hich forbids him to
turn the necessity of another to his own advantage. Amundsen's farewell
to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, "Goodbye, my
dear, dear friends. My best wish for you is that civilisation may never
reach you."

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

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

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

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