258 LABRADOR 



for her winter hay. All our people are forced by the neces- 

 sity of their poverty to resort to the outer seaboard during 

 the whole of our four warm months. There the Arctic 

 current renders us liable to sudden frosts at night, and so 

 gardening is unremunerative. Only one or two of our 

 salmon-fishers who remain up the inlets all summer can 

 collect the plentiful wild hay that grows there. The ex- 

 periments of the Grand River Pulp Company in raising 

 green oats or barley for fodder on the shore of Hamilton 

 Inlet have been successful, but do not bear directly on the 

 problem of procuring milk supplies on the outer coast, where 

 most of our people live. 



It was in this dilemma that I turned to the Rev. Sheldon 

 Jackson, to learn the results and prospects of his experi- 

 ments with Siberian and Lapland reindeer in Alaska, 

 which is a somewhat similar coast, and I went to Wash- 

 ington to get our information at first hand. Meanwhile 

 Sir William MacGregor, governor of Newfoundland, collected 

 and sent to Kew Botanical Gardens specimens of all our 

 mosses and lichens, and received from them a completely 

 favourable report as to the suitability of our most abundant 

 forms of vegetation to support these deer. Favouring the 

 conviction that we were plunging into no unwise specula- 

 tion, we had the evidence of the abundant natural herds 

 of caribou, known to exist in the barren lands west of 

 Hudson Bay, as well as the more direct evidence of the com- 

 paratively large herds of caribou on the Labrador plateau, 

 from which our native Indians still draw almost their 

 entire food-supply. Moreover, we are familiar with the 

 large numbers of caribou maintaining themselves against 

 all odds (including the extensive forest fires) in Newfound- 



