The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the whaling-ships.  Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its changed culture characteristics.  But as a more far-reaching result of the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo mothers, and, for “floating fathers,” marking their escutcheon with every nationality under the sun,—­American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Portuguese, Lascar.  This state of things startles one, as all miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is different from all others.  In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one.  There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo “wives” outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this.  One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken “outside” by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior waterways south to some mission-school, Anglican or Roman.  As a rule, the marriage-contract is “good for this season only,” and the wife and children bid their quondam husband and father farewell, smiling at him with neither animosity nor reproach as the boats go out.

What is then the ice-widow’s condition?  Is she an outcast among her people?  No, you must remember that neither the matrimonial standard of Pall-Mall nor Washington, D.C, obtains here.  The trade-ticker of the erstwhile wife of the whaler ticks skyward in the hymeneal Lloyd’s; she is much sought of her own people.  Has she not gained in both kudos and capital?  The knowledge which she must have acquired from the white man of whalers’ ways of trading is supposed to be of monetary use to her second lord.  Moreover, the tent, utensils, and cooking-kit which she shared with her spouse from the ships makes a substantial dower when she again essays Hymen’s lottery.

Eskimo women are neither petulant nor morose.  With the men they share that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a child which makes such a rare and winning mixture.  In moving among the half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall below the standard of the thorough-bred natives.  About the morals, the ethical, or mental standards, we venture no comparison, for heredity plays such strange tricks.  The whole condition is formative, for the blending of races has been going on scarcely long enough for one to see and tabulate results.  The influence of the mother will be longer applied and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in this is their hope.  For years we have been repeating the trite, “The sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation;” it remained for Charles Dickens to ask, in his own inimitable way, if the virtues of the mothers do not occasionally descend in direct line.