244 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



son's Bay find no difficulty in securing it in winter or summer, al- 

 though their country is not nearly so well supplied with fuel plants 

 as is the southerly "barren ground" into which the Dog-ribs and 

 Yellowknives make their furtive dashes, or the northern portion 

 of Alaska where the Point Barrow Eskimos experience fuel scarcity. 



The summer of 1910 I was living with three western Eskimo 

 companions among the Eskimos of Coronation Gulf. When after 

 a day's march across the prairie we camped in the evening, my 

 three Eskimos used to scatter and go sometimes a mile in search 

 of small willows which they would gather with great difficulty into 

 bags and bring home on their backs. Before this willow gathering 

 was done our local Eskimo traveling companions would have their 

 own supper cooked and ready to eat, for they used for fuel a sort 

 of "heather," Cassiope tetragona, which grew in many places and 

 always in those we selected for camp sites. I pointed out the 

 great advantage of using these plants for fuel, but conservatism is 

 a trait that is always stronger the more ignorant the people, and my 

 Eskimos were unwilling to listen. Their people had always traveled 

 in this kind of country and they had always used willows. It 

 was an application in a field other than religion of the sentiment of 

 the well-known hymn: " 'Twas good enough for father, 'twas good 

 enough for mother." They seemed to feel there was something 

 essentially wrong or degraded about using a "grass" when wood 

 was available. This same conservatism had prevented their ances- 

 tors as long as they lived in Alaska from learning the art of "grass" 

 burning from the Oturkagmiut. There they were in their own coun- 

 try and public sentiment was overwhelmingly on their side, but 

 here they were in the minority with everybody laughing at them. 

 They stood pat for a month, but finally gave in; and before fall 

 we were able to cook a meal as quickly as any of the local people. 



This is a digression, the point being that the plant Cassiope 

 tetragona grows abundantly in most parts of Banks Island, and that 

 usually we were able to pick a camp site where around our camp fire, 

 in an area no larger than the floor space of a bedroom, would be 

 fuel enough to cook a meal. In sunshiny weather with a moderate 

 breeze blowing I would cook with heather even were dry willow 

 at hand, and in my experience dry willow is rare, at least of that 

 type which is most prevalent in the northern part of the North 

 American mainland. There is, however, in Banks Island and the 

 northerly islands and in rare places on the mainland another "wil- 

 low" which has roots many times as large as that part of the plant 

 which is above ground. The roots are found dead and sticking out 



