PRESENT COMMERCE AMONG ARCTIC COAST ESKIMO. 
3 
frequent sled trips from their home to the Asiatic side to buy 
reindeer skins of the Siberian deermen. 
So far as the writer knows, it was only in Alaska and near 
Hudson bay that the rivers played an important commercial 
r61e. Indians and Eskimo made use of the Yukon. The several 
rivers north of the Yukon brought the inland Eskimo to the 
coast, where they bought wares whose ultimate source was in 
distant Eskimo, Indian, or Siberian communities. Either by 
boats, or by sleds carrying boats, parties then bent on trade 
ascended the Kuwflik and Noatak rivers, carried their boats by 
sled over to the upper Colville, and descended by boats to the 
sea to meet the Point Barrow people near the western edge of 
the Colville delta, or traversed one of the easterly delta channels, 
by which routes they sometimes made their way as far east as 
Barter island. There was some trade intercourse between the 
Athabaskan Indians, and the Mackenzie Eskimo on that river 
and between the Athabaskans and the Coronation Gulf Eskimo 
on the Coppermine or near it, but in neither of these cases did 
the waterways, as such, play an important part — indeed the 
Coppermine can hardly be called navigable and, although 
portions of it were now and then used by Indians as canoe 
routes, the Eskimo probably never took their kayaks farther 
up than Bloody fall, nine miles from the sea. (They do not 
seem ever to have had umiaks). Chesterfield inlet and the 
rivers flowing into it were no doubt formerly, as now, ascended 
by Hudson Bay Eskimo for purpose of trade with the Back 
river, Arctic coast, and Victoria Island people. 
An interesting light is thrown upon the past history of the 
Athabaskans of Great Slave lake, as well as upon that of the 
Eskimo, by the fact that, in the early days of the fur trade, 
these Indians made long and difficult journeys to the Hudson 
Bay trading posts by a circuitous southern route which was 
recommended neither by abundance of game (for they frequently 
starved), nor by navigability of rivers, while (as David T. 
Hanbury’s explorations have shown) there existed a direct route 
well supplied with game and consisting of readily navigable 
rivers and lakes — the Akilinik River route still so much used by 
the Eskimo. Either the Indians did not know of this route, or 
