2 MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. 6. 



certain routes of travel more feasible than others; the character 

 of the natural resources of the different districts; and the dis- 

 tribution of the peopled areas (as well as the degree of friend- 

 liness of their inhabitants). 



In the Eskimo country the great highway of travel is the 

 sea. This is generally known and frequently reiterated by 

 students of the subject, but so habituated are many of us to 

 mentally defining a sea route as a water route, that in making 

 the above statement we speak a fact while we think a fiction. 

 The sea is indeed the commercial highway, not, however, as 

 water but as ice; not as a medium for boat travel so much as 

 (in many districts) the sine qua non of rapid sled travel and the 

 hauling of heavy loads by dog teams. Nowhere between Baf- 

 finland and Smith sound on the east and Cape Bathurst on the 

 west, did boats probably ever play a considerable part in trade; 

 certain portions of the Greenland coast were about the only 

 localities where the boat completely supplanted the sled. From 

 Cape Bathurst west to Mackenzie delta the use of boats was not 

 interfered with so much by ice conditions as by the fact that 

 the summer season here was the harvest season more absolutely 

 than in most districts, not only because of the annual coming 

 of the caribou, but chiefly because the various sorts of whales, 

 upon which the Eskimo depended for food, fuel, and light, fre- 

 quented the coast during most of the summer and engrossed the 

 people's attention, while in winter and spring they had plenty 

 of leisure for travel and for trading. The whales pass the Alaska 

 coast earlier in the season and people there have the summer 

 freer; but without sleds such journeys as those of the Point 

 Barrow people east to Barter island and back again, could not 

 have been accomplished. They, therefore, hauled both boats 

 and trading gear on sleds well towards the Colville river as well 

 as a greater or lesser part of the way back, except in the most 

 favourable seasons. It might be hastily concluded that on 

 Bering strait at least, in the commerce between Asia and Alaska, 

 the boat supplanted the sled entirely. It did not, however. 

 In our camp, as I write, is a young man of Port Clarence, Alaska, 

 whose father and older brothers, up to a few years ago, made 



