70 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



Smythe, with a good command both of Eskimo and English, had 

 been engaged as interpreter for Jenness. I would leave Jenness with 

 Hopson among the Eskimos near Cape Halkett where he would 

 put in the winter acquiring a familiarity with the language and 

 lives of the Eskimos. With the rest of the party I would pro- 

 ceed east to Collinson Point. 



As to the expedition's southern section the plan had been that 

 it was to spend the present winter in Coronation Gulf and survey 

 in the spring the land in that vicinity. This was now impossible, 

 since Coronation Gulf is seven hundred miles east from where they 

 lay at Collinson Point. I thought it unwise and unprofitable to 

 keep an expedition as large as that of the Alaska idle a whole sea- 

 son simply because they were not in the particular district of my 

 original plan. I would therefore make out a program for them on 

 the following basis: 



The Mackenzie delta was interesting geographically and impor- 

 tant in its commercial possibilities. And it was accessible from 

 Collinson Point, being only two hundred miles east. I had myself 

 made two journeys the full 2,000-mile length of the Athabasca and 

 Mackenzie River system from Edmonton to the Arctic Ocean, and 

 they had impressed on me the tremendous potentialities of this 

 system as a waterway, should commerce for any reason develop. 

 I had journeyed up the Yukon by steamer and had found that the 

 steamers grounded on sandbars frequently, although the pilotage 

 was expert, the channels were well buoyed, and the ships drew only 

 four and a half feet of water. On the Mackenzie, with no buoys 

 for the channels, with pilotage not so expert and with a boat drawing 

 six and a half feet of water, we had navigated without difficulty 

 an approximate distance of thirteen hundred miles — from Smith 

 Rapids on the Slave River, which is the only serious obstacle to 

 navigation on the system, across Slave Lake and down the Macken- 

 zie River to the head of the delta. Through the delta I had passed 

 several times, commonly in boats of shallow draft, but once with 

 a boat drawing about five feet. If we could survey the various 

 channels of the delta and find that any had a depth of five feet or 

 more all the way to the ocean, the knowledge might be of great 

 importance. It would be so not only to the Hudson's Bay Company 

 and other traders already in the quarter, but to the public in gen- 

 eral should a strike of gold or oil or other commercial development 

 ever bring people into that valley as they had been brought sud- 

 denly some years earlier into the Yukon valley. 



So I gave it as my intention to go from Point Barrow myself 



