longest stretch
of water is only about thirty-five miles. Moreover the Strait is usually
full of ice, which frequently becomes a solid mass from shore to shore.
Therefore it would be no strange thing if some primitive savages, in
hunting for seals or polar bears, crossed the Strait, even though they
had no boats. Today the people on both sides of the Strait belong to
the American race. They still retain traditions of a time when their
ancestors crossed this narrow strip of water. The Thilanottines have
a legend that two giants once fought fiercely on the Arctic Ocean. One
would have been defeated had not a man whom he had befriended cut the
tendon of his adversary's leg. The wounded giant fell into Bering Strait
and formed a bridge across which the reindeer entered America. Later
came a strange woman bringing iron and copper. She repeated her visits
until the natives insulted her, whereupon she went underground with her
fire-made treasures and came back no more. Whatever may have been the
circumstances that led the earliest families to cross from Asia to
America, they little recked that they had found a new continent and that
they were the first of the red race.

Unless the first Americans came to the new continent by way of the
Kurile and Aleutian Islands, it was probably their misfortune to
spend many generations in the cold regions of northeastern Asia and
northwestern America. Even if they reached Alaska by the Aleutian route
but came to the islands by way of the northern end of the Kamchatkan
Peninsula, they must have dwelt in a place where the January temperature
averages -10 degrees F. and where there are frosts every month in the
year. If they came across Bering Strait, they encountered a still more
severe climate. The winters there are scarcely worse than in northern
Kamchatka, but the summers are as cold as the month of March in New York
or Chicago.

Perhaps a prolonged sojourn in such a climate is one reason for
the stolid character of the Indians. Of course we cannot speak with
certainty, but we must, in our search for an explanation, consider the
conditions of life in the far north. Food is scanty at all times, and
starvation is a frequent visitor, especially in winter when game is hard
to get. The long periods of cold and darkness are terribly enervating.
The nervous white man goes crazy if he stays too long in Alaska. Every
spring the first boats returning to civilization carry an unduly large
proporti