountainous also all the way across. Our route was through a sort of a pass and there seemed to be higher mountains on either end. To the east there was an especially conspicuous range which had never been seen by white men before and as it appeared as a whole to have no native name, we called it the Museum Range to commemorate the connection of the
20 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
American Museum of Natural History with the expedition. From Eskimo report we learned, however, that there is a belt of low land stretching across Victoria Island approximately straight east from the foot of Prince Albert Sound to Albert Edward Bay. This strip consists of the valleys of the two rivers that are probably the largest in Victoria. Island: the Kagloryuak which heads near the center of the Island and Hows west into the foot of Prince Albert Sound and the Ekalluktok which heads in the same vicinity with the Kagloryuak and flows east into Albert Edward Bay. It seems from Eskimo report that, the eastern half of Victoria Island is in general low. This is corroborated so far as they go by the observations of Rae, Collinson, and Lieut. Hansen of Amundsen's expedition.
The country between the USth meridian and Coronation Gulf can scarcely be called mountainous but rather high, hilly, and rocky. There is an abundant vegetation of grasses, mosses, and lichens in the low places, but the high hill tops are in many cases barren on account of their rocky character. There are some rivers of size, but the details of them are un- known to us except that we were told that Rae River heads in an oval-shaped lake, apparently about twenty miles long that lies south of Staypleton Bay which, by the way, is not nearly so deep a bay as the maps indicate. There are commonly the smallest of dwarf willows said to be found anywhere north of the Rae River, and that, river itself is not, well supplied, but the Richardson River which has its mouth just south of that of the Rae has, we were told, considerable growth of willows in its valley and this we verified through finding heaps of drift willow at its mouth.
The Coppermine, as elsewhere described, is well wooded. It is one of the swiftest large rivers of the world and is therefore never likely to be com- mercially valuable for anything except water power. It is practically a continuous rapid, but there are no real falls in it, not even the so-called Bloody Fall which is really a shelving cascade or rapid about six hundred yards long. On account of the general rocky character of the country, the valley of the Coppermine is much narrower than would be expected from the volume of water it carries, and the stream itself runs through a confined bed and is seldom over three hundred yards wide and that only in shallow places, while one hundred thirty yards may be considered its average width between Kendall River and the sea while there are many places much narrower than this. Being the swiftest of the great northern rivers, the Coppermine is also peculiar in the roughness of its ice in winter. What apparently happens is that first the river freezes over to a greater or lesser thickness of ice and then the rush of the water causes this original roof of ice to break down and cave into the water. The swift current seizes the blocks of ice and whirls them downstream until something occurs to make a
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 21
blockade and there they are heaped together on edge and in every other way while level ice again forms over the open water which has just been swept clear. A few days or weeks later another cave-in may occur where the ice lies smooth and the same process is repeated. But where a jam has once been lodged and cemented together there the ice will remain approximately unchanged all winter. As the season advances the water in the stream bed gets less and less. In many places in the Coppermine there seems to be a sort of winding secondary channel in the bed of the river proper so that towards spring there is really only a little creek running through this curved and ice-roofed water course. Eventually the roof over even this sometimes caves down, but usually only after the ice becomes so thick (say over a foot) that it does not break small and float in cakes as the younger ice did earlier in the year. The current is not so strong late in winter, with the result that this last cave-in produces pits and valleys in the river ice proper. In the centers of some of these the ice is eight or ten feet below the general level of the river in the months of March and April. In the spring- when the thaws begin, it is along this channel that the melted snow water first begins to run and we found in the first week of June, 1910, that where the rest of the ice of the river was comparatively solid, this creek had com- menced flowing and had eaten through the ice so that although the water had not risen sufficiently to flood the river as a whole, nevertheless a crossing could be made by sled.
The popular summer hunting district which lies between Bear Lake and the Coppermine River north of the parallel of 66° is largely Barren Ground on account of its high and rocky character, although trees of good size are found in all the creek beds round about. East of the Coppermine too, so far as we know it, the land is high and rocky and devoid of trees for the same reason.
The south shore of Coronation Gulf averages much higher than the north shore. A striking feature of the topography south of the Gulf is a series of rocky terraces. If one walks southward or southeastward over this country in foggy weather or at night one will often go up so gradual an incline that the country seems level, until suddenly one comes to preci- pices where it is necessary to scramble down forty to sixty feet of cliff and talus slope. If the walk be continued southward, this experience will be repeated.
Apparently the character of the bottom of Coronation Gulf is similar to the character of the land south of it. There are many times more islands than the chart indicates and these lie in chains extending from the west side of the Gulf eastward or northeastward. Most, if not all of these islands have precipices to the south or southeast and slope down gradually
22 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
to the north or northwest. There is deep water close up to their precipitous faces while from their low north ends dangerous reefs extend. There are many boulders of all kinds found on the surface of some of these islands. The islands themselves seem chiefly basaltic and the cliffs are typical colum- nar basalt. In a few cases we found the basaltic upper portion of the island underlain by stratified limestone.
It is of great significance to the people of this district that native copper is found in many places. I have known of a piece of copper float as large as a house-building brick picked up on the north shore of McTavish Bay, Great Bear Lake, and from here north copper is known to occur either in the form of float along the stream courses or native copper outcrop from the hillside all the way north to at least forty miles north of Prince Albert Sound in Victoria Island a distance of over three hundred miles. The western limit of copper deposits known to us is in the vicinity of Dismal Lake, while to the east it extends at least to the east shore of Bathurst Inlet. It is naturally difficult for the natives to cut the native copper where it occurs in huge masses or as an outcrop and most of the material actually used for knives and other things is picked up in the form of small fragments along the banks of the rivers. Smelting is quite unknown and nothing is ever done with the copper except to pound it with stones and to sharpen the edges of cutting tools by grinding them against rough stones.
As pointed out elsewhere another geological feature of great importance to the people is the occurrence of talc chlorite, of a character suitable for the making of pots and lamps, at the mouth of Tree River and at certain places farther east. Although wood is not used for fuel except to a slight extent in summer, the occurrence of trees on the Coppermine and the head of Dease River, draws people from great distances to these places each sum- mer for they need wood continually for various things, and driftwood of a character suitable for implements and utensils is found only on the coast of the Gulf.
Before quitting this geographical discussion it is worth while to comment especially upon the anomalous economic importance of the Mackenzie River to all the district west of Coronation Gulf and east of Point Barrow. Not only does the huge volume of warm water temper somewhat the climate at the immediate mouth of the river and alter the seasons to a degree, but the river also supplies building material for the construction of houses for more than one thousand miles of coast and material for the construction of the framework of boats and for all the smaller wooden things that the Eskimo need. Most of this wood comes from the Liard branch of the Mackenzie River. Although a great river, the Liard does not bring down as much driftwood as does the Peace or the Slave and it is possible that even
1914.] The Stefdnssorir-Anderson Expedition. 23
the Athabaska River may cany as much wood as does the Liard: but un- fortunately practically all the wood brought by the Athabaska is stranded in Athabaska Lake and all the wood brought by the Peace and Slave is depos- ited on the shores of Great Slave Lake. On neither of these lakes is the driftwood of any considerable economic importance while on the Arctic coast it would be of incalculable value to the Eskimo, should they survive for any considerable period, or to the white men, should numbers of them ever come to occupy the coast.
In the region of the Mackenzie Delta there were a large number of permanently inhabited village sites. By permanent habitation, however, we mean only that there were houses at these places which were occupied regularly year after year at corresponding seasons for a month or more at a time. The most important of the western settlements was that one of the three on Herschel Island which was called Kigirktayuk. This name was sometimes even in the old days applied to the island as a whole, and now that the other two village sites on the island have been abandoned, the name for the village has become synonymous for that of the island. Between Herschel Island and the Mackenzie River were several village sites, the most important of which seem to have been Kingak near King Point and Tapkark on the Shingle Point sandspit.
It is true of all Eskimo tribes that they use for distant, tribes other names than those which really belong to those tribes. From the point of view of the Kittegaryuit people, for instance, the people west of the Mackenzie River to and a little beyond Herschel Island were known as the Tuyormiut. The people of Point Barrow and Cape Smythe who were called by themselves the Nuvugmiut and Utkiavigmiut were called by the Kittegaryuit people collectively Apkvarmiut. All other western people were grouped collec- tively under the term Nunatagmiut.
Two names that may be used anywhere for one's neighbors tip or down the coast were therefore naturally in use in the Mackenzie section. These are Uallinergmiut, the people up the coast, and Kagmalit, the people down the coast. It is an interesting fact that whereas in going west along the main- land coast from Baillie Island west the next people may always be called Uallinergmiut while the next people east are Kagmalit, but to this rule there is one striking exception, the people of the Colville River although living south and east of Point Barrow always spoke of the Barrow people as Kagmalit. This is what one would expect had the Colville people first become familiar with the Barrow people at the time when the Colville tribe were living on the seacoast to the west of Cape Smythe. This is what would have happened had Alaska been peopled by a migration from the east along the coast which had followed the shore around until it got to Kotzebue Sound and had then sent a branch up the Noatak and back down the Colville.
24 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
From the point of view of the Mackenzie people, the Baillie Islanders and other comparatively near neighbors to the east were known as Kagmalit but beyond them lived the Nagyuktogmiut. Under this term of Nagyuktog- miut they vaguely grouped all the distant easterners just as they with equal vagueness called the inland Alaskans, Nunatagmiut. Just as we found that the Nunatagmiut were really but one of the many tribes of interior Alaska so we also found later on that Nagyuktogmiut are but one of the many tribes of the Copper Eskimo. Although the name of no other tribe seems to have penetrated as far west as the Mackenzie or if any did penetrate that far they have at least now been forgotten.
As the relation of the Mackenzie Eskimo to the Indians was an especially aggressive one they had pushed their settlements a considerable distance up into the forest country to the head of the delta., but. the larger portion of the Mackenzie Eskimo were on the east coast of Richard Island and on the mainland coast opposite and eastward, thence to the Baillie Islands and beyond. Curiously enough, a large number of these people were known to their immediate neighbors by the name of a village which, for a century at least, has been uninhabited. Kupuk was located on the east coast on Richard Island and was a place favorable for the killing of white whales in summer, but the shifting current of the rjyer made the whaling grounds too shallow and the people had to move across to the mainland to the neighbor- hood of the present large village of Kittegaryuit, which was the largest of all the Eskimo villages of the Mackenzie section and possibly of all Arctic North America until the great measles epidemic of 1900, when the few remnants got the idea that the site was an unlucky one and moved away. Richardson tells us that from this village alone about two hundred kayaks came out and followed his boats as he was passing. We know that during the white whale season kayaks were tised only by the able-bodied hunters so this will show that the population of the Kittegaryuit village alone must have been somewhere between eight hundred and one thousand people. It was not true that the other villages on the coast were all depopulated and their people gathered at Kittegaryuit. for the white whale hunt. No doubt a few individuals from the nearest village did so, but the people of the Eskimo Lakes inland were at that season hunting caribou and the people of Point Atkinson told me that they never took part in the Kittegaryuit. hunt.
There seem to have been many villages of considerable size east of Kitte- garyuit, but the biggest of them next to that of the Baillie Islands was Nuvo- rak (Point. Atkinson), and eventually it became the only inhabited village between Baillie Island and the Mackenzie Delta proper, and even it is uninhabited since the epidemic of 1900, or was so, until the winter of 1911- 1912 when a trading schooner anchored there. The natives as a result
1!)14.J The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 25
gathered about and in April, 1912, there was a population of perhaps thirty people.
Formerly the people whom we call Baillie Islanders had a permanent village on one of the Baillie Islands which they called Avvak. Since the whaling ships began to come in and winter in this vicinity, the dwelling site was removed to a sandspit on the mainland of Cape Bathurst, called Utkal- lnk. In the autumn both the people of Cape Bathurst east of Liverpool Bay, Nuvorak, and other places west of it, used to go to the head of the Bay in the fall for the caribou hunt and used to spend the early part of the winter there fishing; but apparently the entire population moved out to one of the promontories for sealing purposes about the middle of winter. East of the Baillie Islands were several villages between that and Langton Bay, which was known as Xuvuayuk from the sandspit on which the village was located, and behind which whaling ships have wintered in recent years.
There is little doubt that there was a continuous chain of habitations prior to say 1S30, all the way east along the coast from Langton Bay to Coronation Gulf, and from the character of the archaeological remains, we are inclined to think that these people resembled in culture those of the Baillie Islands more than they did those of Coronation Gulf. However, there seems to have been a feeling at the Baillie Islands that the people east of Langton Bay were not their people, while those of Langton Bay were, and when the changing trade conditions and other reasons broke the con- tinuity of habitation along the coast (about 1840), most of the people of Langton Bay moved west to the Baillie Islands, while some of Langton Bay and apparently all east of them, moved east towards Coronation Gulf if indeed they were not exterminated by some famine consequent upon an untoward season. There were evidently permanent villages as far east, at least, as the mouth of Crocker River, and clearly bowhead whaling was one of the chief occupations. Even beyond Crocker River closer investiga- tion is likely to show the existence of permanent earth and wood dwellings. We did not happen to find any, but we passed this section of the coast in the early spring (May, 1910) when the snow would have covered so as to hide any but the most conspicuous house ruins.
The Copper Eskimo do not seem ever to have had any permanent houses, so far as we could ascertain from spending the summer in the neighborhood of the Coppermine and from making inquiries from the oldest men. In looking for a characteristic by which to differentiate the eastern from the western Eskimo, it may be difficult to find a better one than this, that the westerners built permanent dwellings of earth and wood while the easterners used only skin tents and snowhouses. If it shall be found, as I suspect, that the distribution of the larger western sled will coincide archaeologicallv
26 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
approximately with the area of earth and wood houses, and the long eastern sled with that of the absence of house ruins, these two features will differ- entiate the two regions with some clearness. So far as we know the big skin boal or umiak was also a characteristic of the western section and absent in the eastern, al least within the last century.
Named from the west and following the mainland coast around without ;ui\ reference to Victoria Island, we have the groups enumerated below. The population in each case is approximate, but the figures given may be relied upon to vary in most instances not more than ten percent from the actual.
The Akuliakattagmiut are to be found, usually in the late autumn and early winter encamped on the shore of Cape Bexley. This is a trading rendezvous where there come to visit them most or all of the Haneragmiut, a considerable number of the Puiplirmiut and the Noahonirmiut and a sprink- ling from other tribes as far removed as the Ekalluktogmiut of the cast coast of Victoria Island. Shortly before or after the winter solstice the Akuliakattagmiut move out on the ice of Dolphin and Union Strait for scal- ing purposes and about the same time the visitors begin to return, each party to its own tribe. Between the tenth and the last of May they will move ashore near ( 'ape Bexley where they cache their stores or seal blubber as well as their spare clothing and household gear, and move inland twro or three days' journey south to Akuliakattak Lake, which is said to be the head of Rae River. This section is less well supplied with caribou than most other districts of the Copper Eskimo; consequently, the people live to some extent on fishing in the lake and are forced to purchase some of the skins they need for clothing from other tribes, chiefly in exchange for articles of wood. On account of this scarcity of caribou the Akuliakattagmiut use more sealskin for garments than do other tribes and are in general less satisfactorily dressed. They are much given to visiting among other tribes, so that while the population is really no doubt sixty or over, we found only thirty-seven at home when we were visiting them in May, 1910.
The Noahonirmiut hunt in winter on the ice of Dolphin and Union Strait in the neighborhood of Liston and Sutton Islands and spend the summer in general on the mainland south of those islands and north of Rae River. This is perhaps the smallest of the recognized subdivisions of the Copper Eskimo on the mainland. Their number is about twenty.
South of the Noahonirmiut in summer are found the Kanianermiut, so called because they inhabit the headwaters (Kangia) of the Pallirk which is their name for the Rae River. These people are also sometimes called the I allirgniiut. In winter most of these seem to be out on the ice of Corona- tion Gulf. This is rather an indefinite subdivision sometimes confused with the Pallirmiut proper. The number may be about thirty.
1914.] The Slefdnsson-Anderscm Expeditio '27
The Pallirmiut occupy in spring, and sometimes also in summer, the mouth of the Rae River (Pallirk). Some of them, however, annually join the Kogluktogmiut in the summer salmon fishery at Bloody Fall. In win- ter, they occupy the ice of the west central portion of Coronation Gulf. Their number is about forty.
The Kogluktogmiut draw their name from Bloody Fall (Kogluktok it flows rapidly, or spurts, like a cut artery) which name is also generally applied to the Coppermine River as a whole. They spend their winters on the ice of Coronation Gulf and in summer it is not always that they remain at Bloody Fall during the summer salmon fishery, although the Fall is recognized by the other groups as being their particular hunting ground. Their population is about thirty.
The Kugaryuagmiut hunt in summer in the vicinity of the Kugaryuak River, the mouth of which is about eighteen miles east of that of the ( opper- mine. In winter they are like the rest on the ice of Coronation Gulf. Their population is about twenty-five.
Pingangnaktok (meaning it blows a land wind) is a place some distance inland west of Tree River and a number of people whom we met considered themselves natives of this district, the Pingangnaktogmiut. Like the rest, they hunt out on the gulf in winter. Their number may be about thirty.
The Kogluktualugmiut are the people who frequent the neighborhood of Tree River (Kogluktualuk). They are also called Utkusiksaligmiut, the dwellers of the place where there is pot stone. This is the location of the most westerly pot stone (steatite, or talc chlorite schist I quarries known to the Eskimo on the Arctic shore of the continent of North America. These quarries and others east of them are probably the source of all the so-called soapstone lamps and soapstone cooking pots in the possession of the Eskimo as far west as Bering Straits and even into Siberia, for people still living at Cape Prince of Wales have told me that they got stone lamps from the east and exported them to Siberia, and as you go east from Cape Prince of Wales you find in each village the story that they got their lamps from the next village east of them and so you can follow the trail until it leads to the Utkusiksaligmiut about eighty miles east of the Coppermine River. In April, 1911, we visited a village of these people, located about twenty miles to seaward from the north of Tree River and they had just moved to this campsite from another farther northeast. The population is about forty. This is the most easterly tribe actually visited by us on their own hunting grounds, although we saw and talked with individuals of other tribes as far east as the Kent Peninsula.
Kogluktuaryumiut are in winter on the ice off Gray Bay. In spring they fish at the mouth of the Kogluktuaryuk River where Hanbury found some of them in July, 1903. This is the most westerly tribe seen by Hanbury on
28 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
his journey with the exception that he saw one family of the Pallirmiut on Dismal Lake. The population is probably about fifty or sixty.
We were informed in a general way that the entire district from Gray Bay to Kent Peninsula was thickly inhabited and this was said to be espe- cially so on Bathurst Inlet and the Kent Peninsula itself. As none of our informants would count above six, it was of course rather difficult to get a definite idea of numbers from them. Members of the tribe of Kanhiryuar- miut informed us that the number of people in Bathurst Inlet was greatly in e\ic-- of that of their own tribe and. as that tribe numbers about two hun- dred, 1 am inclined to assign to the region between Gray Hay and Kent Pen- insula a population of four to five hundred. I think that in conversation, 1 must have heard the names of various tribes of this district, but through some slip I failed to note them down except that of the most talked-of group. the Umingmuktogmiut of the permanent village of Umingmuktok on the wesl coast of Kent Peninsula. We have never ourselves seen permanent villages or permanent dwellings among the Copper Eskimo, but we were told that Umingmuktok was inhabited the year around. There are no doubt several groups, each with its own name, between the Umingmuktogmiut on Kent Peninsula and Ogden Bay, where live the Ahiagmiut. The ahiak is the Alpine bear berry. We know of this tribe only because they are visited by the Victoria Island Eskimo when they are on their way to the summer trading rendezvous on Hanbury's Akilinik River, near the head of Chesterfield Inlet. According to the Victoria Islanders, the Ahiagmiut should number anything between fifty and one hundred persons. South of the Ahiagmiut, the Victoria Islanders fall in with the Haningayogmiut, the people of Back River (Haningayok) who are said to be a small tribe. On this journey they also met sometimes the Kaernermiut, which they say may be only another name for the Haningayogmiut. On the Akilinik itself, they met the representatives of a large number of tribes, some of them from the ocean to the east (Hudson Bay*/). The people with whom they chiefly trade they speak of, however, as the Pallirmiut. Parties of the Pallirmiut also of recent years make winter trading trips as far north as the Kent Peninsula. It is probable that these trips began with Hanbury's journey, for the Victoria Islanders speak of the first visit of the Pallirmiut to Kent Peninsula as being that of the party of which Hanbury was a mem- ber. Whether this was really the first visit or whether it was merely the first one of which the Victoria Islanders happened to hear, is not certain.
We have given roughly the summer location of all the mainland coastal tribes so far as it is known to us, but one district is peculiar in that it is occupied by representatives of a dozen or more tribes. This is the summer hunting district enclosed by a quadrangle formed by the Coppermine River
1914. ! 'I'h' Stefdnssortr-Anderson Expedite 29
on the east, Great Bear Lake on the south, Dease River on tin- west, and Dismal Lake and Kendall River on the north. Among two hundred or so people who visited this district and with whom we hunted the summer of 1910, there were representatives of all the mainland tribes from Cape Bexley to the Kent Peninsula as well as the Puiplirmiut and Nagyuktogmiut of Victoria Island.
In naming the island people we must begin with Banks Island, tor it i> still inhabited in its southern portion in winter and all of it seems to have been inhabited until comparatively recent years. We were told by the old men of the Kanhiryuarmiut that so far as they knew, all Banks Island was inhabited formerly and the people were very prosperous. They are said to have killed so many musk-oxen and caribou in summer that they usually had plenty of dry meat to take them through the winter. However, famines began to occur now and then, due the Victoria Island people say, to the enmity of a powerful Victoria Island shaman who by his spells caused all the food animals to leave Banks Island and its neighboring waters. Finally . the last of these people are said to have died of hunger at a time when men now apparently less than thirty years of age were small boys. On Victoria Island north of Minto Inlet there was also a numerous population known as the Ugyuligmiut. This is also attested by the English explorers Collinson and M'Clure, whose maps are labeled "numerous Esquimaux parties" in the district north of Minto Inlet. There is a belief among the Victoria Islanders today that these Ugyuligmiut murdered some white men belonging to the exploring ships and that the white men in revenge shot them down, exterminating them to the last man. This is supposed to have happened in the lifetime of the oldest of the Victoria Islanders, a man named Pami- ungittok, who at the age of six years visited Collinson's ship in Walker Bay. Pamiungittok said, however, that he had never heard of any eye-witnesses to the shooting of the Ugyuligmiut by the white men and he said it \\ as quite possible that they might really have died from famine and that the story of their being shot might have grown up "as such stories do." However, all the Victoria Islanders agree that at present there are no living representa- tives of the Ugyuligmiut.
The north coast of Victoria Island east of Collinson Inlet and the easl coast north of its middle are supposed to be uninhabited attd to have always been so. Collinson Inlet has been visited occasionally by many members of the Kanhiryuarmiut tribe still living, and they have never seen other signs of human habitation than those which they believe to be the traces of the earlier visits of their own people.
Coming to the tribes still in existence, the Kanhiryuarmiut are the most westerlv although they draw their name from Prince Albeit Sound
30 • Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
ECanghiryuak). They live in winter, most of them, on the southeast coast of Banks Island between Xelson Head and De Salis Bay, where in contradistinction to most other Eskimo tribes they depend for food chiefly on polar hears. A few, however, spend an occasional winter on the south- wesl corner of Victoria Island near Cape Baring. Two families did so the winter of 19101911.
Late in March or early in April in each year they commence their east- ward migrations crossing the straits to Prince Albert Sound and moving east along the middle of the Sound. We found them to be approximately in the geographical center of the Sound on May 13, 1911. and it is probable that their migrations pass this point at the same time each year. In Prince Albert Sound the parties divide. In the summer of 1911, none of them were going south into the Colville Mountains, although certain years a few of them are in the habit of going there to meet the Haneragmiut. Six or seven families were going north into the mountains between Prince Albert Sound and Minto Inlet; a larger party still, were going southeast from the foot of the Sound to meet the Puiplirmiut and another good-sized party were going northeast from the foot of the Sound, location about forty miles inland, where native copper is most abundant and can most easily be had for the manufacture of knives, missile points, needles, and other articles. But the largest party of all, were going east up the Kagloryuak River to meet the Ekalluktogmiut near the center of Victoria Island. The popula- tion of this group is two hundred or a little over. When they were all together in the spring of 1910 they occupied thirty-three dwelling-, as we learned from the examination of one of their deserted villages. When we visited them, six families had already separated themselves from the main body.
North of the Kanhiryuarmiut are the people who bear the name of Minto Inlet, the Kanghiryuatjiagmiut. They are said to have been more numerous formerly, but have suffered somewhat from famines, not so much in actual deaths as in having certain families leave them to join other tribes that had better hunting grounds, for some such as the Kanhiryuarmiut who never had a famine within the memory of anyone living. I failed to make a record of where they spent their winters but have the general impression that they usually, if not always, are with the Kanhiryuarmiut on Banks Island. When we visited the Kanhiryuarmiut the middle of May, 1910, the Kanghiryuatjiagmiut were said to have separated from them on the ice ot the straits as they were coming from Banks Island and to have gone around Cape Wollaston into Minto Inlet with the intention of spending the summer in the mountains to the north. Their number is about twenty.
As we have mentioned above, the larger number of the Kanhiryuarmiut
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 31
hunt in summer in the middle of Victoria Island, where they meet the Ekalluktogmiut who come up from the east from Albert Edward Hay along the iee of the Ekalluktok River. It is said that the river is so called because of the large number of fish to be caught in it and this is the only tribe of the Copper Eskimo who, according to our information, live largely on fish in winter. It was this 'tribe with whom Lieut. Hansen of Amundsen's expedi- tion came in contact on the iee east of Victoria Island in the Spring of 1905. The Kanhiryuarmiut say that they and the Ekalluktogmiut are tribes of about the same size, so that we may estimate them at two hundred. Two members of this tribe, both of them men, had married into the Kanhir- yuarmiut tribe. We talked with both, and one of them gave us considerable information about the east coast of Victoria Island as well as about his own people and other tribes farther east.
Along the south coast of Victoria, Island, the most westerly are the Haneragmiut. A few of them each year hunt on the mainland with the Akuliakattagmiut or farther east, but the larger number go north into the Colville Mountains to a fishing lake called Tahiryuak, where they also get numerous caribou and where, as stated above, they some years meet a few representatives of the Kanianermiut. The population is about forty.
The Puiplirmiut are in winter on the ice in the neighborhood of Liston and Sutton Islands and most of them hunt in summer northeast from Simpson Bay into Victoria Island, where they annually meet a party of the Kanhiryuarmiut. A few families usually hunt south of the mainland, some of them as far as Great Bear Lake. This tribe is so given to visiting with other tribes that their number is difficult to estimate, though I suppose it to be not short of sixty.
The Xagyuktogmiut are so called from the little island of Nagyuktok, which may be intended by the charts to be one of the Duke of York Islands, although the maps here as in many other places are so poor that identifica- tions are difficult. This tribe also has the name Killinermiut from the dis- trict Killirk on the south coast of Victoria Island east of Lady Franklin Point where many of them hunt in summer. This is nowadays, at any rate, not one of the most important tribes of the Copper Eskimo and still, as mentioned elsewhere, it is the name of this tribe alone of all the tribes ol the Copper Eskimo, that is known as far west as the Mackenzie River, as I know from my own observations, and as far east as King William Island as we know from Amundsen's account. This name also impressed itself on Richardson who mentions it in connection with his expedition <>l 1848. They spend their winters near and north of the middle of the western half of Coronation Gulf and most of them hunt north into Victoria Island in sum- mer, although some hunt to Bear Lake and elsewhere upon the mainland. The population of this group is not over fifty.
32 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
The NTagyuktogmiut were the most easterly tribe of Victoria Islanders visited by us. They told us that the next tribe east of them were called tlic Kilusiktogmiut. I got no special idea of how numerous they are. I happened to see one or two members of the tribe among the Nagyuktog- miutj but in the press of other things I neglected the opportunity of making careful inquiries as to population. They told me, however, that so far as they knew, the entire south coast of Victoria Island was populated all the way around to Albert Edward Bay and in their opinion about as densely as that portion with which we were familiar. If that be so, it should mean from three to four hundred.
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1914.] The Slefdnsson- Anderson Expedition. 33
THE CORONATION GULF ESKIMO.
For convenience we have chosen to designate all the various Eskimo groups visited by us in the Coronation Gulf District as the Copper Eskimo. In the preceding discussion and again on the ethnographic map we have given the designations employed by the Eskimo themselves and indicated their conceptions of inter-relationship. In general the cultures of these groups seem to be similar and may be conveniently discussed under one head. Since one of the striking traits of this culture is the use of native copper, the term seems to us quite appropriate as the designation of the general culture group.
Range and Distribution.
We found in the spring of 1910 when we first visited the Akuliakattag- miut and Haneragmiut, that they had place names for various points along the coast of the mainland running as far west as Cape Lyon, apparently. Several members of these tribes were pointed out to us as having had parents and ancestors that came from the west or habitually made journeys west. This merely corroborated what we already knew from the Baillie Islands Eskimo that there had been, probably up to about 1840, continuous tribe to tribe trade relations between the west and the Nagyuktogmiut. It was an interesting thing to find that while the westerners knew the easterners by the name of the Nagyuktogmiut tribe, which was but one of many, the easterners correspondingly knew the westerners by the name of Kupugmiut, which was but one of the western tribes and a distant one at that, although a numerous body and powerful locally. Similarly it is true that the Point Barrow people were familiar with the name of the Kupugmiut which they used for all the Mackenzie section whenever they did not employ the vague general term Kagmalit.
This knowledge of place names to the west of Cape Bexley indicates that the Cape Bexley people are familiar with a stretch of country about two hundred miles to the west of them. To the south, they as a tribe do not seem to be in the habit of going even as far as Dismal Lake. A few members of the tribe do go to Dismal Lake and beyond, but they apparently always do so by a circuitous route, going east into Coronation Gulf and joining one of the local tribes there such as the Kogluktogmiut and accompanying them to Dismal Lake and Great Bear Lake. We found that one family, at least, of the Akuliakattagmiut had been as far east as Tree River.
:;.) Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
We talked with one woman who had been a member of a party that spent the summer there with the Utkusiksaligmiut in the making of pots and lamps; and one of the most popular songs at Cape Bexley was one composed by this woman to commemorate the journey. This song contains several geographic names and so formulates a sort of a record of the event. This woman seems to have been about fifteen or eighteen years of age when she made the journey and she is now about forty. East beyond Tree River the knowledge of the Akuliakattagmiut is exceedingly vague, although they had heard of Umingmuktok (on Kent Peninsula). Like every other tribe, they knew of the Akilinik River. In fact, it seems that the Akilinik River is perhaps the most widely known locality of all places familiar to the Eskimo. In the Mackenzie district there are many tales of the Akilinik and so there are said to be in Greenland. Of course, it is not susceptible of absolute proof that the Akilinik of the stories can be invariably translated to mean the Akilinik River that flows into Chesterfield Inlet, for in the Mackenzie District and probably in Greenland the people have no idea in which direction from them the Akilinik lies, but seeing that the district of the Akilinik draws to it today visitors from a thousand miles west and from great distances in all other directions, it seems that it may always have been as it is now, the greatest gathering center from a geographic point of view of the whole Eskimo race. No doubt the trade meetings in Kotzebue Sound, for instance, were attended by larger crowds, but they did not come from such great distances although some of them came from Siberia and others from the Arctic coast near the Colville or from the comparatively warm region south of the Yukon.
That the travels of the Akuliakattagmiut and Haneragmiut to the east have not been very extensive is shown best by the fact that they had no idea of Victoria Island being an island. We found no one who knew that important fact until April, 1911, when we visited a village occupied chiefly by Nagyuktogmiut and Utkusiksaligmiut off the mouth of Tree River. Several men there knew that Victoria Island had an east coast and they said they had always supposed that it had a north coast also and was an island; in fact, they had heard so from their fathers. These people were familiar with the fact of the loss of Franklin's vessels in the sea between King Wil- liam Island and Victoria Island. I asked them whether they had ever heard of a ship being wrecked and white men dying on the east coast of \ ictoria Island. Had they answered either in the affirmative or negative simply, the thing might have meant little, for an Eskimo is likely to answer any leading question without much reference to the facts, merely thinking what answer is likely to please you best. But this man promptly replied that so far as they knew no ship had been wrecked on the east coast, but that about the time when they were born two ships had become fast in the
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. • >•)
ice well off shore and that they had been abandoned by their white crews many of whom they knew had starved to death and think that it was likely that all of them had.
It was a curious thing that some months later when in Prince Albert Sound I met two members of the Ekalluktogmiut tribe who live on the east coast of Victoria Island who declared that they had never heard of any ships being lost in their vicinity. These were, however, young men, and young men commonly pay very little attention to the stories told by their elders unless they be stories of a religious or miraculous nature. These men promised me that if they revisited their tribe they would make inquiries from the old men about these ships and would tell me if I were to return. In view of the fact that all but one man among the Rae River Eskimo declared stoutly to me that no white man had ever come to Rae River, shows that no great dependence can be placed on negative testimony. Some of these men who denied knowledge of white visitors on Rae River were the sons of the old man Ekallnkpik, who himself as a boy of six or eight had seen Richardson when he was followed across the Rae River by the Eskimo in 1848. When later I asked Ekallukpik's sons how it happened that they were ignorant of such an important event^that had happened before the eyes of their father, they replied that they no doubt had heard the story often, but had never paid any attention to it "for," they said, "old men tell so many tales."
We know that the people of the vicinity of the Coppermine often follow it in summer south beyond Kendall River, but then they generally come over to the west into the district between Dismal Lake and Bear Lake. We understood that when the people of Bathurst Inlet come to Great Bear Lake, they go well towards the head of the Inlet and then strike approxi- mately straight west for the east end of Great Bear Lake. One group whom we met the summer of 1910 told us that they had come this route. How far south they sometimes go from the head of Bathurst Inlet we do not know, although the chances are that it will be a considerable distance.1
» None of the Eskimo who habitually hunt to Bear Lake on McTavish Bay know that the Dease River flows into the same lake. In fact, they told us definitely that McTavish Bay was a large lake "like the sea" whose name was Imaryuak; while Dease River, for which they have no name, flowed into a small lake which likewise has no name. As a matter of fact, what they consider two lakes are, of course, but two bays of Bear Lake. They specifically denied knowing of any connection between McTavish Bay and the lake into which the Dease flows, though "there may be a river between" they said. As a matter of fact. Ritch Island so completely shuts off the triangle of water into which the Dease flows, that no one could suspect its connection with a big lake unless he went along either shore past the end of Ritch Island, or got a view of the lake from the high land of the Caribou Point peninsula. It seems evident that in recent times these Eskimo have never penetrated so far, or else the presence of Bear Lake beyond Ritch Island would be known. To discover the identity of McTavish Bay with the water into which the Dease flows they would have to have been to the top of Caribou Point some twenty or thirty miles beyond the farthest reached by them in 1910 while we were with them.
30 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
The Kafihiryuarmiut have the widest range of seasonal migrations of any of the Copper Eskimo tribes and probably of any Eskimo tribe in the world. In winter most of them are found on south Banks Island just east of Nelson Head. They leave here late in March, cross the straits to Prince Albert Sound, and here the tribe scatters in all directions. Some go thirty or forty miles south; some sixty or seventy miles southeast; some forty or fifty miles northeast; and occasionally all the way across the island to Collinson Inlet, while the larger number go about one hundred miles east up the Kagloryuak to where it heads near the head of the Ekalluktok which flows from the center of Victoria Island east into Albert Edward Bay. At this point four or five families separate themselves from the rest, descend the Ekalluktok and cross the straits to the mainland in the vicinity of Ogden Bay. It seems they reach this point annually the early part of June, for it is here they have to abandon their sleds and proceed south carrying back loads and their dogs also carrying packs, for they are bound overland to the Akilinik River. Usually, on the way they are joined by a few families of the Ekalluk- togmiut in Albert Edward Bay and later by some families of the Ahiagmiut at Ogden Bay. The united parties march overland and some time in July they come to Back River which they call the Haningayok. Their visit is expected by a party of the Haningayogmiut, who are ready for them with kayaks to ferry them over.
The party then proceeds south and it is probably early in August that they reach the trading rendezvous on the timbered section of the Akilinik River. It was here that Hanbury fell in with a party of them. We met near Tree River in April, 1910, a young woman who with her parents had been on the Akilinik at a time subsequent to Hanbury's visit and who had heard from the Eskimo there all about Hanbury and his companions, and a month later we met in Prince Albert Sound the man Hitkoak who had been actually present on the Akilinik when Hanbury visited them. This being the only white man Hitkoak had seen, he was naturally much interested and told me all about Hanbury's equipment down to the smallest detail as well as giving all the names of the Eskimo who accompanied Hanbury. Hanbury's own name and that of his two white companions, Darrell and Ferguson, Hitkoak mispronounced so badly that they were not recognizable, but his personal description of the men was correct as were the names of the Eskimo of Hanbury's party.
These t lading parties of the Haneragmiut usually do not get back to join the tribe that year, but return only as far north as the vicinity of the Kent Peninsula. They sometimes proceed some distance west into Bathurst Inlet or even into Coronation Gulf proper, but never continue far enough west to reach the vicinity of the Coppermine and to return home by the
1914.] The Slefdnsson- Anderson Expedition. 37
route which we followed on our spring journey in 1911 . Instead they always turned back to Albert Edward Bay and ascended the Ekalluktok River by sled in spring to join their countrymen the second summer after their de- parture on their summer hunt in the middle of Victoria Island.
Meantime another party has gone east towards the Akilinik to make in its turn the same round. It seems to be seldom that any individual of the Kanhiryuarmiut will make this trip more than two or three times in a life- time. On the other hand, there seems to be a good half of the tribe who have made the trip at one time or another. The chief object of the trip in the early days, and it remains so still, is the securing of wood for sleds, implements, and utensils. Probably too, it was only a few years after the first establishment of Hudson's Bay Company's post on Hudson Bay that iron began to percolate into the west by this trade route. Nowadays knives, files, and a few cooking utensils are purchased as well as little odds and ends such as bits of cloth that are kept chiefly as curios. Two steel fox traps had found their way by this route into Coronation Gulf, but we found none among the Prince Albert Sound people.
It is natural that the Haneragmiut, on account of their extensive travels, are better informed of distant places than are any of the other tribes. It is not only that they have seen more places themselves, but by extensive travels and much association with strangers they have acquired a perspective and broadmindedness lacking in other districts. I secured from them accordingly, chiefly from the man Hitkoak mentioned above, a good deal of geographic information about distant places to the east and northeast most of which is more conveniently embodied in a map than in a set discus- sion.
Hitkoak's information seemed fairly definite and correct as far east as King William Island. He told me that there lived the Netjiligmiut. He had heard that they were just ordinary Eskimo although they had many disagreeable and cruel customs, but next east of them lived other people who differed from ordinary human beings in having no chins; in other words, their necks come straight down from the face to the breast. Bey< >nd these he said lived the Kablunat of whom he had heard many strange stories. These he admitted were not, however, borne out at all by his own experience with Hanbury whom he had found very different from the tradi- tional description of the white men who lived east of King William Island. It was also true he said, that the old men who visited Collinson on his ship had found him and his men to be very similar to Hanbury and not very different from Eskimo in general.
Hitkoak told me further that if you were to come from the mainland to King William Island and keep on in the same direction after you had crossed
38 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
the island you would eventually come to another and bigger island inhabited by Eskimo who dressed exclusively in sealskins because they had no caribou. "These people," he said, "are called the Tununirohirmiut because they live on the far side of the land from the point of view of the rest of us." This name corresponds with that given by Professor Boas for a tribe near Admir- alty Inlet from information secured on the east coast.1 Hitkoak's descrip- tion might fit either North Somerset or Prince of Wales Island. In May, Mill, I learned from the old man, Pamiungittok of the Kanhiryuarmiut, that lie is the only man living who saw either Collinson or M'Clure. He was aboard of ( 'ollinson's vessel with his father in 1S52 in Walker Bay wdien he w as ,-i boy of six or eight. At that time as now, members of the Kanhiryuar- miut tribe but rarely wrent any distance north of Minto Inlet, although they associated freely with the Uguligmiut (now extinct as elsewhere related) who occupied the narrow part of Prince of Wales Straits on the west end of Victoria Island. A few years after this visit to Collinson some of the Banks Island people (now also extinct, see ante) discovered M'Clure's abandoned ship in the Bay of Mercy on north Banks Island and passed the information on to the Kanhiryuarmiut who made a trip up there immediately for the pur- pose of securing iron and wood from the ship itself and from the stores which had been carried ashore by M'Clure's men before they abandoned the " In- vestigator." The iron was of priceless value but there was so much of it that the people could not carry it all away and as they did not have the fore- thought to suitably protect it from the weather, much of it was destroyed by rust during the next decade or two, although many parties of Eskimo from various directions went up there to help themselves. The wood was of little use because it was mostly hardwood with the working of which the Eskimo are unfamiliar. The only desirable wood they found, Pamiungittok said, was the packing cases around the various kinds of goods. They accordingly broke these cases open, threw the contents awray and used the boards for shafts of arrows and things of that kind. The hard wood Pamiungittok pointed out, was almost as hard and difficult to work as caribou antler without being nearly so strong, and consequently they had no use for it. There were many barrels filled with meat which was unfit to eat on account of its saltiness and others filled with strange liquids (among other things probably brandy and rum, large quantities of which were cached on shore by M'Clure), but the hoops of some of these barrels were of excellent iron and were removed by the people while the contents as well as the barrel staves were of no use.
The last visit paid by the Kanhiryuarmiut to the Bay of Mercy was at
1 Boas, Central Eskimo, 442.
1914.] The Slefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 39
a time when Pamiungittok's son, Aglervittok, was a boy of about ten years or as Pamiungittok said, when he was big enough to walk all day behind the sled and to shoot ptarmigan; he was not big enough to hunt caribou. Agler- vittok appears to be about twenty-five years of age although he may be thirty. It is therefore from fifteen to twenty years since this last visit. At that time there was nothing left of the iron of the " Investigator" except some big pieces that were so unwieldy they could not be handled by the Eskimo. The ship had long ago disappeared. Pamiungittok did not know how the break-up took place or when, but it was not very long after she was first discovered by the Eskimo. Ship's timbers and pieces of wreckage which they recognize as belonging to the "Investigator" have been found in Prince of Wales Strait at various points north of Ramsay Island. This shows not only the fact that the vessel has been broken up, which is not particularly interesting as it could have been surely predicted, but also the more interesting thing that the winds or currents, or both, in this section are such as to bring drift materials down from the north into Prince of Wales Strait. From the scarcity of driftwood on the south coast of Banks Island and Victoria Island and from its abundance in Prince of Wales Strait, as described by both the English navigators, it seems probable that this wood must have passed from the Mackenzie River north along the west coast of Banks Island and east around its north end.
At present no people occupy Banks Island in summer although it is known to be fairly well stocked with both musk-oxen and caribou. The caribou, however, are not in such vast numbers here as in Victoria Island, which is filled by the migrations coming from the mainland in the spring although there are few if any caribou there in winter. Banks Island, how- ever, has caribou the year around, for they do not seem to migrate across Prince of Wales Strait to any extent. It is not very many years, however, since some parties of the Kanhiryuarmiut must have spent a part of the summer in Banks Island. We did not learn this from them, however.
The Eskimo, Uavinirk, who worked for our party was one of four Eskimo who some years ago purchased the schooner " Penelope ". They owned her and sailed her for many years and on one of their voyages they anchored off Cape Kellett on the southwest corner of Banks Island and went ashore to hunt. In more than one place on the land they found recent traces of Eskimo occupation, such as bones of animals that had been eaten and the remains of fires where cooking had been done. According to our present knowledge, we infer that these people must have been members of either the Kanhiryuarmiut or Kanghiryuatjiagmiut. Because the Kanghiryuat- jiagmiut winter with the Kanhiryuarmiut annually and families of either tribe may join the other at any time, we can consider that the range of these
40 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
two tribes is practically the same, although the more northerly tribe has for its particular hunting ground the country north and east of Minto Inlet.
Climatic Conditions.
There are some rather astonishing differences in climate within the comparatively restricted district occupied by the Copper Eskimo. Dr. Anderson found, for instance, in the first week of May, 1911, that the rivers were already opened and mosquitoes on the wing on the southward slope between Dismal Lake and Great Bear Lake. The same year the last days of April and the first days of May we had the first thaws at the mouth of the Kugaryuak, eighteen miles east of the Coppermine. The morning of the second day of May we arrived at the village of the Noahonirmiut near Lambert Island. When we arrived the houses were all of snow, but that was the first warm day and by the middle of the afternoon most of the snow roofs had caved in on account of the heat of the sun and had been replaced by roofs of skin. Going north from Lambert Island we found a week later on Forsyth Bay at the northeast corner of Simpson Bay, houses that were still all of snow. In other words, although we were traveling slowly and halting frequently, we were still moving north at a pace that was leaving the summer farther and farther behind us. We went across the Wollaston Peninsula into Prince Albert Sound and spent more than a week visiting the people there ; then we went west along the sound and south to Bell Island near the southwest corner of Victoria Island. The snow on Bell Island showed plainly that there had been no thaw as yet, for even a slight thaw is bound to leave a trace by turning to ice some of the snow on the southward faces of the cliffs. The first thaw came on May twenty-sixth when we had been two days in camp at Bell Island. In the afternoon of that day we started southwest across Dolphin and Union Strait and landed four days later just west of the mouth of Crocker River. When we left Victoria Island the snow had lain soft and white as in midwinter; when we got half way across the straits, puddles of water began to appear here and there on the ice and the last ten or fifteen miles before reaching the mainland the sea ice was honeycombed by the sun and we waded in many places knee deep thr< nigh puddles on the ice. There were open cracks near shore across which we had to ferry our sled and when we got to the land we found it bare of snow except that a few deep drifts still remained in the shadow of cliffs and cutbanks. In going southwest sixty miles we had found as great a change i »f \\ ea ther and ice conditions as could possibly have been brought about on .southwest Victoria Island by a month of spring weather. In other words,
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 41
there is a difference of a month apparently in the climate of southwest Victoria Island and of that of the mainland sixty miles south.
Richardson remarks that the fall comes a month earlier at the eastern end of Dolphin and Union Strait than it does at the mouth of the Mac- kenzie River. I consider this an approximate statement of the facts, al- though of course it would take the maintenance of a meteorological station at these different points for periods of years to form a really safe conclusion.
The fall of 1910, the caribou migration crossing Coronation Gulf from the north began November ninth, which seems to indicate that the ice had not been strong enough to carry the animals until a day or two before this time, for it is the universal Eskimo account that the animals are found on the south coast of the land each fall waiting for the ice to form. One would infer that this is the case and there is no reason to doubt it; besides the statement is corroborated by Collinson's observations at Cambridge Bay on southeast Victoria Island in 1851. On Coronation Gulf it was the second week in October before the rivers could be crossed at any places except those of nearly currentless water. In September, 1910, snow fell more than once to clear away again. There was a medium heavy fall of snow, Septem- ber nineteenth, however, which remained on the ground for about ten days but had practically disappeared by the end of the month and it was the tenth of October before even the quieter places on the Dease River were frozen, while on November eighth when we set out from the mouth of Dease River for our crossing of the Barren Grounds northwest Jo Langton Bay, Bear Lake was frozen only around the edges and open water could be seen a few miles out. When we reached the height of land north of Great Bear Lake, however, and commenced the descent of the Arctic slope, it seemed to us again as if we had in the space of two or three days gone a month farther into the winter.
It is difficult without the maintenance of a permanent meteorological station to say definitely about the prevailing winds in summer, but in winter it is an easy matter, for the snowdrifts form a permanent record of the trend of the stronger and more frequent winds. We know, however, that in Coronation Gulf and on Dolphin and Union Strait and in Prince Albert Sound the prevailing winds are from the northwest approximately, while the winds next in frequency and force are approximately from the southeast, or from between southeast and east so that there is an angle of perhaps ten or fifteen degrees between the snowdrifts formed by the opposing winds. One result of the strength and frequency of the northwest winds is that driftwood is driven chiefly upon beaches that face that wind while beaches lying parallel to the wind or in such a way that the wind blows off the land are less well supplied with driftwood, or not at all. Accordingly, we have a
12 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV
comparative plenty of < lii ft sticks along the mainland shore as far east as Liston Island, while there is little on the opposite shore of Victoria Island. Similarly there is considerable driftwood along the south coast of Prince Alberl Sound and very little along the north coast. The record for the whole year is therefore complete for the driftwood deposited in summer tells the same story as the snowdrifts in winter with reference to the preva- lence of the northwest wind.
We found the summer of 1910 that inland one hundred miles or so south of < oronation Gulf there is very little rain and the sun shines down from a cloudless sky often for many days and nights in succession. The result is that the temperature rises to a height which one could not suspect could prevail north of the Arctic Circle. We did not have a thermometer with us, but all of us felt that the heat was intense and difficult to bear and I suppose that at times it rose to well over 90° in the sun and probably approached 80° in the shade. In September, however, the climate changed suddenly and both the Eskimo and the Bear Lake Slavey Indians said that this was the ordinary case. Fogs and drizzling rains became prevalent and days of sunshine were comparatively rare.
On the seacoast the presence of floating ice at no great distance from land has a considerable effect on the climate farther west, but in the compara- tively narrow and enclosed waters the quantities of ice are not so large and although the seacoast of Coronation Gulf is said by the Eskimo to be more rainy and foggy than the interior, still it is no doubt less foggy and rainy and probably considerably warmer than the coast of the open ocean farther west.
Driftwood.
As pointed out above in the discussion of the prevailing winds, those coasts west of Coronation Gulf which face north are better supplied than the southward facing coasts. Coining east from Cape Lyon we found the driftwood gradually diminishing as we went east, but not nearly so fast as we had expected. Logs of considerable size clearly derived from the Mac- kenzie River are numerous well beyond Inman River, but when we come as far east as Cape Bexley mostly broken sticks are found and it would be difficult M) get together on a small stretch of beach large logs of considerable size such as would be needed, for instance, for the construction of a log house. The beaches, however, are mostly composed of broken rock and for that reason all the wood there is dry and has been preserved from rotting. There is no doubt that if the Eskimo of this country are ever taught the use of sheet iron stoves as the Western Eskimo have been, the supplies of wood
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 43
which now are sufficient so that a traveling party can camp almost anywhere and find enough for fuel, will disappear in a few years and it will be found then that the replenishing will be a slow process for the piles of driftwood that make such a brave showing now have clearly been gathered here for centuries.
At one place we found a log that had been chopped with a sharp ax and the ax marks and the chips looked about as weather-worn as they would look in a temperate climate after a year or two of exposure and yet we knew for certain that this log had been chopped by one of Sir John Richardson's parties either in 1826 or else in 1848. This shows how slow the processes of decay are when working upon dry wood in an Arctic climate. Some of the sticks that burned brightly in our camp stove may have been lying there waiting for us some hundred years.
In Coronation Gulf itself there is comparatively little driftwood and most of it derived from the Coppermine River, doubtless. The Coppermine does not bring out much wood commonly, for although it flows through well- forested country, it is a country of solid rock in general, the erosion is slight and it is only in a few places that the river meanders over flat, wooded, bottom lands. It is no doubt on account of the prevailing northwesterly winds that we found much less wood on the west shore of Coronation Gulf than on its south shore, and it seemed to us that there was rather more wood on the island chain that runs east from near the mouth of the Coppermine than on the mainland itself. No doubt a party journeying by boat in sum- mer will find no fuel difficulties, but while the snow was deep in winter we used to keep an eye open all day for any stick we might see and by that means we used to get together enough in a day to furnish fuel for camping at night.
On one of the islands, however, we saw a large log of cottonwood. The chances are that this stick came from the Mackenzie River; surely it could not be of local origin in Coronation Gulf. While it is clear that there is no steady and uninterrupted eastward current sweeping from Beaufort Sea into Coronation Gulf it seems that the prevailing trend of the currents must be more easterly than westerly or else how could this stick get to where we found it. There might well be a current from the west into the Gulf, how- ever, without much driftwood coming in, for the northwesterly wind would naturally drive it ashore in the narrow straits. The course of a drifting stick is evidently a resultant of two forces, the one exerted by the current, the other by the wind.
The Eskimo told us that a few years ago they had found a stranded bowhead whale on one of the islands of Coronation Gulf and in it they had found what must have been a brass whaling iron. This whale must clearly have been shot by the whaling ships in Beaufort Sea and its carcass may have
44 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,.
been transported to Coronation Gulf by the currents and winds. It is, on the other hand, possible that the animal may have been merely wounded and may have made its way into Coronation Gulf before it died.
Trees and Vegetation.
In many of tire river valleys of Alaska and of the neighborhood of the Mackenzie, there is a growth of very heavy willows which serves the natives for fuel. This is not so general in the district of the Copper Eskimo. Small willows are found both on Banks Island and Victoria Island, but there seems to be only one place in Victoria Island where the willows attain a considerable growth. This is the valley of the Kagloryuak River which falls into the east end of Prince Albert Sound. We did not see these willows, but we were told that what there were of them, grew crooked and never stood quite as high as a mast head.
In the valley of the Coppermine the growth of willows is very small north of the tree line, and on Dismal Lake where there are trees both at the east and the west ends of the lake, the middle section of the lake shore is supplied with willows that are only of a size corresponding with the descrip- tions we have from Victoria Island.
In ascending the Coppermine, the first week of June, 1910, we found a dozen shoots of spruce not more than three or four feet high growing a mile and a half north of Bloody Fall, or not over four miles from the ocean in a direct line. It may be considered, however, that the tree line of the Copper- mine is, as measured along the river, nine or ten miles south of Bloody Fall, or in an air line, perhaps fifteen miles from the ocean. Just east of the Coppermine there is, however, a small patch of trees on the head of a little creek. These trees are no more than seven or eight miles from the ocean. As one proceeds up the Coppermine, trees appear in irregular patches not so much in the valley of the river itself as in the valleys of its tributaries, Along the east side of the river we found that north of the mouth of the Kendall, the spruce nowhere extends more than about ten miles up any of these creek beds, and on the west so far as wre could judge by looking across from hill tops with our field glasses, the woods are even more closely confined to the river. Just north of the mouth of the Kendall we crossed from the east to the west bank and found that not only is the Kendall Valley itself densely wooded all the way to Dismal Lake, but the higher lands to the north of it are also banked with scattered groves of spruce. Dismal Lake is about thirty-six miles long and is curved as shown on Hanbury's map and not a chain of lakes as described by Dease and Simpson and shown on most of our
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 45
maps and charts. There is a considerable growth of spruce around the east end of the lake for the first five or six miles from its outlet, and then for about thirty miles it is flanked on either hand by Barren Ground, but there is a dense grove of trees at a creek mouth at the southwest end of the lake. Crossing here and descending south into the valley of the Dease, it is only a matter of a mile or so from trees on Dismal Lake to the trees of the Dease Valley which run continuously clown to the northeast corner of Bear Lake.
South of Dismal' Lake there is, however, what amounts to an island of Barren Ground surrounded as it is by the woods of Dismal Lake, Dease River, Great Bear Lake, and the Coppermine. It is on the high hill tops of this rocky section, that the Eskimo chiefly camp in summer.
It is commonly supposed, no doubt from the knowledge of Greenland, that most of the Arctic Islands are covered with an ice cap. This is so far from being true that so far as I know, there is not a vestige of a glacier any- where either in Victoria or Banks Island and they are everywhere covered with green grass and flowers, except in districts that are too rocky for plant growth.
Fuel.
The most important item of fuel among the Copper Eskimo is, of course, the blubber of the seal. Except in special emergencies this is the only article of fuel used in winter in Victoria Island or on the mainland, although the Kanhiryuarmiut on southeast Banks Island use also the fat of the polar bear to some extent. It makes little difference whether driftwood is abun- dant or scarce in any district, it is never used during the part of the year when people live in snowhouses. It would manifestly be unsuited for the heating of a snowhouse and as a matter of fact, as I know from experience, the seal oil lamp is better suited for the heating of any kind of a substantially built Eskimo house than .wood is, even when burned in sheet iron stoves. But in the spring when the snowhouse is discarded for the tent and the people move from the sea ice inland to hunt, the supplies of oil are all left behind at the coast and either wood or heather is used. Among the Noahon- irmiut, for instance, we found in the latter part of May, 1910; that families living six or eight miles from the seacoast had taken with them two or three sticks of wood equivalent to as many stout cord wood sticks and these they were eking out for cooking purposes. The man of the family would take an adze and with it make fine chips or shavings which the woman would feed one by one into a tiny flame built under the bottom of the pot. In this way a very small piece of wood could bring a good-sized pot of meat to a
• Ill Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
boil. When this was done they intended, they told us, to find heather (Cassiope tetragona) underneath the snow and use that for fuel. Later, when the sun had cleared the snow away, it. would, of course, be easy to find I he heather whieh is the favorite fuel of the Copper Eskimo.
The Eskimo of my party were all westerners and used to cooking with driftwood or willows. When during the summer of 1910 we traveled around with parties of the Copper Eskimo, my companions insisted that they were not going to cook with " grass." They seemed to look upon the very idea as degrading in some way; and would scout around in search of bushes of willow whieh they maintained woidd make a much more satisfactory fire. The result was that our local traveling companions would have their camp pitched and supper cooked before we got our fire lit and proceedings in our camp were usually suspended while we went over and joined them in their supper inviting them later on to come and share ours which was ready an hour or so later. Towards the end of the summer my westerners had finally become convinced that the use of grass was really not necessarily degrading, with the result that we could get our meals as quickly as the natives.
There is a special art about burning heather. You must make a small fire and feed in a handful at a time, keeping the blaze uniform. In most Arctic districts where I have traveled, you cannot wralk half a mile without finding a patch of heather big enough to cook several meals by. You build the fire in the proper place and within ten or fifteen feet of it you can gather sufficient fuel for cooking. We found it convenient to carry a small stick of dry wood wTith which to make shavings to start the fire on damp days, for when it is wet the heather is not easy to light, but with the fire once going there is no more trouble about it.
The Bear Lake Indians are unfamiliar with the use of heather for fuel, which greatly handicaps them on their annual incursions into the Barren Ground in search of musk-oxen. Like my western Eskimo companions they understand the use of willows, but on the Barren Ground, patches of these are few and far between and quickly hidden beyond chance of discovery by the blizzards of early winter. Consequently the Indians on their musk- ox hunts carry sled-loads of wood which burden them and decrease their speed. When the wood has been exhausted the party retreats towards the forests of Bear Lake again. The local Eskimo are under no such handicap. Even in the depths of winter, they could always find heather to burn, as the Back River people do in fact, as we know from hearsay. The Eskimo with whom we personally associated never leave the sea ice in winter and con- sequently have no occasion for any fuel except oil.
191 4. j The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 47
Food.
Vegetable Foods. The Eskimo of Alaska from Kotzebue Sound south along the coast depend to some extent on vegetable foods, not only in sum- mer while these are growing and can be gathered for immediate use, but also in winter when the people draw on stores gathered in summer. The Mac- kenzie district is as well supplied as some Alaskan localities with edible vegetables, but very little attention is paid, or was, until a few years ago when Alaskan immigrants began to teach them the use of berries, leaves, and roots. The summer hunting districts of the Coronation Gulf Eskimo, too, are rich in vegetable foods, but the knowledge of their use is on an even lower level than in the Mackenzie Delta. That proximity to the vegetable- eating Indians of Alaska and not the richness of any given district deter- mines the amount and variety of vegetables used, is one of the many reasons for thinking that the Arctic coast population did not come to their present home down the Mackenzie or from the Yukon. Had they come from a district rich in vegetables to a district rich in the same vegetables they would not have forgotten their use.
Berries known as paunrat are eaten by all the Copper Eskimo, and a few other sorts are occasionally tasted. The most substantial and palatable fruit found on the Arctic coast is the akpek (salmon berry). This grows abundantly on the summer hunting grounds of the Coronation Gulf tribes and is sure to be found also on Bathurst Inlet. Its use, however, was never discovered in this locality, though the name seemed to be known. It was the natives of our own party who first induced trial of these berries, and only a few of even those who spent most of the summer of 1910 near us acquired a taste for them. So far as we could learn the akpek was under no taboo, it simply had never occurred to anyone that they were food.
The one vegetable of some importance among the Copper Eskimo is the root known to them as mahu (Alaskan, masu). These can be dug for food at any season, though it is difficult to find them in winter under the snow. In summer they are eaten chiefly in times of scarcity, but occasionally from choice.
The mahu (Polygonum bistortum) is a parsnip-like root. Large speci- mens may be half an inch in diameter and ten or more inches long. They sometimes fork into two or more branches. They seem of better flavor and less "woody" if gathered from sandy soil. If boiled and then kept in bags, as is the custom in Alaska, there develops an agreeable mild acid flavor and the roots become excellent eating to the taste of most white men. The Copper Eskimo never keep the roots to sour, but eat them from hand to mouth, either raw or boiled.
48 Anthropological Papers Amu-inn, Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
Probably because of greater abundance of other foods, these roots are less used in the Mackenzie Delta than even in Victoria Island. They are abundant on the rivers flowing into the foot of Prince Albert Sound, and are said to be fairly common, too, in certain parts of Banks Island.
Reindeer moss is never gathered for food directly from the ground but is a highly relished dish when found in the paunch of a caribou. It is eaten warm with the warmth of the animal, or cold; preferably, however, the paunch is let lie in the sun several days till the contents begin to ferment. West of < ape Parry seal oil is poured over the soured mass, making a kind of salad; the Copper Eskimo, however, never take oil with them inland, and so far as we know do not have the opportunity of eating moss and oil together.
No tal would prevent their doing so, however, as land and sea foods are
everywhere freely brought in contact as well as meat, vegetables (mahu), and oil. *
Besides the undigested moss from the stomach, partly digested food from other portions of the alimentary canal is eaten. Among the Puiplirmiut especially, we saw deer droppings picked up from the snow and eaten di- rectly; here they are also gathered in pails and kept in the house to be eaten as wanted. In Alaska caribou droppings are commonly used to thicken blood soup, or were, until white men's taboos began to restrain the prac- tice. Some quantity of vegetables is also consumed through the eating of the stomachs and intestines of hares, marmots, and ptarmigan.
Animal Foods. Most of the Copper Eskimo depend chiefly on seals for food in winter. Fish are said to be caught at all seasons by the Ekalluktog- miut; the Kanhiryuarmiut secure a large number of bears in midwinter in Mint hern Hanks Island and all tribes secure stray foxes and wolves now and then. Musk-oxen are never hunted by the Kanhiryuarmiut in winter, but if a band wanders down to the coast between Xelson Head and De Salis Bay the opportunity is taken advantage of. We never heard of caribou being killed in winter either on the mainland or on the islands west of Bathurst Inlet. Among most of the tribes in question no taboo prevents caribou hunting at any season, so far as our questions could bring out; it sinrply bas never been tried. Among half a dozen tribes I have myself been assisted by natives in caribou hunting on the sea ice, and I have seen caribou meat and seal meat eaten at the same meal by members of the following tribes: Nagyuktogmiut, Kogluktogmiut, Pallirmiut, Puiplirmiut, Xoahonirmiut, Akuliakattagmiut, and Kanhiryuarmiut. Some families said, however, that caribou and seal meat should not be cooked in the same pot unless the pot were suspended over the lamp by a fresh cord when the caribou meat was to be cooked; but most people paid no attention to even this prohibition.
1914.
The Stefdnsson-Amlcrson Expedition.
49
In bear hunting among the Kafihiryuarmiut two or more men usually hunt together. Sleds are not used, as for instance in Smith Sound and among other eastern Eskimo, but dogs loose or in leash accompany the hunter. When a bear is either accidentally met with or is found by the fol- lowing of a fresh trail, the dogs are turned loose. They overtake the ani- mal and hold it at bay by barking and by nipping its heels when it turns to run. On close approach it is then shot with arrows or speared with lances improvised by lashing the hunting knife (iron or copper) on the end of a
Fig. 1 a (60-6941). b (60-6931), c (60-6930). Probes for Seal Holes, made of Bone, Coronation Gulf. Probe b is tipped with musk-ox horn. Length of a, 90 cm.
Fig. 2 (60.1-3462). Length of needle, 30 cm.
Seal Indicator of Ivory, Prince Albert Sound, Victoria Island.
Fig. 3 (60-6943). Seal Indicator of Ivory, Coronation Gulf. Length of -;, 3 1 cm.
long walking staff (aiaupiak) which Eskimo usually carry on their hunts, whether in winter or summer.
The Kafihiryuarmiut is the only tribe of Copper Eskimo in whose food supply polar bears play an important part. There are two localities where this hunt is feasible — the southeast coast of Banks Island between Nelson Head and De Salis Bay, and the southwestern point of Victoria Island — Cape Baring. At Cape Baring, however, the "open water" gets farther and farther from shore as winter advances and the people depend more and more on seals as the bears re'reat with the retreat of the floe. Near Nelson Head, however, the floe is always near shore, for whenever an easterly wind
50
Anthropological Paper* American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
blows the ice moves off into the Beaufort Sea. Accordingly this locality is rich in bears, and they form the chief article of food in winter for the larger portion of Kanhiryuarmiut. Even for fuel, bear grease here largely replaces seal oil, though occasionally the bear hunters near Nelson Head trade bear meat or fat for seal blubber to their neighbors towards De Salis Bay, for these do not depend exclusively on bears.
There is but one sealing method in winter. All tribes of the Copper Eskimo, except those Kanhiryuarmiut who live on bears and those Ekalluk- togmiut who live on fish, seek level stretches of ice on which to pitch their camps. So far as we know, the Kanhiryuarmiut are the only ones who ever build winter houses on land or even near land, but it is probable that the Ekalluktogmiut do also. These ice encampments are moved from time to time, for the seals within a five-mile radius of any spot are soon exterminated
Fig. 4 (60.1-3462d). Copper Probe for Seal Holes, Prince Albert Sound, Victoria Is- land. This copper rod is square in cross-section and seems to have been formed by beating together thin sheets of the metal. It is the most remarkable specimen of copper work in the collection. Length, 77 cm.
Fig. 5 (60.1-3468). Pull for Cord used in hauling Seals, Prince Albert Sound, Victoria Island. Length, 11 cm.
by the hunters. Seals in winter are necessarily non-migratory, as each depends for his supply of air to breathe on the hole in the ice which his own teeth have kept open in spite of the frost.
Of a morning the various hunters start out from camp, usually before daylight, in directions radiating from the encampment. Each is followed by his dogs, one or more, but never over three, for a man who is wealthy enough to own three dogs is sure to have a grown son or a dependent who also goes sealing and needs a dog. The main business of the dog is to find a seal hole ; secondarily, he is to drag home the seal if the hunt proves successful. _ The seal's breathing hole at the upper surface of the ice is but an inch or two in diameter; downwards it widens out, and has thus the shape of an inverted funnel. If it is the home of a female seal about to become a mother the mouth of the hole is enlarged sufficiently to allow the animal to crawl on top the ice and make a cave for herself in the hard snowbank above. But be the
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 51
seal male or female, be the hole small or large, there is nothing in the appear- ance of the snow roof above it to indicate its presence to the eye, unless in- deed a wandering fox has smelt it out the night before and stopped above it to investigate, leaving its tracks to tell the story. Be a seal hole to wind- ward a dog will smell it at a considerable distance ; the finding of it is usually therefore the least of the hunter's troubles. When the general locality is discovered the position of the hole is accurately determined by prodding the snow with the caribou antler probe till its point slips into water instead of meeting the hard ice. If the snow roof is thick it is thinned down consider- ably by scraping away with the snow knife. When so thin that it is not likely to offer much resistance to a lance-thrust, the "feeler," a slender bone or antler rod, is thrust down through the snow until its lower end is just below the surface of the water. When this is done the hunter cuts himself a block of snow for a seat, spreads a skin rug in front of it to keep his feet from the snow on the ice, and sits down by the hole to wait. The lance lies ready by his side.
The seal must come to the surface frequently to breathe, and the hunter's wait would therefore not prove a long one had the seal but one string to his bow. He has several. In the neighborhood of any seal hole there is a group of several others that have been made by and are used by the same seal. Though the hunter may have done his work so carefully that the seal's suspicions remain unaroused, yet mere chance may prevent for hours and even days his visiting the hole where the captor awaits him. It may happen therefore that the hunter sits from daylight till dark and from daylight till dark again, awaiting the sign of his quarry's approach. If fortune favors, however, the hunter may have his seal in half an hour.
When the seal rises to his hole to breathe his nose pushes upwards the slender "feeler" that has been so arranged that its upward motion is un- impeded. The hunter rises from his seat, which was so near that it is not necessary for him to step forward to be in a position to drive his lance vertically downward into the hole; if he needed to make a step forward the crunching of the snow under his foot would warn the animal of danger. When the indicator rod has been elevated as much as it can be, and just as it begins to fall the lance is driven down alongside it, usually striking the seal in its neck or shoulder. The thrust usually goes home; against a good hunter no more than one fluke in ten chances should be recorded.
When the seal has been speared the hole is enlarged with ice pick or knife sufficiently to allow the animal to be hauled out, this after its strength has been partly exhausted by its struggles. As it is about to be hauled out it is despatched by a stab in the head or, occasionally, by a blow on the head with a club. For killing the seal, among the Kanhiryuarmiut at least, a special instrument is used, this is described elsewhere.
52 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
If the seal is of the common small kind, the man has little trouble holding him by the stout harpoon line and the hole is soon enlarged with the ice chisel and the animal hauled out on top of the ice. In the case of the gigantic bearded seal, however, the struggle is often severe, the line may break, the harpoon-head pull loose, or the hunter may have to let go. This latter seldom happens, for two reasons : it is considered a great disgrace to let go one's hold, and secondly, the harpoon point, especially if it be of iron, is an article of great value and must not be lost. A single hunter may get, in this manner, three or four seals in a day, or, he may go a week without getting one. But his neighbor's catch is his, no less than his own would be. A man's success is the good fortune of the community as much as his own, he has the work of getting the seal and the praise of a successful man is his ; otherwise, the seal belongs to all alike, except for the skin, if that is to be used for clothes rather than eaten. When a seal has been caught, if the village be not far off, the hunter often sends the dog home dragging the seal by the harness which the hunting dog always wears, while he stays in the hope of getting another; if the village be far off (three to five miles) the seal is not taken home till evening. Some hunters, discounting success, will take along two or even three dogs, sending one dog home each time a seal is caught.
It is not common that more than a week's supply of meat accumulates in the village, but the supply of blubber steadily grows beyond what is needed for food and fuel, and often a family has seven to ten sealskins full of oil (fifteen hundred to three thousand pounds) to cache against the need of the next autumn, the period of scarcity.
The method of securing bearded seals is the same essentially as that employed against the common seal, except that two men occasionally join forces, for the animal is huge and powerful and difficult to hold after it is speared. Few bearded seals are secured in winter for they frequent chiefly shore waters, and the seal hunting tribes seldom approach land until towards spring. The stretch of strong current in Dolphin and Union Strait from Lambert Island east to Cape Krusenstern is richer in bearded seals than any other locality accessible to the Copper Eskimo. The ice here is never over two or three inches thick and the seals bask on the ice even in February with the temperature below —40° F. I have here counted over forty bearded seals visible with the naked eye from shore, as many as ten sometimes crawl up through one breathing hole.
Except among the Kahhiryuarmiut the winter from October to April is generally a hand to mouth struggle. Starvation may, and does, occur at any time, but generally the sunless days are most feared. There is seldom a winter that among one or another of the Copper tribes dogs do not die of
1914.
The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition.
53
Fig. 7.
Fig. 6 (60-6970). Seal Harpoon, from Mouth of the Coppermine, Coronation Gulf. Length, 1.80 m.
Fig. 7 (60-7032 a-e). Set of Seal Wound Pegs, Coronation Gulf.
Fig. 6.
5-4 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
hunger; dried sinew and clothing are eaten and the houses are without light or fuel. Specific instances of deaths from hunger are detailed in another place.
In April and early May seals are still the main food of the people and the methods of securing them remain what they were in winter. During this period the Kanhiryuarmiut move from Banks Island to Prince Albert Sound, Victoria Island, and the other tribes divide or move in single bodies towards either the mainland or the Victoria Island shore. The Akuliakat- tagmiut consider the appearance of the first seal on top of the ice in their locality (about May 20th) as a sign it is time to leave the sea for the fishing lakes. No member of this tribe or of the Haneragmiut, we were told ever tries crawling up to a basking seal in the manner familiar from many other Eskimo districts. Among the Puiplirmiut and Noahonirmiut (in portions of whose hunting districts seals bask on the ice even in winter) about one in three of the able hunters knows this method and uses it more or less. In Coronation Gulf again the method is not much used.
All tribes of the Copper Eskimo in April and May have their camps on ice across which the caribou migrate in thousands on their way north. None of these make any use of their opportunities so far as we could learn. Especially the Noahonirmiut near Lambert Island and the Kanhiryuarmiut on Prince Albert Sound see endless successions of small bands passing their very doors. As mentioned above, there seems no taboo on caribou killing or caribou meat at this season, but we were merely told " nobody ever hunts caribou on the ice" — they live in abundance of seal meat at this time and blubber gathering is their most important object. It would really be foolish for them to spend their time pursuing the skinny migrating cows, if they did they would have to face the winter without the store of blubber that is their salvation at the time of autumn scarcity.
In April no starvation came to our notice, though we found a Puiplir- miut village on short rations May G, 1911, in Simpson Bay, Victoria Island. These had plenty of blubber, however. Each family lays by at this season as much blubber as it can. This is cut in small pieces and placed in bags made by skinning a seal through the mouth. Each of these bags when filled with oil will weigh one hundred seventy-five to two hundred fifty pounds and one good hunter will fill two or three such bags during March, April, and May. When it comes time to go inland these are placed en cache, preferably on a small island. Be the caches on an island, or not, they are covered with large stones so as to be safe from bears ; people, it is said, never steal from such caches. At the same place are also cached usually the winter lamps, the heavier stone pots, the winter clothing and all good clothes, and in fact everything that is not absolutely needed for the summer. On account of taboo restrictions no blubber is taken along inland.
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 55
Most people move inland while there is still snow on the ground; a few remain on the coast till the thaws are well under way, and some~even stay on or near the coast all summer; notably certain of the Puiplirmiut in Simp- son Bay, most of the Pallirmiut at the mouth of Rae River and some of the Kogluktogmiut at Bloody Fall on the Coppermine. Nothing is rigid about these arrangements; — the summer 1910, for instance, Bloody Fall was unoccupied.
On May 7th, 1911, the first three families of the Puiplirmiut moved inland into Victoria Island from Simpson Bay. They expected to camp by some fishing lakes and to live mainly on fish till the ground should be bare of snow some three or four weeks later. They no doubt tried for caribou too; at any rate we found on May 24, 1910, that some Noahonirmiut had already begun deer hunting about fifteen miles southwest of Lambert Island. By May twenty-sixth, however, they had not themselves secured any cari- bou as yet, and had no food when we left them but the carcasses of two bucks that we shot just before leaving their neighborhood. The women of the party fished every day for small lake trout with their copper fish hooks and caught about half enough to feed the party. The Kanhiryuarmiut whom on May 19, 1911, we left still encamped on the ice in the middle of Prince Albert Sound expected to move inland in about two weeks and to live partly on fish when they got inland.
The musk-ox plays no part in spring among any Victoria Island tribes directly known to us, nor among any people on the mainland much west of Gray Bay. About Gray Bay and east of it musk-oxen are more numerous and are said to come down towards the sea in the spring, but to what extent they are killed while the snow is still on the ground we do not know. The pursuit of these animals will assume new phases now that guns are about to be introduced in Coronation Gulf. It is said there are some musk-oxen east and north of Minto Inlet, Victoria Island, so the Kanhiryuatjlagmiut may get a few occasionally.
Hares and ptarmigan are shot with bows and form part of the food supply in spring, summer, and fall.
An important food animal in the mainland districts is the marmot (Sper- mophUus parrii). These awake from their winter hibernation in April and when they first come out of their holes they are rolling in fat and are excellent eating. Many are killed with bows and many are caught at the mouths of their holes with slip nooses of slender braided sinew. It is generally not difficult, except for large parties, to secure enough of these to feed men and dogs. Certain sections, especially rocky barrens, are largely wanting in squirrels, however, while others, such as the flats of Rae River and the lower twenty miles of the Coppermine, are abundantly supplied.
It is only on Banks Island and southwestern Victoria Island that polar
56 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
bears are common at any season. A stray bear may find its way into Dolphin and Union Straits and Coronation Gulf, especially in the spring. One at least was killed by the Puiplirmiut in 1911. I have however, both among the Akuliakattagmiut and in Coronation Gulf, seen grown men who have never seen a live polar bear. Brown bears (Ursus arctos Richardsoni) are quite absent from Victoria Island but most mainland tribes kill one of them now and then, especially the Akuliakattagmiut. If found still in the stupor of hibernation they are easily despatched, but if awake (any time after the middle of April, or even sooner) they are more difficult game than polar bears. One or two good dogs will generally keep a polar bear at bay; it is seldom dogs can hold a barren ground bear. At close quarters, too, they are more dangerous than white bears both to men and dogs, and many a man bears the mark of their claws. They are however attacked single- handed, by hunters armed with only the bow and knife. We were told that the hunter sometimes pays for his venturesomeness with his life; of this, however, we learned no specific instance, though I saw among the Kogluk- togmiut a man whose eye had been scratched out and who had been " con- fined to the house" the larger part of the summer as a result of the mauling he got.
In summer caribou are the chief source of food, although in certain dis- tricts fish, birds, and eggs, barren ground bears, and musk-oxen, play a more or less important part. Fishing is of most significance in early spring. When the first seals appear on top of the ice, about May fifteenth to May twentieth at Cape Bexley, the supply of blubber, the winter clothing, oil lamps, etc., are put in safe caches under heavy stones, usually on small islands, and the people move inland by sled, taking along a little seal oil (not nearly enough for all summer) and little other food. Individuals of some groups, such as the Pallirmiut, sometimes go inland only after the snow leaves the land, carrying packs instead of using sleds. A few people stay near the sea all summer, especially at the mouth of the Coppermine. Gener- ally, the objective point with those who move inland early is a fishing lake that is also frequented by caribou and while the men hunt the women fish with hooks. As the hooks are not barbed they are seldom "set." Later, when the water courses become free of ice, fish are often speared at certain well-known spearing places. These spears are of the three-pronged Eskimo type with handles sometimes twenty feet long or longer. The barbs of these are usually of copper, though they may be of iron, bone, or antler. If fish are caught in large numbers they are often dried by being spread out on flat stones, hung up on deer antlers, etc., seldom on wooden racks, even where wood is available. Perhaps the most frequented spearing place is at Bloody Fall on the Coppermine. No fish nets or fish traps are used or known.
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 57
For spearing caribou a few members of the Puiplirmiut, Nagyuktogmiut, Pallirmiut, and Kogluktogmiut still use kayaks. Formerly, they say, while caribou were more numerous, kayaks were more numerous and much used. A few even of those who hunt farthest inland carry kayaks by sled or on their backs to astonishing distances from the sea. The summer of 1910 seven or more kayaks were brought to the lake, Imaernirk, in which the middle branch of the Dease River heads. One of these came from the Kent Peninsula and had been packed on the back a hundred miles of that distance by Itigaaittok ("The Footless") whose toes and insteps of both feet froze off a few years ago and who has only the heels of his feet to walk on.
Many spearing places have of late been abandoned. One of the favorite ones up to a few years ago was Dismal Lake, at the Narrows (Cf . Hanbury's Account). This was last occupied by a single family the summer of 1909 but they got no deer and nearly starved. The summer of 1910 half a dozen families spent a part of the summer on Imaernirk Lake but were finally starved out. The Kogluktogmiut, perhaps the best caribou hunters as a group, carried no kayaks inland the summer of 1910, though they use them for crossing the river those summers when they fish at Bloody Fall instead of going to the Bear Lake hunt.
The method of waylaying and spearing caribou is the same as elsewhere described by Eskimo and need not be here described.
All the hunting practically is with the bow and arrow, either by simple stalking, or, by driving bands of deer towards concealed hunters. The first consists merely of approaching the deer to seventy-five yards or less by such methods as the character of the ground and the other special features of each case suggest. Just before sending the arrow, the hunter usually abandons all attempts at concealment and makes a sudden dash towards the caribou, thus usually getting fifteen or twenty yards nearer than was possible by stealth, for sometimes the animals will not at once notice a man running at them though upright at close range and even when they see him their minds seem to work slowly and it takes them a second or two of staring to make up their minds to run, and then they do not always run directly away, but as often as not at about right angles to the approach of the hunter. The first run is often, too, only a dash of a dozen bounds, after which they stop to have another look, and thus give the hunter a chance to speed three or four arrows. At close range an arrow that does not strike a bone will go entirely through the largest bull caribou and often fly a considerable dis- tance on the other side. An animal wounded by an arrow that stays in the wound, and all do, unless they pass clear through, usually lies down to prevent the arrow from working in the wound, and is then easily approached for a second shot. I have known a single hunter to separately approach and kill three isolated caribou in a single day.
58 Anthropological Papas American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
Most of the caribou killed, however, are secured by the concerted action of several men, women, and children, even the dogs help. When a band is discovered feeding, a V-shaped "fence" is constructed somewhere beyond their line of vision, generally to leeward. The "fence" consists of straight lines of stones or pieces of sod raised on end and set twenty to forty yards apart. In spring, blocks of snow are used instead. These stones, sods or blocks of snow are often not over eighteen inches high and no particular pains need be taken as to their shape or appearance, though a dab of earth is usually put on a block of snow or light colored stone so as to make sure the animals will see it. Apparently the eyesight of caribou is very poor, as compared with that of man. When this fence is completed, a half dozen men make one a mile long in an hour, the men conceal themselves in the angle of the V, the women and children with the dogs, go to windward of the deer to drive them. Usually the deer do not see the women who go to their windward. A few long-drawn wolf howls will generally set a band of deer in slow motion before the wind, or in the direction they are migrating. If they attempt to pass outside one of the wings of the V, someone is there to turn them, and usually the band moving in single file along one side the V- shaped fence, much like horses along a barbed-wire fence, arrives at a walk or slow trot at the point where the angle of the fence becomes so narrow, about one hundred yards, that they begin to notice the fence on the other side and to see there is no opening. Then they bunch up irresolutely and give the hunters a good opportunity to shoot. Members of our party have seen only as many as eleven caribou killed in this way by four hunters and half-a- dozen women and children. It is uncertain how many they get in lucky hauls, none can tell themselves, for none can count, but they considered eleven a small catch. Perhaps six to eight animals per hunter may be near the ordinary limit, though we have been told that occasionally not a single animal escapes of those that once enter the fence.
When deer have been killed in some number, most of the meat is cut up and half-dried, never fully dried, spread out on stones. The blood is always taken and used for soups, and the moss contents of the stomachs are allowed to ferment a few days in the sun and then eaten. This last dish, fresh or fermented, is about the only article of vegetable diet used by these Eskimo.
Most of those groups who hunt on the mainland kill a barren ground bear (Ursus richardsoni) now and then. These animals are not found in Victoria Island. A few musk-oxen are killed by the Kanhiryuarmiut only in Banks Island, by*the Akuliakattagmiut west and northwest of Dismal Lake, and by the more easterly people in the district towards Kent Penin- sula and southward perhaps to the Akilinik River. Otherwise, musk-oxen are extinct from the mainland and Victoria Island in the districts frequented
1914.] The St< fa nsson-Anderson Expedition. 59
by the groups under discussion. Where there are musk-oxen they are natu- rally an easy prey for the Eskimo, who surround them with their dogs and usually kill every animal of every band found.
A few wolves and foxes are killed every year, with the bow, for there is little trapping, and a good many spermophiles (marmots) are taken. The skins of all of these are valued for clothing, though deerskin is preferred, and the meat of all is eaten, though only the marmots are secured in numbers to make them of significance as sources of food. The Akuliakattagmiut and others kill a few muskrats, but they use neither skins nor meat but only use the tails for charms. This, as well as lack of knowledge of common berries as food, may go to show that the present territory has not long been occu- pied by these people. Further, had they come to Coronation Gulf either from the south or west they would have brought with them the habit of using these things, and would not have forgotten it while occupying the present, territory which, comparatively speaking, abounds in berries and has numbers of muskrats. (As to the muskrats, however, the Bear Lake Slaveys say that they, as well as the beaver and the moose are new arrivals north and east of Great Bear Lake. This may explain the Eskimo igno- rance of their use.)
All groups shoot a few ptarmigan with bows; the only ones to whom birds and eggs are of much significance are those who summer in Victoria Island, some of these are said to kill numbers of swans and smaller water birds during the moulting season. The skins of all birds are used for hand wipers after eating greasy food, and the skins of loons are used for slippers between the socks and outer boots in winter. Loon skins are also used during the fly season in summer to beat off mosquitoes.
Cooking and Handling Food.
Caribou meat is more often eaten raw than cooked, whether fresh or half- dry, thawed, or frozen. Fish are also often eaten raw, whether frozen or not. This eating of raw meat and fish conforms to Eskimo custom farther west, except that the western people show greater preference for the frozen state as opposed to the thawed. A raw dish peculiar to the Straits and Gulf Eskimo (at least, the Eskimo of my party knew nothing of such a practice) is fresh sealskin cut in small pieces with about a quarter inch of blubber left on it. The hair is not removed. I found this agreeable eating on first trial, but our Eskimo would not taste it, they had "never heard of such a thing." All western Eskimo, however, practice eating the skin of the bow- head and white (beluga) whales in a similar manner.
60 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
In general, these Eskimo are not so fond of "high" or partly decomposed fish as are those of the Mackenzie River and farther west, who generally prefer rotten to fresh fish for eating raw. Meat is more often eaten "high" here than farther west, but that seems a result of circumstance and is not a matter of preference. Caribou liver is, however, highly esteemed here, as everywhere to the west, after being allowed to ferment for some days under a hot sun inside a moss-filled caribou stomach. Seal oil fermented in an air-tight bag from spring till fall is by all Eskimo, and those whites who have tried it, much preferred to the fresh.
There is really but one method of cooking and that is boiling, though roasting before a fire is known. Fish and caribou are more often eaten raw than cooked, but caribou heads are always boiled and fish heads are boiled when convenient. Seal is seldom eaten raw, and never raw unless frozen, except in emergencies. The cooking is over the seal oil lamp in winter and generally over a fire of heather or small twigs in summer, even when good wood is at hand. The pots (stove) are long, narrow, and shallow, a large pot may be thirty inches long, eight inches wide, six inches deep. The seal meat or deer meat is usually cut in pieces of such a size that half of each piece sticks out of the water. In cooking over the lamp the meat (at least the first potful) is put in the cold water as the pot is hung over the lamp flame, and when the pot boils the lower half of the meat is considered cooked. The pieces are then turned around and now and then after that one is lifted out of the pot and squeezed between thumb and finger to see if it is sufficiently cooked. When one of the larger pieces seems done, the pot is emptied of the meat and some seal or caribou blood is added to make the blood soup which forms the last course of a properly arranged meal.
In a snowhouse, where space is limited, the guests usually eat standing, while the master of the house, his wife, and perhaps an especially honored visitor sit on the edge of the bed. The woman divides the meat into as many (or more) pieces as there are people present, squeezes each tightly between both hands so that no blood or juice shall later drip on the floor while it is being eaten, and hands the best piece to the guest of honor, e. g., a visitor from another village. If there is no especially distinguished guest, the woman hands the best piece to her husband, she will not keep a good piece for herself though she may make up for that by eating a few tidbits between meals. Each person present has a piece handed him in turn, the order being generally one of age, the oldest first. A middle-aged woman will be served ahead of a young man though an old woman or a decrepit man may be ranked lower than a middle-aged one. A few usually get a second helping, though I have never seen enough pieces of meat at a meal to go twice around.
When the meat course is finished the warm blood soup is dipped up with
1914. J The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 61
musk-ox horn dippers and these are passed around in about the same order as the meat was. Several persons often have to use the same dipper in suc- cession; a single house seldom has more than five or six dippers and twelve or fifteen people often eat in a single house. If the pot is not large enough to satisfy all present, then it is filled with meat a second time, or a few of the younger people are given frozen instead of boiled meat. In case of two or three boilings, each potful is eaten while the next is cooking, and the blood soup course follows only the last potful of meat.
The foregoing is based on the practice of the Akuliakattagmiut and Haneragmiut, who were the only ones visited while still living on the ice or by the seashore in May, 1910.
The summer food being caribou and fish mainly, there is less cooking done in summer than in winter, though there is usually one cooked meal per day, the morning meal commonly. The last course here too is generally warm (never hot) blood soup, though I have seen caribou blood drunk un- boiled. Birds and spermophiles are almost always cooked, and as above stated caribou heads always are. Marrow bones are cracked and the mar- row eaten raw; caribou back fat is sometimes boiled and the intestinal and kidney fat usually is boiled. Eggs are always boiled if a fire is available.
Dwellings and Furniture.
The general style of the Copper Eskimo snowhouse is fairly well shown by our photographs.1 They are built in a manner similar to that employed by the Mackenzie Eskimo. In Alaska the construction of proper snow- houses is an unknown art. A sort of snowhouse is built at Point Barrow, the groundplan is usually rectangular. The blocks are huge and stuck on edge in a slip-shod way and rafters of wood are used to support the roof. The true dome house is first met at the Mackenzie River.
The snow is cut with a snow knife into blocks that have a surface area of something like eighteen by thirty inches and are about four inches deep. Among the Copper Eskimo this method of cutting snow blocks is rarely used and chiefly in the fall while snow is still thin on the ground. In winter when good snowdrifts can be found, the cakes are cut of about the same length as in the Mackenzie district but with a depth of eighteen inches instead of four so that while the finished block is the same size and shape as that used by the Mackenzie people, it is obtained by a different method. In other words, the snow block in the Mackenzie district, is, while it is being
i See "My Life with the Eskimo."
62 Anthropological Papas American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
cut, in the position of a domino lying flat on a table, while the block among the Copper Eskimo is cut in a position of a domino standing on edge.
The snow dwelling houses of the Mackenzie Eskimo proper were used only on journeys and under special circumstances. Among the Baillie Islands or most easterly branch of the Mackenzie people, snowhouses were frequently lived in all winter although wood and earth houses were also used. Among the Copper Eskimo no other form than the snowhouse is now in use nor was any other house in use in the past so far as the people themselves know. The Cape Bexley people were familiar with the wood and earth houses used on the section of coast west from them to Cape Lyon, but I infer that this familiarity came through the ruins of the houses only because they made about them some statements which are absurd in the light of our knowledge of the characteristics of the Eskimo house of the western type. They said that the people of this section of the country used to live in snow- houses in winter and in earth and wood houses in summer. The nature of an Eskimo house is that so soon as the sun begins to thaw the snow on its roof in the spring, the house begins to drip and must be vacated. This is true, I know, all the way from Point Hope east to Baillie Island and must be true wherever houses of the type are used. All summer the floor of one of these houses is a puddle of water and it is only next fall after the ground is thoroughly frozen that the dwellings become again habitable. It appears to me therefore an essential absurdity to suppose that the houses of which we saw the ruins west of Crocker River were used as summer dwellings.
The snowhouses of the Mackenzie people seem to have averaged con- siderably larger than the ones in use by the Copper Eskimo. It was com- mon enough at Baillie Island that it was something like nine or ten feet from the floor to the top of the dome. In the east, however, houses of this size are erected only on special occasions when dances are to be held. One such house was built to celebrate our coming to the Akuliakattagmiut and was about nine feet in height and accommodated forty people standing up, with a circular space of about five feet in diameter left in the center free for the dancers.
The largest dwelling house we ever saw in actual use was among the Kanhiryuarmiut, where nine people slept under a single roof. At the time we were there they were using snow walls and a skin roof in that particular house, but we were told that the same family had occupied a snowhouse until a few days before. Five or six may generally be considered a large number for a single snowhouse and if there are only two or three inhabitants, the house is commonly no more than five by seven feet in the dimensions of its floor space and five and a half to six feet high from floor to the center of the dome.
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 63
By the eastern method of cutting snow blocks so as to have them stand- ing on edge as they are cut out of the drift it is possible to complete a house entirely from the blocks that are cut out of the floor; in other words, a single man without assistance can easily complete a house and finish it to the last detail of the "key stone." By the western method this is not possible for a second man is required to stand outside, cutting blocks and bringing them to the builder, or else, the man who does the building would have to cut a door in the wall of the house he is making and crawl out through it to fetch blocks with which to continue the work.
The principles of snowhouse construction have been so often discussed that there is not much use for going into them here in detail; besides our photographs are in a measure self-explanatory. It is worth pointing out, however, that while the Eskimo of the Mackenzie River are rather particu- lar in building up the house in a continuous spiral which seems from the accounts of other travelers to be a method also in use in many other districts, the Copper Eskimo take no pains to follow this method. In the building of a large house, for instance, there are sometimes three men working at different parts of the wall and one of them may have his section five feet high while neither of the others has got beyond three feet and there will be high and low places in the wall so that it presents a serrated appearance. All that is necessary in order that the snow blocks do not cave in is that no part of the wall shall be absolutely straight. The curve must be continu- ous; if then the ends of two blocks are properly trimmed so that they fit together they cannot possibly cave in without breaking. The same principle applies to the finishing steps of a dome roof. The roof may be almost flat but it cannot be quite flat for if it were the blocks would fall in of their own weight. Still, an expert snowhouse builder will make a roof so nearly flat that it is difficult to see it is not perfectly so.
When the key stone has been put in place the next thing is to arrange the interior. It is intended that the bed shall be on a platform anything from eighteen inches to three feet high which occupies about two-thirds of the oval floor space. Commonly the house has been excavated to about a depth equal to the desired height of the platform by the taking out of the floor of the blocks that went to construct the walls and roof. If this has been the case, the builder has been careful to leave a little shelf running all around the wall, but if that has not been convenient he will cut from what remains of the floor a series of blocks and stand them up on edge around the wall, or if there is not material enough inside the house to do this have it brought in. Then the floor blocks are passed in to the house by the builder's wife or someone who remains outside. The longest of these has a length equal to the transverse diameter of the house and by being put crosswise
64 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
forms the front edge of the bed platform. The shorter ones are put farther back, the shortest forming the foot of the bed. In other cases, however, there is one piece put crosswise on the side to form the front edge of the bed platform and the others at right angles to it lengthwise of the house. The skins are spread over this platform and household gear is stowed away under it.
If, however, no planks are at hand out of which to make the floor of the bed platform, the entire platform is built up out of snow. The disadvantage of this method is that it takes a little more work and that it gives you no stowage space underneath the bed. After the bed platform has been pre- pared it is the woman who does the rest of the work. She comes in and spreads the skins over the bed and then she puts up the blubber lamp, either setting it on a block of snow or else by the use of uprights and cross pieces of wood she sets up a table upon which the lamp stands and above which the stone cooking pot is to be swung. When everything is in readiness she takes a little blubber, crushes it with a blubber pounder and about half fills the bowl of the lamp. Then she takes from a bag either a piece of moss or some fuzz of the pussy willow and spreads a layer for a wick along the forward rim of the lamp. She now strikes a light by knocking together two pieces of iron pyrites above a bit of pussy willow fuzz which is used for tinder. When the lamp has been lit it is trimmed so as to burn with the greatest possible heat and then the door of the house is sealed up with a block of snow. In about half an hour the house becomes so warm that the snow of its walls and roof begins to melt. As the melting goes on the water does not drip but is soaked up into the snow blocks blotter fashion until finally they are nearly or quite soaked through. The woman occasionally feels of the walls by pressing her knuckles into them and when they are the requisite degree of dampness she puts out the lamp and opens the door. In a few minutes the intense cold which rushes in from the outside freezes the wet snow blocks and the house is turned from a fragile structure of snow that would crumble if you touch it carelessly to a vaulted dome of ice so strong that a polar bear might crawl over the roof without the danger of breaking it in. This in fact often happens in districts where polar bears are numerous.
The house is now fit for occupancy and will be occupied as long as cir- cumstances require. When the weather is cold out-of-doors, it is possible to keep the snowhouse very comfortably warm for the cold from the outside neutralizes the heat from within and no melting takes place, but if the weather turns warm, melting soon starts. If the house has been perfectly built the dome is of such even curvature that no water drips down, but only trickles down the sides. If there is any unevenness, however, dripping will
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 65
commence. This is temporarily dealt with by pressing a block of dry snow against the spot from which the water drips. This block will adhere to the roof without any danger of its dropping until it becomes thoroughly soaked before which it should be removed and be replaced by a dry block. Occa- sionally, however, one naturally forgets to do this and it is not uncommon to have a block of soaking wet snow drop on the bed upon your head or into any food that you are eating.
Outside the door of the house is an alleyway anywhere from ten to thirty feet long with its floor on a level with the floor of the house. Both the outer door and the alleyway and the door of the house itself remain open day and night and there is commonly also a small ventilating flue in the roof so that the interior is always plentifully supplied with fresh air. This is universally the case except in times of famine when seal oil becomes too precious for food to allow its being used for fuel and then, of course, it will be necessary to decrease in size the ventilating openings to keep up the temperature of the house.
Sometimes two families will occupy the same house in which case the woman of each family has a separate lamp for cooking standing on either side of the door as one enters. More commonly two families, if for any special reason they want to live together, will build a double house. There is a single alleyway at the inner end of which there are two doors leading into the two houses. Again, there may be a three-room house or three snowhouses built adjoining each other and intended for the occupancy of two families. In this case there are generally two alleyways leading into the houses at either side while there is interior communication between the two houses and the central common room furnished by the third house be- tween them. It is also common that a house has an alcove for storage pur- poses either built on to the house or excavated into the snowbank in which the house stands. This alcove is used chiefly for the storing of meat and blubber although other articles may be kept there as well. Sometimes these storage alcoves are built into the wall of the alleyway just outside of the door of the house in which case they have to be closed with snow blocks for the dogs of the family occupy the alleyway and would help themselves if un- restrained.
When the warm weather of spring comes upon a snowhouse village that is already built, the roofs will cave in while the walls remain intact. A few sticks are then put up for support and skins spread over. Only caribou skins are used, although sealskins, bearskins, and musk-ox skins are used in emergencies. If, however, a village is built during the changing weather of spring, snow walls are put up with the intention of using a tent roof over them in which case they are built rectangularly instead of ovally as they
66 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Xatural History. [Vol. XIV,
would be if they were to be roofed over with snow. This is a sort of a transition stage and all the dwellings of this time are makeshift ones so that they may be of any shape. The roofs may be flat, pyramidal, or of the general outline of our A-tents, differing from them, however, usually in that the ridge pole is never as long as the floor of the house and the roof therefore slopes in from all sides instead of from two sides only as in the case of our common tents.
The tents in use in summer from (ape Bexley to the Kent Peninsula as seen near Bear Lake the summer of 1910 may be described as A-tents with bell ends. Commonly the tent of last year is during the winter cut up and used for some purpose, perhaps it has been fed to the dogs, or possibly it has been needed for bedding. The tents of all but the most provident families are therefore very small and unsatisfactory but each time a caribou is killed its skin goes to increase the size of the tent and by the latter part of summer everyone is suitably housed. The skins are always used with the hair side out whether they be sealskins or caribou skins. I have never seen musk-ox or bearskins used in summer. They are useful only in the transition stage while the snow walls are still in use and while the people are still able to haul their belongings in sleds. In the summer, when everything has to be carried on one's back, none but light skins can be conveniently used. The tents range from little bits of three-cornered shelters where skins are spread over the two sides leaving the lee side open, to long affairs with a floor space say six by fourteen feet and a door in one of the long walls. In this sort of a tent two families live, one on each side of the door while the shelter first described merely keeps the rain off the heads and upper parts of the bodies of two or three people who use them. Their feet stick out into the open as they sleep and if it commences to rain, they either get soaked or else the people have to get up and sit huddled inside their shelter.
The triangular shelter, of course, has no ridge pole; its frame is a mere tripod. A good-sized ordinary tent used by a single family will have a ridge pole about five foot long supported on either end of the tent by a tripod of sticks about seven foot long, the third leg of each set being so placed that the floor of the tent will have an extreme length of about nine feet. This frame is by its construction rigid and is completed by leaning up against it at various points any number of sticks that happen to be at hand. The skins that form the tent cover are sewn in one piece and are spread over the tent frame something in the manner employed with Indian tipis. It is not intended, however, that a fire shall be built within the tent except for smudge purposes, to keep out mosquitoes. There is therefore no design to have an opening at the top of the tent. It is, however, a matter of fact that little care is taken in lacing the skins together at the top and a little rain will accord-
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 67
ingly come in all along the ridge pole and especially at the two ends where the upper six or eight inches of the poles that form the tripods stick out through the roof of the tent.
An Eskimo family usually needs such a quantity of gear that there is room for but a small part of it inside the house and it is kept outside either on top the roof or on a rack especially constructed for the purpose. Most of this belongs to the woman's department of the family and consists in large part of partly worn-out clothing, tanned and untanned skins intended for garments, bundles of sinew for sewing thread, and things of that sort.
Some of the main items of the furniture of the snowhouse have already been indicated : the planks that form the floor of the bed platform, the stone lamp, and stone pot with which the cooking is done, the wide board that forms a table in front of the lamp, and the round rods that are stuck verti- cally into the floor and horizontally into the walls of the house form the framework that supports the lamp and the cooking pot and upon which the drying frame rests above the lamp. The drying frame is a hoop commonly oval in shape perhaps two feet by four in size. There may be one or two rods across this hoop to keep it rigid or there may be only thongs stretched at right angles to each other across the hoop so as to form a network upon which mittens and other small articles can be spread without any danger of their falling through into the cooking pot or lamp underneath. On the table in front of the lamp will usually be found some platters made of wood for holding meat and dippers of musk-ox horn from which the blood soup is drunk. There is also a woman's knife, the rod of antler which she uses in place of a fork to turn over the meat when it is boiling and to fish it out of the pot when it is done, the blubber pounder of musk-ox horn to crush the frozen seal blubber before it is put into the lamp, and the short flat-tipped stick that is used for trimming the lamp. There is also kept convenient a little pencil-like stick the end of which is charred and stuck in grease. This can be made at any time to form a torch if anyone wants to look in a dark corner of the house or under the bed or something. By the door is a flat stick like a ruler that is used for beating the snow out of the clothes when anyone comes in from a blizzard. This is usually done out in the alleyway while the snow is still dry and powdery on one's clothes. If you were to come into the warmth of the house the snow among the hair clothing would soon become damp and would stick instead of flying out easily as it does when clothes are beaten while the snow is still dry with cold.
The furniture of the summer camp is even simpler than that of winter. In Coronation Gulf there are certain small islands upon which all sorts of household belongings can be safely left for the summer and everywhere the greater part of the property of a family is left behind in spring, although
68 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
the cache may be nothing safer than a heap of stones which a polar bear might easily break into. Polar bears, however, are exceedingly rare, so that the danger is really not very grave. Commonly when they move about, tin' grown members of the family carry all the household things as well as the small children; the dogs are loaded with nothing but the dry meat and with the tent poles and the handles of fishing spears which they drag along somewhat as did the dogs of the more southerly Indians.
For some reason, apparently not a taboo, no seal oil is carried inland and consequently the seal oil lamps are all left behind. Only the smallest stone pots are taken not only because they are heavy, but also because the large ones are so fragile that they would never get through a summer's hunt unbroken. Even a pot no larger than twelve inches long by seven wide and six deep is so breakable that no one but the housewife is entrusted with the carrying of it and she wraps it carefully in a bundle of bed skins and carries it on her back. Two or three musk-ox horn dippers will also be carried for use in drinking the blood soup but the wooden food platters are all left behind, for stones or grass can always be found upon which the boiled meat can be spread for the meal. Unless the woman's sewing kit be considered an article of furniture, we have hereby exhausted the list of the furnishings of the typical camp.
Household Utensils.
Most lamps and cooking pots are made of stone secured on a small main- land river that flows into Coronation Gulf "a short distance" east of the Coppermine. This river is called Kugaryuak but is often referred to as Utkusiksalik (the place where there is material for pots).
The lamps are of the type already familiar from Point Barrow.1 This is to be expected if, as the Mackenzie people say, the Point Barrow people used to buy lamps at Barter Island from the Mackenzie Eskimo who got them from the Baillie Islanders, who in turn got them from farther east. Lamps and pots were formerly costly in the west as compared with other artifacts, but are now cheap on Coronation Gulf, another thing that points to the Gulf as the source of pots, etc., used farther west.
We have seen lamps in use ranging in length from six to forty-three inches. If the lamp is too short for the entire length of the pot or pots swung above it, a second or third is used, so as to give a flame equal to the total length of the bottoms of the pots. For wicks, moss is sometimes used
1 Cf. Murdoch, John. Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition. (Ninth Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, 1892.)
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as at the Mackenzie River, but more often the cotton-like fuzz of a plant
found in marshy places. This seems to make a wick superior to the moss
used in the west, for at the Baillie Islands, etc., the snowhouses are usually
discolored inside by lampsmoke,
but old winter houses at Cape ^gt^$
Bexley to our surprise showed no
lamp black on the walls.
Pots seldom vary much in depth or width (about eight inches wide, and six inches deep) but may be anything from ten to forty-five or more inches in length. These pots, especially the larger, are very fragile and are a constant care to the women. The larger ones are never carried inland to the hunting and fishing grounds in summer; the ones that are taken along are carried by the women wrapped inside a big bundle of skins. In winter each housewife keeps two pots at least in continual use, one for cooking, the other for melting drinking water. The pots are so swung on rods that they can be shifted over the lamp flame or beyond its influence. The length of the lamp flame is constantly varied according to the warmth of the house or the urgency of bringing a pot to the boiling point.
The blood soup that forms the last course of every cooked meal is drunk from dippers of musk-ox horn. These differ strikingly from the sheep horn dippers in use west of the Mackenzie, through being so shaped that they will stand on any flat surface without danger of upsetting, and in having a handle less than two inches long against handles of eight to twelve inches to the west. Some housekeepers have as many as five or six of these dippers, though two or three is more common. At a meal the head of the house or an important visitor gets the first dipperful but never gets a second helping until all present have had their turn. The woman who serves, drinks last, but grown women present are preferred to boys. Rank at meals is by age irrespective of sex; decrepit persons rank below those of middle age.
Shallow wooden dishes are used as platters for meat, cooked or raw;
Fig. 8 a (60.1-2862), b (60.1-3458), c (60.1- 2871). Stone Lamps: a, Point Barrow; b, Coronation Gulf; c, Mackenzie River type. Length of 6, 60 cm.
70 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
pails of sealskin are used for carrying and keeping water; bags of sealskin are used for oil and blood; and bags of one sort of skin or another are em- ployed by the men to keep safe small tools, fragments of metal, etc., and by the women for scraps of skin, needle cases, knives, etc. In eating, both sexes prefer To use ulus (women's knives), a copper ulu is preferred to a man's iron knife. The women's needle cases are of the lowest long bone of the foreleg of the cari- bou. Clubs or mallets of musk-ox horn are used for pounding blubber before it is put in the lamp so the oil may run out more freely.
Campsites are chosen with more care in sum- Fig. 9 (go.1-3211). stone mer than in winter. In the fall the Kogluktog-
Kettle, found on an Island . , . .
in west Darnley Bay about niiut, they told us, are kept from moving out on three Miles off Parry Penin- the ice to the best sealing grounds by the lack
sula. Length of fragment, <> • 1 i i>t i m t i
47 cm- of suitable snow tor house-bmldmg everywhere
except near shore. Why the Akuliakattagmiut remain near shore at Cape Bexley through the fall, till about the disap- pearing of the sun, we did not learn, but the reason is most likely the same. After midwinter, however, a village can be built wherever the ice is a little rough and has gathered snowdrifts of sufficient depths for house blocks and that is in several places every square mile of even the levelest ice the Straits can show. Of course, villages are seldom found in winter except in good sealing localities. What is a good site for a sealing village one year may not, however, be equally good the next for the seals, though more dependable than caribou, frequent certain localities more one year than another, the fluctuation depending probably largely on the season at which the ice forms in the fall and on the conditions of calm or storm under which it forms and its consequent roughness.
The summer of 1910 we saw several hundred sites of summer camps, two dozen or so of which were occupied when we saw them. The location is always marked by the stone tent rings (the stones that have been used to hold down the tent flaps) and usually by numerous other works of man, shavings of wood, bones and horns of animals, flat stones raised on edge for fireplaces, drying frames for meat, or for windbreaks, etc. Over ninety percent of these are situated on hill tops that give a commanding view of the surrounding country. The reasons for choosing such hill tops were given as follows: (1) Fear of Indian attack; (2) Desire of a good view of the caribou feeding grounds; (3) The advantage of a wind-swept hill in mitigat- ing the plague of mosquitoes and sandflies. Those that hunt toward Bear Lake told us the nearer they camped to the lake the more carefully they chose their campsites for "you never know when or from where the Indians may come."
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Another consideration in choosing a campsite is that there shall be enough stones for camp purposes, to fasten down the tents, to form windbreaks, fireplaces, etc., to furnish suitable slabs and boulders on which to spread meat to dry, and perhaps most important of all, to give a background with which the color of the tents so harmonizes as to make them difficult to per- ceive from a distance. The tents generally have a mottled appearance due to the use of whole caribou skins, the animals are much darker on some parts of the body than on others. This harmonizes well with the huge moss- grown boulders and stone slabs that cumber the hill tops about the sources of the Dease and along the Coppermine to McTavish Bay of Bear Lake. A dozen tents are often so artfully pitched that the men and dogs moving about them can be seen at a greater distance than the tents, while an Indian
Fig. 10 a (60.1-3457), b (60.1-3455). Large Lamp, and a Kettle from Prince Albert Sound, Victoria Island. Length of a 1.8 m.
lodge or a white man's tent can usually be seen four times as far as could men standing around them. In August, 1910, our camp was for a few days located a quarter mile across a small lake from an Eskimo camp of some seven tents. Though this camp was on the skyline as seen from ours, we had the greatest difficulty in making it out without the use of glasses, so little did a tent on the skyline differ in shape and color from a boulder on the skyline. Looking from their camp to ours the small details of arrangement could easily be made out.
A third desideratum is the presence near by of a considerable supply of heather for fuel. There seems to be a prejudice against camping near wood, or even using it for fuel. If wood is used at all in cooking, a small dry stick is brought to camp and chopped into shavings with an adze. The chief
i- Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
Fig. 12.
Fig. 13.
Fig. 14.
Fig. 11 o (60-70(56), b (60-7065), c (60-7067), d (60-7071). Models of Vessels, Corona- tion Gulf: a, food dish, made of a knot from a tree, diameter, 9 cm.; b, pail made of skin; c, dipper made of wood; d, food dish made of wood. Length of a, 9 cm.
Fig 12 (60-7073) . Model of a Horn Spoon, Coronation Gulf. Length, 8.5 cm.
Fig. 13 (60-6963). Wooden Pail with Bail of Horn and Copper Rivets, Coronation Gulf. Height, 12 cm.
Fig. 14 (60-7027). Small Spoon of Musk-ox Horn, Coronation Gulf. Length, 14 cm.
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Fig. 15 (60-7006). Fork made from the Metacarpal Bone of a Musk-ox, Coronation Gulf. Length, 29.5 cm.
Fig. 16 (60-7028). Horn Spoon with Bone Handle, Coronation Gulf. Length, 40 cm.
Fig. 17 (60-7024). Horn Dipper, Coronation Gulf. The repairing is with iron and horn plates; copper rivets. Length, 23 cm.
74
Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
Fig. 18 a (60-7070) ,\b (60-7072a). Models of Buckets, Coronation Gulf: a, bone, horn. Height of a, 3 cm.
Fig. 19 (60-7053). Bag for Fire-making Implements, Coronation Gulf. It contains t wo pieces of pyrites each having wrapped grips'. Length, 19 cm.
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Fig. 20 (60-7062). Bag of Moss for Tinder, Coronation Gulf. Length, 12 cm.
Fig. 21 (60-6967). Frame for drying Clothes, Coronation Gulf. The cord is of braided sinew, the frame of wood. Length, 55 cm.
7(» Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
Fig. 22 (60-6925). Blubber Pounder of Musk-ox Horn, Coronation Gulf. Length, 35 cm.
Fig. 23 (60-7031). Dipper of Musk-ox Horn, Coronation Gulf. Length, 18 cm.
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reason for doing this I take to be the, to a white man, incomprehensible conservatism of the race, though the shape of their cooking pots furnishes some reason. Fear of enemies cannot be the reason, for a heather fire makes more smoke by a great deal than would an adequate blaze of dry sticks.
In cooking with heather, the oblong stone pots are set up on small blocks of stone about the height of a common house-building brick laid edge-
c
Fig. 24 a (60-6926), 6 (60-6964), c (60-7026). Wooden Ware, Coronation Gulf: o, food dish, 69 cm. long, carved from a single piece; 6, food dish made of two pieces, bottom carved out, sides bent ; c, food bowl, carved out.
wise, or perhaps an inch higher. A long slab of stone is then taken and set on edge at the back of the pot and two smaller ones at either end of it, so as to form three sides of a rectangular box for the pot. Fire is then built and small handfuls of heather or a shaving at a time of wood are pushed under the pot to keep a low blaze constantly going.
Our own Eskimo refused for a long time to cook with heather when we were traveling with a party of Coronation Gulf Eskimo, saying their people
78 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
(Port Clarence, Alaska, and Mackenzie River) never cooked that way. They would therefore hunt far and wide for green dwarf willows, but by the time there were willows enough gathered by our party, further operations would be stopped by hospitable shouts from the other tents to come over and have supper. They had boiled two successive potfuls of meat and some- times three, while we were getting ready to build a fire. This was too much for the conservatism even of Eskimo and towards the end of the summer our Eskimo could cook a potful of meat as quickly as anybody, though there seemed always an undercurrent of feeling that they were doing something unworthy, and there was much rejoicing in our camp over finding a patch of large willows to camp by, though I cannot see that it helped us to get supper any quicker.
But as our Eskimo prefer wood, for fuel, so the Coronation Gulf people prefer heather. When heather is scarce and far from camp and wood near and easy to get, they often waste much time gathering and carrying heather, but so often do white men traveling with Eskimo waste time and energy doing in their own way what could be quickly and better done in the way of their companions. It is a common human trait, though the Eskimo has it developed more strongly than most other people, more strongly than the most "old-fashioned" European.
Nearness of water is not of much concern in choosing a summer campsite, for good water is found almost anywhere during the Arctic summer, even on top the salt sea ice. Of self-evident importance to the Eskimo (and there- fore not needing much consideration) is locating their camps overlooking deer passes, good feeding grounds, places where caribou swim lakes or rivers, etc. The steady decrease in the number of migrating caribou has of late years led to the abandonment of many formerly frequented campsites at swimming places.
Methods of Travel.
In winter there is little long distance travel by large parties, the individ- uals and groups of two or three families often make long journeys for trading purposes, to pay visits, or to return to their own people after summer wander- ings to distant hunting grounds. Such travel as there is, is by sled exclu- sively.
The sleds used in Dolphin and Union Strait are longer on the average than any familiar to me among Eskimo farther west, the natives of the Kuwuk and Noatak Rivers have long ones also, while perhaps the shortest sleds used by any Eskimo are those of the Mackenzie Delta and Baillie Islands, three and a half to four feet long. The sled fragments found on
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 79
old graves at Cape Parry, Cape Lyon, and east along the coast to the limit of the present range of the Straits people (say Inman River) are all of the short type and correspond in detail to those still in use by some of the Baillie Islanders, the same width of "guage," shape of runners, number of cross bars and manner of inserting the ends of the crossbars into the runners. There are always three crossbars, and the fourth perforation in the runner, that for the hauling lines, is always triangular. The sleds in use in the Straits vary from twelve to twenty feet in length and those of Coronation Gulf average longer. The number of crossbars varies not only with the length of the sled but also according to the fancy of the maker, though there usually are from five to nine. A few sleds in the Straits and as far east as Rae River are shod with whalebone in the usual Eskimo way, strips of bone cut lengthwise from the bone of the lower jaw (inferior maxillary bone) of a bowhead whale. Generally, however, the shoeing of a sled is as follows : —
The runner to begin with, is a spruce wood plank about one and a half inches thick and twelve or fourteen inches high. To the bottom of this is pegged with round wooden pegs a thin strip of wood, the width of the runner. This strip is of as decayed and "fuzzy" a kind as is obtainable, a piece of half decayed driftwood is preferred. In the fall, when the sled is to be used sod is cut in strips as long as convenient and about three inches thick and four inches wide. Lengthwise, along the flat side of these is cut a groove the width of the sled runner and the sod is put under the runners as shoeing. With a little water these are securely frozen to the bottom of the runners, the fuzz of the half-decayed wood holding them securely. The bottom of the runners is then rounded off with an adze or knife so the sod takes the form of a longitudinally bisected cylinder. The last touch is given by turning the sled upside down and washing over the sod runners with a little water to give them a one-tenth inch coating of ice. This ice coat is inspected every day of travel and repaired when necessary; the sod shoeing usually lasts a whole winter without special attention being paid to it. In spring when the sun shines warm a skin is hung loosely over the sunward side of the sled to shield the runners when traveling from the direct rays of the sun, and at camp time, the sleds are buried in snow to keep the sod shoeing from dropping off and the ice coat on its bottom from melting. In various places I have seen different ways of applying ice to the shoeing of sleds but none seems so satisfactory as this, at least, none are so well adapted to use on rough ice or stony ground. Ice is no doubt the best form of shoe- ing ever devised for sledging at low temperatures. We have seen sleds thus shod carrying a thousand pounds and more of load, traveling at the rate of two miles an hour hauled by one man, one woman, and two dogs.
80 Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XIV,
Traveling in the same company we had some difficulty keeping up with the party with six good dogs and two men hauling six hundred pounds on a steel shod sled such as is now used by all Eskimo west of Baillie Islands. Steel has many advantages and is the best all-round shoeing in spring and fall, but it grates on the snow as on sand when used at temperatures prevalent in the Arctic from December to April. Ice is the best, possible shoeing for low temperatures, it most nearly eliminates friction.
\,- Except when carrying blubber and other things to islands, promontories, and other places where they are to be cached, the Straits and Gulf Eskimo usually travel light, but we have never accompanied them on such journeys. Generally, they do not carry even one day's provisions of meat, expecting to catch seal wherever they camp, and thus be saved the trouble of hauling, always irksome to them as few have over two dogs, none, so far as we know, over three, and many only one. We have however, followed the trail of a
Fig. 25 (60-7054). Wooden Snow Goggles, Coronation Gulf. Length, 14 cm.
party bound for the caribou hunting grounds who kept the coast several days before striking inland. These traveled on an average of about six miles per day. Their chief baggage in winter is the lamps, cooking pots, wooden supports for the lamps, and the pots and woman's table that stands before the lamp, and the boards that form the bed platform of the snow- houses. More than most Eskimo these groups practice keeping a large part of their belongings in caches here and there. This is pretty safe as a polar bear is seen once in many years only (we have spoken with middle- aged men who never saw a bear) and wolverines are absent from a large part of their territory. There are no powerful animals to break caches, therefore, neither wolves nor foxes will break a stone cache.
When bound for the caribou hunting grounds and fisheries in the spring most families start inland by sled, though some are delayed on the coast by
1914.] The Stefdnsson-Anderson Expedition. 81
this or that circumstance till the thaws have made sledding impossible. Those usually spend the summer not far inland, though we have seen within ten miles of Bear Lake men who had packed their camps on their hacks from the mouth of Rae River on Coronation Gulf. A large kill of caribou near the coast may delay any party till the thaw overtakes them, hut commonly they penetrate seventy-five or one hundred miles inland before the disap- pearance of snow (about the first week in June for the Coppermine district I compels the abandoning of sleds.
When moving camp in summer the woman carries the stone cooking pot wrapped in bed skins, for the pot is very fragile. She also carries, if there be any, pups that are too small to walk and usually she carries the tent besides. If he has a kayak, the man carries this, his how. arrows, all bis tools, fragments of copper for making arrow-heads to replace those lost, and some other odds and ends. The one or two dogs carry hackloads of meat and drag the sticks that go to make the tent frames. Thus loaded, the party travels at the rate of about two miles per hour but seldom moves over eight, miles per day. The loads carried by the men and women are about of the same weight, and seldom exceed eighty pounds, for if there is more meat on hand than the dogs can carry they either delay till the surplus is eaten or dried down to suitable weight, or else a stone cache is made for the meats to serve as a relay on the return journey to the coast. Generally, therefore, a family returns to the coast by the way it came south in the spring, or else someone else takes up the caches if some special reason sends the owner by another route. Things en cache seem to belong strictly to the maker of a cache, though all eat equally of the meat when the cache is once broken. Very seldom does anyone, however, help himself from another man's meat pile, his wife is expected to serve out the food to all who want it.
On a windy day the long kayaks though they weigh not over forty pounds are very awkward to carry, and camp-moving is often delayed by a gale. When traveling a man will usually not take the trouble to launch his kayak on a lake less than two or three miles long. When a sufficiently long lake is found the kayak is put in the water, the rest of the man's back- load is stuifed into the after end of it, and the man paddles quickly across. But the speed and ease are not all pure gain, for the wetting has increased the carrying weight of the boat and it has taken