Eskimo

Our first experience with the Sunday taboo was at Shingle Point, about fifty miles east of Herschel Island, in July, 1908. Dr. Anderson and I, with our Eskimo and two whale-boats, had arrived there at the boat harbor one evening. Each Eskimo family had its own whale-boat, and we were all bound for Herschel Island and anxious to reach it, because we feared that any day the whaling fleet might arrive from the west, put into the Herschel Island harbor for a day, according to their custom, and pass on to the east, and all of us were anxious to be there to meet the ships. 

The morning after we reached Shingle Point and for several days after that it blew a steady head-wind, and we were unable to proceed. We were getting more impatient each day and more worried, for the wind that was foul to us was fair to the whaling-ships, and would bring them in and take them past without our seeing them, we feared. When our impatience to be moving had grown to a high pitch, we awoke on a Sunday morning early, to find a change of wind. It blew off the land, and the weather was therefore propitious for travel. Some of our Eskimo neighbors paid us an early morning visit, and inquired whether we were going to start for Herschel Island that day. My answer was that of course we were, at which they were evidently well pleased; and when we had eaten breakfast a good many of them had struck their tents and were loading the camp gear into the boats. After our breakfast was over I said to our Eskimo that now we would start, but they replied that they could not do so unless someone started off first, in which case we could follow. Considerably astonished, I asked them why that should be so. They replied it was Sunday, and a person who led off in Sabbath-breaking would receive punishment. Accordingly, they said, if any one was found who was willing to start, they were willing to follow; but they would not lead off, for then the sin would be on their heads, and they or their relatives would be punished. 

As many of the Eskimo boats were already loaded, I at first thought it would be a question of but a few moments until someone would start, for these people had all been heathen when I had lived with them the previous autumn, and I could not at once grasp the fact of the new sacredness of the Sabbath, which had been a neglected institution half a year before. But it turned out that of all our impatient party no one dared to start. II went went around around among them from boat to boat, inquiring whether they were not going to launch out. The answer of each boat crew was that they would not start out first, but they would follow me if I started. 

After talking over with Dr. Anderson the necessity of doing something, I suggested to our own Eskimo servants that Dr. Anderson and I alone would sail one of our whale-boats and lead off, and they could follow in their boat; to which they replied that a subterfuge of that sort would avail nothing, for they belonged to my party now, and would (so long as they were of my party) have to suffer the penalty of any wrongdoing of mine. If I insisted upon sailing that day, they would have to sever their connection with us in order to escape the penalty of our desecration of the Sabbath. So we accordingly had the choice of losing the services of our Eskimo, which for the future were indispensable to us, or of letting the fair wind blow itself out unused, which we did. 

I spoke to Ilavinirk about the fact that he and I, less than a year before, had traveled together on Sunday, to which he replied that at that time he was not a Christian, and although he had heard of heaven and hell, he had not then realized the situation or the importance of good conduct; but that now he realized both fully, as did all his countrymen, and not only did he not care to brave the Divine punishment, but also he was unwilling to become an object of the disapprobation of his countrymen. (I believe that in fact the latter reason was with Ilavinirk quite as strong as the former, for on other occasions when none of his countrymen were around he often followed my lead in breaking the Sabbath.) 

The good wind blew all day, and there we stayed, all of us eager to reach Herschel Island, and each of us unwilling to be the first to break the divine law. Toward sundown the situation was changed by the arrival from the east of a whale-boat manned by Royal North west Mounted Police, a party of whom were on their way from Fort McPherson to Herschel Island. We signaled them to come ashore, and they had tea with us. Afterward, when they set sail, all of us followed them, for by landing and taking tea with us they had joined themselves to our party, and it was therefore they and not we who broke the Sabbath when they started off, with our boats close behind. By the time we finally got off the fair wind had nearly spent itself, and most of us had a good deal of trouble in getting to Herschel Island by beating and rowing, which is a detail.

I had been compelled to come to Point Barrow for the lack of matches, but now that I was there I needed a great many other things, for the season was so short that I could not possibly get east to the Mackenzie River before the freeze -up. Instead of being able to winter in a region well supplied with fish and game, as I should have been had I obtained matches at Herschel Island, I was now compelled to winter on the northern coast of Alaska, where ten years before there had been vast herds of caribou , but where there now is practically no game at all. The let-alone policy of the Government, the cupidity of traders, and the ignorance of the Eskimo themselves have practically destroyed the caribou as the buffalo was destroyed in our own West. The situation here, however, was fundamentally different. In the West the destruction of the buffalo was a necessity, for he cumbered the land which the farmers needed for the planting of crops; but the caribou graze on lands where no crops will ever grow. Shooting buffalo for their hides and for sport destroyed them a few yearsbefore they would have had to go anyway; but the shooting of the caribou for the same reasons cannot be similarly extenuated, for had no more been killed than were needed for food and clothing for the population of the country itself, they would have lasted in definitely, and would have been forever an economic resource not only for the Eskimo but for the country at large. 

As there could be no hope of our party “living on the country ” the coming winter, I had to buy from the whaling vessels food enough to take us through twelve months. I had no money, for I expected to buy nothing in the Arctic, but fortunately, several of the whaling captains knew me and realized the circumstances; I had there fore no trouble in getting what I needed.

The ethnologist has this advantage over other scientists who go to the polar regions, that he has a good field for investigations wherever he is not alone. The navigator is hampered by the winds and seasons; the secrets that the geologist tries to decipher are covered up in winter by a blanket of snow; but the ethnologist can learn something about human nature wherever he has companions, and strange and unpleasant situations are likely to bring out peculiar and interesting phases of character. For our Eskimo our present situation was not essentially peculiar, however; they are used to being overtaken by winter in places that do not suit them, and they simply put up with it as a matter of course. Their life goes on in the ordinary way, in the search for and the preparation of food, in the making of clothing, and in the exercise of their religious observances. My notebook for this period is therefore not barren. I recorded folk-lore stories which my Eskimo told each other in the evenings when the day's hunting for marmot was over. I noted that Nogasak's milk teeth were pulled out by her mother with a piece of sinew and that they were not thrown away but were put carefully inside of pieces of meat and fed to dogs. It is a matter of wise forethought to do this, for were some evilly disposed man to get hold of one of your teeth, he could practice magic on you by practicing it on the tooth. This is the sympathetic magic known to many primi tive peoples. You freeze a man's tooth, or a paring of his finger nails, or a lock of his hair, and you give him chills ; you put these, or any other parts from his body, near a fire, and he suffers with a fever; you let them drop, and he is likely to have a fall in the mountains and to break some of his bones if not to kill him self. Some Eskimo therefore will burn a tooth, put it into a marmot hole, or throw it into the sea; but the Mackenzie River Eskimo believe the safest way is to feed the tooth to a dog. 

I learned also why it is that animals allow themselves to be killed by men . The animals are much wiser than men, and know every thing in the world , -including the thoughts of men; but there are certain things which the animals need, and which they can get only from men . The seals and whales live in the salt water, and are there fore continually thirsty . They have no means of getting fresh water, except to come to men for it . A seal will therefore allow himself to be killed by the hunter who will give him a drink of water in return ; that is why a dipperful of water is always poured into the mouth of a seal when he is brought ashore. If a hunter neglects to do this, all the other seals know about it, and no other seal will ever allow himself to be killed by that hunter, because he knows he is not going to get a drink . Every man who gives a seal a drink of water, and keeps this implied promise, is known by the other seals as a depend able person, and they will prefer to be killed by him. There are other things which a seal would like to have done for it when it is dead, and some men are so careful to do everything that seals want that the seals tumble over themselves in their eagerness to be killed by that particular man. The polar bear does not suffer from thirst as much as the seal, for he can eat the fresh snow on top of the ice. But polar bears are unable to make for themselves certain tools which they need. What the male bears especially value are crooked knives and bow-drills, and the female bears are especially eager to get women's knives, skin scrapers, and needle cases ; consequently when a polar bear has been killed his soul (tatkok) accompanies the skin into the man's house and stays with the skin for several days (among most tribes, for four days if it is a male bear, and for five days if it is a female) . The skin during this time is hung up at the rear end of the house, and with the skin are hung up the tools which the bear desires, ac cording to the sex of the animal killed . At the end of the fourth or fifth day the soul of the bear is by a magic formula driven out of the house; and when it goes away it takes away with it the souls of the tools which have been suspended with it and uses them thereafter. 

There are certain manners and customs of humanity which are displeasing to polar bears, and for that reason those customs are carefully abjured during the period when the soul of the bear is in the man's house. The bear, in other words, is treated as an honored guest who must not be offended . If the bear's soul has been properly treated during his stay with the man, and if he has received the souls (tatkoit) of implements of good quality, then he will report those things in the land of the polar bears to which he returns, and other bears will be anxious to be killed by so reliable a man. If the wives of certain hunters are careless about treating the souls of the bears properly while they are in their houses, this will offend the bears quite as much as if the man who killed them had done it, and this may cause an excellent hunter to get no polar bears at all. Certain women are known in their communities for this very undesirable quality, and if a woman becomes a widow, her reputation for carelessness in treating the souls of animals may prevent her from getting a good second husband.

On September 17th we considered that the sea ice was probably strong enough for sled travel. The ice of Smith Bay had been strong enough for several days, but we feared and with good reason I am sure that east of Smith Bay the coast would still be open. In the afternoon of the 17th Ilavinirk and I took a small sled-load with the idea of going to Point Pitt at the eastern end of the Bay, to cache it there and to find out if conditions were propitious. We did not get quite that far, for about ten miles southwest of Point Pitt, well within Simpson Bay, we saw an Eskimo camp pitched on ground that rises about twenty feet above the sea at the mouth of a small creek that comes out of a well-known fishing lake lying a few miles inland. 

This camp turned out to be returned traders who had been to the Colville and even to Flaxman Island to exchange ammunition, flour, tea, cloth, and other commodities —which they get cheaply at Point Barrow — for skins of caribou, mountain sheep and foxes. At Point Barrow these men work for the Cape Smythe Whaling & Trading Company, and for other white and Eskimo whalers. Some of the Eskimo at Point Barrow now carry on whaling on a large scale, maintaining as many as five or six boat crews. Irrespective of whether their employers are white or Eskimo, these men get each year as wages about two hundred dollars' worth of supplies. This means that the Point Barrow community leads an easier life than any other community does as a whole in any land where I have ever traveled . The whaling season in the spring is six weeks, and it is six weeks of fairly easy work at that. For all the rest of the year the men have nothing to do, are their own masters, and can go wherever they like, while their employers must not only pay them a year's wage for six weeks' work, but also furnish them houses to live in, usually, and rations for the entire year. Of course the men are expected to get their own fresh meat, which they do by seal and walrus hunting, and by cutting in the whales, —only the bone (balleen) of which goes to their employers. The employer supplies them with cloth for garments, and such suitable provisions as flour, tea, beans, rice, and even condensed milk, canned meats and fruits. Each man each year gets, among other things, a new rifle with loading tools and ammunition. The result is that firearms are probably nowhere in the world cheaper than they are at Point Barrow (or at least were, up to 1908) . When I first came to Point Barrow you could buy a new Winchester rifle of any type, with loading tools, five hundred rounds or so of smokeless powder ammunition, and a considerable quantity of powder, lead, and primers for five dollars in money; had you bought the same articles wholesale at the factory in New Haven, the price would have been in the neighborhood of twenty dollars. There are few Eskimo who will use a rifle more than one year. They will no more think of using a last year's rifle than our well-to-do women will consider wearing a hat of last year's fashion, and you see rifles and shotguns, which our most fastidious sportsmen would consider good as new, lying around on the beach, thrown away by Eskimo who have no realization of their value because of the ease with which they have ways obtained them in the past. The reason for all this is that whaling was, until a few years ago, so fabulously profitable an industry that the whaling companies cared scarcely at all what they paid for services as long as they got the whales. But now that the price of whalebone has suddenly gone down through the invention of a substitute, the Eskimo are facing a new era and the change will be hard on them. 

The pay-day of the Point Barrow Eskimo comes in the spring, and their employer hands them out rifles, ammunition, cloth, provisions, and various things which the people scarcely know what to do with . So they load them into their skin boats and take them east along the coast, to sell them at any point in the Colville or at Flax man Island. To give some idea of the scale of prices it is worth while to say that one of the men whom we met returned with ten deerskins, which was all he had received in the Colville River for a boat-load of supplies consisting of two new rifles, two cases of smoke less powder ammunition for these, twenty -five pounds of powder and a corresponding supply of lead and shot, three bolts of cloth, a case of, carpenter tools, some camp gear, three hundred pounds of flour, sixty pounds of good tea, two boxes of tobacco, and various other articles too numerous to mention. The ten caribou skins were of varying quality. The best of them were worth that year about five dollars apiece, and the total value of the ten skins could not have been more than thirty dollars. In other words, had this same Eskimo stayed at Point Barrow during the summer and been able to board a whaling ship with thirty dollars in his pocket, he could have bought ten deerskins of a corresponding quality, had they been carried by the ship, — although of course the ships carry only fairly good skins, averaging much better than the ten which he had secured in the Colville

In going eastward, September 27th, we found the ice off the mouth of the Colville still too thin for safe travel, and we had to go along the shore, thus nearly doubling our traveling distance, for the land has many and deep bights. We were able to shoot a few seal, and to get a ptarmigan, gull, or a duck now and then. We were in no danger of shortage of food, for our load consisted of over two hundred pounds of provisions, besides the ammunition and camp gear. The ducks and gulls, we noticed, were all traveling west parallel to the coast. 

Just east of the Colville, at a point known to white men and Eskimo alike as Oliktok, but which on charts is called Beachy Point, we had luck in seeing a band of caribou. There were nine of them, and between Ilavinirk, Kunaluk, and me we got seven. This was the first time in my experience that I had shot at caribou with Eskimo, and it was probably the first time in the experience of these Eskimo that they had ever seen a caribou killed by a white man. Ilavinirk and Kunaluk, accordingly, had some amusing arguments about the matter later on. They had agreed that neither one of them would shoot at a big bull caribou until the others had been killed, because he was sure to be poor and his skin would be less valuable than that of the younger animals; nevertheless the bull was dead now , and Ilavinirk said that I had killed it; but Kunaluk said that could not be, and that one of them must have killed it by a stray shot, although admittedly neither of them had aimed at it. Ilavinirk and Kunaluk had never hunted caribou together before, and we learned later that Kunaluk considered he himself had killed most of these caribou, and that I had certainly killed none and it was doubtful whether Ilavinirk had killed any or not. But it was Eskimo custom and by it he was willing to abide — that when three men shoot at a band of caribou, the booty shall be divided equally among the three. This did not suit me particularly, however, as I had been feeding and taking care of Kunaluk for some time, and I pointed out to him that by white men's custom all the animals belonged to me. I told him, however, that I was willing to concede the point only in the matter of the skins and would keep all of the meat. 

We stopped a day to make a platform cache for the meat, and that day Kunaluk, unaided, killed another caribou, so that we had the meat of eight to leave behind in cache. Three of the animals were skinned as specimens, and are now, with many others, in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. These are the first skins of caribou taken for scientific purposes on the north coast of Alaska east of Point Barrow. 

On October 8th, just west of the mouth of the Kuparuk River, I went inland alone and killed a young bull caribou which even Kunaluk did not dispute had been shot by me. We had seen a band of caribou in another direction in the morning, and Ilavinirk and Kunaluk had gone after them, but with no success. In the afternoon, however, the three of us together killed another bull caribou, so that at the mouth of the Kuparuk also we were able to leave behind a cache of meat. These we expected to be useful some time later in the winter when we should come back over the same trail. 

The low, coastal plain of northern Alaska is triangular in shape, with its apex at Point Barrow, perhaps two hundred miles north from the base, which is formed by the east and west running Alaskan spur of the Rocky Mountains, which comes within a few miles of the coast in eastern Alaska at the international boundary and meets the ocean in western Alaska at Cape Lisburne. This plain is so nearly level that in most places it is not possible , in going inland , to determine offhand whether you are going up hill or down. The rivers are all sluggish, but thirty or forty miles inland most of them run between fairly high banks, which shows that the land does slope up , even though imperceptibly, towards the foothills. Just east of the Colville River at Oliktok, the mountains are probably about eighty miles inland. As you proceed eastward along the coast they be come visible from near the mouth of the Kuparuk. Continuing east ward they get steadily nearer the coast, and apparently higher, until their distance from the sea is not more than six or eight miles at Demarcation Point, while their highest places are probably about ten thousand feet in elevation and lie southward from Flaxman and Barter islands, where they contain a few small glaciers. 

This whole coastal plain was a few years ago an immense caribou pasture and inhabited by hundreds of Eskimo who lived mostly on the meat of the caribou. Of late years the country has been depopulated through the disappearance of the caribou. This fact explains the United States census returns as to the population of northern Alaska. To any one ignorant of the facts, the census figures seem to prove that the population of northern Alaska has remained stationary during the last two or three decades. This is so far from being true that I am certain the population is not over ten per cent now of what it was in 1880. The trouble arises from the fact that the census covered only the coastal strip. The village of Cape Smythe contained probably about four hundred inhabitants in 1880, and contains about that to -day. But only four persons are now living who are considered by the Eskimo themselves to belong to the Cape Smythe tribe, and only twenty or twenty-one others who are descended from the Cape Smythe tribe through one parent. The fact is that the excessive death rate of the last thirty years would have nearly wiped out the village but for the fact that the prosperity of the whaling industry there year by year brought in large numbers of immigrants; so that while thirty years ago it was safe to say that seventy five per cent of the four hundred Eskimo at Cape Smythe must have been of that tribe, no more than seven per cent can now be considered to belong to it . The difference is made up by the immigrants, who, according to their own system of nomenclature, belong to a dozen or more tribes, and hail from districts as far apart as St. Lawrence Island in Bering Sea, and the mouth of the Mackenzie River in Arctic Canada,while the majority come from inland and from the headwaters of the Colville, Noatak, and Kuvuk rivers. It seems that the inland Eskimo, who by their head-form and other physical characteristics show clearly their admixture of Alaskan Indian blood, are more hardy than the coast people, or at least are less susceptible to the half dozen or so particularly deadly diseases which the white men of recent years have introduced. But hereafter the census figures will begin to be more truthful, for now the northern interior of Alaska is all deserted , and no recruits can come down from the mountains to fill in the vacant places left by diseases among the coastal Eskimo. 

It was the vanishing of the caribou from the interior coastal plain that drove down the Eskimo to the coast, and now it seems that the caribou are having a slight chance, for in large districts where for merly they had to face the hunter, their only enemy is now the wolf. Temperamentally, the Eskimo expects to find everything next year as he found it last year; consequently the belief died hard that the foothills were inexhaustibly supplied with caribou. But when starvation had year after year taken off families by groups, the Eskimo finally realized that the caribou in large numbers were a thing of the past ; and they were so firmly impressed with the fact, that now they are assured that no caribou are in the interior, as they once thought they would be there forever. 

One result of this temperamental peculiarity was this, that during the winter of 1908-1909 there were numerous families huddled around Flaxman Island (where, as it turned out, the Rosie H. was wintering) with the idea that it was impossible for them to get caribou for food or for clothing, while we went inland to where every one said there was no game, and were able to live well. Our own small party that winter in northern Alaska killed more caribou than all the rest of the Eskimo of the country put together, because we had the faith to go and look for them where the Eskimo “knew” they no longer existed .