230 POLAR PROBLEMS 



The grazing resources of the Arctic have long been used by primi- 

 tive men but are only recently coming into the domain of commerce. 

 Chinese records show reindeer in northern China (or north of China) 

 in the fourth century of our era, and King Alfred in England knew 

 about their being in northern Norway in the ninth century. Some of 

 the larger North European cities, such as Stockholm, have had reindeer 

 meat on their markets regularly for several decades, with prices 

 usually a little above mutton or beef. At the urging of a Presbyterian 

 missionary, Dr. Sheldon Jackson, the United States Government 

 introduced a few domestic reindeer from Siberia into Alaska in 1892; 

 these were followed by successive small shipments, until, by 1902, 

 1280 had been imported. Every three years without fail they have 

 more than doubled in number, and now (1927) there are more than 

 650,000 in Alaska, although more than 200,000 have been butchered 

 for local use. Export to the United States began a few years ago on 

 a small scale in a sporadic way not easy to trace accurately. In 1926, 

 4000 carcasses, weighing about 125 pounds each, were shipped from 

 the vicinity of Nome to the larger American cities by one firm, and 

 about 3000 were shipped by various o,ther firms and by the U. S. Bu- 

 reau of Education. The meat has been selling at from two to three 

 times the price of beef, although the production costs in Alaska are 

 very low and the shipping costs only moderate, the price being regu- 

 lated by the willingness of consumers to pay for a favored and rare 

 article. The price will doubtless come down to that of beef eventu- 

 ally but is unlikely ever to go lower because, in America as in the Eu- 

 ropean cities where reindeer is now a standard meat, a number of 

 people sufficient to keep the price up will doubtless consider it as 

 good as or better than beef. 



The Reindeer and Musk Ox as Sources of 

 Meat Supply 



We have, then, in connection with this new meat industry, a 

 whole series of economic problems. The most general one is to decide 

 which of the Arctic climates' are best for reindeer. The tentative 

 answer, which needs checking, is that the reindeer is a northern ani- 

 mal and, generally speaking, the farther north it goes the more it 

 prospers. This we deduce chiefly from what is known of the caribou, 

 which is the same animal under a diff"erent name. Arctic expeditions 

 have usually found them fattest and most prosperous in the most 

 northerly islands, whence they never migrate. That must be be- 

 cause the vegetation and climate there are at least equally agreeable 

 to them as farther south, and they escape certain insect pests, 

 especially the mosquito and the botfly, which are a great trial to them 

 around the Arctic Circle and for some hundreds of miles north of it. 



