104 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



from the Commissioner of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, 

 Colonel A. Bowen Perry of Regina, to cooperate with the expedi- 

 tion in every way they could. 



The police patrol was starting in a day or two for Fort Mac- 

 pherson, which lies a little over two hundred miles to the southeast 

 up the Peel River, just above the head of the Mackenzie delta. 

 This patrol, made by the Inspector himself and Constable Jack 

 Parsons, I was able to share. The journey revealed both men tem- 

 peramentally and physically well adapted for the sort of work they 

 w^ere doing. It is certainly true that the Royal Northwest Mounted 

 Police is a force of men with a remarkably high average from what- 

 ever point of view they are regarded, although they naturally vary 

 among themselves and do not in every case come up to storybook 

 standards. But these two could scarcely have been better adapted 

 to the work they were doing, a corollary of which is that they liked 

 it and liked the country. Parsons has never left it since, although 

 he left the Mounted Police service and is now a trader in the employ 

 of the Hudson's Bay Company at Cape Bathurst. Inspector Phil- 

 lips had been north before and this was his second assignment to 

 the Arctic coast. He made every effort to stay there as long as he 

 could, and when eventually ordered out he was able to get his 

 superiors to send him back North again. Just now he is not in the 

 North, however, and admits that the country does not come up to 

 what it used to be. The climate and topography are still the same 

 but, as the Inspector puts it, "the place is getting too damned 

 civilized." 



I found on this trip that Inspector Phillips had the important 

 qualification of being genuinely interested in everything that per- 

 tained to the natives. At first he had a hope of being able to learn 

 the language, but after a discussion of this subject with me he gave 

 that up and confined himself like all the police inspectors before 

 him, to the use of the jargon, a sort of "pidgin English." * 



About the only people for whom it is practicable to try to learn 

 Eskimo are missionaries who expect to devote their entire lives to 

 the field. The principles of the language are entirely different 

 from those of European languages, and in order to talk Eskimo 

 you have first to adopt in general a different mode of thought. 

 Then, like most "primitive" languages, Eskimo is so highly in- 

 flected that all the complexity of Greek declensions, conjugations 

 and grammar gives but a faint idea of it. Further, between ten 



* See V. Stefansson : "Vocabulary of the Herschel Island Eskimo Jargon," 

 published in the American Anthropologist, April-June, 1909. 



I 



