; how has the
intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the
Eskimo?

Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta
region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of
that number. The causes? White men's diseases: scarlet fever,
consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling
decrease. Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though
consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian,
measles perhaps more than all. Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal
than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.

What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them
making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic,
so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole
horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but
call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates
once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and
molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches. To the credit side
of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the
Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.

The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by
marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the
whaling-ships. Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its
changed culture characteristics. But as a more far-reaching result of
the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the
Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo
mothers, and, for "floating fathers," marking their escutcheon with
every nationality under the sun,--American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian,
Italian, Portuguese, Lascar. This state of things startles one, as all
miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is
different from all others. In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a
Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or
Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one.
There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo
"wives" outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this.
One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken
"outside" by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or
eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior water