6 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



sees the animals no more. Not many years ago, the coastal plain of Arctic 

 Alaska from Point Barrow to the Mackenzie was the pasture of vast herds 

 of caribou. Only an occasional scattered band is now seen. As a conse- 

 quence many families of Eskimo have been compelled by starvation to move 

 out, notably from the Colville River region. The caribou are practically 

 extinct around Point Barrow and our party in summer found only a few 

 between Cape Halkett and the Colville, a herd of perhaps four hundred in 

 the Kuparuk River delta (the only large band seen by anybody in northern 

 Alaska that season) and other small bands as far east as Demarcation Point. 

 Around the mouth of the Mackenzie the caribou have practically dis- 

 appeared although stragglers are occasionally seen on Richard Island and 

 in the Eskimo Lakes region. Few are now found on the. Cape Bathurst 

 peninsula and only small numbers around Langton Bay and Darnley Bay. 

 This great diminution of caribou all along the Arctic coast from Cape 

 Parry west has mostly occurred within the past twenty years, since the 

 advent of whaling ships to the western Arctic. There are places in the 

 interior of Alaska which are more favored. On one of the northern 

 tributaries of the Yukon in December, T saw as many as one thousand 

 in a single herd. 



Farther east also the caribou are more plentiful. Victoria Island pas- 

 tures great numbers in summer. These herds cross to the mainland south of 

 Victoria Island as soon as Dolphin and Union Strait and Coronation Gulf 

 are frozen over in the fall, returning over the ice in April and May. Some 

 caribou are also found all summer around Great Bear Lake and the Copper- 

 mine River. Large numbers winter on Caribou Point, the large peninsula 

 between Dease Bay and McTavish Bay at the eastern end of Great Bear 

 Lake. Here on the cold, calm days of midwinter the steam from the massed 

 herds often rises like a cloud over the tops of scattering spruce forests. 



The Eskimo of this region have no firearms and kill caribou by driving 

 a herd between long rows of rock monuments into an ambush of concealed 

 bowmen, or by driving the deer into lakes and spearing them from kayaks. 

 On the Barren Grounds around Coronation Gulf these itiuktjuit [inuk (man)- 

 like] caribou drives are found everywhere. But even here the older people 

 say that in their youth caribou were much more abundant. 



These natives live almost entirely upon seal in winter and hunt caribou 

 very little at that season. Consequently they do not travel much by sled 

 and keep few dogs. With the advent of rifles in the near future, the natives 

 who elect to follow the caribou in winter will be obliged to keep two or three 

 times as many dogs as at present, feeding them on caribou meat as did the 

 Alaskans, with the certainty of a speedy diminution of caribou in this 

 region as in northern Alaska. 



The caribou is without question the most important animal of the Arctic. 

 Its extinction would be a calamity to the natives. Its skin is an article of 

 clothing hardly to be dispensed with, while as a source of food supply we can 



