44 THENORTHPOLE 



another way, teaching them how to modify and con- 

 centrate their wonderful ice technic and endurance, 

 so as to make them useful for my purposes. I had 

 studied their individual characters, as any man studies 

 the human tools with which he expects to accomplish 

 results, until I knew just which ones to select for a 

 quick, courageous dash, and just which dogged, un- 

 swerving ones would, if necessary, walk straight through 

 hell for the object I had placed before them. 



I know every man, woman, and child in the tribe, 

 from Cape York to Etah. Prior to 1891 they had never 

 been farther north than their own habitat. Eighteen 

 years ago I went to these people, and my first work 

 was from their country as a base. 



Much nonsense has been told by travelers in remote 

 lands about the aborigines' regarding as gods the white 

 men who come to them, but I have never placed much 

 credence in these stories. My own experience has been 

 that the average aborigine is just as content with his 

 own way as we are with ours, just as convinced of his 

 own superior knowledge, and that he adjusts himself 

 with his knowledge in regard to things in the same 

 way that we do. The Eskimos are not brutes; they are 

 just as human as Caucasians. They know that I am 

 their friend, and they have abundantly proved them- 

 selves my friends. 



When I went ashore at Cape York I found there 

 four or five families, living in their summer tupiks, or 

 skin tents, From them I learned what had happened 

 in the tribe in the last two years; who had died, in what 

 families children had been born, where this family and 

 that family were then living — that is, the distribution 



