HAMLYN'S MENAGERIE MAGAZINE. 



13 



Omer, France, in 1824, and died at Ealing, 

 London, in 1897. 



The gardens were closed about 1866, and 

 the land was soon covered with houses. Farn- 

 worth Street, Boaler Street, and West Derby 

 Street may be said to cover the boundaries. 



Farming The North American 

 Caribou. 



The Illustrated Sporting and, Dramatic 

 News has a most interesting article on the 

 above. The writer (H. Mortimer Batten) gives 

 the fullest particulars of the scheme, which I 

 am sure will interest all my readers. 



From the Alaskan boundry line to the 

 shores of the Hudson Bay there exists a vast 

 territory known as the Arctic Prairies — about a 

 million square miles — which has long been 

 written off as of no value to man. This region 

 is commonly known as the Barrens of the 

 North-West Territory, and consists of a wilder- 

 ness of rocks, snow and endless tiny lakes, where 

 summer reigns for about three months in the 

 year, and where the rank vegetation serves only 

 to supply thousands of musk oxen and the 

 greatest herds of animals in the world — namely, 

 the herds of barren land caribou. These have 

 estimated at thirty million head, and the word 

 " herds " is somewhat misleading. The caribou 

 exists, not in mere scattered groups but in vast 

 armies, ranging from one million' in a group to 

 perhaps a dozen million. 



As in the barren lands of Labrador, these 

 animals migrate with seasons, and prospectors 

 and traders sometimes bear stories to civilisation 

 of the romance of these great migrations. They 

 tell how for days and nights on end, the whole 

 vast landscape as far as the eye could reach is 

 grey with the drifting hosts, every animal 

 moving northwards or southwards in accordance 

 with the promptings of the season. 



When a year ago the world was experiencing 

 its pangs of post-war hunger, the well-known 

 explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefannson, took the floor 

 of the Canadian Houses of Parliament and put 

 forward proposition which naturally created 

 great interest, for he pointed out that this vast 

 belt of waste country could be rendered capable 

 of producing meat supplies almost equivalent 

 to Australia. The explorer's speech was listened 

 to with deep attention and so much have the 



sidelights and footlights of civilisation shifted 

 during recent years that no proposition, even 

 though five years ago it might have been 

 regarded as one of utter folly, was now too 

 fantastic to prove credible. Stefannson, it 

 will be recalled, established a new system of 

 Arctic exploration, that of living off the country 

 carrying little or no white man's provisions 

 which require great trains of dogs and many 

 men. He is acquainted with the barren lands 

 in every aspect of the seasons, having spent six 

 years in the midst of this region which he 

 regards as one of brimming lakes, verdant up- 

 lands, and flower-strewn meadows. He pointed 

 out that this prolific growth affords sufficient 

 and the right food for the gigantic herds of 

 wild beasts that inhabit it, and that the time 

 had come to put these teeming millions to some 

 practical use. 



That the domestication of the caribou is 

 not only possible, but highly practicable, has 

 already been proved. At the present time the 

 animals of the North West Territory are, of 

 course, too remote from civilisation for any 

 means of transportation to be established, but 

 this was not an insurmountable difficulty. 

 There was plenty of barren land, so called, 

 nearer civilisation, which would support the 

 animals as well as their old habitat. For 

 twenty-seven years the caribou in Alaska have 

 been raised and domesticated by the natives, 

 and the same state of affairs has existed in 

 Siberia since time immemorial — in that country 

 caribou — the smaller breed — being known ss 

 reindeer. A group of Siberian reindeer were 

 imported from Russia to Alaska twenty-seven 

 years ago by the United States Government 

 at the suggestion of Dr. Sheldon Jackson, at 

 an initial cost of two hundred and forty 

 thousand dollars. The Government farmed 

 out the animals to the natives and the mission 

 stations on a co-operative basis, and the 

 experiment proved from the first an unqualified 

 success. To-day the herds have reached the 

 grand total of 85,000 head, and the natives, no 

 longer a half-starved and wretched people 

 dependant on hunting conditions which vary 

 with the seasons, are well clothed, well fed, and 

 well housed. 



Stefannson pointed out that if such things 

 are possible in Alaska, they are possible on an 

 even greater scale in Canada, and by this 

 synthetic reasoning he concluded that thebarren 

 lands of the North-West Territory could be 

 made profitable to the Dominion. 



