154 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



for the abundance of its deposits of mammoth bones, 1 

 the Corwin carried Mr. Townsend, then naturalist to 

 the United States Fish Commission. At Cape Prince of 

 Wales some natives came on board bringing a few bones 

 and tusks of the mammoth, and upon being questioned 

 as to whether or not any of the animals to which they 

 pertained were living, promptly replied that all were 

 dead, inquiring in turn if the white men had ever seen 

 any, and if they knew how these animals, so vastly 

 larger than a reindeer, looked. 



Fortunately, or unfortunately, there was on board a 

 text-book of geology containing the well-known cut of 

 the St. Petersburg mammoth, and this was brought 

 forth, greatly to the edification of the natives, who were 

 delighted at recognizing the curved tusks and the bones 

 they knew so well. Next the natives wished to know 

 what the outside of the creature looked like, and as Mr. 

 Townsend had been at Ward's establishment in Roches- 

 ter when the first copy of the Stuttgart restoration was 

 made, he rose to the emergency, and made a sketch. 

 This was taken ashore, together with a copy of the cut 

 of the skeleton that was laboriously made by an Innuit 

 sprawled out at full length on the deck. Now the 

 Innuits, as Mr. Townsend tells us, are great gadabouts, 

 making long sledge journeys in winter and equally 

 long trips by boat in summer, while each season they 

 hold a regular fair on Kotzebue Sound, where a thou- 

 sand or two natives gather to barter and gossip. On 

 these journeys and at these gatherings the sketches were 

 no doubt passed about, copied, and recopied, until a 

 large number of Innuits had become well acquainted 

 with the appearance of the mammoth, a knowledge that 



1 Elephant Point, at the mouth of the Buckland River, is so named 

 from the numbers of mammoth bones which have accumulated there. 



