Of the High Class Eskimo

Away up in the great northland, even further north than the northern boundary of British Columbia, there lives a race of people who form, and have formed, no part of the great human civilization of the world which has been, and is going on in the more moderately climatic regions of the earth.  For centuries they have lived apart, and have taken no notice of the big world which has been, and is living itself to death far from them down in the indolent south, where the sun could shine every day in the year—­where it did shine every day that it was not cloudy, and where there was no long, dreary, dark midnight of at least four months’ duration; where the sun did not dip beneath the horizon at about the beginning of October, and disappear, not to be seen again until the end of March; where, in some parts, there was no snow, while in others only for a few weeks during the year.  No snow! no ice!  Can you imagine such a condition?  And up there it is almost the Eskimo’s only commodity.  He eats it, drinks it, lives in it, sleeps on it, and his castle is built of it.  And he endures it year after year, from his babyhood to his gray days, and there appears no hope for him.  Bare ground is a curiosity to the Eskimo; and there are no spring freshets.  Their bridges across their streams are formed of ice; the very salt sea is covered with it; and they venture out on those great floors of ice in search of the polar bear and the right whale which form almost their only food, and supply them with their only source of clothing, heat and light.  In the midst of his narrow and cramped circumstances the Eskimo can laugh at times as heartily as any other human, and he has grown extremely low in stature to accommodate himself to the small opening which gives access to his igloo (house).  The average man or woman does not exceed much over four feet.  No other explanation seems to have been offered by science for the extreme dwarfishness in stature of this curious race of people.

Like the polar bear—­almost their only associate in those northern and frozen wilds—­the idea never occurred to this people to migrate south where the earth is bare and warm, and is clothed in a green mantle; where the sun shines every day; where the land is flowing with milk and honey; where peaches and water melons grow, and where it is not necessary to go through a hole in the ice to take a bath.  No, this strange people, whose food is ice, whose bed is ice, whose home is ice, and whose grave is ice, are part and parcel of the snowy north; and they live on, apparently happy and contented with their hard life and uncongenial environment.  Where the white man begins to be uncomfortable, the Eskimo begins to be at home.  Where the white man leaves off the Eskimo begins, and his haunts penetrate away into the far north—­into the land of perpetual ice and snow.  Where we go only to explore he builds his permanent abode.