The Eskimo has two fields in which to hunt food,—­the land and the sea, with fish the great staple; and both fresh and salt-water fish are his, that in the mouths of the great rivers being better than what the Loucheux gets higher up.  If the Eskimo wrote copy-book lines, the most insistent one would be, “Lose your matches, throw away your guns, but hang on to your fish-net.”

Through the years there was bad blood and mutual distrust between Eskimo and Loucheux.  The last pitched battle occurred in the 60’s, when of the contestants only two Loucheux escaped and not one Eskimo was killed.  The Hudson’s Bay Company officer at the close of the fight called together the relatives of the slain Loucheux, upon whom rested the duty of revenge, and out of The Company’s stores paid in trade-goods the blood-price of the slain.  Since then both peoples have traded at Forts Macpherson and Arctic Red River, maintaining a sort of armed peace, but with no deeds of violence.  The Loucheux Indian, his wives, his babies, and his slab-sided dogs suffer from starvation almost every winter.  In the whole history of the Eskimo there is not an authenticated story of one of this people having starved to death.  Once more we protest against misapplied sympathy.  However it may have been in the past, the Eskimo stays on the coast to-day because it is to him “God’s country” and not because any hostile Loucheux sends him there.

For the past twenty years the men on the American ships have employed the Eskimo to aid them in the whaling industry, picking up different bands all the way from Bering Sea eastward as they sail in from the Pacific, and depositing each group at their individual beaches as the ships take out their rich spoils of baleen and oil at the close of the season.  The Eskimo has proven a valued aid to this industry; how has the intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the Eskimo?

Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of that number.  The causes?  White men’s diseases:  scarlet fever, consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling decrease.  Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian, measles perhaps more than all.  Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.

What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them making in Eskimo evolution?  Who shall say?  It is so easy to be dogmatic, so hard to be just.  This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but call it rather the coming of commerce.  The whalers have taught palates once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches.  To the credit side of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.