THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 147 



until the end, when there always was a fusillade of 

 questions. 



They frequently asked me to tell about how condi- 

 tions were in the white man's country, but I soon found 

 that they were really not much interested and that this 

 was largely courtesy. At first I thought their lack of 

 interest might be due to my inability to make myself 

 understood, but I found in later years after I got com- 

 mand of fluent Eskimo that this was not the case. They 

 have far less interest in the white man's world than we 

 have in theirs. The whaling captains told me that they 

 had found no Eskimo who was willing to go with them 

 to San Francisco (which was their outfitting port) except 

 for wages. The idea of any one wanting to go to a place 

 for the sake of seeing it struck them as curious. They 

 had no intention of living in San Francisco and if they 

 did not want to live there, why should they go there? 

 The only possible motive they could see was that the 

 whaling captains wanted them to work for them, in which 

 case they were perfectly willing to go if they were prom- 

 ised sufficient wages so that at the end of a year they 

 would return to their people with a larger amount of 

 goods than they could have purchased for the foxes they 

 might have trapped during the same year. It is only 

 when an Eskimo community becomes "civilized" that 

 some of the Eskimos begin to want to go south to see 

 the big cities. 



I used to try to explain to Ovayuak that the climate 

 of San Francisco was very good. (We always spoke of 

 San Francisco because the name was well known to the 

 Eskimos. In general the Mackenzie Eskimos at that 

 time took the name to mean the whole world of white 

 men). When I praised the southern climate he asked 



