106 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



attention to him and had not noted that he was getting angrier and 

 angrier, until out of the corner of my ear I heard him say to Sik- 

 sigaluk, the Inspector's interpreter, that there would be no Eskimos 

 living to-day in the Mackenzie district if it had not been for the 

 missionaries. That remark I repeated to the Inspector, and sug- 

 gested that if he cross-questioned Taliak he would probably get at 

 first hand some views about the missionaries that would be quite as 

 interesting as any he could get from me. 



So we turned to Taliak and asked him what he had meant. He 

 said he had merely made a remark in Eskimo to another Eskimo, 

 one not intended to be taken up or discussed with a white man ; and 

 it took a good deal of pressure to get from him what he had in mind. 

 But it finally came out that he considered it well known that a 

 few years ago there was a large body of armed white men over in 

 the Yukon valley in Alaska who had come there for the purpose of 

 making a foray across the mountains into the coast land to kill off 

 all the Eskimos and take their land for occupation by white people. 

 This purpose would undoubtedly have been carried out if it had 

 not been for the missionaries, who induced the Government to send 

 the Royal Northwest Mounted Police into the country to protect 

 them. 



At first this seemed so grotesque that it was difficult to deter- 

 mine any foundation for it. The explanation turned out to be a 

 garbled version of the incipient dispute between the United States 

 and Canada as to the location of Herschel Island, it having been 

 originally assumed by the American whalers that the island was 

 on the Alaska side of the International Boundary, and accordingly 

 that the Canadian Government had no authority over them when at 

 their winter quarters. The United States Revenue Cutter Thetis 

 was sent to Herschel Island in 1889 to determine the position of the 

 island, and found it to be well within Canadian territory. Later 

 the missionaries were doubtless in part responsible for getting the 

 first detachment of police sent in to Herschel Island to establish 

 Canadian law among the American whaling fleet there. From 

 this boundary dispute and this effort of the missionaries to get 

 police sent in, Taliak and apparently all the Eskimos of the district 

 had got the idea that the police were protecting them from the 

 incursion of an army or a horde of armed people who desired to 

 dispossess them of their land. 



Another interesting point that came out on the patrol journey 

 was that the Eskimos had a very definite opinion as to why the 



