THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 21 



Few of the explorers of the far north have come from a moun- 

 tainous country but most of them have been brought up among 

 hills and woods. So what they mean when they call the north 

 barren is that it is devoid of trees, and when they say desolation they 

 mean absence of cultivation and habitations of men in the sense 

 in which they are familiar with them. Two stories on one subject 

 illustrate this completely and give, I believe, the whole truth of 

 why we have so often been told that the north is barren and desolate. 



A young man by the name of Thomas Simpson had come in 

 1838 direct from his home among the woods and hedges of Eng- 

 land to the limit of the forest area on the arctic circle, just north 

 of Great Bear Lake. Except for the Atlantic voyage he had 

 traveled to Bear Lake chiefly if not entirely through a country of 

 hills and woods, and here for the first time in his life he was face 

 to face with the open country. He came to a lake about thirty 

 miles long surrounded by hills of varied form. There were trees 

 at the east end but he could see them only in the far distance; 

 there were trees at the west end which he probably did not see 

 at all. He did what is customary when a European "discovers" 

 some place to which he has been guided by the natives whose an- 

 cestors have been brought up in the vicinity: he gave the lake a 

 name. He named it "Dismal Lake." And in his book he goes 

 nearly to the limits of the language in telling us how desolate and 

 dreary, forlorn and forbidding, blasted and barren the country was. 



Half a century later there grew up in England a man by the 

 name of David Hanbury. He did not come to the far north di- 

 rectly from England by a route exclusively through woods. For 

 one thing, he had purchased a ranch and lived on it off and on for 

 years in Wyoming. He was familiar with the prairie and even 

 with the uninhabited prairie. He had read Thomas Simpson's 

 book, and the adjectives had made enough impression upon him so 

 that when he approached Dismal Lake he expected the place to 

 live up to its name. But all Thomas Simpson had really meant 

 when he strained his vocabulary was that trees were absent or far 

 away and that there was some snow on the ground. To Hanbury 

 treelessness and a covering of snow would not of themselves have 

 constituted desolation. Perhaps partly as a reaction against 

 Simpson, he goes to the other extreme and describes the lake as 

 a wilderness paradise. Simpson chanced to come to the lake in 

 winter and Hanbury in summer, but this was not where the differ- 

 ence lay, as Hanbury makes clear and as I can testify personally. 

 For with a familiarity with the prairie and with treeless mountains 



