36 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



On the way to Cape Smythe the Doctor and I met a party of 

 Eskimos tending one of their herds of domestic reindeer. We 

 walked among the herd and found them fat, considering the season, 

 and much tamer than range cattle in places like Montana or Al- 

 berta, although not so tame that you could walk up and touQh 

 them. Commonly they allowed you to get within ten or fifteen 

 feet and then moved quietly away. The Doctor ran after some of 

 them, pretending he was trying to catch them, and they just kept 

 out of his reach. Very likely they were used to being similarly 

 pursued by the Eskimo children. Incidentally I learned that one 

 of the Eskimo owners now had about a thousand head of reindeer. 

 As there were many other Eskimos willing to buy them from him 

 for twenty-five dollars per head paid in furs, and as he was a clever 

 trader and could easily have made on the furs an additional profit, 

 we can say that his property in reindeer alone was worth over 

 $25,000. This Eskimo, named Takpuk, was also doing whaling on 

 a large scale and employing others to trap for him, so that he had 

 in his service about a hundred and fifty men. He was, therefore, 

 both for wealth and enterprise a remarkable exception to what we 

 suppose Eskimos to be, although not so much of an exception to 

 what Eskimos really are. 



At Cape Smythe I was among old friends. I knew most of its 

 three or four hundred Eskimos, and the Europeans were either 

 friends or acquaintances. In the Government school were Mr. and 

 Mrs. G. W. Cram, and at what had formerly been the whaling sta- 

 tion but is now mainly a trading establishment were my old and very 

 real friends Charles D. Brower, Jack Hadley, and Fred Hopson, 

 Mr. Brower being the resident manager and part owner of the Cape 

 Smythe Whaling & Trading Company. 



During the next two days I engaged the single Eskimo, Katak- 

 tovik, and the married man, Kurraluk, with his wife, Keruk, and 

 their two children. I also engaged Hadley; and there were many 

 reasons why I wanted him. For one thing, all my Karluk men were 

 new in the Arctic except Bartlett, and Bartlett came from a part 

 of the Arctic where conditions are so fundamentally different from 

 what they are around Alaska that I felt the need of at least one 

 man with whom I could talk over local conditions with a certainty 

 that he had the knowledge necessary to criticize my own ideas 

 and give opinions of value. I had the highest opinion of Hadley's 

 judgment, both because of the sort of man he was and because 

 he had been living on the north coast of Alaska acquiring experience 

 for more than twenty years. His experience was of all sorts. He 



