Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the world forgot.  The white men who reached the Eskimo land from the south were discoverers following to the sea the three great rivers that disembogue into the Polar Sea:  the Mackenzie, Coppermine, Back or Great Fish.  The first of these explorers was Samuel Hearne who, in 1771, followed the Coppermine to the Frozen Ocean.  For the northern natives their first contact with white explorers was a disastrous one, for at Bloody Falls on the Coppermine Hearne’s Indians set upon the only band of Eskimo they saw and almost exterminated them.  Sir John Franklin in 1820 was more happy.  He says, “The Eskimo danced and tossed their hands in the air to signify their desire for peace; they exhibited no hostile intention; our men saluted them by taking off their hats and making bows.”  Back, who explored the Back or Great Fish River in 1834, has this tribute of respect and appreciation.  He says, “I called out ‘Tima’ (Peace), and putting their hands on their breasts they also called out ‘Tima.’  I adopted the John Bull fashion of shaking them each heartily by the hand; patting their breasts, I conveyed to them that the white man and the Eskimo were very good friends.  They were good natured, and they understood the rights of property, for one of them having picked up a small piece of pemmican repeatedly asked my permission before he would eat it.”

Through all these years, if we except the noble devotion of the Moravian missionaries on the northeast of Canada and the splendid Christianity of such men as Bishop Bompas who sought them from the south, no one visited the Eskimo from the outside with the purpose of doing him good, but rather with the idea of exploiting him.  Yet, from the days of Sir John Franklin and Sir Alexander Mackenzie to the recent voyage of Amundsen, the spontaneous tribute of every man who has met them, talked with them, and received their hospitality is the same.  The Eskimo is generous, and his word is worth its full face value.  What we have done for the Eskimo is a minus quantity; what he has done for us is to point a splendid moral of integrity, manliness, and intrepid courage.

Indians beg and boast, the Eskimo does neither.  With no formulated religion or set creed, he has a code of ethics which forbids him to turn the necessity of another to his own advantage.  Amundsen’s farewell to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, “Goodbye, my dear, dear friends.  My best wish for you is that civilisation may never reach you.”

The trite saying is that the Loucheux Indians forced the Eskimo north, “keeping them with patient faces turned toward the Pole.”  But the Eskimo has a better country than the Loucheux has, for it is less rigorous and it produces more food stuffs.  The Loucheux at Fort Macpherson knows what it is to experience a temperature of 60 below Fahr., while at the coast it doesn’t drop below 55.