on of men who have lost their minds because they have endured
too many dark, cold winters. His companions say of such a man, "The
North has got him." Almost every Alaskan recognizes the danger. As one
man said to a friend, "It is time I got out of here."

"Why?" said the friend, "you seem all right. What's the matter?"

"Well," said the other, "you see I begin to like the smell of skunk
cabbage, and, when a man gets that way, it's time he went somewhere
else."

The skunk cabbage, by the way, grows in Alaska in great thickets ten
feet high. The man was perfectly serious, for he meant that his mind was
beginning to act in ways that were not normal. Nowhere is the strain of
life in the far north better described than in the poems of Robert W.
Service.

Oh, the awful hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand, As I
blundered blind with a trail to find through that blank and bitter land;
Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, with its grim heartbreaking
woes, And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough
knows! North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain
Passed like a dream I slept to lose and waked to dream again. River
and plain and mighty peak--and who could stand unawed? As their summits
blazed, he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God. North,
aye, North, through a land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes, And
all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes, Till
at last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill, And I
burst in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death, lay Bill. *

* From "Ballads of a Cheechako."

The human organism inherits so delicate an adjustment to climate that,
in spite of man's boasted ability to live anywhere, the strain of the
frozen North eliminates the more nervous and active types of mind. Only
those can endure whose nerves lack sensitiveness and who are able to
bear long privation and the strain of hunger and cold and darkness.
Though the Indian may differ from the white man in many respects, such
conditions are probably as bad for him as for any race. For this reason
it is not improbable that long sojourns at way stations on the cold,
Alaskan route from central Asia may have weeded out certain types of
minds. Perhaps that is why the Indian, though brave, stoical, and hardy,
does not possess the alert, nervous temperament which leads to invention
and progress.

The ance