184 ODOB^ENUS OBESUS PACIFIC WALRUS. 



writer, their " flesh supplies them with food; the ivory tusks 

 are made into implements used in the chase, and for other do- 

 mestic purposes, as well as affording a valuable article of barter ; 

 and the skin furnishes the material for covering their summer 

 habitations, planking for their baidarras, harness for their dog- 

 teams, and lines for their fishing-gear. r * 



According to Wrangell, "the Walrus is almost as useful to 

 the settled as the Eeindeer is to the nomad Tschuktschi. The 

 flesh and the blubber are both used as food, and the latter for 

 their lamps ; the skin is made into durable thongs for harness 

 and other purposes, and into strong soles for boots ; the intes- 

 tines furnish a material for light water-proof upper garments 

 for summer use; a very durable thread is prepared from the 

 sinews ; and, lastly, the tusks, which are of the finest ivory, are 

 sometimes formed into long narrow drinking vessels, such as 

 takes a long time to hollow out, but are more frequently sold to 

 the Eeindeer Tschuktschi, who dispose of them to the Rus- 

 sians."! 



As already incidentally noted in the foregoing pages, their 

 tusks have been an important article of traffic from the earliest 

 times to which the history of this region extends, and the source 

 of this valuable commodity was the "Eldorado" of the Russian 

 adventurers of the middle of the seventeenth century who first 

 explored the Arctic coast of Eastern Asia. Now, as then, the 

 tusks have the highest commercial value of any of the products 

 of the Walrus, and thousands of these animals have annually 

 been sacrificed, for perhaps the greater part of the last two cen- 

 turies, in order to meet the demand for them. Mr. Dall, writing 

 in 1870 of the Alaskan Walrus, states that "the quantity of 

 Walrus tusks annually obtained will average 100,000 pounds.^ 

 Allowing the average weight of a pair of Walrus tusks to be 15 

 to 20 pounds (I have found the weight of large tusks to vary 

 from 6 to 8 pounds each, the very largest 1 have seen weighing 

 less than 9 pounds) a very high estimate this enormous 

 quantity implies the destruction of more than six thousand 

 Walruses annually in the waters bordering Behring's Straits. 



According to Captain Scammon, the whalers have of late been 

 largely instrumental in the destruction of the Alaskan Walrus, 

 they having, owing to the scarcity of Whales, become more or 



* Scammon, Marine Mammalia, p. 180. 



t Wrangell's Polar Expl., Harper's Amer. ed., p. 282. 



t Alaska and its Resources, p. 504. 



