THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 173 



never known how to build ^snowhouses in their own country. When 

 they came east from Ahiska into Canada they came as passengers 

 with whaling ships, and from the whalers or from their own tradi- 

 tions they had a prejudice both against the eastern Eskimos and 

 against the snowhouse, which is their characteristic habitation in 

 winter. As a result I have never known but one Eskimo from 

 Alaska who, while residing in the Mackenzie district, learned to 

 build snowhouses. And in spite of the undoubted comfort of these 

 dwellings they have now gone thoroughly out of fashion in the 

 Mackenzie district, so that it is only the older men who were 

 mature before the coming of the whalers in 1889 who are expert at 

 building them. The winter of 1917-18 I built a snowhouse at 

 Herschel Island at the instance of my friend, Inspector Phillips, 

 of the Roj'al Northwest Mounted Police, who, although he had 

 been stationed at Herschel Island for several years, had never seen 

 one. The curious thing was that the Herschel Island Eskimos 

 gathered about to watch with rather more interest than the white 

 men of the place. The younger Eskimos came because they had 

 not before seen a snowhouse built; the older ones because it struck 

 them as extraordinary not only that a white man should know how 

 to build a snowhouse at all, but that he should demean himself by 

 using so unfashionable a dwelling. 



The reason no snowhouses had been built on our ice journey 

 before April 15th was the warm weather of which we have com- 

 plained. Then when the cold weather came we were eager to travel 

 every moment, and the pitching of a tent is undeniably quicker 

 than the building of a snowhouse, especially when the men are inex- 

 perienced. But on the evening of the 14th I had a slight touch 

 of snow-blindness, and that night a lead obligingly opened just 

 ahead of our camp, giving an additional reason for not traveling 

 the next day. This provided the long-wanted opportunity for 

 putting my snowhouse-building theories into practice, and in three 

 hours we built a dwelling nine feet in diameter and six feet high, 

 inside measure. It was as well built as any of the hundreds I have 

 built since, with this difference, that the three of us could now put 

 up a house the same size in about forty-five minutes. 



As a preliminary to the building of a house we find a snowbank 

 that is of the right depth and consistency. With our soft deerskin 

 boots we walk around on the drift, and if we see faint imprints of 

 our feet but nowhere break through, we assume provisionally that 

 the drift is a suitable one, but examine it further by probing with 

 a rod similar to a very slender cane. When the right bank has 



