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 lable 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- 
