REVIEWS 55 



or a quarter of what it should be if the plans and equipment do not provide 

 against the mosquitoes. 



Approximately the last half of the book is a description of the trip through 

 the eastern arm of Great Slave Lake and into the Lockhart River basin. It was 

 on this part of the journey, probably on the way eastward, that Seton climbed 

 the shore cliffs to scratch his name and the date. He did not actually carve 

 the rock, but only scraped off the lichens that covered it. These lichens are large 

 leaf-like affairs (of the genus Gyrophora) , nearly black and very brittle when 

 dry. When they are scraped off, the light-colored igneous rocks are exposed. 

 They grow very slowly, so that inscriptions made by this method will be clear 

 for a long time. We climbed up to Seton's name, to see how much they had 

 grown in twenty years, and found that they had scarcely more than started 

 to recover the exposed rock. 



Traveling on the lake by canoe is not nearly so hazardous now as it was 

 when Seton and Preble made their journey. In spite of the fact that much of 

 the route through the East Arm is in narrow channels among the islands, there 

 are still some open water crossings of several miles that must be made in 

 calm weather. Seton and his party had to paddle these crossings, whereas they 

 can now be made in much less time with outboard motors. Furthermore there 

 are now excellent maps, not only of the complex island system of the main 

 lake, but also of Artillery, Clinton-Colden, Aylmer, and other lakes in the 

 Lockhart basin. 



Seton's descriptions and sketches of the country and its natural history are 

 authentic and lively. The first edition of "The Arctic Prairies" contained, in an 

 appendix, a list of plants collected by himself and Preble. This collection, now 

 in the National Herbarium at Ottawa, forms a material base for checking the 

 botanical field observations noted in the book. Descriptions of villages and 

 people are not so applicable to the modern scene ; for vast changes have occurred 

 due to the development of mining interests and air transport. Seton's Fort 

 Smith is scarcely recognizable anymore, situated as it is on main air- and water- 

 routes to the oil fields of the Mackenzie and to the mineral deposits of Great 

 Slave and Great Bear Lakes. Local families, on the other hand, such as the 

 Loutits and Beaulieus, of which the author writes a great deal, are still very 

 much in evidence. Seton's guide, Billy Loutit, when last we saw him (1939), 

 was mate on the Hudson's Bay Company steamer Distributor, plying between 

 Fort Smith and Aklavik. The author devotes a chapter (XXIII), and rightly 

 so, to the dog situation, painting a pretty unsavory picture of the way the sled 

 dogs were treated during the summer season. Although some of this ill treat- 

 ment can still be seen, much of it has been relieved, especially in the villages. 

 The dogs are now mostly kept tied up and fed, commonly by someone who is 

 hired to do the job, so that they no longer have to forage for themselves. Seton's 

 description of the dogs at Fort Resolution, however, was still true as late as 



