14 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



scale an absolute value. The Canadian government has for more 

 than twenty years maintained a weather observatory at Herschel 

 Island on the north coast of Canada, about two hundred miles 

 beyond the arctic circle, and during that time the lowest tempera- 

 ture recorded has been 54° below zero Fahrenheit. This may seem 

 cold, and indeed is cold in comparison with Zululand or England. 

 But it is not cold when compared with certain permanently inhabited 

 countries. Traveling south from Herschel Island less than two 

 hundred miles you come to Fort Macpherson, for a long time the 

 most northerly trading post of the Hudson's Bay Company, and 

 here the temperature some winters drops as low as 68° below zero. 

 This is because, although going south, you are getting away from 

 the moderating effect of the huge amount of unfrozen and compara- 

 tively warm water that underlies the ice of the polar sea and that 

 forms a great radiator which prevents the temperature from drop- 

 ping exceedingly low. Traveling again south from Fort Macpherson 

 several hundred miles you come to the city of Dawson, the capital 

 of the Yukon Territory. This is a great mining center, although 

 it no longer has a population of forty thousand people as in the 

 days of its highest prosperity. Dawson is an ordinary town with 

 buildings steam-heated and electrically lighted, and with all the 

 ordinary activities of a place of four or five thousand population. 

 There are shops where people buy and sell as they do in other 

 climes, there are churches with people going to church (a few), 

 and there are little children toddling to school, all without any 

 greater apparent discomfort, though the temperature sometimes 

 drops to 65° below zero, than you find in France or in North Caro- 

 lina where the temperature goes a little below freezing. More 

 hardship is felt, more complaint expressed, and there is more inter- 

 ference with the ordinary routine of life when snow falls in Paris 

 than when Dawson is at its coldest. 



As you go south along the Rocky Mountains from Dawson you 

 get farther from the great temperature equalizer, the ocean, as you 

 get nearer the equator. A thousand miles south, in northern Mon- 

 tana, the United States Weather Bureau gives the same minimum 

 figure for winter cold near Havre that the Canadian Weather 

 Bureau does near Dawson — 68° below zero. We know from ob- 

 servation it is never colder than 54° below zero on the north coast 

 of North America at sea level: we know theoretically that it can- 

 not ever get much colder than 60° below at the North Pole which 

 lies in a deep ocean. It is, then, at Havre, Montana, fourteen de- 



