d children by supplying them with food when they were on the
verge of starvation. For eighteen years I had been training them in my
methods; or, to put it another way, teaching them how to modify and
concentrate their wonderful ice technic and endurance, so as to make
them useful for my purposes. I had studied their individual characters,
as any man studies the human tools with which he expects to accomplish
results, until I knew just which ones to select for a quick, courageous
dash, and just which dogged, unswerving ones would, if necessary, walk
straight through hell for the object I had placed before them.

I know every man, woman, and child in the tribe, from Cape York to Etah.
Prior to 1891 they had never been farther north than their own habitat.
Eighteen years ago I went to these people, and my first work was from
their country as a base.

Much nonsense has been told by travelers in remote lands about the
aborigines' regarding as gods the white men who come to them, but I have
never placed much credence in these stories. My own experience has been
that the average aborigine is just as content with his own way as we are
with ours, just as convinced of his own superior knowledge, and that he
adjusts himself with his knowledge in regard to things in the same way
that we do. The Eskimos are not brutes; they are just as human as
Caucasians. They know that I am their friend, and they have abundantly
proved themselves my friends.

When I went ashore at Cape York I found there four or five families,
living in their summer tupiks, or skin tents, From them I learned what
had happened in the tribe in the last two years; who had died, in what
families children had been born, where this family and that family were
then living--that is, the distribution of the tribe for that particular
summer. I thus learned where to find the other men I wanted.

It was about seven o'clock in the morning when we arrived at Cape York.
I selected the few men needed from that place, told them that when the
sun reached a certain point in the heavens that evening the ship would
sail, and that they and their families and possessions must be aboard
the ship. As hunting is the only industry in these Eskimo villages, and
as their goods are of an easily portable character, consisting mainly of
tents, dogs and sledges, a few skins, pots and pans, they were able to
transport themselves to the _Roosevelt_ in our boats without much loss
of time. As soon