144 THE ARCTIC PRAIRIES 



York boat, and with the help chiefly of Charlie McLeod 

 the white man, who is interpreter at the fort, I secured 

 a crew to man it. But oh, what worry and annoy- 

 ance it was! These Great Slave Lake Indians are 

 like a lot of spoiled and petulant children, with the 

 added weakness of adult criminals; they are inconsist- 

 ent, shiftless, and tricky. Pike, Whitney, Buffalo Jones, 

 and others united many years ago in denouncing them 

 as the most worthless and contemptible of the human 

 race, and since then they have considerably deterio- 

 rated. There are exceptions, however, as will be seen 

 by the record. 



One difficulty was that it became known that on the 

 Buffalo expedition Bezkya had received three dollars 

 a day, which is government emergency pay. I had 

 agreed to pay the regular maximum, two dollars a 

 day with presents and keep. All came and demanded 

 three dollars. I told them they could go at once in 

 search of the hottest place ever pictured by a diseased 

 and perfervid human imagination. 



If they went there they decided not to stay, because 

 in an hour they were back offering to compromise. I 

 said I could run back to Fort Smith (it sounds like 

 nothing) and get all the men I needed at one dollar 

 and a half. (I should mortally have hated to try.) 

 One by one the crew resumed. Then another bomb- 

 shell. I had offended Chief Snuff by not calling and 

 consulting with him; he now gave it out that I was 

 here to take out live Musk-ox, which meant that all 

 the rest would follow to seek their lost relatives. 

 Again my crew resigned. I went to see Snuff. Every 



