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Title: Adventures in error
Author: Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Release date: April 14, 2026 [eBook #78443]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Robert M. McBride & Co, 1936
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78443
Credits: Alan, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES IN ERROR ***
[Illustration]
ADVENTURES IN ERROR
[Illustration]
ADVENTURES
_in_
ERROR
_By_
VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
[Illustration]
_New York_
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
[Illustration]
ADVENTURES IN ERROR
COPYRIGHT 1936
BY VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA
FIRST EDITION
[Illustration]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chapters I. and II. are, with alterations, from my short book _The
Standardization of Error_, published some years ago by W. W. Norton &
Company and now out of print. Chapter III. is but slightly changed from
an article that originally appeared in _The American Mercury_, May,
1927. Chapter IV. is adapted from an address which I gave before the
American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, January 2, 1931. About
the first ten thousand words of Chapter V. appeared in _The American
Mercury_ of July, 1927, but much additional information has been added.
Chapter VI. is published with slight changes from an article entitled,
_That ‘Frozen’ North_ which appeared in _Maclean’s Magazine_, Toronto,
November 15, 1929.
The publishers regret that owing to Mr. Stefansson’s sudden departure
on an extended journey he was unable to read the proofs of this
manuscript.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
I.
THE STANDARDIZATION OF ERROR
PAGE 3
II.
THE PLEASURES OF BUNCOMBE
PAGE 16
III.
ARE EXPLORERS TO JOIN THE DODO?
PAGE 67
IV.
TRAVELERS’ TALES
PAGE 88
V.
STANDARDIZED WOLVES
PAGE 136
VI.
BEYOND THE FRONTIER
PAGE 223
VII.
OLOF KRARER
PAGE 243
VIII.
HISTORY OF THE BATHTUB IN AMERICA
PAGE 279
[Illustration]
ADVENTURES IN ERROR
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I.
THE STANDARDIZATION OF ERROR
It is said that Bacon considered all knowledge his province. But the
sciences of today are so many and complex that a single Baconian view
of them is no longer possible, and perversions of thought and action
result because our intellectual horizon has been narrowed to a part of
the field. From a realization of this have come various attempts to
co-ordinate the sciences to permit a unifying view of the whole. Comte
made one of these a century ago in his _Positive Philosophy_. There
have been many since.
But if we pause to state clearly the case against the standardization
of knowledge, the essential absurdity becomes so patent that we have to
recall the numerous failures to convince ourselves that anyone was ever
foolish enough even to try it.
Consider for instance the physiology of the human skin or the
composition of a dust nebula. In these fields, among others, the
accepted facts of a dozen years ago have become the error and folklore
of today. You standardize knowledge, and while you are at the job the
knowledge changes. Long before the thing can be done adequately it has
ceased being worth doing at all.
Then why are we continually attempting this hopeless task? Partly,
let us say, from irrepressible human optimism, which leads us to
think that any desirable thing is possible. Partly, also, because of
unclear analogizing from fields that seem related but are not. One of
these analogies is from business. If you have on hand, on July 1st,
a pair of socks, assuming honest and successful management, you will
have them still on hand on August 1st, or else cash in your till to
correspond. But, in spite of unlimited honesty and efficiency, you have
no guarantee that an idea on hand on July 1st may not have been simply
removed by August 1st without any equivalent remaining. You may have
discovered that month, for instance, reasonable assurance that the moon
is _not_ made of green cheese, without being able to get any clear idea
as to what it _is_ made of.
The reader may here jump to the conclusion that we are arriving at a
philosophy of pessimistic hopelessness. That is not the way of the true
philosopher. His ideal is the _tabula rasa_. He sweeps away the systems
of others, that he may build his own on a smooth foundation.
Realizing simultaneously the insatiable craving of the human mind
for order and the impossibility of bringing order into the chaos of
knowledge, we appear to be faced with a dilemma no less distressing
than insoluble. But on looking deeper we find the dilemma apparent
only. This will become clear when we consider the essential nature of
knowledge.
The thoughtless among us may speak, for instance, of a red cow, and
naïvely imagine we could prove our point with the testimony of a
witness or two. But the philosophers have long ago made it clear that a
cow would not be red but for the presence of someone to whom it looks
red. Having established that point, the deeper of the philosophers go
on to prove that the cow would not only not be red, but would not even
exist, were it not for the presence of someone who thinks he sees a
cow. In our argument the position is even stronger than this, for we
have two lines of defense. First, we agree with the philosopher that
you cannot prove of any given cow that it is red, or even that it
exists; and then we point out that an idea is so much less stable than
a cow that, even were the philosophers wrong about the cow not being
red, they might easily be right about an idea not being right, or not
existing.
Take an example: The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both
that the earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they
are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer
dispute about whether it is flat. This shows the greater lasting power
of a real thing (whether it exists or not, for that point has not yet
been settled) as compared with an idea, which may not only not exist,
but may also be wrong even if it does exist.
We have now come in our discussion to the point where we see the
absurdity of supposing ourselves to have any knowledge, as knowledge
is ordinarily defined--or at least we would have come to that point
but for lack of space which prevents us from making the subject really
clear. However, it doesn’t matter from a practical point of view
whether you have followed this philosophical reasoning. Perhaps you
are not a philosopher. In that case, and in the homely phrase of the
day, I ask you, what’s the good of an Englishman’s learning, first,
that all Americans speak through their noses and, secondly, why they
do so, when he has to find out eventually that they do not? What’s the
good, again, of knowing that central Australia is a desert and that
certain principles of physiography make it so, when you may have to
listen to an after-dinner speech by someone telling that it is not a
desert?
Such things do not always go in triplets of (1) so it is, (2) why it
is, and (3) it is not--but that is a common order.
The reader may here protest that we are not getting much nearer our
promised emancipation from the dilemma between our passion for system
and the impossibility of systematizing knowledge. We have hinted above
that the solution lies in finding a new basis for knowledge, and this
we now proceed to do.
So long as you believe in them, the nasality of American speech and the
desert nature of central Australia are fragments of knowledge capable
of being arranged in a system. The trouble comes when you discover that
they are “untrue.”
This gives the solution of our problem. We must have knowledge that
is incapable of being contradicted. On first thought this seems
impossible, but on second thought we realize that such facts do exist
in the domain of mathematics. Two and two make four.
But why do two and two make four? Obviously because we have agreed that
four is the name for the sum of two and two. That principle has been
applied in mathematics to such advantage that it is rightly called the
science of sciences; and this is the principle which, now at length,
we propose to apply to all knowledge. Through it every science will
become a pure science, and all knowledge as open to systematization as
mathematics.
The trouble with facts, outside mathematics, has been inherent in the
method of gathering information. We call these methods _observation_
and _experiment_, and have even been proud of them--not realizing
their clumsy nature, the unreliability of the findings, the transient
character of the best of them, and the essential hopelessness of
classifying the results and thus gratifying the passion of the human
intellect for order and symmetry in the universe.
Take an example: A man comes from out-of-doors with the report that
there is a red cow in the front yard. Neglecting for the moment the
philosophical aspect of the case--as to whether the cow would be red if
there were no one to whom she seemed red, and also the more fundamental
problem of whether there would have been any cow at all if no one had
gone out to look--neglecting, as I say, the deeper aspects of the case,
we are confronted with numerous other sources of error. The observer
may have confused the sex of the animal. Perhaps it was an ox. Or if
not the sex, the age may have been misjudged, and it may have been a
heifer. The man may have been color-blind, and the cow (wholly apart
from the philosophical aspect) may not have been red. And even if it
was a red cow, the dog may have seen her the instant our observer
turned his back, and by the time he told us she was in the front yard,
she may in reality have been vanishing in a cloud of dust down the road.
The trouble lies evidently in our clumsy system of observing and
reporting. This difficulty has been obviated in the science of
mathematics. A square is, not by observation but by definition, a
four-sided figure with equal sides and equal angles. No one has denied
that and no one can, for the simple reason that we have all agreed in
advance that we will never deny it. Nay more, we have agreed that if
anyone says that a square has three or five sides we will all reply
in a chorus: “If it has three or five sides it is not a square!” That
disposes of the matter forever.
Why not agree similarly on the attributes of a front yard?--making it
true by definition that, among other things, it contains a red cow.
Then if anyone asserts, for reasons of philosophy, color-blindness, or
the officiousness of dogs, that there is no red cow in the yard, we can
reply, as in the case of the square: “If it does not contain a red cow,
it is not a front yard!”
The author feels at this point a doubtless unwarranted concern that
he is not being taken seriously. Or perhaps the plan proposed is not
considered practical. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
The thing has been tried, and successfully--not in the systematic way
now proposed, but sporadically. Some instances are well-known and
convincing.
Take the assertion that a Christian is a good man. If you attempt to
deny this on the ground that Jones, a deacon in the church, ran off
with some public funds, your stricture is at once shown to have been
absurd by the simple reply: “If Jones was a thief, he was _not_ a
Christian.” A Christian is, not by observation but by definition, a
good man; if you prove that a certain man was not good you merely show
that he was not a Christian. Thus we have established that a Christian
is a good man. It is like a square having four sides.
But if someone asserts that a Bolshevik, a Conservative, or a chemist
is a good man, you can soon confute him; for the members of these
classes have neglected to define themselves as good. Thus their
attributes have to be determined by observation and experiment. It is
highly probable that evidence could be brought against many Bolsheviks,
and even some Conservatives, to show that they are not good men. At any
rate we have here no such clarity of issue as in things that are true
by definition--as the four-sidedness of a square or the goodness of a
Christian.
Through some experience of arguing this case in the abstract I have
learned that its essential reasonableness can best be established from
concrete examples. Let us, then, take cases at random from various
fields of knowledge.
Consider first the ostriches of Africa. These birds have been studied
in the wild by sportsmen and zoologists, and as domestic animals by
husbandmen who tend them in flocks like sheep. There are accordingly
thousands of printed pages in our libraries giving what purports to be
information upon their habits. Besides being indefinite and in many
other ways faulty, this alleged information is in part contradictory.
Having studied the bird of Africa, let us turn next to the ostrich
of literature, philosophy, and morals. Instead of confusion, we now
have clarity and precision. This is because the ostrich of literature
exists by definition only. He is a bird that hides his head when
frightened. You may too precipitately object that men would not accept
universally this definition of the ostrich of literature if it did not
also fit the zoological ostrich. The answer is that the definition has
never received any support from zoologists, hunters, or owners of the
domesticated birds, and yet it has been accepted universally throughout
Europe since Pliny’s time (about 50 B.C.). It has survived all attacks
from science and from the bigoted commonsense of those who did not
recognize its true nature. Like the definition of a four-sided square
or a good Christian, it has survived because it was useful. Can you
imagine any real attribute more instructive than the head-burying of
the ostrich-by-definition? As a text for moralists, as an epithet that
politicians use for their opponents, as a figure of speech generally,
what could serve as well? Our literature is richer, our vocabulary more
picturesque through this beneficent bird of hypothesis. He has many
inherent advantages that no real bird could have. Since his habits are
defined we need not waste time studying him first hand, nor in trying
to adjudicate at second hand between books about him that disagree.
Since he never existed as a beast he is in no danger of the extinction
that is said to threaten the lion and swan.
Consider next what trouble we should get into if we did not have
the literary ostrich and wanted to convey picturesquely the idea of
that sort of wilful blindness from which we ourselves never suffer
but which curiously afflicts our opponents. In pursuit of suitable
analogy we might vainly canvass the whole animal kingdom. The
ostrich-by-definition is, therefore, not only less trouble to deal
with than a real bird; he is actually more useful and instructive
than any real bird or beast. When we consider how often he has been
used in sermon and precept we must admit that this model creature
has contributed substantially not only to the entertainment and
instruction of nations but also to the morality and general goodness of
the world.
The ostrich is but one of several useful birds of definition. But we
must be careful not to confuse these with real birds or their value is
lessened. An example is the stork that brings babies. By a confusion
of thought which identifies this stork with real storks, and through
the pernicious birth control propaganda which insists on rationalizing
everything, the baby-bringing stork has ceased to be useful except in
conversation with children, in the symbolism of the movie, and in the
picture postcard industry.
The wolves of literature are among the most picturesque and useful of
our definitions. Zoological wolves go in pairs or families, never above
a dozen. It is clear how inadequate this would be for movie purposes,
where they should run in packs of scores or hundreds. Even in a novel
or short story of Siberia or Canada you need packs large enough for
the hero to kill fifteen or twenty, with enough left over to eat, or
to be about to eat, his sweetheart. This is readily accomplished by
using a wolf of the general type we advocate--having no relation to
the so-called realities but possessing by definition all the required
characteristics (habit of running in packs of any desired size,
willingness to eat, or attempt to eat, the heroine, etc.).
Another useful definition has long been that of Arctic, Canadian,
and Siberian cold. The danger and disadvantage of confusing this
hypothetical with a so-called real climate are best seen if we compare
the facility with which people who have never been in these countries
use the weather in conversation, speeches, and books, and contrast that
facility with the awkwardness of travelers and natives. An example is
a story by Tolstoi. Great as he was, he failed to realize the advantage
in simplicity and vividness of postulating that Siberia is always
cold, and actually allowed himself to be led into the artistic blunder
of having the convicts in one of his novels die of sunstroke. An
acquaintance of mine was filming this story. He realized the pictorial
ease of “putting over” drifting snow as compared with heat waves--the
snow could be managed with confetti and an aeroplane propeller, but how
would one photograph heat waves? He realized still more clearly that
the public is wedded to the defined, as opposed to the “real” climate
of Siberia, and did what Tolstoi would have done in the first place had
he been a Californian--he changed the scene from summer to winter, and
then froze to death as many convicts as the picture required.
These few examples from among many are enough to show not only that
the method of knowledge-by-definition is and long has been in standard
use, but also that it has the advantages of being easily grasped,
picturesque, and of a higher average moral value than the so-called
“real” knowledge. It is inherent in the genesis and nature of defined
facts that they can be made picturesque in proportion to the ingenuity
of the one who defines them, and as moral as necessary. This is a
striking advantage over empirical knowledge, which cannot always be
relied on to support the fashion of the time or even the moral system
of the community.
It is from this last point of view that there has grown up in many
countries of recent years a profound distrust of “facts” and the
theories deduced from them. In England the situation is dealt with
by the simple and adequate means of paying little attention to the
exposition of “new” things. In the United States it has been found that
the public listens even to the newest views, and sometimes actually
wants to act upon them. This has necessitated the expedient of passing
laws prescribing what may and may not be advocated and believed. These
American laws are a step in the right direction, but inadequate because
they have back of them only specific considerations. Few people as
yet realize the general reasons of expediency and broad sanity that
underlie the scheme we are here proposing.
Let us consider next a sample or two of knowledge-by-definition that
could well be added to our present stock. Just as artificial tongues
are built upon spoken tongues but avoid their mistakes, so may we
conveniently base our knowledge-by-definition, or absolute knowledge,
on what is already believed by some.
Assume, for instance, that all Irishmen are peasants holding land by
insecure tenure from grasping landlords, that each has a pig under
his bed, that everyone carries shillalahs, that kissing the _Blarney
Stone_ is the chief national occupation. Having agreed on these things,
we could teach them in the schools of all countries. We should then
presently all agree (on the basis of common facts) as to what our
attitude toward Ireland should be, and the troublesome _Irish Question_
would disappear from politics and history.
Think, too, what a charm the new system would lend to travel in
Ireland! As soon as you landed you would note the rarity or absence
of all the things you had expected. You would meet surprise after
surprise, which would not only delight you at the time but give you
material for endless letters home and for endless stories to tell when
you got back. Thus would be built up an increasing tourist traffic, a
source of revenue to Ireland itself and to the shipping and tourist
companies of the various nations.
You may think such tourists, on coming home, would upset our
system of facts-by-definition about Ireland. Not if that system is
once thoroughly established. Consider in that relation the Greek
pronouncement that at any time of year it becomes colder the farther
north you go. North America is in language and civilization a
homogeneous country in which one might think knowledge would therefore
spread rapidly, and in which Atlanta, Richmond, New York, and Montreal
are, and have been for a century, large and well-known cities that
are by observation about equally hot in July. Yet there is even today
practically unanimous adherence in all these cities to the Greek
definition (“the farther north the colder at any time of year”), and
each city believes those farther south to be hotter and those farther
north to be colder, though thousands of travelers for a hundred years
have found it to be uniformly otherwise. The ostrich with his head in
the sand has survived two thousand years and is still going strong.
No human being can retain oil, but the hypothetical Eskimo drinks it
by the flagon in our books and belief, and is none the worse for it.
Then why should not all the world forever believe that every Irishman
has a pig under his bed? All parties would benefit. It would be only
the hypothetical Irishman that has the pig, and we could by hypothesis
arrange that he should thoroughly enjoy it. The real Irishman would get
the benefit of the increased tourist trade and surely he ought to be
grateful. The tourist would make facile discovery of the non-existence
of the pig; that would please him and interest all his friends forever
after as a sort of occult knowledge, like knowing privately that Indian
fakirs are really no more clever than our conjurers, a pleasing secret
now possessed and highly valued by many without detriment to the fakirs
or to those who prefer to say they have seen them do marvels. Thus
would everyone be the gainer.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER II.
THE PLEASURES OF BUNCOMBE
The most striking contradiction of our civilisation is the fundamental
reverence for truth which we profess and the thorough-going disregard
for it which we practice. This is the veriest commonplace. The lowest
journalism fattens on pointing it out and the highest clergy prosper in
the same occupation. According to them all, the world is rotten to the
core with hypocrisy and falsehood.
But while they agree on the condition, the physicians of the world
order hopelessly differ on the remedy. Without disagreeing on the
condition, either, we want to suggest nevertheless that it is a bit
naïve of the philosophers to diagnose from the mere scarcity of truth
that the world is sick with an incurable malady. Is it not just
possible that they cannot cure us for the basic reason that we are not
ill?
And if we are not ill, the worries of the moralists should dissolve
into good cheer. Can we, then, be well though the truth be not in us?
Strangely late in the history of philosophy, we now for the first time
address ourselves to that problem.
God and Truth have from the earliest times been the two ideas that have
commanded the greatest reverence. They have been much argued by the
philosophers, with many curious parallels and one striking contrast.
Typical of the parallels are the long disputes about whether there can
reasonably be supposed to exist either an absolute god or an absolute
truth. The one contrast is that while the philosophers have discussed
at great length whether God is good, they have never discussed whether
Truth is good. Is it not a bit suspicious that this is the one thing
they have always assumed? And in a world of chaotic philosophies that
get us nowhere, is it not high time to ask if there be any sound reason
why Truth should be exempted from that fundamental scrutiny to which
even the gods have had to submit?
In addressing ourselves to this hitherto neglected question, as to
whether truth is good, we adopt in the first instance a test which has
long appealed to the common sense of mankind: _By their fruits shall ye
know them._
In defining our subject, we admit at once that the truth may have
effects outside of the immediate field in which we shall study it,
that of human affairs. It is like the question of soul. For thousands
of years the civilization which is intellectually descended from the
lands around the Mediterranean has agreed that all men have souls.
Usually those who speculated have considered that women have souls
also, a few that horses and dogs have souls, and the most generous that
all animals have them. But it is only the highest intellectuals and
the most benighted savages who have ever conceded souls to plants and
sticks and stones. We shall ignore, for the time being, such possible
extensions of our subject, and discuss Truth solely in its relation to
men (including women).
As both definition and defense of our method, we premise, further, that
mankind frequently does much better than it knows. Nearly all of us,
for instance, can keep in balance as we walk along upright, though the
physiologists are still arguing about exactly how we do it. Similarly,
the biologists tacitly agree that we know what life is; for they test
their definitions of life by measuring them against the reality which
they feel they know, though they cannot define it quite successfully.
Go through any considerable number of examples like the preceding,
selecting them, if you like, from every sphere of life, and you will
gradually reach a firm confidence in the reasonableness of human
actions as compared with the flightiness of our theories and the
contradictions so frequently involved in our explanations. That may
be because (admitting the evolutionary theory and the geological time
scale) we, and the pre-human ancestors from which we inherit our
traits, have been acting so as to save our bodies and reach our desires
for a good many million years longer than we have been speculating on
how to save our souls and protect our reputations. And practice makes
perfect.
We arrive then at a simple problem: If we ignore all theories and study
those instances where mankind has preferred truth or falsehood the
one to the other, we shall be in a position to determine which set of
choices has been of the greater benefit.
In a later and more rigorous inquiry we may go in for objective proofs,
like statistics. Here we shall use only such examples as are well-known
to everyone, so that the conclusions we state will certainly be merely
the equivalent of the reader’s own verdict, set before him in print.
Few things are more generally admitted than that parents, in most
cases, love their children and desire their greatest good. These
parents may be in error as to what constitutes good, but this is beside
the mark, for we are at the moment merely trying to find out what it is
they think is for the children’s welfare. Of course, if you ask them,
they will quote you Truth with a capital, or more likely TRUTH all in
capitals. For so have they been taught to protest. But study their
actions, which are a surer guide than their words.
THE CASE OF INFANTS
To put it bluntly, most loving parents take the greatest care to
surround children not with truth but with deception.
We cannot deceive children before they are born, so we do the next
best thing and practice every deception about them. We conceal, not
only from children but also from grown persons so far as possible, how
babies come into the world. The marriage is announced, and even made
a public occasion, but thereafter everything is mystery. Pregnancy is
concealed by an artful dress, the expectant mother hides or goes to
a remote place. In some classes of society it is rather a breach of
etiquette if the doctor talks openly about whom he is going to attend
that night. There is a blare of publicity after the birth, in which,
however, only a few things may be told--the weight and sex of the
child, whom it resembles, and in a very general way how the mother
is progressing. But the fact that the child looks red and wrinkled,
that its eyes do not focus, and several other details about it, are
of so private a nature that many mothers discover these and other
more “intimate” things only in their own children. And certainly to
most fathers the new-born looks as surprising as it looks unpleasant.
That, by the way, is a fact every parent must conceal--it would be
dreadful if anyone were ever to find out what a disagreeable shock his
first-born was to him.
The reader may here want to stop and argue with the author that all
this is but decent and proper reticence--which if he does he pleases
the author very much. For there would be nothing to argue about. The
author, too, feels that this is how all these things should be. He
certainly would hate to break any such taboos. But let us not argue
one way or the other. To do so would be unscientific. We should pursue
our inquiry with a steady view to just one thing: Is it true that
the majority of people feel and do as stated? From that survey will
emerge a general conclusion as to which it is that men really prefer in
practice, truth or falsehood.
The systematic deception of the child usually begins almost at the
moment of birth. The instrument is speech, most fittingly, since
our studies will show that this is the favorite means of deception
throughout life. At first, the child does not understand any words, and
balks the mother thereby. However, she makes capital of this dilemma
by seeing to it that her baby shall chiefly hear (and therefore learn)
only incorrect speech. This is known as teaching the child “baby talk.”
There are certain standard forms of baby talk which, through wide
usage, are not completely deceptive; as when the child is taught to
say that papa has gone bye-bye when the meaning is that papa has gone
out. Accordingly, most mothers invent a special jargon so that each
child grows up with several dozen sounds or combinations of sounds
which are either not words of any language or else are real words with
perverted meanings.
As the child grows up he discovers that he has been deceived in the
first speech taught him; and thus he gets an early and practical lesson
in one of the main concerns of life--how to deceive others.
As soon as the child has acquired a vocabulary by which he can be
misled, people begin to deceive him in ways that increase in complexity
with his growing faculties. Many of these are specially devised by his
mother and family and do not lend themselves to sociological study, for
they are seldom placed on record. But there is a general system, one
broad aspect of which is stories, especially classics, that fall under
the heads of fairy tales and folklore.
There has come to my attention a very practical way of determining what
people really think of the place of folklore in the education of the
young. As there has been prejudice to guard against, I need to describe
the manner of my investigation before I come to the matter of it.
In a very tentative and general conversation I casually introduce the
subject of bolshevism. In three cases out of four there is an immediate
hostile reaction, and then I go no further, for my desire has been to
get an opinion on a reported bolshevik undertaking, and a person who
bristles at their very name is certain to be opposed to anything they
sponsor. Correspondingly I get in some cases reactions of favorable
enthusiasm, and these are equally hopeless, for they would naturally
support any part of the bolshevik program.
In the few cases of seeming freedom from bias, I proceed to retail,
without vouching for it, what I have heard about certain educational
experiments conducted in the Soviet Union. It really makes no
difference about the truth of these reports, for a person scientific
enough to be neither strongly pro- nor strongly anti-bolshevik is also
intelligent enough to consider a hypothetical case and give the same
sort of verdict he would if it were a real one.
It is said, then, that the Soviet powers believe in the maxim of Paul
about proving all things and accepting only those that can stand the
most rigid investigation. I do not know (I must say, since the subject
has been brought up) whether the bolsheviks are trying to discourage
baby-talk, insisting that mothers shall speak a real language even to
the youngest child; but it has been represented to me that from the
time the child begins to speak the government makes an effort to see
that it is told only the truth.
One of the first things western mothers tell their children is about
Jack and the Beanstalk. The Russians feel reasonably certain that there
never was such a Jack or Beanstalk. Accordingly, neither that fabled
youngster nor the fabled plant is ever mentioned, I am told, to the
up-to-date bolshevik-sponsored child.
But, says the Russian, there are in real life things quite as
interesting and marvelous as Jack and his stalk; for instance, a child
named Tom instead of Jack, and surnamed Edison. Nothing very marvelous
is reported about this Tommy while he was small. But when he became
a sizable boy, or perhaps even later, he got an idea about how a
string could be heated till it became red and even white, and how this
string could be put in a glass bottle and hung up to give a light much
brighter than any lamp that ever existed up to that time.
The Soviet educators are said to maintain that by applying the same
ability and ingenuity to telling the story of Tom and the glowing
string that has been used in popularizing the adventures of Jack
and his Beanstalk, you could create an equally vivid story, equally
entertaining and, they contend, more beneficial since it is “true.”
In the case of a child taught to believe in the Beanstalk, it becomes
necessary to tell him later (or else to let him find out for himself)
that it never existed. Some psychologists claim that there is an
injurious mental shock involved when a child’s faith is shattered.
What the Soviets emphasize is that if Jack had been real the child’s
interest would not have had to cease at the age of five or six, but
might have continued growing until the larger boy gradually mastered
all the history and later grasped the achievements of Jack. If, then,
instead of Jack and the Beanstalk, you begin with Tom and the red-hot
string, there is no shock, they argue, no dead halt, no shifting of
interest from one thing to another, but instead a growing delight in
the whole adventurous life of Thomas Alva Edison that finally develops
into a grasp of all the sciences with which he was concerned.
I seldom get this far in my second-hand explanation before my listeners
stop me with rhapsodies on the glories of the imagination and diatribes
against the bolsheviks who now for the first time are seen by these
previously impartial people to be insidious foemen of the soul.
This counterblast used to floor me and I would stop at that point; but
more recently I have developed a flanking operation. People strong
on the beauties of the soul are nearly always great admirers of
Maeterlinck. So I apparently change the subject, falling in with their
praise of the imagination and asking if they think its subtle beauties
are anywhere more evident than in the great son of Belgium. There is
usually agreement, and soon we are communing ecstatically together
about his book on the bee.
The next step is to ask the champions of the imagination whether they
remember that Maeterlinck says near the beginning of that book (which
we have just agreed is one of his greatest works) that he has long
since given up trying to invent anything half so marvelous as the
truth. Oh, yes, they remember that, but they always understood it to
mean Truth with a capital letter, which is something very different
from a fact, and apparently means anything you are so fond of that you
are prepared to stick to it whether it is true or not. But a little
discussion about the sort of truth which Maeterlinck says he is trying
to present in the Bee, and the sort which the bolsheviks say they are
trying to present about Edison, shows that both are of the same kind.
This conclusion results in no increase of admiration for the bolsheviks
but a noticeable decrease of liking for Maeterlinck, who apparently has
been cheating some of his readers into thinking that he was telling
them Truths when he was only telling facts.
Usually the outcome of the conversation is a feeling of how blessed are
we whose imaginations have been stimulated and delighted by Little Red
Riding Hood, Bluebeard with his many wives, and tales of that sort,
and what an eclipse of the imagination is spreading its shadow over
Russia, where even little children have to be told the truth.
The Soviet campaign against folklore in general has been paralleled
by an American campaign for Santa Claus in particular, which shows
the differing temper of the two countries. Santa, it is well known,
drives reindeer. Now it happens that some friends of mine own a hundred
thousand reindeer in Alaska and have been trying to find a market for
them. Other friends of mine own and edit _The Kansas City Star_, one
of the most respectable and respected newspapers in the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt, after he had been President, thought it an honor
to be one of its editors: and the standards of personnel, management
and policy are quite as high now as then. My Alaskan friends are, in
ideals and character, not below the level of even the _Star_. However,
they were not at that time as well-known, nor was their standing in
the community possibly of as direct business value to them. You might,
therefore, suspect them of using Santa Claus to help them find a
reindeer market, no matter what they thought of the Saint himself. But
surely the _Star_, whose business sense is as keen as its ethics are
scrupulous, would not touch the enterprise unless its editors were sure
of two things: that Santa was all right, for otherwise the _Star_ would
not associate with him even for profit; and that nearly everybody else
thought Santa all right, for otherwise the _Star_ would not profit by
associating with him.
The campaign was planned to deceive the children of Kansas City into
believing that the real Santa with his real gift-bearing reindeer had
entered into an arrangement to arrive in Kansas City some weeks before
Christmas and to be on exhibition there. The _Star_ organization were
his alleged representatives and the part for which I was requisitioned
by the Lomen Reindeer Corporation was to write to the kiddies a
letter telling how I had visited Santa in his northern home and what
message he had sent by me to the children of the United States. My
letter would be printed on dozens of front pages, aggregating millions
in circulation, for this was a nation-wide campaign handled by
newspapers or department stores in many of the larger cities, such as
Cleveland, Brooklyn, Denver, Oklahoma City, and I have forgotten what
other places. The letter I wrote was deceptive, though not literally
untruthful. It was printed by all the papers engaged in the Real Santa
campaign, and between me and a thousand other willing collaborators who
all felt we were doing the nation’s children a real service, we fooled
them so thoroughly that the _Star_ (to come back to that worthy paper)
was able to stage a parade through the streets of Kansas City that was
even larger, it was said, than the American Legion could muster when
they held their National Convention in the same city the year before.
The entire police force was needed to control the crowd. Some other
cities did almost as well.
I have heard much comment on the campaign waged by the _Star_, and by
the like-minded papers of other cities, and none has been unfavorable.
I believe the mayor of Kansas City thanked the _Star_ for a great
public service--or something of that sort. But mayors do such things
rather perfunctorily--whatever is done by a prominent enough citizen
or foreigner, at that they publicly rejoice. But tradesmen are usually
more hard-headed, and their chief organizations are discreet and
particular to be always on the side of the common weal. But higher than
any of our non-religious bodies in its ideals and aims is likely to be
the Parent-Teacher Association of the city. Listen, then, to what they
said in a display proclamation which occupied, in suitably large print,
nearly a whole page of _The Kansas City Star_ on Christmas Day, 1925:
To _The Kansas City Star_:
May we express our congratulations and appreciation to _The Star_ on
the wonderful success of its enterprise in bringing Santa Claus and
his reindeer to Kansas City and acting as the host, friend and guide
of the children’s Christmas saint.
We believe all Kansas City and our neighboring towns share with us in
our felicitation. It is nothing new for _The Star_ to be generously
mindful of the children at Christmas time. We have not forgotten
_Snow White_, _The Seven Swans_ and _Peter Pan_! But this year Santa
Claus and his reindeer have been brought “in person,” have paraded
our streets, visited our schools and hospitals and have taken their
Christmas cheer directly to the children and to the older folk as well.
The Old Spirit of Christmas has been revived and stimulated, and
everybody has been made happier and better by this Yuletide visit.
With this Christmas Spirit in our hearts, we now think it most fitting
to thank _The Star_ publicity for its unique and happy achievement.
TO SANTA CLAUS AND
HIS HOST:
A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND
THANK YOU
Merchants Association:
Parent-Teacher Association:
Chamber of Commerce
You agree with them, heartily, Gentle Reader, I am sure. And so do I.
The pudgy Saint with his sleigh load of gifts and his eight reindeer
is part of the glory and romance of childhood. You and I, when we were
small and believed in him, saw with our mundane eyes nothing more than
a jolly old man in a red coat with a crinkly smile and a flowing beard;
the more blessed youngsters of today (thanks to the Lomen Corporation
in Alaska and men of humanity and vision in our cities who cooperate
with them), become personally acquainted with Dancer and Prancer, and
Donner and Blitzen, and all the other members of the famous team. They
ride in the sleigh with Santa and they ride on the backs of his deer.
They are thrilled by the no longer simulated (as in our day) interest
of their parents who now stand shivering with cold and quivering
with delight as they are shoved about by policemen to make way for a
Santa-and-Reindeer parade as large and enthusiastic as ever marched
behind a young lady that swam the channel or a young gentleman who flew
the Atlantic.
Best of all, this apparent faith of the elders enables us to stretch
the faith of the younger generation a year or two longer than was
possible before the Lomen concern thought of providing real reindeer to
make the mythical Saint more real. We used to lose such beliefs when
we were five, but today the Parent-Teacher Association, the Merchants
Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the _Star_ are able to
stretch the faith of Kansas City at least till seven--two years of
happy unreality given to thousands of children in that one city alone.
And so in many other cities. Multiplying the clear gain, two years
for each child, by the total number of children affected, we have an
aggregate of millions of happiness-years added for this nation alone.
When the fashion spreads to other countries and continues through the
years, the total gain to the world will become incalculable.
Preserving the faith of children was the main purpose of the Santa
campaign, but the more enterprising newspapers used the opportunity
to benefit older readers as well. The Denver paper (which we will
not name, for some people mistakenly consider it wrong to deceive
grown-ups) erected an imitation snow house near where the reindeer
were kept (I think it was at the municipal buildings) and employed an
Eskimo, who had never before seen that sort of snow house except in
movies, to explain to visitors that he and other reindeer herders of
Alaska dwelt in that kind of snow house when they were at home. So far
as I could judge, and I was in Denver at the time, every grown person,
from Unitarian to Rotarian, swallowed that as readily as the children
did the Santa part, and with as much satisfaction. Such beliefs have a
moral as well as an entertainment value. It certainly makes you more
content with a hall bedroom if you can visualize the Alaska Eskimos
shivering in huts of snow.
But this about Alaska snow houses and the preservation of the faith
of adults, has been a digression. We must proceed with our systematic
inquiry into the planned and benevolent deception of the growing child.
THE CASE OF THE GRADE SCHOOL
We aim in this book at no more than establishing a reasonable
presumption either in favor of truth as opposed to deception or else
in favor of deception as opposed to truth. We shall not, therefore,
attempt a study of our educational system as a whole but shall take a
few cases that are typical.
_The Teaching of History_: Under this head we shall consider two
general problems and then a few specific instances.
One of those disadvantages of facts which their advocates usually
admit, is that they are complicated. Another is that in most cases
people cannot agree as to what are the facts. Simplification and
standardization are therefore necessary, especially for the young. This
is universally conceded.
Not till the prospective historian starts graduate work in a university
does he usually begin to have any conception of how debatable are most
of the things that he has been taught as a child. The disillusionment
then continues rapidly until he feels like selecting as the best
definition of his specialty the one usually credited to Napoleon:
“History is a set of lies agreed upon.” But (and this is significant),
in spite of the high average moral tone of our populations, few
historians become crusaders against history. The simplest, and I
believe the correct, explanation is that they think that, on the whole,
deceiving children does them good.
When we entered the 1914-18 war, we suddenly discovered that most of
our school histories were anti-British. Many of them were forthwith
changed to pro-British, without a murmur from anyone except a few
people who (we all agreed, as soon as they began to protest) were
either pro-Germans or Pacifists. But the War, after we got into it,
was so short that before it was over there was not time to oust all
the anti-British propaganda from the texts. I had the instructive
experience of being in a city where a violent newspaper controversy
sprang up between correspondents, some of whom advocated anti-British
history but most of whom favored pro-British. The ground of the pros
was that we ought to stand by our former allies, that there might soon
be another war, and that we should bring up the younger generation
strong for English-speaking unity, because that was the natural basis
of the coming alignment. Some argued specifically that we might be
able to annex Canada if we used the same sort of histories as the
Canadians and therefore grew up to the same beliefs. Even the Hearst
papers, which then opposed this view and anything else that seemed to
favor the British, later came out for the principle and advocated an
English-speaking union.
The voices which suggested an impartial history were few and weak. Thus
did what we believe to be the sound common sense of the people manifest
itself. For next after patriotism comes a right world outlook. We must
know in advance what country to favor in time of trouble. And how can
the needed unanimity be secured in a democracy except by teaching the
youngsters to like the right country so that they may vote correctly
when they later come to decide tariffs, treaties and wars?
Much proof of what no one doubts is tedious and we have gone far
enough in the argument. Certainly if you are pro-British, you will see
at once that teaching love for British ideals, respect for British
institutions, cannot help but benefit any country. If you are not
pro-British, you can arrive at the same conclusion by substituting in
the discussion the name of whatever country you most admire. Call that
country X. You will then at once see the advantage of teaching the
rising generation to be pro-X, or _proex_--to coin a much-needed word.
The reader may here object that even if it is agreed that history
teaching in the schools should be chiefly for the purpose of laying
down principles to guide us in life, it does not follow that we have
to teach children to be in favor of any particular country or set of
countries. Perhaps you are a pronounced isolationist and think we are
strong enough to go it alone, then this strength would be increased
by the solidarity we would gain if we learned in school to dislike
all other nations and later ran our government and shaped our private
actions so as to get them all to dislike us. That is an old and
much-advocated principle: that real unity can be attained only in the
face of a common enemy. Very well, then, you are not a Proex but an
Antex, and you must go about trying to get the schools into your hands.
Let the best men win! It looks just now as if it would be the Antexes.
Coming to specific problems of truth in history, we need little but a
catalogue to see on which side we stand. Supposing, just for argument,
that the biographers of Lincoln could prove, as some of them have
tried to do, that he was of illegitimate descent, would you then want
that taught in the schools? The conclusive arguments against are: (1)
Such teaching would attack the Home, the most precious of all our
institutions; for Lincoln is our greatest national hero, and having
him illegitimate, even if only back in his parents’ or grandparents’
generation, would be a destructive influence. (2) That teaching would
also attack the institution of National Heroes. Lincoln is our greatest
hero; nothing is more beneficial than to have heroes to look up to; we
would not look up to Lincoln quite so much if he were in any degree
illegitimate; therefore we ought to hide the fact, if it were a fact.
(3) Nothing could be gained by encouraging children to attach scandal
to the names of great men. (4) It would be in bad taste to teach in
school about the illegitimacy of anyone. On the basis of these and
many similar reasons, all decent people will agree that the question
of whether Lincoln was illegitimate should never be mentioned in the
schools.
To be on the safe side, the author states here emphatically that the
biographers who favor the legitimacy of Lincoln, even unto the third
and fourth generation, have, in his opinion, much the best of the
argument. For this book might possibly fall into the hands of minors.
It is maintained by some that it would do no harm for adults to
know the fact, if it were a fact, that Lincoln was illegitimate.
Their reasoning is that character is formed in infancy and that the
perverting influence of a truth, no matter how improper, is negligible
in adults. We agree with that contention, and the more readily because
it is in harmony with the conclusion at which we are fast arriving (a
conclusion, by the way, at which you could arrive still faster with
less reasoning): The purpose of child training is to build character,
and all education should therefore trend toward that goal. The truth
should be admitted into the curriculum or kept out of it by that test
alone. Facts of a disturbing nature should be permitted, if at all,
only when characters have set beyond the reasonable possibility of
change.
The importance of discretion in history teaching was once brought
forcibly to my attention when I was spending a summer in northern
Vermont, and found in use three miles away across the Canadian line in
Quebec, school texts in which the War of 1812 differed so much from
the war in the Vermont histories that you would hardly believe it was
the same war. You can readily see how wise that was on both sides.
Imagine the discord that would be introduced into the teaching of
Canadian patriotism if they used Vermont histories, and similarly what
havoc a Canadian history could work, if tossed into our school system
like a stone into delicate machinery. Nor is there any halfway course
possible. If you were to cut out all the contradictions, there would
be little left of that particular war; neither would the leavings be
any good for inculcating patriotism or other moral virtues into either
Canadians or Americans. Obviously things had best remain as they are.
Or would you ever hint in the history courses that Sir Galahad never
had a bath? That Tristram’s courting, so touchingly described by Edwin
Arlington Robinson, must have smelled pretty strong even at arm’s
length (except when the wind was just right)? That some of the most
revered saints of the Church made vows never to bathe and never to be
unkind to the lice that swarmed over them? And that the only two great
bathing eras of known history were the ancient period which historians
call the decline of the Roman Empire, when civilization was going to
the dogs, and our modern period, when the Fundamentalists tell us we
are all going to the Devil? Would not such teaching suggest that there
may be a connection between clean bodies and unclean living? And what
could be worse for æsthetics or for the soap trade?
The fact was, of course, that Tristram liked the smell of his
sweetheart, and she liked his, both being used to it, and that the
sinners as well as the saints of the Middle Ages really enjoyed what we
would call the stink of foul linen. The past was not necessarily such
an unpleasant time for those who lived in it (in view of their tastes).
But, even after dwelling on that, most of us will remain convinced of
the superiority of our own taste, and will continue unwilling that
historical studies shall in any way encourage those of our youngsters
who seem to have been born with medieval propensities for dirt.
Indeed, what possible good end could be served by letting such facts
(if they be facts) gain currency through history teaching? Would
patriotism, good manners, or good morals profit thereby? Would such
teaching build character? Certainly not, and the present course is the
right one: to say nothing about bathing in the Age of Chivalry, but
to imply always that cleanliness is the natural state and passion of
man--excepting rare miscreants who come to school inadequately washed
behind the ears.
And so we might go on, canvassing our histories and our moral,
political and æsthetic judgments till we arrive at the conclusion that
in school texts at least the truth needs to be very judiciously handled.
_The Teaching of Physiology_: If the truth be a tricky thing in
history, it is no less so in many other “branches” taught in the first
eight grades of school. For instance, consider physiology. We need not
dwell on sex, which most of us instinctively and rightly feel must not
be thrust upon the young, but will instead continue under this head the
discussion with which we ended the section on history.
Cleanliness may seem to lie in the field of æsthetics, but it has the
most practical value. You would be ostracized socially if people knew
you did not bathe; you would be worse off than if you had halitosis and
four-out-of-five pyorrhea. Personality courses, books on etiquette, and
the efforts of the Hamilton Institute combined with Pelmanism would
be of little avail to gain you preferment. Listerine could not remove
the odor nor Pond’s Cream make your countenance seem agreeable. So
at least, we believe, and so the rising generation must be taught to
believe, or cleanliness may depart from among us.
But it is now said by some of the physiologists (doubtless untruly)
that nearly all the supposed scientific arguments for bathing are
fictions and fallacies. _Item_: The skin does not excrete any
appreciable amount of harmful substances from the body, nor do the
pores “breathe.” Therefore your system is not purified by “keeping the
pores open” and one argument on bathing-for-health disappears. _Item_:
A chief function of the skin is to protect the body; poisons, such as
mercury, cannot enter your body through a skin proofed with its own
secretions, but will seep through if the natural lubricants have been
washed away with warm water, soap, or other methods. Therefore your
health is, in this respect at least, the safer the less you bathe, and
another of the standard arguments vanishes. _Item_: The skin’s own
secretions keep it softer and in better condition than any substitute
yet discovered. This is a deserved pat on the shoulder for the Lord
who made us, but a rather stiff jolt for the cosmetic manufacturers.
_Item_: The body odors come chiefly from three areas or parts of the
body (that are too taboo for mention even here). Keeping these clean
goes nine-tenths of the way toward freeing you from odors that other
normal humans can detect, and changing your underwear every day, or
even every other day, would go the remaining one-tenth, thus removing
that argument for bathing.
And so on for many arguments more, the sum of which is that if you have
a healthy skin it is safe enough to bathe if you like; but with eczema
and certain other diseases you must not bathe if you want to stop the
blotches from spreading, or to sleep for the itching at night.
Now just assume, for argument’s sake, that all the above (or to be
conservative, say half of it), is true. Then ask yourself, would
you be in favor of having little children of the dirty-ear stage
find out about it? The slogan was, in the generation of our parents:
“Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” But the investment in soap and in
the allied industries has grown faster since then than the property
of the churches, and the soaps advertise more. Today the sales talk
sways the nation, and it is doubtful if godliness even approaches
cleanliness in popularity. We must fight harder, therefore, to keep
such physiology out of the schools, than any fundamentalist has yet
fought to keep Darwinism out of the colleges. And we shall succeed,
backed as we are by the advertising funds and the publicity genius of
the whole soap industry from Bon Ami to Zap.
But there is one disquieting thought: The interests of Listerine
and the perfumers are opposed to those of the soap and bath towel
manufacturers. Europe, too, may seek to control our cleanliness, as it
does our politics, by its insidious propaganda. But, fortunately, it
will be disunited. It will be England pleading that odors be removed
with Lifebuoy against France urging that they be covered up with
Houbigant. These may kill each other off. Then there will be apathy
and discord at home among our Napoleons of business. Some will stand
aside from the struggle, for great houses, like Colgate, make soap as
well as perfume. The underwear manufacturers will be against both, and
so will the laundries, for they will want us to get rid of odors by
frequent changes of linen. Frequent launderings wear out clothes and
thus benefit the cotton planters of the South and the wool ranchers of
the West.
The issue will be doubtful if the battle ever starts. We, the great
public, having once been won over from France and the perfume to
England and the tub, should try to prevent the issue from ever rising
again by keeping the unæsthetic new physiology out of the schools.
Furthermore, especially as this book may fall into the hands of minors,
the so-called new physiology is doubtless all wrong. So let us continue
circulating the story about the page in Venice who was clothed in gold
leaf for a pageant and who died of suffocation because his pores could
not breathe. Let us never forget suggesting, when we see a lad whose
face is covered with pimples, that he has doubtless been neglecting
his wash basin and soap. And let us soft pedal the fact, if it be a
fact, that abstinence from bathing is frequently prescribed by the most
expensive skin specialists.
_The Teaching of Geography_: The teaching of this science brings out a
new consideration--the reticence customarily practiced in it, while no
less benevolent than in the other subjects, is based on motives new in
our discussion and results in benefits of a different kind.
When facts are played down in geography teaching it is not usually
because they would be in bad taste or otherwise detrimental to the
character of the scholars, but rather because they are too complicated.
The teachers are busy and overworked, and the pupils have limited time
for the curriculum, for some of them may have to quit school soon and
go to work. A complicated idea takes a long time to teach, it is hard
to learn and difficult to remember and understand. From both the giving
and receiving end, simplicity is therefore desirable, but facts have
usually the unfortunate defect of being complicated. In the practice
of teaching it is therefore often necessary and sometimes desirable to
ignore them. We can best and most sympathetically understand this if we
take a case where we have been ourselves deceived, for we shall then be
able to testify from personal knowledge that we have benefited, or at
least that we have suffered no harm.
The best geographical example under this head is perhaps one of those
upon which we touched briefly in the first section of this book--that,
other things being equal, the farther north you go the colder it gets,
no matter what the time of year. We shall develop that topic more
fully than we did before, exploring some of its more instructive and
entertaining ramifications.
First we need perspective from the history of geographical science. As
in many other cases, we owe the beginnings of learning in this field
to the Greeks. They may have borrowed from earlier civilizations,
and probably did; but they formulated the doctrines and cast them
into the molds in which many of them are still set. One of their
chief achievements was that they worked out the laws of temperature
distribution over the earth substantially as we learned them in the
grade schools up to a few years ago, and roughly as they still remain
in the minds of the general public.
Already five hundred years before Christ, the Greeks knew that the
earth was a sphere. They understood the migration of the sun northward
over the earth in summer and southward in winter between what they
called, and what we still call, the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
They also determined the polar circles beyond which the sun does not
rise in winter nor set in summer. This was dividing the earth into five
logical zones. The Greeks and the rest of mankind lived, they said, in
a zone that was temperate. But if you crossed the Mediterranean and
were to travel south into Africa you would get too near the sun and
come first to a section unpleasantly hot, then to one intolerable, and
last to a burning region where no living thing, either plant or animal,
could exist by reason of the fierce downpour of the sun’s heat. This
was the Torrid Zone. Going north from Greece you came similarly first
to lands unpleasantly cold, then to others intolerable, and last to a
permanently frozen region “where life is as impossible because of the
freezing as it is in the Torrid Zone because of the burning.” South of
the tropics there doubtless was another temperate zone and this might
be inhabited--probably was, in fact, though we should never know except
by inference, as no one could ever cross the burning tropics. And at
the south end of the earth would be a second frozen zone.
Thus from their doctrines of beauty, simplicity, and symmetry, and
from the principles of logic the Greeks evolved laws of temperature
distribution which are so easy to explain and understand that if
you had never heard of them before you could have grasped both them
and their necessary implications from a description no longer nor
better composed than mine that you have just read. Such a natural
law is a boon to teacher and student alike. No wonder, then, that it
held its ground from more than four hundred years before Christ to
more than fourteen hundred years after, as John Kirtland Wright has
recently proved in a long and scholarly work published by the American
Geographical Society of New York: _The Geographical Lore of the Time of
the Crusades_.
That we do not still have in the schools these Greek temperature laws
in all their pristine simplicity is due to two of mankind’s most
troublesome qualities, cupidity and skepticism. In the fifteenth
century Western Europe was greedy for the riches of the Far East, and
the road to Cathay, traveled by Marco Polo and his predecessors and
successors, had been closed by Mohammedan victories over the less
bigoted Mongols. It is usually easy to disbelieve anything that crosses
our desires, and so doubts began to arise as to whether the tropic
lands were really burning hot and the tropic oceans boiling. Henry the
Navigator gets most of the credit for cooling off the burning zone by
sending out ship after ship that went farther and farther south along
the West Coast of Africa, each returning with fearful tales of what
they had seen or imagined, but most of them nevertheless returning and
thus giving hope that others might go still farther. At last a ship did
sail to where the sun stood overhead without cooking the sailors alive.
Indeed, she returned with the story that the days had not been hotter
right below the sun than they were on some occasions in Portugal.
So began the “Conquest of the Tropics,” and so ended the simplicity of
the Greek laws of temperature distribution. Every work on meteorology
of college grade now tells you that the highest temperatures registered
by thermometers in the shade, under weather bureau conditions, are not
recorded in the Torrid Zone at all; but in the Temperate (!) Zones.
Probably the highest in-the-shade records so far taken are those of
Death Valley, California, about 900 miles north of the northern edge
of the Torrid Zone--136°; almost certainly the highest temperatures
that can be recorded in Africa are in the Sahara Desert, also north of
the tropics. If there are higher temperatures south of the Equator we
feel sure they will not be near the Equator, but near the tropic of
Capricorn or else (more likely) in the South Temperate Zone.
These principles are now known to all authors of text books, but
they are still able to maintain a degree of simplicity in the lower
school grades by implying it is average temperatures that matter, and
by saying nothing about extremes. The fact is that averages count for
some things and extremes for others, and that both are important. It
is not, of course, the average cold of January that sometimes destroys
the fruit in the South, but the one extreme night; similarly it is not
the average heat of July that kills by sunstroke in New York but the
one extreme day. Extremes are really more important, in that sense,
than averages; but averages are much simpler and more teachable. It
is so complicated to explain and remember that extremes may be high
where averages are high, that extremes may be high where averages are
low, and that extremes may be low where averages are low. We would
certainly have to lengthen out our school courses if we went into such
hairsplitting, and our millions of potential workers would be kept out
of the mills and factories even longer than they are now. Besides, the
complexities of facts are bewildering and confusing to the average
mind, and never give the feeling of enlightenment you have when you
grasp a simple principle which throws a flood of logical light on a
previously haphazard world.
It is unfortunate--or perhaps fortunate--that we have not space to go
deeply into the history of the way in which the simple Greek law of
temperature distribution has been gradually broken down by explorers
who went to remote places and came back with stories of conditions that
did not fit into the theory, and how the scientists toiled at fitting
together the mosaic pieces till they finally evolved an explanation
that does fit all the facts. But we must give at least a brief sketch.
The investigation that has been going on since the days of Prince Henry
the Navigator started from the simple Greek proposition: There is no
cold and the greatest heat on the Equator, no extreme of either heat
or cold in the North Temperate Zone, and no heat but merely intense
cold at the North Pole. The first slight exceptions to this had, of
course, been noted long before Henry’s day: The mountain tops are cold.
Other discrepancies due to sea breezes, ocean currents, and many other
things soon followed, but they were, on the whole, not very difficult
to explain as exceptions to the rule. True enough, the altitude one was
taken to be a universal exception; mountains were said to be colder
than their surroundings in any zone at any time of year, and it became
a popular saying that climbing a few feet up was like traveling a good
many miles north.
All exceptions other than altitude were explained in the Middle Ages,
and down to our day, as an inroad of conditions from one zone into the
territory of another--the Gulf Stream warmed the British Isles because
it came from the tropics, the Labrador Current cooled Newfoundland
because it came from the Arctic, and so on. New Yorkers still speak
of sunstroke waves as coming from the Equator, even on occasions when
the press reports few or no deaths south of Washington and the weather
bureau shows that Boston is hotter than Richmond (those who think about
it at all probably supposing that the heat arrives by some special
conveyance through the upper atmosphere). By similar acceptance of
theory and lack of reasoning, cold winds are still spoken of as coming
from the North Pole.
Serious trouble for the classic theory first developed when travelers
returned from the Arctic with their reports. John Davis, whose name
you find on the strait west of Greenland, said, for instance, that he
had been far within the so-called Frozen Zone “three divers times”
(1585-1588) and that he had on occasion found the weather there “as
salubrious as ever I did in the Isles of De Verde”--which was certainly
amazing, for those islands lie in the region supposed until Prince
Henry’s time (after 1400 A.D.) to be lifeless “because of the burning.”
Both before and after Davis there were, however, conflicting reports
from the Arctic explorers, those of the hero kind speaking (with
modest reserve) only about the cold, while those of the commercial
type, like Davis, dwelt on the surprising heat. On the whole there
was reason for the textbook writers to side uncompromisingly with the
Greeks (particularly in elementary education, where simplicity is most
desirable), so long as any travelers continued to support them.
The balance was more seriously disturbed than ever before when the
weather bureaus entered the field, and the U. S. Weather Bureau, for
instance, began to report from Fort Yukon, Alaska, which is within
the Arctic Circle, temperatures and humidities like those which kill
people in New York. After that the classic simplicity of the zone in
which it is “always cold” could be maintained only by ignoring the
records. This has been done with remarkable success, for the textbooks
stating or plainly inferring that it is never warm in the Arctic were
in extensive use in American schools for more than twenty years after
the Bureau at Washington began to publish at government expense Arctic
temperatures ranging up to 100° in the shade. You can verify this by
going ten years back in the geographies used by the schools of your own
neighborhood--not in every case, but in most.
There are some texts still in use which imply that it is never warm
in the Arctic, but many have felt themselves compelled to present the
following complicated explanation of Arctic summer temperatures (after
stating that the old law does hold for three-quarters of the year):
Practically all the heat comes from the sun, some arriving at any given
spot directly in the form of light, some transported there by various
agencies, such as winds, ocean currents. The amount of heat (light)
delivered straight from the sun to a unit of the earth’s surface on
a summer day depends primarily on how nearly vertical the sun is and
for how many hours it shines; but secondarily it depends on other
factors, such as clouds or dust in the atmosphere, the color of the
surface the light rays strike, and so on. The resulting temperature,
as observed either by a thermometer or by the human sensory organs, is
further modified by how long a night, during which heat was lost, has
preceded the day, and by how much “cold” was stored in that locality
by the preceding winter. In some places that are mountainous, such as
Greenland, this winter chill has been effectively stored in the form
of snow, which not only throws back the light rays without giving
them a chance to turn into heat but also neutralizes those that have
become heat by using them to lessen its own cold; other places, such
as the ocean, have also stored the “cold” effectively, and cancel the
heat of the summer with great success. Therefore it is never very hot
on mountains in the Arctic, nor on the ocean; and it is probable that
if you spent a summer in a tent on an ice floe at the North Pole
out-of-doors you would never observe a temperature higher than twenty
degrees above freezing (say 50° or 55° F.) measured five feet above the
ice. It would of course be much hotter if you put up a windbreak and
then let the sun shine on a dark tarpaulin spread on the floe.
But there are in the Arctic, the explanation would continue, thousands
of square miles of low land not very near either to mountains or to
the sea. Over these it is far colder in winter than at the North Pole
(because the air above the Pole is warmed by the heat radiated by
the ocean up through the floating ice). Winter winds are therefore
frequently warmer when they blow from the north than from some other
direction, and in some places the coldest winds are southerly. This
extreme cold makes a heavy precipitation impossible, and the average
snowfall of the Arctic lowlands for twelve months is therefore less
than the average snowfall of Virginia or Scotland. This little snow
dissolves quickly in the spring, and after that the sunlight strikes
a dark surface, which helps it turn into heat. Nor is there much cold
stored anywhere near that can become effective to neutralize the sun.
What cold had been stored up by the snow is gone, except as it is held
in a little water on or near the surface. What has been taken up by
the ground through last winter, and through the centuries, is securely
imprisoned there; for the first few inches which thaw near the surface
become an insulating blanket that confines the rest of the chill and
makes it as powerless to affect the temperature of the air as if it
were hundreds of miles away.
On the Arctic prairie that is remote from mountains or the sea, one
factor, then, far overshadows all others in determining how hot any
given day shall be. This is the quantity of heat received each hour
from the sun at that place, multiplied by the number of hours. Now,
at the Equator the sun can deliver heat no more than twelve hours out
of every twenty-four, giving the tropical prairie an equal length of
time in which to cool off. But on the prairie north of the Arctic
circle the sun shines the whole twenty-four hours, delivering less
heat per hour than at the Equator, but more per day, and without any
night in which to cool off. There is, accordingly, a period in summer,
varying in length according to where you are in the Arctic, during
which the sun delivers to your locality about the same heat per day as
at the Equator. _This is the rule_, for it is based on the broadest
principles; the places where it does not work out are exceptions, for
narrower or special reasons. And it is a fact that there are many
places on and near the Equator where the hottest day in a hundred years
does not equal the hottest days of the same century at many places in
the Arctic that are equally high above sea level.
Few will deny the interest of the preceding facts; but, says the really
sensible man, the world is full of interesting things, and we certainly
have not room for them all in the textbooks, nor time for them all in
the schools. The practical value of this curious Arctic lore is very
small to the average man, who stays at home or, at the most, goes to
Paris; though it is undeniably highly useful to those few individuals
who travel to the Arctic and who want to know in advance what sort of
weather to expect, warning them to take fly dope instead of furs if
they are going on a Midnight Sun excursion to Fort Yukon. But even
for the excursionist, facts are not an unmixed blessing. If you know
about the heat and the mosquitoes in advance, you will not have the
pleasure of discovering them; the fly dope may save you from stings,
but it also spoils the after-dinner value of the tale about how foolish
you were and how badly instructed _before you went north_, which sort
of story is the only really satisfactory way of putting your listeners
both firmly and pleasantly among the uninstructed where they belong.
And even from their point of view, too much advance knowledge is rather
a bore, for what is the drawing-room value of that which everybody has
learned in school when compared with: “Jones, you know, the Famous
Traveler, told me once that when he was in the Yukon, etc.”
Facts are tedious, anyhow, and we should think carefully before
agreeing that the simple and edifying Greek rule shall go by the board.
Consider just a few of the entertaining and instructive things, some of
them with no mean character-building value, that would have to go, too.
_Item_: All the ideas would have to go that are similar to the familiar
kindergarten ditty that has been sung by millions of little Americans
and which goes something like this (there seems to be no standard
version):
“Frosty little Eskimo,
In your house of ice and snow.”
and so on, till the final line:
“For in Greenland there is nothing green to grow!”
We might be able to salvage the house of ice and snow temporarily,
though it is a bothersome fact that of something over 14,000 Eskimos
in Greenland, by the last census, less than 300 had ever seen a snow
house. But the “nothing green to grow” would not last very long under
the combined attack of the unromantic geographers, who insist on
pointing out weather bureau records, and the historians of Greenland,
who will tell you that the country was a republic from 986 a.d. to 1261
(a good deal longer than the United States has yet been a republic) and
a dependency of Norway and Denmark thereafter; that they had churches
and monasteries administered from European archbishoprics (you may
have seen the Greenlandic church ruins in the movies some years ago,
as background for the King of Denmark hobnobbing with Eskimos). The
historians will point out that a European civilization could not have
existed in Greenland during the Middle Ages except for stock raising.
The colonists had cattle, with as many as a hundred head in a single
barn. They lived in considerable part on milk and milk products,
and wove cloth from their own sheep, making garments which you can
examine today through photographs in many books or study in the museum
collections of Europe. Both cattle and sheep raising are now again
practiced in Greenland, and have been for many decades. That means hay,
and hay means meadows with that “something green to grow” which is
denied by the kindergarten.
Such are the facts, but what of it? If we pressed them upon children
while they were at the impressionable age, we would so change their
mental picture of Greenland as to rob it of every charm it has so
long had for us. What substitute would they find for the delicious
thrills and chills that creep up and down our spines as we look with
the mind’s eye upon a world of permanent white silence and peer into
Greenlandic snow houses where Eskimos shiver (doubtless without their
teeth chattering, else it would not be so silent) as they devour (again
silently) the blubber that enables them to eke out their miserable
existence. And then there is the character-building value of thinking
what a marvelous thing is the human spirit that continues its fight
against the powers of darkness and cold even up there on the frozen
edge of the world. On the other hand, too, how fortunate we are who
live in a country of warmth and green grass--and schools. Take away,
if you must, the good old picture of the North that is always cold;
but consider first what it is you are going to give our disillusioned
children in its stead. Surely it will have to be something better than
cow pastures and a few ruined churches. We already have at home enough
of the one and many of the other.
_Teaching Through Educational Movies_: While our love for children
makes us conceal from them anything that may be injurious to their
welfare, the same affection leads us to strive for their instruction
in whatever we consider beneficial. But in this field we are sometimes
misled. I have in mind a special case, parents who were greatly
incensed at a movie called _Nanook of the North_, which, although
not true to the native life of the Eskimos, had been shown in their
children’s school and recommended as true. But these parents were
wrong, as will appear.
To begin with, the _Nanook_ story was at least as true as that of
Santa Claus, of which those parents approved. It was the same sort
of partial truthfulness, only greater. Real as well as Santa reindeer
have horns, four legs, and are driven before sleighs in harness, though
not such sleighs, quite, nor in such harness as the ordinary Christmas
pictures show. They run on the ground, not through the air; they are
very swift, though not quite so speedy as Santa’s. There are in the
world old men, too, who would like to give a present to every child
at Christmas if they could, though there is no old man that actually
succeeds in doing it. Thus the Santa story, while fiction in a way,
does represent truths.
Similarly with the movie, _Nanook_. There are Eskimos in Hudson Bay
where the picture was taken, and the people you see on the screen
are Eskimos, which is more realism, right from the start, than you
have ever had in a Santa Claus picture. The country you see, too,
is the real Hudson Bay. True enough, not even the coldest month up
there averages as cold as _Nanook_ tells you the whole year averages
(35° below zero), but then you must have something exceptional in a
movie or it would not impress. You are told, too, that the Hudson
Bay Eskimos still hunt with their primitive weapons, and this is
justified. For it would spoil the unity of the picture to tell the
truth about the weapons, though it is an interesting fact in itself
that the forefathers of the Eskimos shown on the screen have had guns
for generations, as the Hudson’s Bay Company has been trading into the
Bay since 1670. Moreover the titles do not actually say that the Bay
Eskimos hunt with primitive weapons _only_, so you can take it any way
you like. Doubtless the producer meant nothing more than to say that
the children (who are certainly Eskimos) still play at hunting (which
would be hunting of a sort) with bows and arrows.
No real Eskimos, in my belief, ever hunted seals through the ice in
the manner shown in the picture, nor do I think a seal could be killed
by that method unless he were a defective. But it is true that certain
Eskimos in other parts of the Arctic (about half of all there are) do
know how seals can be killed through ice. That the Hudson Bay Eskimos,
with whom our producer had to deal, did not know such methods was no
fault of his, and he would have been deficient in resource if he had
allowed that to stop him. Neither are there libraries in Hudson Bay
where he might have borrowed a book that described the method so he
could have studied it up and taught it to the local natives. There
he was with an expensive movie expedition, the picture just had to
be taken, and audiences in the South would demand to be shown what
they had heard of--Eskimos sealing through the ice. And so a method
was developed (perhaps by the Eskimos themselves along lines roughly
indicated by the director) which photographs beautifully and gives as
much feeling of enlightenment to an audience as if it showed the real
technique that does secure seals.
I have gone to _Nanook_ many times for the purpose of observing the
audiences. In several cases some movie fan has noticed that the
seal ostensibly speared in the picture is stiff and dead, clearly
planted there. But that, it seems to me, is all the realism you could
expect in a play. You would not demand that Fairbanks really kill
all his adversaries, though you do appreciate seeing a bit of good
swordsmanship. And in _Nanook_, what seal but a dead one could possibly
be expected to allow himself to be speared in the manner shown?
Another thing I have found _Nanook_ audiences complaining about is
that they had heard somewhere that Eskimo snow houses are warm and
comfortable, while the _Nanook_ picture shows the occupants shivering
as they strip for going to bed, and there are clouds of steam puffing
from their mouths and nostrils. These erudite fans are still more
troubled when they see the movie title which says that the Eskimos must
always keep their snow house interiors below freezing to prevent them
from melting, for they have read a book by someone who has lived in a
snow house and who has explained the principles of physics by which,
when the weather is cold enough outside (and no weather was ever quite
so cold as the _Nanook_ country is supposed to be), the snow does
not melt though it is comfortably warm inside--say, as warm as the
average British or Continental living rooms in winter. But the answer
is simple, and the producer is quite justified by it: An Eskimo snow
house is too small for inside photography, and the light might not
be good enough. So to get the best light and plenty of room for the
camera man, half the house was cut away (like the “sets” you see in
the movie studios), and the poor Eskimos were disrobing and going to
bed out of doors. But it would have spoiled the picture to introduce
such technical details. Hence the producer had to explain the shivering
people and their visible breathing by the harmless pretence that snow
house interiors have to be colder than freezing to prevent the walls
and roof from thawing.
And so on for the whole picture.
It was the very fact just stated and others like them which made my
friends angry. That may have been because the realities of the picture
were not so charitably interpreted to them as we have done above. It is
possible to make the same facts look a good deal worse if you try.
But no charity is needed, and only a proper understanding of the
case, to reconcile any parent to a movie like _Nanook_ and to its
presentation in the school. For the Eskimo, properly understood,
is really the grown-up’s Santa Claus. We love the world of the
imagination. Santa, fat, jolly and generous, portrays certain things
and qualities as we would like them to be. But in the world of fancy
we need contrasts; ugliness as well as beauty, wickedness as well as
goodness. For the proper effect, we need not only Heaven, but Hell
also. It may be pleasant to think how fortunate you will be if you go
to Heaven, but that is nothing compared to the satisfaction you get
from a reasonable prospect of being able to keep out of Hell.
What we mean, then, is that the Eskimo is really a sort of reversed
Santa; and that since Hell has begun to fade, the Arctic is our best
substitute. For somehow grown people, even those who cannot visualize
Hell, seem to be able to believe not only that Hudson Bay is in the
Arctic but also that the Arctic averages thirty-five degrees below
zero, as the picture says the Hudson Bay country does, and that it has
all the other distressing attributes.
In fact, the Arctic, peopled by Eskimos, is much more practical for
our purposes than any inferno ever was when peopled by tormented
spirits. No picture of spirits ever gets us like one of a wretched
flesh-and-blood Eskimo who shivers from one year’s end to the other.
Away up there, crouched in his foul, unventilated house, drinking oil,
he has a power to make us remarkably contented with poor lodgings,
a careless landlord, and meals at Childs’. In our little backyard
with its one wretched tree we think with a pleasant compassion of
the stunted little Arctic Mongol who has never seen even a bush. And
then, to make his usefulness complete, we remember in summer when we
are perishing with the heat that Nature has her compensations! She
mercifully sees to it that her chilled children of the snows shall at
least escape sunstroke and the after effects of too much Coca-Cola.
And how could you get these and other similar benefits from the Eskimo
and the Arctic if you did not encourage such pictures as _Nanook of the
North_, and the books that correspond? And what better time than the
impressionable years of childhood in which to acquire ideas that are
going to have such high consolatory and moral values later?
* * * * *
Perhaps, Gentle Reader, you had arrived at the truth about Truth before
you saw this treatise. If so, you will know, or you may have guessed
by the trend of this inquiry, that neither side is going to have it
all its own way. At first Truth (in the sense of facts) seemed to be
getting the worst of it, being so frequently immaterial, inexpedient,
even immoral, and nearly always in such bad taste. But the last
argument from geography has shown the merits divided, with, generally
speaking, the “practical” advantages in favor of the facts, but the
idealistic ones against them. We are likely to feel here an immediate
concern that in a crass and materialistic age the “practical” side
will prevail. Not necessarily, for we may be able to show the higher
practicality of idealism.
We will admit now, partly to save the trouble of a formal canvass,
that the rest of the argument from the schools will go, on the whole,
against us; or, rather, against the conclusions deduced. The fact is,
our position is not really at all what it has seemed to be. We keep
another, and so far unhinted, solution in reserve.
* * * * *
_A Glance over the Other Studies_: A critical study of psychological
teaching would not go against the preceding conclusions from history,
physiology, geography, and the educational movies, but in fact
decidedly in their favor, more especially as the newer developments
have tended so strongly toward an undesirable, and, in fact, degrading
materialism. Psychoanalysis and especially behaviorism come near
being a total loss from the point of view of character-building. But
chemistry has scarcely any bad aspects unless you happen to be a
pacifist, objecting to gunpowder and poison gas. But even so, what
is that when measured against soap, a product of chemistry on which
rests that perfect cleanliness revered today even beyond godliness?
Physics, too, is on the right side, especially those theories of it
that are neither so puzzling that the ordinary man can make nothing of
them, or else are clear in statement but seemingly lead to impossible
conclusions--which can, nevertheless, be experimentally verified. For
it is so valuable to be able to lay one’s hands somewhere on views
that seem either silly or impossible and can nevertheless be proved.
Reasoning from them gives such force to analogous religious views
which it does not happen to be possible to verify.
Going ahead thus to canvass the rest of the grade school and high
school sciences (for we have inadvertently progressed on our argument
a little beyond the grades before we knew it) we shall come to the
provisional conclusion that about forty per cent of the truths of
education are good and should continue to be encouraged, about forty
per cent are bad and should be ignored or suppressed, and the remaining
twenty per cent are all right in themselves but too complicated and
should be reserved for those who continue their education into the
universities.
Since our love and care prompt us to make the education of our children
their best and most logical preparation for the life which we admire,
it is not really necessary for our present examination to go beyond the
common and high schools, for they are a sort of abstract or synopsis of
the world as we both think it is and want it to be. Still it will do no
harm to take another case or two.
In politics, for instance, would you want the whole truth told about
every candidate? You can test that out with a few simple reactions.
When it was whispered around, for instance, that Harding was partly of
negro descent, was it your first inclination to try to discover if the
charge were true or not? On the contrary, you almost certainly took no
thought of truth or falsehood, but were offended and angered by the bad
taste and poor sportsmanship of whoever it was that started the yarn.
In the case of Wilson, would you have favored it (even as a Republican)
if there had been openly circulated some of the things which (as a
Republican) you firmly believed about him? Bad sportsmanship again,
and bad taste; you would not have done it and are glad no one did. Even
in the case of so innocent a thing as President Theodore Roosevelt’s
bad eye, said to have resulted from a boyish sparring bout, would
you, as a Democrat this time, have favored any campaign use of it
whatsoever? Once more, bad sportsmanship, bad taste, an emphatic no.
In the August, 1927, number of _Harper’s Magazine_ Dr. Joseph Collins,
famous as a physician in all literary circles, had an article on
_Should Doctors Tell the Truth?_ It will not take a reading of that
article, nor anything but a backward glance of the mind over our own
experiences, to make us agree with him when he says: “The longer I
practice medicine the more I am convinced that every physician should
cultivate lying as a fine art.” Nor do we quarrel with the general
conclusion that while a physician should tell the truth in certain
cases, lying is usually the kinder, the safer, and therefore the better
way.
And what of the every day social relations that are more important
than our business or professional contacts to most of us? Consider
the one remark: “How well you are looking!” Can you imagine the sort
of place this world would be if that little exclamatory sentence, or
its equivalent, were not working overtime in every country? I know my
own case. Ever since I can remember the declaration: “You are looking
better than when I saw you last,” has cheered me greatly. It was not
till a year or two ago that it first struck me that if this had been
uniformly true all these years I ought to be looking remarkably well
by now. But even so, I am still able to take a little comfort in this
serial fiction.
In view of the benevolent nature of the many sample reticences we
have considered, all of which and many more like them are sure of a
heavy vote in their favor could this nation, or any other civilized
country, be polled on the subject--in view of this and much more that
could be said in favor, is it not rather strange that most of us have
allowed ourselves to fall victims to that cynical outlook on life which
considers the deceiver, almost necessarily, wicked? You see how absurd
that is, particularly if you think back over the cases of your own
deception. As a child you may have deceived your parents occasionally
to get out of a licking; but far oftener, I am sure, you did it to
save their feelings, so they would not be offended or worried--on the
well-known and sound principle that “what you don’t know don’t hurt
you.” And, in later life, was it not usually the same? In school you
bluffed partly for marks, of course, but very often, almost oftener
than you realized, to save the feelings of a kindly teacher who trusted
you and would have been so disappointed had he known. In married life,
too, you deceive, oftener than not (I am sure the married will agree)
to save the feelings of the other party. In fact, the conjugal relation
calls for the highest known percentage of benevolent reticence. There
are, for instance, certain situations that do not seem to irk the
technically aggrieved parties, even when they know about them, so long
as they are able to keep up the appearance of not knowing. And what
is more, that public which always takes an interest in the marriage
relations of other people, does not think it reprehensible for the
technically aggrieved party to know about the dereliction and still do
nothing, so long as he does not know that the public knows he knows.
In fact, next in importance after the systematic deception of children
by parents, comes the amiable deception of husband and wife by each
other. That is not only in the nature of things, but proper according
to the highest standards, since the family is the social unit and the
home the strong citadel of our institutions.
CONCLUSION
We have now come to a point where we can survey the whole ground and
draw reasonable conclusions from the facts set down. The irresistible
main decision is against the rest of the philosophers and against all
their philosophy. This is as it should be; for what would be the profit
of a new philosophy if it failed to destroy the old? The philosophers
may, of course, rise to counter-attack; but what do we reck of that?
For we have the public with us, since we have come to a conclusion
which justifies what they always have done, what they dearly love
doing, and what they are at heart convinced is right--though they did
not know it, any more than the perfect athlete knows how he balances
when he walks.
The conclusion is, then, that like religion, truth is neither good nor
bad. There are good religions and bad religions, good truths and bad.
Generally, though, or at least more often than not, truth is, in
practice, bad--especially in the fields of æsthetics, ethics, morals,
character-building, and business (which last we have not stopped to
argue since it is so self-evident).
We pointed out in the first section of this book the necessary
imperfection of all the sciences except mathematics. Since nothing is
true there by observation or by any evidence, but merely by agreement,
it is obvious that truth in mathematics need never be bad--since we are
not obliged to agree on it if we do not like it, and nothing is bad
unless it is something we do not like.
Though we have not covered the field exhaustively, we may agree that
truth is good, usually, in engineering, chemistry, physics, and the
allied sciences. It is good in astronomy and geology whenever it
does not conflict with religion. It is good about as often as bad in
sociology, psychology, physiology, biology, and several of the related
sciences, for in these about half the time it appears to support
present-day manners, current morals and the prevalent religion. In
history, civics and many such fields it is always open to the gravest
suspicion. In the training of very young children as a general thing it
should be rather carefully avoided.
THE NECESSARY REFORMS
Having arrived at this conclusion, we must profit by it. At first
sight it will seem that, since we have found the truth bad as often
as not, the thing to do would be to proclaim our emancipation from
its tyranny. But that would be forgetting the more important part of
our findings--the benevolent nature and salutary effects of at least
a good half of all the deception there is. How could you carry on a
Santa Claus campaign, or remain happily married, if you said openly
that you were going to deceive whenever you thought it best? It is
only in prestidigitation, where “the quickness of the hand deceives
the eye,” that you can safely tell people that you are going to fool
them. In spiritualist seances, in praying for rain, or in forecasting
a year without a summer, what effect do you suppose you would produce
if you said to everybody that you were doing everything for its mere
psychological effect on them?
We can well take our pointer as to what to do from a famous general who
has announced publicly that he is going to explain in a book just how
he himself and his associates invented and circulated some of the most
effective (or outrageous) lies of the Great War. In connection with
this announcement he has had two things to explain, and he has made an
explanation that is not only satisfactory in his case but admirably
suited to broader uses.
Asked how he could, without shame, admit such lies as he proposed to
admit, he replied in substance that if you are justified in using
shrapnel, poison gas, torpedoes from submarines and bombs from
airships, you are justified in using any means at all. The main concern
is to make the nation at home and the soldiers in the field a unit
for the war, and you cannot do that unless you at least convince them
that there is good reason to fight. The more convinced they are the
better they will fight, and what propaganda does is to make them more
convinced. This argument is so familiar that it deserves no further
amplification.
The General’s second defense was against the accusation that he had
said himself that he expected another war within twenty-five years from
the last, and that such a war could not be won without propaganda. How,
then, did he justify himself in giving away his country’s secrets of
just how its citizens were fooled in the last war? His reply was that
the remedy would be very simple. All you had to do was to say: “Yes,
quite right; we fooled you in the last war. But times have changed and
that sort of thing would not work now. Besides, we would not fool you
even if it served our ends, we have become so honorable.” Having said
this, you could go ahead and fool them not only with the old methods
but, in some cases, with the very same tale. All you will have to do in
the last case is to explain: “The story which we invented in the last
war must have given the enemy the idea, for now they are actually doing
what we then accused them of.”
We may well adapt the General’s ideas to a wider field. The leaders of
thought among us must continue to proclaim their devotion to Truth, in
order that they may be able to get people to believe and act upon those
things that are for the general welfare.
The conclusions and recommendations at which we have arrived will
receive informal support from most thoughtful and all public-spirited
persons. But will that be enough, especially in view of the solid front
presented by the old-school philosophers, who still hold that the Good
is the same as the True, and that the True is whatever corresponds to
facts? It should be enough, for we have an initial advantage in the
cogency and popular appeal of our reasoning. By considering the very
same facts as the old philosophers, but merely selecting them more
judiciously and approaching them from the opposite, or scientific,
angle (of reasoning from facts to principles), we have discovered (what
has long been instinctively felt) that many facts are bad; and have
demonstrated that the Good cannot be synonymous with every kind of
fact, for that would make good synonymous with bad, which is nonsense.
The Good, we have thus demonstrated, has no necessary relation to facts
at all, but is ultimately determined by the sound instincts of the
majority.
The ancients, it seems, anticipated our findings in a measure; but that
is natural, and strengthens our position, for we are only trying to
go back to the first principles of Nature, and they understood Nature
better than we, being closer to her and yielding a freer rein to their
instincts. They expressed their conclusion in the saying that “The
voice of the people is the voice of God.” The triumph of the same idea
was poetically forecast by Tennyson when he spoke of an epoch in which
“The common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe.”
Can we secure the triumph which Tennyson foresaw, the need of which we
have shown, without a special organization to attain it? Pondering the
question, it does not seem that we need any wholly new organization,
but rather a federation of those existing agencies that believe in
acting on our principle--the principle of the sound common sense of
the majority. Consider what we have to start with: The Fundamentalists
would take care of religion, the American Legion and the Liberty
League would see to patriotism and would safeguard the status quo,
the Anti-Saloon League, the W.C.T.U., and similar organizations would
look after the prohibition of alcoholics (and other prohibitions, as
needed); the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Watch and Ward
Society, and their kind, would protect our literary and other morals.
And so on through the list.
Of course it will never do for the benevolent organizations to
continue acting separately, each for its own end. They must unite.
The Fundamentalists must agree to support the Legion and League on
patriotism, and they must return the favor by a united Anti-Darwinism.
All of them must get behind the next Clean Books Bill, and so on till
every organization to promote the common good has the support of every
other.
Such union will be strength, but there will be more power in reserve
that may be called on when needed. Suppose, for instance, that the
schools are threatened. The toy makers, the printers of fairy tales,
and the educational movie people will see to it that Noah and his Ark
remain in our religion, Jack and the Beanstalk in our folklore, and
the permanently frozen Arctic in our geographies. The politicians
will arrange that the histories shall continue to be reticent and the
soapmakers will look out that the physiology of the skin does not get
too well understood. Back of all such individuals, corporations, or
groups, will be the sound morality and the good taste of the community,
taking care that mere facts shall not lead us too far astray.
CHAPTER III.
ARE EXPLORERS TO JOIN THE DODO?
There are few who will not admit that exploration is a Good Thing (we
do not here deal with those who question its economic importance, and
so on). In this chapter we offer proofs that exploration can remain
durable after the last island has been discovered.
With so much recent flying over seas previously unknown, and no land
discovered on any of the flights, the commentators are beginning
to worry about the end of the romantic Age of Exploration, and the
possible extinction of the Columbus family. Are there to be no more
explorers, they ask, or, at least, no more Great Explorers?
Waiving the question of whether it matters much if the tribe of
Columbuses does perish, we have encouragement, of a sort, in a
study of the inside history of exploration, by which we see that
nearly all the most famous explorers came into their greatest fame
through misunderstanding, or through the planned or accidental
fruits of publicity. That is good news for those who want us to
have Great Explorers in future. For there is always room for more
misunderstandings, and surely the arts of publicity are not on the
wane. The Columbuses should, therefore, be able to flourish among us
yet awhile. Their last fade-out will come only when mankind ceases to
delight in being humbugged.
For those who want new Columbuses hereafter, there is nothing more
encouraging than the story of Christopher Columbus himself. If there
were any such thing as an abstract greatness in discovery, then surely
_the_ discoverer of America would not have been Christopher, but the
first human being who stepped ashore on the continent, or who first
saw it from a distance (I rule out of court the beasts that were ahead
of the humans, since the institution of fame has never been developed
among them).
This first human discoverer came thousands of years ago, and may have
been a Negrito or some sort of Negroid person. He may have resembled
a kind of Chinaman, or perhaps he was a good deal like some modern
Europeans. (In that case the Nordics would assume, _a priori_, that he
must have been a Nordic, or at least an Asiatic proto-Nordic, in whom
their coming greatness was already foreshadowed.) One more assumption
is that the discovery probably took place across Bering Straits or
along the Aleutian chain, though some contend that it may have been
from island to island across the South Pacific.
But we are really perverting the meaning of “discoverer” by this talk
of Negro or Mongol, for by immemorial practice the use of that word
is confined to Europeans. No place is discovered until some European
finds it. It might be safer to narrow down still farther the meaning
of “discoverer,” for there are books claiming that a kind of European
(in the sense of coming from Europe) really found North America in
very ancient prehistoric times. These would not have been adequate
discoverers, for they probably resembled Eskimos, and no one would
suggest that a place was discovered when the first Eskimo found
it--even if he came from Europe.
We do not arrive at a proper competition in claims of discovery until
we begin to discuss whether the Irish found America. They have enough
political and other prominence--in fact, they are the next most
fashionable whites after the Nordics. Still, merely being Irish is not
enough, for what we really mean by a Great Discoverer is a European
who was hurrahed while living or at least haloed reasonably soon after
he died. The Irish discoverer, if there was one, does not meet these
requirements. The Irish themselves never tried to make much of him
until recently, when they became ambitious for setting up a rival
to Columbus. Greatness does not sit very securely on even the most
deserving dead man unless, as said, he develops a cult soon after his
real or alleged deeds.
After the Irish, we come to more formidable discoverers, for we know
their names and they have the advantage of being Nordic--Gunnbjorn,
who first of known Europeans sighted the American island of Greenland,
probably around the year 900; Eric the Red, who colonized Greenland
following 982; and his son Leif the Lucky, who visited the American
mainland in A.D. 1000. There are no scholars and few intelligent laymen
who dispute the records of Eric and his son Leif, but still most of
them agree that they were not the real discoverers of America, even
though the Papacy followed soon and effectively in their footsteps
by establishing churches in Greenland about 1050, maintaining them
for 400 years, and encouraging the knowledge of the Western World to
spread throughout Europe by way of the learning that bound together the
medieval monasteries.
Christopher Columbus is _the_ discoverer of America chiefly because he
and what he was supposed to have done got the right advance publicity.
Marco Polo and others had reminded Europe afresh of the riches of
the East. Desert raiders, fairly well press-agented for those days,
were making more dangerous the overland routes which had always been
difficult. Prince Henry the Navigator and his group had finally worked
out an eastward seaway by rounding South Africa, but the way was stormy
and tedious. Everybody wanted an easy and cheap eastward route. For
centuries many had been trying and the public interest was constantly
getting more and more inflamed.
Then, at the psychological moment, Columbus sailed westward for
the East, with all his other publicity advantages strengthened by
fashionable royal backing. He struck land, and at first everybody
thought he had discovered a short route to the wealth of the Indies.
A little later doubts arose, about which people argued violently, and
the arguing was quite as good for advertising as the previous harmony
of acclaim. Before the legend died that Columbus had found Asia, other
legends about gold and jewels and fountains of youth had grown up to
take its place. There never was a let-down of publicity until colonies
developed, and America became wealthy in her own right.
As a result of the centuries of advertising that thus went before the
rise of historical scholarship, it is hopeless now to try to disturb
the preeminence of Columbus by publishing the truth about all the
discoverers who preceded him. Folklore has gathered about him until he
is almost as safe in his historical shrine as if he had never existed,
like some god or demigod. When a well-known character is securely
mythical he has such permanence as our world can give. Hercules is more
famous now and his achievements are more widely known than ever they
were in the days when a handful of Greeks believed in him. Little Red
Riding Hood is better known than Queen Elizabeth, more safely immortal
than Mary Baker G. Eddy. If fame depends on any achievement at all, it
depends only on publicity achievement.
Greatness in the field of discovery can be acquired today or tomorrow
by the same publicity methods that worked for Columbus. That such
modern greatness happens to have been secured most often by men who
deserved well and worked honestly, is really beside the point. For
others who deserved as well and worked as honestly are now forgotten,
or else were never known to the public at all.
The most striking case in point is that of Admiral Peary. For
integrity, ability, courage, persistence, and many other admirable
qualities, he had few equals. He discovered or elucidated several laws
of nature that are of permanent value to science, and he widened the
horizon of geography. Theories of the wind circulation of the globe,
for instance, hinge in considerable part on Peary’s work in Greenland.
Now that we are flying, and especially when we begin to fly more with
dirigibles, to understand the winds has become crucially important.
Peary is a world benefactor in helping us to that understanding, but
it is reasonably certain that his fame will not thereby be appreciably
increased. Geographers are nearly unanimous in holding that his
biggest achievement was determining that Greenland is an island. Also,
his demonstration that the north end of Greenland, now called Peary
Land, is free of snow in summer, and that it supports plant and animal
life the year round, was a death blow to the old theory that if lands
were only far enough north they would be sure to be covered with ice.
But in spite of all these things, Peary’s greatness has been made to
depend almost solely on his having been first to reach the North Pole.
With all his real worth, Peary would not have become an immortal had
the North Pole not been a well-advertised place. He rode in on its
publicity.
A side issue is that the public will not usually consider a man great
unless he has done something which it can visualize. Children play with
tops and we have all seen vehicles running on wheels, so we think we
know what is meant by the axis of the earth. We translate axis into
axle, visualize a top or a wheel, and imagine that we understand about
the North Pole. It is one end of the axle on which the earth spins
like a top or wheel. Accordingly, we think we can understand and value
properly the achievement of the man who first got there.
But what most people knew about the North Pole until recently was an
understanding as far from reality as it was clear. By an artificially
simplified theory of the nature of the earth, they had arrived at the
conclusion that this pole had many remarkable qualities beside being
the end of the axle of the earth. It was discussed as if it were the
coldest place on earth, the center from which the cold winds were
distributed, the hardest place to reach, and the one toward which the
magnetic needle pointed. It was supposed to be at least five poles in
one--Cold Pole, Wind Pole, Pole of Inaccessibility, Magnetic Pole, and
North Pole. We now know that the coldest place is more than a thousand
miles from it, the wind center nearly a thousand miles, the hardest
point to reach about four hundred miles away, and that the magnetic
needle points toward a district in Canada that is much closer to the
nearest railway station than it is to the North Pole.
However, during the long time when the North Pole was still supposed
to possess the qualities of all the other poles, it became so famous
and acquired such a hold on the public imagination that if you were
now, by knowledge and argument, to strip away from it one by one
all of its supposed attributes of greatness you would not detract
appreciably from its fame--just as Pike’s Peak remains the most famous
mountain in Colorado although more than twenty peaks in that state
alone are higher--just as Hercules will always be more famous than any
real strong man--just as Columbus will remain the great discoverer of
America no matter how many earlier discoverers history may soundly
establish.
Peary seems to have agreed with Cicero that to be ambitious for the
immortality of your name is among the greatest of human virtues.
Furthermore, he wanted the glory for his associates and for the flag
of his country. So he went to the North Pole and became immortal. It
was not the most difficult of his achievements nor the most important
scientifically. But it had the necessary advance publicity, and the
proper follow-up.
In fact, the North Pole has a superfluity of popular reputation,
enough to make many explorers famous. Byrd will probably become
immortal for having been the first to fly there, and Amundsen for
having been the first to fly there in a dirigible. No motor vehicle
yet devised is likely to travel effectively over the floating ice
north of Spitsbergen, but if such is built it is likely to make its
driver semi-immortal for having been the first to visit the North Pole
by automobile. This Pole is doubtless reachable by submarine, and the
first man who goes there that way will become still another fixture in
history. And so on for several firsts by new methods.
These will all be international immortalities. National immortalities
will fall to the first Frenchman, the first Japanese, the first Siamese.
If you want to find out how much glory a man gets for doing a hard
thing that is little advertised, just check up on the credit Amundsen
received for flying over the Pole of Inaccessibility. That pole is at
least as much harder to reach than the North Pole as the top of Mount
Everest is harder than the highest point yet climbed. But, you will
discover, the applause of the world for Amundsen’s Inaccessibility
Pole achievement was only a faint echo of what he received a few hours
earlier for the North Pole. Although he was the first man to do the
most difficult thing possible on our earth from the point of view of
exploration, he got out of it far less than for being the third man to
visit an easier place that was better advertised.
True enough, this North Pole flying immortality does not depend
entirely upon the publicity of the North Pole. Some of it rests in
considerable part on the publicity value of the airplane. Unless
it be swimming,[1] nothing has a better press now. Just imagine the
vaudeville salary of the first man to swim to the North Pole!
Close beside the North Pole and the airplane in publicity value is
femininity, as used recently, for instance, in the Channel swims. Thus
we may one day have immortality for the first woman who goes to the
North Pole, then for the first mother of a family, and eventually, when
we get a little more advanced, for the first divorcee. And think of the
first visit to the North Pole by Siamese Twins! (A later set of them
could be the first to marry there, perhaps in an airplane.)
If and when the public gets fed up on the North Pole we could no doubt,
by suitable publicity, convince them that the Pole of Inaccessibility
is really more interesting because more difficult. Hereupon vast glory
will come to the first man to fly there in an airplane, to the first to
walk there, the first to motor there, and so on. Then would come the
first debutante to go there, the first mother of a family, and so on,
with no limit other than that set by the arts of publicity.
A further encouraging thing about geographic discovery is that people
are forgetful of details, although they remember generalities.
* * * * *
After more than three hundred years of heralded search, the Northwest
Passage has become permanently famous. Then it was discovered by Sir
John Franklin in 1846, but nobody knew about that and gold medals were
awarded to Sir Robert McClure for discovering it in 1853. The world
resounded with McClure’s glory for a while.
The great public had forgotten about even McClure, but still remembered
that there had been a search for a passage, when, in 1903, Amundsen
sailed west from Norway. Three years later, when the job was done,
some newspaper man misunderstood Amundsen’s announcement that he had
navigated the Northwest Passage and put a story on the wires that he
had discovered it. The public hurrahed for the discovery even louder
than they had done in the case of McClure half a century before, and
most people think even now that Amundsen discovered the Northwest
Passage. Why not, if Columbus discovered America?
That it is not the first discovery, but rather the best advertised
discovery that counts, was proved to me from my own career. For, in so
far as I am known at all, I am generally known as the discoverer of the
“Blond” Eskimos. But the first traveler to report a strangely blond
people in the Arctic was not I, but Nicholas Tunes 256 years ahead of
me--in 1656. This seems to have been in Baffin Island, far from my
locality. But in my own district, without attracting much attention,
European-like Eskimos had been reported in the following order: by Sir
John Franklin in 1824, by Dease and Simpson in 1837, by Captain Charles
Klinkenberg in 1906, by Captain William Mogg in 1908, and lastly by me
in 1911. The report that created a furore was my second, given out in
1912.
That none of these reports about a European-like people in the Arctic
produced an appreciable stir in the world was apparently either because
the public did not know of the possible romance behind them, or else
failed to make the proper connection. They certainly did know of the
romance in 1911, but they failed to see its relation to my report, even
though it was published in the London _Times_, a paper that commands
much attention. But in 1912 the same report was dressed in newspaper
extravagance and joined up by the reporter with the tragic drama of
the colony of 5000 Europeans who disappeared from Greenland in the
Middle Ages. There was better reason for connecting the report of Tunes
with the lost colony than with mine, and at least a reason equal with
mine of 1912, for connecting those of Franklin, Simpson, Klinkenberg
and Mogg, and my own report of 1911, but it simply was not done. The
achievement of making the same discovery was presumably a little less
each time it was made, yet more glory resulted from the last one than
from all the others put together--because the right publicity note was
struck.
The connection once made with a topic of high publicity value
(involving also a misunderstanding similar to the supposition that
Amundsen had discovered the Northwest Passage), the “Blond” Eskimo
story swept the world and has not yet been forgotten after fifteen
years--in fact, shows no signs of fading.[2]
In view of how often America, the Northwest Passage, and the “Blond”
Eskimos were discovered before the hero came along who got the maximum
publicity out of each, we have little reason to be depressed, thinking
that the glamor of discovery is about to fade. When the first man has
climbed Mount Everest, the first woman can do it, and then the first
mother of a family; when the first airplane has flown over Everest,
there is still room for the first dirigible. You can go to Northwest
Australia this year and visit a black family who have never seen a
white man; next year you can capitalize the same family by taking a
woman to see them, for they will never before have seen a white woman.
Then will come the turn of the first mother of a family, who really
should take one of her children with her. There would be a tremendous
thrill in the cannibalism angle. To make the front pages it would not
be necessary to have the baby actually cooked and eaten.
It may seem for the moment absurd that we shall ever be as excited
again as we were recently over the North Pole, the Northwest Passage,
or the “Blond” Eskimos. But the wisest guessers frequently guess wrong,
and especially about news. During the last several years I have read
many estimates of the journalists of New York; none of them have failed
to put Mr. Carr Van Anda high as a judge of news, and most of them have
put him at the very top. Yet, in 1912, Mr. Van Anda said to me that,
with the North Pole found and the Cook-Peary controversy settled, the
Arctic would never again occupy much space on the front pages of the
New York papers. But in 1926 he either himself directed or was present
while someone else directed that the entire front page of the New York
_Times_, along with several of the inside pages, should be given over
to the North Pole, first for the second party to visit it and a few
days later for its third visitors.
I doubt if Mr. Van Anda would prophesy as confidently today as he did
in 1912 that twenty years from now the North Pole will occupy little
space on the front page. And who knows but the public may forget
Amundsen as they did McClure, so that a new discoverer of the Northwest
Passage may ride in on a new wave of hurrahs? Some explorer with a
good press may be able to get the same result sooner by flying the
Passage, or swimming it. A new man may in time get new renown out of
my “Blond” Eskimos as I did out of Franklin’s. The “Tunnit” remains of
Labrador were discovered for perhaps the tenth time in 1926, and the
tenth discovery (if it wasn’t the twentieth) won more glory than any
preceding it. Judging from past records, those “Tunnit ruins” could be
found again with even greater _kudos_ about 1946. And so on for many
thrilling discoveries.
It is, then, the best of discovery methods to find a thing over
again after just enough years so that the public has nearly, but not
quite, forgotten. Next best, as a perpetual device, is to search
again and again for a thing never found. The interest created is not
so intense as in the case of a repeated discovery, but there is the
compensating advantage that you can search perhaps three or four times
more often--you get passable results say once every five years for
the repeated search method; effective rediscoveries need at least
twenty-year gaps.
One of the best examples of perpetual search and resulting publicity is
the quest for an Arctic continent.
Through various theorizing it had been pretty well established a
century back that a great land mass spread across the northern polar
sea. It was the Arctic Continent or Polar Continent. The corner towards
Europe and America had been found and was called Greenland. The corner
towards Asia had been seen by natives looking north from northeastern
Siberia but had as yet no well recognized name.
Just for walking to the North Pole it seemed best to climb upon the
continent at the Greenland corner. But sailing might be easier, and
there was known to be a lot of water north of Alaska. So it appeared
logical to sail up through Bering Straits, coast along the east side
of the land seen by the Chukchis. This would presumably take you into
a deep bay. When you got to the head of it you would just anchor your
ship in some harbor and walk the rest of the way to the Pole.
Meantime the land seen by the Chukchis had also been seen by the
British--by Kellett in the ship _Herald_, so that an island was named
after the ship and a greater land seen to the northwest after the
captain. A modicum of fame resulted from this discovery.
The first attempt to pick up the east coast of Kellett Land and sail
north into the polar bay was by the American De Long in 1879-81.
Instead of sailing much, however, he was caught among eddying floes
that with the autumn frost solidified around his ship and carried him
drifting to the northwest across a corner of the theoretical continent,
amputating Kellett Land--the piece now called Wrangel Island. The
expedition made notable discoveries and was successful in adding to our
knowledge as well as to the record of well-conducted adventures, but it
ended in personal tragedy for De Long and a third of his men. Some of
the interest which the world gave De Long was through the bearing of
his work on the discovery of the Arctic Continent.
A series of notable attempts to walk over Greenland to the North
Pole was made by Admiral Peary. The result was one of the greatest
geographic achievements of the last hundred years, the determination
that Greenland does not run to the Pole, but is an island. De Long
had made a small amputation; Peary now made a large one. The Arctic
Continent had contributed materially to his fame.
The work of many expeditions to the north of central and western
Asia, notably the voyage of Nansen, cut farther into the theoretical
continent and the chance became small it could contain the North Pole.
In 1909 Peary marched from Ellesmere Island to the Pole, the whole
distance over floating ice, and took a sounding at the Pole showing
the water two miles deep. No shore of the dwindling continent was
therefore likely to be very near the Pole. Peary thought, however, that
he had seen land to the northwest of the north tip of Heiberg Island,
which might, of course, be a foreland on the continent. This was named
Crocker Land.
So the two greatest explorers of their time, Nansen and Peary, had
profited materially in popular acclaim and in more enduring reputation
through the bearing of their work on the Arctic land mass concept.
The interest in the elusive polar land had grown enough by 1905 that
an Englishman, Harrison, organized an expedition the chief purpose of
which was to search for the continent to the north of Alaska. He might
have done something, for he was a good man himself and had with him one
of the finest northern travelers, Hubert Darrell, whose quality can be
measured from Hanbury’s book, _Sport and Travel in the Northland of
Canada_, London and New York, 1904, one of the great travel stories,
an account of an expedition shared in by Darrell. But there was now a
whaling fleet at Herschel Island. Whalers and Eskimos alike were sure
that anyone was crazy who tried to travel afoot over the sea ice to the
northwest, and, strangely, were apparently able to convince Darrell.
Harrison stuck to his ideas but could get no one to go with him.
Therefore, his book, _In Search of a Polar Continent_, London, 1908,
has in a way a deceptive title--the search was never started. But it
had a good name. The Polar Continent, through being much sought after
and never found, had become a thing to conjure with.
There was a receptive popular audience when there appeared in
Washington a scientific study by R. A. Harris which, in the opinion
of the author and of many others, came near proving that there was
a continent. The land’s dimensions and the situation of its corners
were pretty well determined by deductions from what he thought to be
reliable tidal observations taken at a few northerly points.
Between wish thinking and mathematics the continent grew substantial
and for the first time had a name, Harris Land. The other names had
been for just corners--Greenland, Kellett, Crocker; this was a name for
the whole land, now shrunken but still spoken of as a continent. In
size it still more or less deserved the name.
Our 1913-18 expedition had somewhat better luck than Harrison’s. The
whalers and Eskimos were not able to talk us into believing that we
could not travel over the sea ice far from land and live by hunting.
Between sledge journeys and the drift of one of our ships (the
_Karluk_, Captain Robert A. Bartlett master), we made further inroads
upon the continent. More serious, we took soundings of 1386 meters
without bottom near some of the farthest points we reached. However, to
the northwest of the Ringnes Islands where, on one occasion, we were
forced to turn back less than 100 miles from shore the soundings were
only around 500 meters, and there seemed possibility of land.
Between driving Harris Land from some of its outposts north of Alaska
and finding what might be signs of it northwest of the Ringnes
Islands--between these achievements our expedition got a whole lot of
_kudos_ out of the Arctic Continent.
A year after we started our work in the sea north of Alaska, Donald
MacMillan attacked the problem and sought the theoretical continent
under the name of Crocker Land. He started out from Cape Thomas
Hubbard, Heiberg Island, whence it had been seen and tentatively
located by Peary. MacMillan returned without seeing land but there
was no assurance that it might not be hidden a little way beyond,
for the expedition had taken no deep soundings near its farthest. It
was, therefore, possible to speculate after the return that perhaps
the farthest point might have been over very shallow water, the land
therefore possibly only a bit farther on, concealed by clouds.
So between our shallow soundings, MacMillan’s absence of them, and
Peary’s report that land had been seen, there was an interest growing
keener with the number of searchers and the publicity of each.
The interest remained keen and there was much talk of the undiscovered
continent when Amundsen, Ellsworth and Nobile flew in 1926 from
Spitsbergen to Point Barrow by way of the North Pole. They saw no land
and would have divided the theoretical continent into approximate
halves but for the saving report that for portions of the journey
between Peary’s farthest (the North Pole) and Alaska the weather had
been so thick that they had not been able to see what lay beneath.
This, said the commentators, still left a chance that they crossed
fairly wide stretches of low snow-covered land. The continent still
lived.
In 1927 Wilkins and Eielson flew 550 miles northwest from Point
Barrow and took at their farthest point the deepest sounding ever
recorded in the polar sea, 5440 meters. The flight itself removed land
possibilities through a wide space. The sounding was a cause of further
discouragement to the geographers, but the public didn’t mind. So far
as they were concerned the Continent was merely elusive, rather clever
at hiding itself.
In 1928 Wilkins and Eielson crossed from Point Barrow to Spitsbergen.
They went some 200 or 300 miles out of their way to avoid the North
Pole, for three assigned reasons--they wanted to avoid the sections
which had been visited by previous explorers; they did not want to
be suspected of a play to that gallery which was still interested in
the North Pole; and they wanted to cross the area within which, for
reasons we have just given in dealing with the Peary, Stefansson and
MacMillan expeditions, there seemed the best chance of finding land.
The newspaper files show there was a great deal of speculation as to
whether they might find the Arctic Continent. There was also talk of
checking up on the observations of Dr. Cook who had reported one or
more lands to the west of the course he described himself as having
followed back from the North Pole in 1908.
Wilkins took a course which was for a time approximately halfway
between the areas explored by our 1913-18 expedition and those seen
by Amundsen. Then he swung toward skirting the district explored by
MacMillan, and so on to Spitsbergen, without seeing land. However,
he was forced to admit that for portions of the flight they, like
Amundsen, had been unable to see what lay beneath. The speculators said
there still remained the possibility of the Arctic Continent. There
was talk that somebody really must go and settle the question of the
Continent.
Between what is reasonably inferred from the soundings and from the
visual report of travelers there is, however, small chance now for an
undiscovered land in the Arctic bigger than Cuba. Islands from that
size down are possible, though not probable. But the interest in what
is now beginning to be called the lost continent still continues. There
will probably be plenty of talk about it next time anybody flies.
Anticipating discussions have already speculated on the chance that the
next flyer may discover “a lost continent the size of Cuba.”
As we admitted in the beginning, there have been in the search for the
continent no such storms of excitement as there were from at least two
of the discoveries of the Northwest Passage, after McClure’s report
(third or fourth discovery)[3] in 1854, and Amundsen’s (fourth or
fifth) in 1906. But on the whole the theoretical continent has given a
pretty consistent performance for a hundred years.
I have myself been in parties, of three in one case and of four in
another, that discovered large islands, rich with vegetation, birds
and animals, which had never been seen before by human eyes, press
agented or otherwise exploited. We were thrilled, of course. It was
one of the great experiences of our lives. But to judge by outward
appearances, there are friends of mine who have been even more thrilled
by “discovering” hamlets in Brittany that were “absolutely unknown to
Americans.” And I think they really had at least an equal right with
us to the thrill, for I imagine that discovering polar countries never
seen by human eyes is today easier than the discovery of a Brittany
village previously never seen by Americans.
Adventure, in the last analysis, is measured by the thrill it gives
to the discoverer, and later to those who hear about it. You can
predispose the world to any desired thrill by suitable advance
publicity. A deliberate campaign would be too long and expensive, so
you should choose for discovery something well advertised already, as,
for instance, the word and idea “ray.” We have long had the rays of the
sun, and they have been very popular. Then there are the X-rays, radium
rays, and many others, until the world is now ready to be thrilled by
anything that is called a ray. It is also important to have a good
adjective for the ray you are going to promote. “Cosmic ray” is the
best to date--see what it has done for Millikan. If you can find a name
a little better than cosmic, people will go daffy over the discovery
of your ray. (Death rays are perennially successful.)
Thus we arrive at a heartening conclusion: the tribe of Great
Discoverers will not become extinct until the Age of Advertising has
passed.
CHAPTER IV.
TRAVELERS’ TALES
What we now call a fish story the Elizabethans spoke of as a traveler’s
tale. I shall discuss whether there are many fish stories among the
travelers’ tales of today, whether they have an important effect on the
sciences which gather their data in part from the reports of explorers,
and whether we ought to do anything about it. These questions are more
important in our time than in Elizabeth’s, for the explorers were mere
travelers then. Now they all claim to be scientists or at least to be
the leaders of scientific expeditions.
I address you both as an expert and as Exhibit A. For my own
expeditions have been insistently, if not so very effectively,
publicized as scientific; and I am one of the travelers who, by my own
contention and the claims of my friends and backers, should be taken as
a scientific explorer.
I begin, then, by discussing the extent to which my own books and other
protestations are to be taken seriously.
In a way this exposition is the direct result of a talk which I gave
in 1907-8 before the Century Association of New York City. It is my
necessary introduction to repeat in condensed form what I said there
and to tell you what the Centurions thought about it.
So far as I remember, I began by explaining to the Century Association
that I was an exceptionally reliable witness, and particularly so
with regard to the Arctic. My father and mother had both been born on
the north coast of Iceland on the very edge of the polar circle, and
that furnished me with a useful background. I myself had been born in
Manitoba where winter temperatures run down to 55° F. below zero, which
is about as low as they get on the north coast of Canada--as a matter
of fact lower than any official record, for the lowest of these to date
is -52°. I had read the northern literature from infancy and had always
been so soaked in it that my first published article labeled scientific
(apart from a brief linguistic study) was “The Icelandic Colony in
Greenland,” _American Anthropologist_, April-June, 1906. In North
Dakota I had seen blizzards as bad as any I had experienced on my first
Arctic expedition, which I was then describing to the Century, and the
prairies of my childhood Dakota, when snow-covered in winter or green
in summer, were much like the Eskimo prairies of northern Canada, so
that I had been quite at home in the Arctic from the first, gathering
information more reliable than if I had been a nervous visitor who was
frightened by conditions different from those of his childhood--as
might easily be the case with, say, a Frenchman.
Such preliminaries being disposed of, I launched into what I still
believe was to the Century Association a convincing first-hand picture
of how things are with the Eskimos of the Mackenzie River.
I told how I was taken into an Eskimo home where 22 people and myself
lived in one room through the middle of the winter and where my life
with the people was intimate throughout the year. I enjoyed being there
and they apparently enjoyed having me with them. I entered both into
their routine and into the spirit of their beliefs, so that they began
to discuss things with me or in my presence quite as freely as if no
stranger had been near. In fact, no stranger was near--I had become as
one of them.
On the basis of this I regaled the Century with many amusing and
allegedly important contributions to the ethnology of the Mackenzie
Eskimos. I shall here review only one topic.
One of the Eskimos, Memoranna, wore an eagle feather on the left
shoulder of his reindeer-skin coat. I asked him once why he did this
and he said there were two reasons:
In Memoranna’s childhood the people of his native village had been more
numerous than now; and, besides, there were many visitors. Athletic
games were common and the people took off their coats perhaps when
wrestling or running foot races, throwing them in a pile. Every coat
was of deerskin and most of them had the same trimmings, but they
were not all of the same size or workmanship and some were newer than
others. It was, then, important that when the games were over each man
should be able to find his own coat. “Therefore we each had a mark on
our coats. One man would have a weasel tail in the middle of his back,
another perhaps a strip of wolf skin on his sleeve. I had an eagle
feather on my left shoulder.”
The second reason for these marks was that when everyone was dressed
alike and when there were hundreds together you could not recognize a
man unless you saw his face. But with the eagle feather on the shoulder
of the coat anybody could tell that the wearer was Memoranna.
The chief reason why I repeat all this is that at the end of my talk
Dr. Franklin H. Giddings, Professor of the History of Civilization at
Columbia University, a foremost figure in American sociology, came
to me. He had been making a study of property marks, he had been
much interested in this particular contribution of mine, and he was
satisfied of its accuracy not only because of my careful methods of
observation and my intimate life with the people but also because it
fitted in with his studies of the origin and development of property
marks among primitive people.
This address of mine before the Century was based on a year with the
Eskimos of the Mackenzie River. I returned north in six months and
spent four years more, making five all together. In the last of those
years I finally acquired such a control over the language that I could
speak with the people almost as freely as they spoke with each other.
Then at last I learned that the eagle feather was a talisman, with no
intentional property mark connection.
Some weeks after I learned this I met Memoranna and asked him why he
had deceived me four years ago. He replied in substance that he had
been almost brought up as a cabin boy on whaling ships and had besides
associated with missionaries, so that he knew the white man’s point
of view. If an Eskimo told his real beliefs, a sailor would call him
a damn fool and a missionary would explain how wrong and wicked they
were. Through long experience he had learned the kind of explanation
a white man likes; giving that kind saved a lot of trouble. He had not
meant specially to deceive me; he was merely treating me as just one
more white man.
There are within the social sciences few more broad-minded or with
a keener sense of humor than Professor Giddings. Still, it is my
impression that he felt just a little bit more enlightened and pleased
when he heard the original incorrect property mark explanation of
the eagle feather, which agreed with his own theories, than he did
when later I told him the final and as I still believe correct
explanation--which did not fit into his sociology quite so neatly.
If this property mark tale were an isolated case it would not be
worth repeating, but it is typical of my work. The impressions and
conclusions of my first year in the Arctic were, I now think, mostly
wrong. Luckily for me I did not publish a book at the end of the first
expedition but placed the diaries of it in storage with the American
Museum of Natural History of New York City. They remained there during
my second expedition of four years and while I wrote my first published
book, called _My Life With the Eskimo_, 1913. They remained there also
during my third expedition of five years and while I wrote my second
book, called _The Friendly Arctic_, 1921.
It was only in 1922 that I got out the diaries of the first expedition
and studied them as the basis of my third book, _Hunters of the Great
North_. In the introduction to that volume, I said: “As I look over
my diaries I shudder to think how vastly I might have augmented the
already great misknowledge of the Arctic had I published everything I
imagined I had seen and everything I thought I knew.”
You may think this autobiographical preface strange. But I shall
presently be dealing with names far more eminent and respected than my
own, even with those holding membership in this oldest of the great
scientific societies of America, and I need myself as the thin entering
wedge for a general discussion.
The introductory remarks closed, I turn to what I intend as a criticism
of the social sciences in so far as they depend for their data on the
findings of explorers.
If I were giving a course of lectures, and had at my disposal ten
evenings instead of one, I should like to consider under three heads
the misinformation contained in the books and reports of travelers. The
first would be intentional misrepresentation, the deliberate drawing of
the long bow; the second would be that unintentional misrepresentation
which results from careless observation or from misplaced confidence
in witnesses; the third would be that subdivision where the traveler
states as a fact which he has observed a thing which he cannot possibly
have observed but in which he believes because it conforms to, or is
part of, a belief which he holds and has never questioned.
Since I have only one evening, too short for me although it may be too
long for you, I shall not merely confine myself to the third heading
but shall discuss only a few typical cases under it. What I said awhile
ago, then, about property marks does not belong to our subject and has
its use merely as part of the introductory approach.
We turn, then, first to a large body of false testimony which is
nevertheless a small subdivision of the last third of our subject, and
consider some of the things that have been testified to about animal
and plant life in that small but typical sample of our world, the Far
North.
The foundation of European belief about the distribution of life over
the earth was laid by the Pythagorean Greeks, if not by someone else
from whom the Pythagoreans borrowed the idea. Essentially it was that
terrestrial life depends on heat from the sun. This heat, when it is
of a degree called warmth, permits life in a belt called the temperate
zone. To the south of the temperate zone there was, according to
orthodox Greek belief, a burning region where the rocks were red-hot
and the oceans boiling. North of the temperate zone was a region frozen
solid. One of the ancient authorities has it that in the North life is
as impossible because of the freezing as it is in the South because of
the burning.
It is not a part of my northern specialty to review what is so
well-known to historians, that from the Greek learned period before
Christ to the age of Prince Henry the Navigator, and therefore through
almost 2000 years, it was nearly or quite the unanimous opinion of
the learned world that no human beings would ever cross the lifeless,
burning and boiling tropics. It is more within my field as an Arctic
explorer to point out that the accepted Greek belief was at one time
that because of the cold no living thing could exist north of Scotland.
Then the Irish discovered Iceland, 600 miles north of Scotland, and the
Icelanders, or someone else, discovered Spitsbergen, another 600 miles
still farther north.
The average January temperature of Reykjavik is about the same as that
of January for Milan in Italy or Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and
the tourist companies which contract with their passengers to show
them pack ice are forced, some years, to carry them 200 miles beyond
Spitsbergen to keep their promise. But at every advance of knowledge,
which in this case has been the northward advance of travel, it has
been discovered with profound surprise that life was there ahead
of the traveler. The interpretative scientists have been driven to
every expedient of logic to explain the contradiction between what
they believed and what they saw. This effort, in turn, has been the
foundation of much false testimony by those of them who were explorers.
Take the case of perhaps the most solidly famous and respected of
the British polar explorers, Sir Edward Parry. He landed on Melville
Island the summer of 1819 and found musk oxen grazing there. This
was startling, but had to be accepted. Presently he went into winter
quarters, practically hibernating with his men for several months. When
they emerged in the spring they saw musk oxen. Hereupon Lieutenant
Sabine, himself later a distinguished explorer in his own right but
acting for the time as naturalist in the publication of the scientific
results of Parry’s voyage, wrote as follows:
“They (the musk oxen) arrived in Melville Island in the middle of May,
crossing the ice from the southward, and quitted it on their return
towards the end of September.”[4]
This was accepted by the entire learned world because it fitted in
with two of their preconceptions--that Parry and Sabine were reliable
witnesses, and that the Far North was by nature hostile to animal
life. It had been believed earlier that no animals could exist, at any
season, as far north as Melville Island. Now, when they had been found
to be there in summer, the scientists executed a strategic retreat by
saying: “The beasts make a summer foray deep into the Arctic, but they
flee from the winters to the hospitable shelter of the temperate zone.”
The theory of the complete absence of grazing animals from this part
of the Arctic was thus replaced by an elaborate theory of seasonal
migration.
For a quarter century after Parry’s first voyage there seems to have
been practically if not complete unanimity among the explorers and the
stay-at-home scientists alike that the musk oxen, in spite of short
legs, made each year a 1200-mile round trip between the winter shelter
of the forest on the North American continent and the summer stamping
grounds in Melville Island.
Lieutenant Sherard Osborn, who both shared in and wrote books about
the Franklin Search, appears to have been the most thoughtful of those
officers. Yet in 1856 he published _The Discovery of the North-West
Passage_ ... and assumed in it that the grazing animals of the
islands north of Canada migrate south to the mainland in the Autumn
to return each Spring. But in 1857 he published a second edition with
a new Chapter, XVII, on “The Migration of Animals Theory.” For the
views there expressed he says he has been “nearly excommunicated as
a heretic.” In this chapter he points out the manifest theoretical
absurdity of the postulated migrations and cites a little testimony he
had been able to get which tended to show that there was no migration.
Thirty years later Greely was sure that the musk oxen of the Arctic
islands do not migrate south[5] and most observers are now agreed
that they do not move from one Arctic island to another at any time
in any direction. Yet there are still in use in the English-speaking
countries, among others, textbooks of recent copyright which retain the
Parry statement and the Parry explanation--that the musk oxen migrate
and that they do it because they need the shelter of the forest against
the severe climate of the northern winters.
When the scientists were finally converted to believing that the musk
oxen do live in the remote Arctic permanently, they and the travelers
cast about for some more explanations--the philosophical scientists
are continually busy trying to reconcile new knowledge with ancient
theory. They now hit upon something clever. People had believed, they
explained, that grazing animals could not exist without grass, and that
was why they had thought there would be no such animals in the Arctic.
They were right in part; there was no grass. What they could not have
foreseen was that in the Arctic the place of the flowering plants is
taken by mosses and lichens. The musk oxen live on mosses and lichens!
The musk ox still lives on mosses and lichens in the usual reference
works; he is mounted with his mouth stuffed with them in the usual
museums. This is in part because many explorers have supported the
philosophizing scientists by testifying that lichens are verily the
food of the musk ox.
But many explorers have denied this flatly. Greely said[6] “... in
no case did I ever note the musk-ox feeding on the latter vegetation
(lichens), although in many places near Conger the ground was covered
with scanty, minute lichens for acres in extent.” Roderick MacFarlane
says[7] that musk oxen live mainly if not wholly on flowering plants,
and I have said the same.[8]
But the traditional belief is still being advanced by explorers as
testimony and as observed fact. For instance, a statement implying
that musk oxen do live on mosses and lichens was issued within the
year by the Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch of the Department
of the Interior of Canada, for they published a photograph of musk
oxen with an accompanying letterpress which said that they were here
shown grazing on mosses and lichens. I wrote at once to a friend, O. S.
Finnie, who is official head of this department although not personally
responsible for the picture and description. I asked him how did they
know that these animals were feeding on lichens and whether their
botanists could not (by examining the original photograph and perhaps
enlarging it) determine what plants were really visible along with the
animals. Finnie then submitted the photograph to A. E. Porsild, the
distinguished Danish-Canadian botanist and specialist in Arctic flora,
whose verdict came in a letter of February 27, 1930:
“There is a firm and rather hard turf composed chiefly of grasses and
sedges with a slight admixture of flowering plants. Most predominant
is the Alpine Foxtail grass (_alopecurus alpinus_) which probably has
a higher food value than any other Arctic grass. With the foxtail grow
a few sedges (_Carex_). In the foreground to the right are flowers of
the Alpine Chickweed (_Cerastium alpinum_). A few twigs of a decumbent
willow (_Salix_) show in the center of the photo.”
Not only these recent Canadian Government observers but also many
scores of normally honest travelers have, then, testified, because of a
solidly founded belief, that musk oxen live exclusively or mainly on a
food which in fact they rarely eat--and then probably not by choice.
One of the most interesting of the systematic fabrications about the
polar regions is within the observational domain of the exact sciences,
although its effects are noticed chiefly in the social sciences. This
is the statement that at a certain place a certain observer has noted
that the midnight sun was visible for a given number of days in summer
and that correspondingly the noonday sun was invisible at the same
place for the same number of days in winter. All statements ever made
to this effect are false. They could not be true anywhere in the world
unless at least one important fact were changed and some laws of nature
altered or abolished. The fact needing change is that the sun would
have to be contracted down to a pinpoint; the laws needing change are
those governing refraction.
A medieval writer, Jordanes, says:[9]
“In its northern part (of Norway) live the people Adogit, who, it is
said, in the middle of the summer have continuous light for forty days
and nights, and likewise at the time of the winter solstice do not see
the light for the same number of days and nights.”
On this Nansen comments[10] to the effect that there can never have
been any such place. For, says he, if the sun was visible at midnight
40 days in summer then it never disappeared at all in winter. Or if it
was invisible 40 days in winter then it was visible 63 days in summer.
Nansen conjectures for the writers of this immediate group, the
commentators on northern Norway, that they had heard for a given
place that the sun was invisible for a certain number of days in
winter and had then added a gloss (in conformity with Greek theory) to
the effect that the midnight sun was visible for the same length of
time in summer. Nansen seems to believe, then, that had the writers
themselves been residents of northern Norway, or had they spent a year
well beyond the Arctic Circle, they could not have written as they
did. In this judgment Nansen is not at his best as a student of human
nature. Nor does he show thorough familiarity with the writings of his
contemporaries, for there are on record a number of them who without
question have seen with the eyes of the body that the periods of the
sun’s invisibility and visibility are unequal, but whose mental eyes
have been holden so that they thought they had observed the periods to
be equal.
We could go into a long catalogue of instances but shall actually use
but a single example which, although typical in a sense, is striking
for three reasons among others: that the witness is a Russian and
therefore a member of a northern people who ought to understand
northern conditions, that his general scientific work is looked upon
by his colleagues as good, and that he has undoubtedly spent long
periods within the Arctic Circle. The quotation we are about to give
was published on pp. 581-2 of the _American Anthropologist_, for
October-December, 1929. The author is Waldemar G. Bogoras, who says:
“The north polar circle forms the southern border of the area which
has in midsummer the continuous day and in midwinter the continuous
night. And so, for instance, on 68-70 degrees of north latitude, we
have in the polar zone three or four weeks of continuous night in
winter and as many weeks of continuous sunshine in summer.”
Unaware of the laws of refraction and forgetful of what they knew
concerning the brightness of the twilight before sunrise and after
sunset, Europeans throughout the Middle Ages and down to our time have
assumed generally that darkness comes in the Arctic when the sun dips
below the horizon. This belief is popularly translated into saying:
“In the Arctic there are six months of daylight and six months of
darkness.” That most people hold this belief is shown by the frequency
with which the idea appears in school texts, in serious newspapers, and
in the humorous journals. The average reader supposes the humor to rest
upon some basis of fact when an Eskimo wife who sits up to await her
husband’s homecoming starts scolding and he replies: “Why, my dear, it
is only half past October.” The father of a baby with the colic walks
the floor with it through the night and is then referred to as being
on a six months’ tramp. A funny paper tells that Macpherson operates
his business from San Francisco during the summer and from Point Barrow
during the winter. You want to know why he goes north in winter and
are told he conducts his business a good deal by telegraph and uses the
Barrow office six months to get the benefit of night rates.
That great universities and leaders in science are still teaching the
view on which the humorists base their quips, was brought in upon me
through a talk I gave at the Explorers Club in New York. There I cited
one traveler after another who had reported from various places within
the Arctic Circle, some of them far north, that they had observed the
sun to be fully visible in summer and wholly invisible in winter for
equal periods. These men, I contended, had reported what neither they
nor anyone else can ever have seen.
A few days later a troubled voice called me on the telephone for an
appointment with regard to a situation at Columbia University. On
arrival he proved to be a student in a course on meteorology. He had
heard my talk and had reported to his instructor my saying that there
was no spot on earth where the days of the sun’s complete visibility
and invisibility could be equal in number. The instructor had not been
impressed, and had pointed out that the author of a book they were
using in the class, Robert DeCourcy Ward, Professor of Climatology
in Harvard University, likely knew what he was talking about when in
defining the zones he said:
“In the polar zones, the sun is below the horizon for twenty-four
hours at least once in winter, and is above the horizon for the same
length of time at least once in summer.”
I had Ward’s _Climate: Considered Especially in Relation to Man_ in
its 1908 edition. Sure enough, on p. 20 were the lines cited by the
Columbia instructor. I procured a “Second Edition, Revised” which says
in a note dated August 1917:
“I have taken the opportunity offered by the publication of a second
edition of this volume to make some revision of the chapters on ‘The
Characteristics of the Polar Zones’....”
In that edition I found, unchanged, the statement we have quoted.
Professor Ward had, then, taken special thought of his chapter on the
polar zones and had nevertheless repeated himself verbatim. No wonder
the Columbia instructor was also firm.
Some textbooks, with a pretense to meticulous accuracy that makes them
more effectively deceptive than others, will contain such statements
as: “Among the Eskimos there is continuous darkness for three months.”
There are, of course, no Eskimo settlements that have continuous
darkness for even three days, or one day.
The textbook writers are in a vicious circle. Embryo explorers learn
from school texts about the continuous Arctic winter darkness; they
come back some years later from an Arctic expedition with testimony of
having observed the said darkness, and this testimony becomes in turn
the basis of new incorrect textbooks. A case is Elisha Kane, the most
famous of American polar explorers before Peary. He reported having
wintered at a place where there was no trace of daylight in a clear
sky at the winter solstice. For comment on this it suffices to quote
Captain George E. Tyson, who says: “Have passed Rensselaer Harbor,
where Dr. Kane wintered during 1853-55. I am surprised that in the
latitude of Rensselaer Harbor (N. Lat. 78⅔°) he should have found the
darkness so intense as he describes it. It was not totally dark with us
at high meridian at any time in clear weather....”[11]
In Heft 1/2, 1930, of the international scientific journal _Arktis_,
Dr. Wilh. Meinardus of Göttingen, has published a diagram of the
distribution of daylight and darkness within the polar regions
throughout the year which shows not only that Kane (as Tyson implies)
must have had a lot of daylight at noon on the shortest day of the year
but also that no polar explorer except members of one Nansen and one
Peary expedition have ever been so far north (or south) in midwinter
that they could say accurately that there was no trace of daylight in a
clear southern sky at the solstice. Yet there are dozens of explorers
who have said so in books or reports which have been believed. Many
of these were as respectable and respected as Nansen or Peary. They
were not liars; rather they were observers and reporters who had been
hypnotized by a belief.
It may be said in the defense of these travelers that when they
said “no daylight” they meant “only a little daylight.” But would
we similarly excuse a chemist after an autopsy if he said “no trace
of arsenic” and really meant “only a little arsenic”? Explorers are
putting themselves forward as scientists. If we are to take them
seriously and at their own evaluation, we should require of them the
standards not only of truthfulness but also of precision that we
require of chemists or astronomers.
It follows naturally from what we have said above how ridiculous it is
to suppose, as many school textbooks still assert or imply, that you
have “six months of daylight and six months of darkness at the North
Pole.” If you mean by daylight what Captain Tyson means in criticizing
Dr. Kane, then we have at the North Pole more nearly four months of
darkness (from October 6 to February 5) and eight months of daylight
(from February 6 to October 5). If, on the other hand, you mean ability
to read ordinary print throughout a clear day out-of-doors, then the
division must be something like 5 months of darkness and 7 months of
daylight.
A further corollary is equally plain. It is that we are being misled
when it is constantly being stated or implied that there is less
daylight per year in the polar regions than in the tropics or temperate
zone. You can perhaps defend that old view if you say that by daylight
you mean the quantity of sunlight delivered per unit of earth’s surface
per year, but that is not really at all what we mean when we say
daylight. For instance, you will hardly say that daylight is lacking
when there is so much of it that you have to wear colored glasses to
protect your eyes and must be careful to sleep in dark places so as
not to go snow-blind while in bed. Judged by ability to read print
out-of-doors, there is more daylight at an average Arctic station per
year than there is in the temperate zone or in the tropics. (We are
not here entering into niceties of how dark it is in Arctic mountain
canyons or how light on snow-clad tropical peaks.)
There was a time when it was commonly believed in Europe (by those
who did not identify travelers’ tales with fish stories) that the
people of a certain remote land had ears so conveniently large that
in sleeping they used one for a mattress and the other for a quilt.
This we now consider a strictly medieval belief. But it is thoroughly
modern to believe that Eskimo women carry babies in the hoods of their
coats. We shall cite you eminent men, many of whom are living, who have
asserted that they themselves have seen Eskimo women carry babies in
their hoods, but first, departing from the main chronological order of
our discussion, we give the testimony of the man indisputably the best
authority on this subject.
Knud Rasmussen was born in Greenland of a Danish father and a mother
who was part Eskimo. He was brought up by the Eskimo women somewhat
as our Southern babies are by their Negro mammies. He was raised
bilingual, his two mother tongues Danish and Eskimo. He associated with
Danes in the house and played with Eskimo children out of doors. In due
course he was taken to Copenhagen where he went through that university
and other training which has made him both a well-equipped scholar and
a cosmopolitan gentleman.
Quite apart from his childhood, which is in this connection the most
significant period, Rasmussen has spent more time in the countries
inhabited by Eskimos than any other man who is ordinarily classified as
an explorer. He is the only one of us explorers who has visited every
Arctic Eskimo territory and practically every Arctic Eskimo people from
the east coast of Greenland to the west coast of Alaska and to the
East Cape district of Siberia. He is primarily an anthropologist and
geographer. For his sound work in these fields, and especially for his
interpretation of the Eskimos to the learned world, he has been awarded
gold medals by nearly every important geographical society in Europe
and in the United States.
On the basis of the studies for which Rasmussen has really deserved
these medals, he says about the belief that Eskimo women carry babies
in their hoods: “The women in Greenland have never in the past carried
their children in their hoods, nor do they do so now ... the child is
decidedly not (carried) in the hood, as that would simply choke the
mother.” (Letter to Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 3rd May, 1930.)
Now we turn to the history of the belief. The early travelers through
Eskimo lands described from most if not all districts a custom whereby
women’s coats were made especially roomy in the back so that a baby
could be slipped up under the coat and supported by a belt. The child
was then held by the coat and belt against the small of the woman’s
back. Usually in removing the child the mother would undo the belt and
let the baby slide down, but the neck of the coat was naturally made
roomy to enable the child to breathe and sometimes the mother would
reach in that way and pull it up and out. It is not impossible, but
was at least geographically rare, that mothers inserted the baby into
the coat from above. But whatever the method of ingress or egress, the
baby, according to early northern books, was always carried inside the
body of the coat, never inside the hood.
Since there are now living men who hold distinguished professorships
in great universities and others of equal rank who say that they
themselves have seen babies carried in hoods, I am planning one
day to write almost a book on this subject, citing, so far as my
researches allow, practically every traveler who has said anything
about how Eskimo babies are carried. Here I give only a few typical
cases, generally men who are not only entitled to respect but who have
received it from the learned world.
Taking them chronologically, the first writers examined are the
following:
Hans Egede: _A Description of Greenland_, first published in 1757 (pp.
132 and 148 in the London, 1818, edition).
David Crantz: _The History of Greenland_, London, 1767. Vol. I, pp.
138 and 162.
Hans Egede Saabye: _Greenland ... in the Years 1770 and 1778_, London,
1818, pp. 13 and 259.
Vol. XIX of the _Continuation of the General History of Voyages_,
Paris, 1770, in which there is a “History of Greenland” by an
anonymous author.
All of this early Greenland evidence agrees with Rasmussen--the manner
in which the child is carried and the coat in which it is carried are
described in almost the same terms as he uses.
But there existed a stream of contradictory testimony. Henry Ellis
published his _Voyage to Hudson’s Bay_ at London in 1748. There you
find on p. 136:
“The Difference between the Dress of the Men and the Women is, that
the Women have a Train to their Jackets, that reaches down to their
Heels. Their Hoods are also larger and wider at the Shoulders, for the
sake of carrying their Children in them more conveniently on their
Backs.”
On pp. 495 and 496 of Sir Edward Parry’s _Journal of a Second Voyage_,
London, 1824, the hood-carrying is weightily reinforced.
Between Parry’s time and about 1855 I have found the following
references:
BABIES CARRIED IN HOODS:
G. F. Lyon: _The Private Journal_, London, 1824, p. 315.
John Franklin: _Narrative of a Second Expedition in the Years 1825,
1826, 1827_, London, 1828, p. 118.
John Rae: _Narrative of an Expedition to the Shores of the Arctic Sea
in 1846 and 1847_, London, 1850, p. 39.
John Richardson: _Arctic Searching Expedition_, London, 1851, Vol. I,
pp. 252 and 369; also _The Polar Regions_, Edinburgh, 1861, p. 306.
Berthold Seemann: _Narrative of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Herald during
the Years 1845-51_, London, 1853, Vol. II, p. 53.
BABIES NOT CARRIED IN HOODS (BUT CARRIED INSIDE COATS):
Captain W. A. Graah, _Narrative of an Expedition to the East Coast of
Greenland_, London, 1837, p. 118.
Thomas Simpson: _Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of
America_, London, 1843.
Joseph Bellot: _Memoirs of Lieutenant Joseph René Bellot_, London,
1855, Vol. I, p. 186.
Around 1850 there was living in Greenland a man who knew the Greenland
Eskimos at least as well as even Rasmussen does now. This was Samuel
Kleinschmidt, born of missionary parents and brought up there until he
had learned Eskimo as one of his mother tongues. He was then educated
in Germany and went back to Greenland to spend the rest of his life,
much of which he devoted to the preparation of an Eskimo-German grammar
and an Eskimo-Danish dictionary.
In some Eskimo dialects _amaut_, _amaun_, or some variant of that word
is the name of an enlargement for child accommodation in the back of a
woman’s coat, or it may be the name for an entire coat which contains
this enlargement. In many districts the nursing mother wears a coat
of no special design but one simply large enough so the child is well
accommodated. The name of the coat is still _amaun_. This is, then, a
word referring to the purpose for which the coat is used, not to its
design. _Amaun_ is never used as the name for a hood, of a woman’s coat
or of any other garment.
In _Den Gronlandske Ordbog_, Copenhagen, 1871, p. 24, Kleinschmidt
defines the verbal form _amarpok_, “carries a child on her back in
a roomy coat designed for that purpose”; and the noun form _amaut_,
“such a coat for carrying the baby.” Thus we see that while most of
the travelers had by this time been converted to the Ellis-Parry
hood carrying and were testifying that they had themselves observed
it, Kleinschmidt, working as a missionary and scholar in his native
Greenland, had either never heard about the belief that children are
carried in hoods or else considered it so absurd as not to be worth
noticing in his dictionary.
In 1927 Schultz-Lorentzen published a dictionary which in many respects
is an improvement on Kleinschmidt’s. At that stage, as we shall show
in a moment, the books were favoring by a substantial majority
the Ellis-Parry view, at least if you merely count noses among the
testifiers. Greenland books, among others, were favoring it and on p.
16 of the Schultz-Lorentzen dictionary we find: _amaut_, “fur jacket
with hood for carrying child.”
But this is really an ambiguous definition. If you think already
that babies are carried in hoods, you will read that meaning into
Schultz-Lorentzen’s words; but if you think that babies are not thus
carried, you will understand him to mean that the coat is for carrying
the baby and that this coat also has a hood. It is therefore fair to
him to cite some of his allied definitions: _amaq_, “child carried in
fur jacket with hood”; _amarpa_, “takes him on his back; carries him on
his back”; _amarpoq_, “carries a child in fur jacket with hood.”
From about 1855 down to about 1888 the evidence of explorers who had
traveled among Eskimos is divided as follows:
BABIES CARRIED IN HOODS:
Charles Francis Hall, 1865.
Isaac I. Hayes, 1867.
Dr. Henry Rink, 1877.
AMBIGUOUS:
A. W. Greely, 1886.
BABIES CARRIED INSIDE COATS:
No testimony during this period.
Now we come to what makes our discussion really worth while. It is that
one of those who report Eskimo babies carried in hoods is Franz Boas,
Professor of Anthropology in Columbia University and President of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Boas is, if not the most eminent living anthropologist, which he very
well may be, at least the most distinguished of those who are also
Arctic explorers and who have made some specialty of Eskimo studies (we
classify Rasmussen here as a traveler or geographer rather than as an
anthropologist). Moreover, the Smithsonian Institution, through which
Boas published a book on the Eskimos on Baffin Island and neighboring
districts, is in one sense at least our foremost scientific body. It is
then significant that on p. 556 of the _6th Annual Report, Bureau of
Ethnology_, 1884-85, in the Section, _The Central Eskimo_, by Boas, we
have:
“The women’s jacket ... has a wide and large hood reaching down almost
to the middle of the body.... If the child is carried in the hood, a
leather girdle fastened with a buckle is tied around the waist and
serves to prevent the child from slipping down....”
Boas spent a winter with the Eskimos at Baffin Island and undoubtedly
had hundreds of opportunities of seeing how the women carried their
babies. He was there for the purpose of studying just such things and
there is no doubting his sincere desire to record and interpret rightly
everything he saw.
But Boas had in a considerable part of his Eskimo work the
collaboration of a man who testifies directly against him, a man, too,
of keen observation, shrewd judgment, and much longer experience among
Eskimos. This is Captain George Comer, who lives at East Haddam,
Conn., co-author with Boas of _The Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson
Bay_, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XV,
1901. On the subject of the belief that Eskimo women carry babies in
their hoods, Captain Comer says:
“... (The statement that) Eskimo women carry their babies in the hood
of their garment is perfectly absurd.... Once when I spoke of the
child being carried in the hood it made the women laugh.” (Letter to
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, May 22, 1930.)
This discussion has been based on the easiest reading of Boas, which is
that he means to say the Eskimo babies are carried in the hoods of the
women’s coats. However, the part about the leather girdle serving “to
prevent the child from slipping down” may be taken to show what Boas
really meant was that the child is carried not in the hood, but inside
the coat as described by Rasmussen. For an examination of Baffin Island
women’s coats in museums, or an examination of the pictures from Boas
and others which give the women’s coats of Baffin Island, will show
that if a child (or anything else) is in the hood, then there is no
chance of its sliding down along the woman’s back whether or not she
wears a girdle.
Continuing our studies, we have made the following classification of
the reports on the Eskimo manner of carrying babies by travelers later
than Boas.
BABIES CARRIED IN HOODS:
Lucien M. Turner (Bureau of Ethnology), 1894.
David Hanbury, 1904.
E. W. Hawkes (Canadian Dept. of Mines), 1916.
Donald MacMillan, 1918.
BABIES CARRIED INSIDE COATS:
Alfred H. Harrison, 1908.
John W. Kelly (U. S. Bureau of Education), 1890.
Fridtjof Nansen, 1893.
AMBIGUOUS:
Ejnar Mikkelsen--expedition 1906-08 (book undated).
John Murdoch (Bureau of Ethnology)--reports them carried in coat for
those Eskimos he visited but says that among the eastern Eskimos (whom
he had not visited) the baby is carried in the hood--1892.
Josephine Peary--describes method of carrying, showing that child is
really carried in coat; but she calls it the hood--1893.
Henry Rink--same as above, description correct for carrying in coat
but speaks of it as hood--1877.
You may think that in spite of the distinction of some of the
advocates, the carrying of babies in hoods has by now been relegated
generally to the domain of folklore and that this discussion has
therefore grown academic. But until within the last twelve months
several of the foremost up-to-the-minute authorities have in reality
been influenced to believe that the baby hood-carrying is a fact.
For with Rasmussen and Boas in knowledge of the Eskimo we might well
group Diamond Jenness, Chief Anthropologist of the Canadian Government
at Ottawa, who, as anthropologist on the staff of the expedition which
I commanded from 1913-18, spent three years in studying the Eskimos
from western Alaska eastward along the north Canadian coast as far as
Coronation Gulf. Since then, through his continued studies and official
position, he has been in close touch with anthropologists and with
the development of Eskimo research. On March 29, 1930, he wrote me in
substance that, although he was convinced those early travelers who
had testified that babies were carried in hoods in the districts which
he had himself later investigated were mistaken, nevertheless he was
willing to believe other travelers who said that in certain districts
which he had not visited the babies were so carried. It was only when
Rasmussen and Comer testified about those very districts in which
Jenness still credited the hood-carrying that he realized the belief
had a folklore nature outside his own territories as well as within
them.
There is plenty of evidently correct testimony that Eskimo women do
carry certain things in their hoods. Among things frequently mentioned
are cigarettes (in recent times), needle cases, dolls or other
playthings for their babies, and small stolen articles. Why is it not,
then, reasonable that they might carry babies similarly?
The reply is that the admittedly hood-carried articles are light.
A baby is so heavy even at birth that (as Rasmussen points out) it
would choke, or at least seriously incommode, the mother if its weight
reposed in the hood. (Babies are carried on women’s backs until they
are three or four years old, making the weight increase considerably
each year.)
The second paragraph in rebuttal will be that most testimony represents
the babies in the hoods as usually naked, at least while very young.
If you study the construction of the hoods on women’s coats in any of
our museums, you will find not only that a weight in them would press
against the mother’s throat with choking action, but also that they are
so open at the top that a naked baby would necessarily suffer a great
deal from cold, at least in winter, even if it were not frozen to death.
It may be suggested that when Boas, for instance, speaks of a hood he
is actually referring to the enlargement farther down in the coat which
makes it commodious, as described by many travelers and easily seen in
museums.
The reply is that this might not be a bad defense argument for
Greenland, where the women frequently have coats without hoods, but
that Boas is dealing with Baffin Island and other neighboring districts
where the women’s coats, at least usually, have hoods. Since Boas
does not describe the coat he has in mind as having two hoods, we are
inclined to feel that by hood he means what the rest of us do.
Then it may be advanced that there are motion pictures and other
photographs in existence which show Eskimo babies actually in the
hoods of women’s coats. This would serve as good argument, if not full
proof, were it not that we know the circumstances under which those
photographs were taken, which are that to oblige the photographers,
or for pay, the women consented to place the babies in the hoods for
the time of as much photographing as the explorer needed to show
graphically on his return what he believes to be the custom of a
primitive people.
In other words, we are driven to the conclusion that the many travelers
who have said they have seen Eskimo babies carried, as a matter of
widespread custom, in the hoods of women’s coats, have all testified to
having seen things they did not see. The merited eminence of some of
these unreliable witnesses comforts the rest of us who, led by faith,
have said or implied in print that we have seen certain objectively
non-existent things. For it is not only misery but error that loves
company. People like Dr. Franz Boas and Sir Edward Parry are very good
company indeed.
The importance of the babies-in-hoods case is in that it shows
strikingly the danger to which the social sciences are exposed when
they include the testimony of explorers among their data.
There are bound to be many in every scientific audience who feel that
the misrepresentations and misstatements of their own science are as
serious as any that will fall within the domain of the geographers and
anthropologists. They may be right, which, if they are, makes the case
more interesting. What we cite are then not exceptions but fair samples
of the body of knowledge.
I have, in reality, never met any specialist who thought that fully
half of what is now being taught in the schools about his subject was
contrary to fact or definitely misleading; but that proportion fits
my opinion with regard to my specialty and I shall use the last few
minutes of my time in dwelling upon it.
The first reason for there being abroad fewer “untrue facts” about
the Temperate than the other zones is that ours is a temperate
zone civilization and that to our forefathers (and, to an extent,
ourselves) the two regions of unrestrained imagination were the tropics
and the Arctic. Five hundred years ago the percentage of misinformation
was no doubt approximately the same with regard to the zones north and
south of the North Temperate, but of late books and ideas about the
tropics have become relatively correct. For the crossing of the tropics
has been a commonplace these 400 years, while the crossing of the
Arctic was not accomplished until within our own time and is not yet a
commonplace, though it soon will be.
The tropic myths have been dispelled by the frequent journeys of
investigators and by the necessities of commercial development. The
Arctic myths have not been dispelled by these or any other causes, or
at least not to the same extent. Moreover, the human mind appears to
crave some district where the fancy may roam. Our favorite character
of the imagination is Santa Claus and we are perhaps right in feeling
subconsciously that it is fitting and necessary for him to reside in
an imaginary world. Moreover, our present attitude towards explorers
makes them the grown-ups’ equivalent of childhood’s Santa Claus. The
explorers, then, need an imaginary world for a satisfying background.
I might confess here that to the extent that I am successful in talks
such as this, I feel as if I were stealing candy from a child when I
make it increasingly difficult for the rest of the world to swallow the
good old hokum about the Arctic. Fortunately, I have never been very
successful.
But it is equally fortunate that I am not very serious about
Truth--fortunate at least for me. I am no Jeremiah declaiming against
iniquity. I like to contrast my benevolence with the misanthropy of
the satirists, and I go on now to point out the amusing but effective
ways which the scientific organizations, some of them nearly as lofty
and respected as the American Philosophical Society, have discovered
for keeping Santa Claus in his Arctic so that all may be well with the
imaginary world.
One of the branches of our government is the Geological Survey and
another branch is the Signal Corps. Lieutenant P. H. Ray, of the United
States Army, discovered on the Signal Corps expedition to Point Barrow
(1881-2) that “willows” 20 feet in height grow a little way inland from
Barrow, more than 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. But it is out
of character to picture such large vegetation in the Arctic, and so
the Geological Survey now comes to the rescue by issuing through the
journal _Science_, the official organ of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, and through _Science Service_, a statement
that in the great triangle north of the Endicott Mountains in Alaska
(an area larger than that of the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania)
there is no tree-like growth bigger than a lead pencil.
Before any of us were born the Hudson’s Bay Company had a trading
post called La Pierre’s House, on the Bell branch of the Porcupine
River, and at Fort Yukon, where the Porcupine enters the Yukon. Ever
since then missionaries, traders, and white men and women of nearly
every condition and description, have been traveling up and down that
river or residing upon it. Now the United States Bureau of Education,
among its other contributions to the Santa Claus background, tells
that one of its agents will go northward and associate on this river
with Indians who are untouched by the white man’s civilization. The
implication is that some of them will never have seen a white man
until the Bureau representative gets there. Really he will find
there Athapaska Indians speaking English with a Scotch accent, their
inheritance from the Orkneyman “servants” of the Company.
We have been listing a few of the notable contributions from scientific
departments of the American Government to our knowledge of the Arctic.
There are naturally similar contributions from the governments of other
countries. We close our remarks on this subdivision of our topic with a
note on the Antarctic which appeared in _Science_ on February 27, 1925:
“The Minister of the Colonies, by a decree dated December 30, has
created a large game sanctuary in France’s Antarctic possessions ...
the principal animals protected are polar bears, walrus, sea lions and
penguins. The French naval station in Madagascar will be responsible
for the patrol of the new preserve.”
In this French decree we seem to have the first published reference
to walrus south of the equator. The polar bear citation is even more
remarkable, for up to this time there had been discovered in the
Antarctic no land mammal, small or big.
The walrus in southern waters has apparently not been reported again
since the French government’s original note; but the polar bears, once
introduced (and protected by gunboats in Madagascar only a few thousand
miles away) have been doing well in our Antarctic mental world. True,
they appear as yet with comparative rarity in print; but they appear
frequently in pictures--not in photographs, of course, but in drawings.
A sample contribution was a cartoon of the _New York World_, spring
1930. Formerly in such drawings, penguins by themselves had symbolized
the Antarctic; now they were joined by the polar bear. Father
Knickerbocker was shown standing at the New York waterfront to welcome
Byrd home from his southern adventures. The boat conveying the hero
toward shore was rowed by a crew of polar bears and steered by penguins.
These same late years that have been so propitious to the Antarctic
have seen a reciprocal enrichment of the Arctic. As there had been no
bears in the South so had there been no penguins in the North. Or,
rather, there had been a sort of penguin, the Great Auk, which became
extinct a century ago. It would manifestly add charm to have penguins,
and so they have been appearing more and more frequently in references
to the North. As with bears in the South, they are most frequent in
drawings. There is, however, a growing demand for photographs of them.
It happens to me, for instance, with increasing frequency that lecture
committees bargaining for talks on the Arctic request that I shall use
movies, or at least stills, showing penguins.
I get friendly advice, too, after my talks--what I said was interesting
and they didn’t realize before they saw my pictures that there are
flowers in the Arctic. But why did I not also show the penguins?--they
are so solemn, so funny and so human.
Next after the official Government agencies in the Santa Claus
propaganda, with regard to Arctic and Antarctic, may be ranked our
great universities. Few of them are greater (and I remind you again I
am not trying to be satirical) than the University of Chicago. In the
spring of 1928 that university informed us through what appears to be
an official press release that a graduate student of theirs, Cornelius
Osgood, was going to live on Great Bear Lake. They said:
“If he is successful, young Osgood, ... will be the first white man
ever to live in the Great Bear Lake region. Two missionaries who tried
it in 1912 were slain by the natives. Armed only with rifles, cameras,
note-books, recording phonograph disks and a sleeping bag to withstand
the 79 degrees below zero weather, Osgood will seek to win the
confidence of the natives, living their lives, helping in their work
and eating their food.... The only other white men who have penetrated
the district are Steffanson, the Arctic explorer, and his companion
D’arcy Arden, a famous figure of the North, and a Northwest Mounted
Policeman who captured the murderers of the missionaries.”
The stodgy fact is, of course, that John Franklin wintered at Fort
Franklin on Great Bear Lake a hundred years ago, that the Hudson’s
Bay Company operated on the lake thereafter, that Richardson and Rae,
three quarters of a century ago, built their Fort Confidence on Great
Bear Lake, and that white men too numerous for easy cataloguing have
been there off and on ever since. I was so overborne by this knowledge
that when I was there in 1910-11 I lacked the courage, or something, to
claim I was the first white man ever to winter.
The bit “Steffanson ... and his companion D’arcy Arden” will be news
to him, as it is to me. We never met at or near Great Bear Lake. I
believe he began his long residence in that district a year or so after
I left there. The lake is big, however, and the country is big--he may
have been to the west somewhere in 1910 without my knowing it.
It is perhaps heaping Pelion on Ossa to prove further the thesis of
this paper, that even scientists will constantly and solemnly report,
as having been observed, things for which there is no foundation but an
inherited belief. I might have resisted the temptation except that a
beautiful example has just fallen into my hands.
In Canada, Dr. F. G. Banting, Professor of Medical Research, Toronto
University, Nobel Prize winner, is the country’s foremost scientist
in that more people know his name than that of any other Canadian
scientist now living. The Canadian Government has deservedly recognized
his position by what the papers say is a lifetime stipend. There is in
Canada now an organization called the Canadian Geographical Society,
a purpose of which is the increase and diffusion of knowledge of
Canada. I shall list for you a few of Dr. Banting’s observations on a
summer trip North, as chronicled in Volume I, No. 1 (May 1930), of the
official organ of the Society, the _Canadian Geographical Journal_:
1. “The thickness of the pans (of sea ice) varied from twenty to forty
feet, depending on whether they were one-year-old or two-year-old ice.”
Many Northern explorers, prominent among them Nansen, have studied the
time required for the thickening of sea ice. Their reports are of the
order that the first winter’s freezing is from seven to nine feet,
that of the second winter adding one to three feet, the third perhaps
less than a foot.
2. “On the surface of the older pans were pools of fresh blue water,
while on the year-old pans the pools were of salt water.”
“Pans” several years old and those a year old will both have on them
pools of water fresh to the taste in summer, if the spray has not
reached them. It is ice much younger, only a few weeks or months old,
that has salty pools.
3. “Varieties of saxifrage, fireweed and stunted willow spring up
beneath the snow and ice.”
Probably what Banting means is that during the winter they had been
under snow, as plants are in Minnesota. Some of the spring processes
may conceivably quicken a little while the snow is still above the
plants, but, if so, how could Banting learn this on a summer trip?
Since he distinguishes between ice and snow, what can he mean by their
springing up beneath the ice? What ice other than snow would there be?
4. He lauds Franklin and his men who, on Franklin’s last expedition,
“in tiny sailing vessels, ventured through these perilous waters.”
Franklin’s _Erebus_ was 370 tons and his _Terror_ was 340 tons, large
to date for ships which have gone in among the islands that are north
of Canada. Amundsen’s _Gjoa_, by which he navigated the Northwest
Passage, was 47 tons. The largest of the six ships of my own third
expedition was the _Karluk_, 247 tons; the smallest, the _North Star_,
about 30 tons.
5. “In protected spots the flowering mosses of various colors ...
reminded us of a summer day at home.”
Either Banting here made some startling discoveries or he was a bit
confused as to the nature of mosses. Not a few works of reference
divide plants into flowering and non-flowering, putting the mosses on
the non-flowering side of the fence.
6. “During these blizzards the land animals huddle together with their
backs to the storm and allow the snow to drift around them.”
Banting must have been thinking of cows and horses down Ontario way.
The ordinary report of hunters and naturalists is that both caribou
and musk oxen feed into the wind and are more likely than otherwise to
travel into it.
7. “... thunder is so rarely heard that the natives are frightened by
it.”
I know people in New York who are frightened by thunder, and have seen
the like farther south.
8. “The married women wear larger hoods which are used for carrying
the baby.”
We have earlier in this paper dealt with the question of whether babies
are ever carried in hoods.
9. “... the Eskimos live in igloos made from blocks of hard snow.”
We consider this under two heads:
(a) If Banting means that an Eskimo calls his dwelling an igloo, then
he is of course right; the Eskimo word _iglu_ means dwelling. A lot of
people in a lot of countries live in dwellings.
(b) If by igloo Banting means a snow house, then he should not have
said “the Eskimos.” Certainly there are Eskimos who live in snow houses
in winter; but it is equally certain that the number of Eskimos who
have never lived in a snow house is larger than that of those who have
lived in them. This statement goes not only for the 20th century but,
so far as we believe, for the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries at the
least. In fact, there are good reasons to consider that the snow house
was geographically more widespread in 1900 than it was in 1600.
10. “... the native has _no_ natural immunity.”
The only necessary comment is to say that the italization in this
quotation is ours.
11. “In a country where there is no sunshine for three months of the
year the people are dependent on their food for their vitamins ...”
The inference seems to be that if there were more sunshine these
remarkable people would not have to depend on food for any of their
vitamins. The recipient of one Nobel Prize for endocrine studies may
then well be candidate for another in comparative racial physiology and
in deficiency diseases.
12. “Perhaps the most important introductions (from whites to the
Eskimos) are the darning needle, which has been the greatest help to
the women in making the clothes and boots, and matches for igniting
their lamps.”
The testimony of many travelers has been that Eskimos felt it a
hardship to sew with copper or bone needles which almost necessarily
were too large for their purpose. Accordingly, the needles which the
Eskimos most valued when the whites arrived were those that were
smaller than darning needles. No. 1 needles are much smaller than
darning size but are, nevertheless, about the largest that I have found
the Eskimos of my territories to value at all appreciably. No. 3 was
a rather large needle for most of the seamstresses whom I have known,
who did most of their sewing with size 5 or smaller. So far as my
experience goes, it has been a standing marvel with white women, and
with white men used to sewing, that the western Eskimos sew with such
small needles. I do not recall ever seeing one use a darning needle for
anything but darning or sewing heavy cloths, like tenting.
As to the preciousness of matches to the Eskimos: I have reported that
the Stone Age people of Coronation Gulf, with whom we spent the summer
1910, often got their camp fires lighted with blocks of iron pyrites
quicker than we did ours with matches. On days of strong wind pyrites
has particular advantages, so that it seemed to me the Eskimos needed
matches less, and appreciated them less, than they did many of our
other contributions to their way of life.
The issue is not so clear with the matches as with the needles. It is
ludicrous to claim that darning needles supplied a keenly felt want.
Whether the matches did is in the field of legitimate dispute.
To guard against misunderstanding I close this discussion of the
Banting paper by reminding you, and insisting upon it, that I am on
the whole one of his great admirers. It appears to me that his career
and character are both of a high order. That is my point. We get from
eminent and deservedly respected men substantial contributions of
misinformation useful in maintaining the general unreality (or shall we
say poetic quality, imaginative charm?) of our world outlook.
Before introducing the next example of how the great stand with us
shoulder-to-shoulder in the battle to keep the world unreal, we mention
that the North Pole of reality lies in a deep ocean and is removed
some 400 miles from the nearest land. During a hundred years there
have been numerous explorers studying this ocean. No one has during
this century, or at any other time, seen an iceberg within 300 miles
of the North Pole; few have been seen within 600 miles. We know, too,
the conditions under which icebergs are formed. So it appears both from
well-established theory and from uniform observation that there are not
and cannot well be icebergs anywhere near the North Pole.
Now we come to a statement that could not be introduced to you more
impressively than by a simple recital of facts. The publication is
the September 20, 1928, number of _Science_. The original author of
the statement is Sir James H. Jeans, who, according to _Who’s Who_,
is M.A., D.Sc. from Oxford, LL.D. from Aberdeen, F.R.S. and secretary
of the Royal Society. He is quoted with implied approval by Robert A.
Millikan, who, according to _Who’s Who in America_, is A.B., A.M.,
Ph.D. from Columbia, studied at Berlin and Göttingen, is D.Sc. from
Oberlin, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Amherst,
Dublin and Yale, and LL.D. from California, as well as holder of the
Nobel Prize.
And this is what Millikan says, quoting Jeans: “Our position is that
of polar bears on an iceberg that has broken loose from its ice pack
surrounding the pole.”
Millikan and Jeans consider, then, that icebergs come from the vicinity
of the pole. But if you could take a census of icebergs as we take
a census of the human population of the United States, you would
find more of them in the temperate zone than in the Arctic; if you
could determine the population center of icebergs as we determine the
population center of the United States, you would find this center is
nearer the British Isles, where Sir James lives, than to the North
Pole. Or, speaking astronomically, since Jeans is an astronomer, it
would be as correct to imply that Saturn is the center of our solar
system as it is to imply that the North Pole is the center of icebergs.
Jeans tells us in a recent work on _Cosmogony_ that light, which goes
eight times around our earth in a second, requires 140,000,000 years to
reach us from the farthest celestial object that our telescopes now
show. With his intellect and with that marvelous tool of the intellect,
mathematics, he probes these depths. The while he probes the vulgar
onlooker speculates as to how accurate Jeans may be about those distant
reaches when he is so far from being accurate about things that are,
comparatively speaking, within a stone’s throw of his house.
It may be said that many people have heard of icebergs who have never
heard of sea ice, and that Millikan and Jeans were perhaps just
catering to their audience in using the better-known word. For it is a
common view that scientists, addressing the laity, have an obligation
to translate their rigorous phrasing into the looser forms of common
speech. But when Millikan referred to the iceberg as “broken loose from
its ice pack surrounding the pole,” he was, according to _Science_,
giving not a popular talk but an “Address before the Society of
Chemical Industry, New York, September 4, 1928, on the occasion of the
conferring on Dr. Robert A. Millikan of the Messel Medal in honor of
his work on the structure and relations of atoms.” We are too polite to
believe it was necessary to talk down to that audience.
Jeans and Millikan were no doubt really thinking of floe ice when they
said iceberg. Their precision of speech would then be like my referring
to Halley’s planet or calling the moon a nebula. An iceberg differs as
much from sea ice as a comet does from a planet.
The iceberg is formed on land; floe ice at sea. The iceberg begins as
snow and gradually acquires the semblance of common ice through time,
pressure, etc., while sea ice forms directly from liquid water. The
iceberg has been fresh since it started; the floe ice began salty and,
if fresh now, has attained that state through a long process. The ice
destined to be a berg gradually approaches the sea; the floe ice was on
the sea from the start. These are but a few of the differences.
It is possible, however, that Jeans and Millikan were not confusing an
iceberg with any form of sea ice. For it appears to be the view of the
average scientist who is not a geographer that the northern polar sea
is just filled full of icebergs. For instance, practically everybody
whom I ever heard objecting to the use of submarines in the northern
polar basin will say that you are bound to collide with icebergs even
if you can navigate deep enough so that there is no chance of colliding
with sea ice.
It may be said, finally, that since Jeans is an astronomer, and
Millikan a physicist, you can’t expect them to know much about the
earth. But why not? I find in several of Jeans’ books which I own, and
have even read, that he talks a lot about the earth in general. He
analogizes from earth to moon and to various other bodies. And Millikan
should know something of land, sea and air, for he and his agents scale
mountains and go aloft in aircraft to study his later rays, sometimes
crossing oceans to do so. Meteorology and geography should be to him,
then, not wholly alien professionally.
The fact is, of course, that this whole reasoning is beside the mark.
Jeans and Millikan, leaders in science, are simply acting, too, as
leaders in that great effort where we all collaborate, the struggle to
keep the world unreal.
Or, declining to close with a negative statement, we affirm that
all the way through from my telling the Eskimo method of property
identification to Millikan’s telling of icebergs breaking loose
from an ice pack surrounding the pole--through that whole gamut we
multitudinous scientists are champions of a higher knowledge which I
have advocated in _The Standardization of Error_, knowledge derived
from facts-by-definition.
There is a perhaps subconscious awareness that lands near home are
getting dull through excessive familiarity and it may be this feeling
which prompts many who are not scientists to join them towards keeping
the ends of the earth from becoming too ordinary. There are many
examples in recent polar exploration and we take a few.
The New York newspapers carried one day a statement that Byrd had flown
over the North Pole and that the temperature of the air had been 10° F.
above zero. Now that is a commonplace temperature, without fascination;
for every state north of the Mason and Dixon Line has had it, as well
as a good many states farther south. This cheapening of the North Pole
needed counteracting. Accordingly, there was an editorial the next day
to the effect that in properly evaluating Byrd’s achievement we must
remember that the flight was performed in cold so intense as to be
unimaginable to New Yorkers.
The reports from most of the winter flights in the Arctic or Antarctic
have been that the planes flew in warmer air than on the ground. There
have been instances where they flew at 40° or 50° warmer; in one case
the temperature was 79° higher at the plane than on the ground below.
Reports of this kind we neutralize in our discussions by assuming,
without citing figures, that (because high mountains are snow-capped
and for various other reasons) the heroic polar flyers contend during
their journeys with temperatures even colder than those endured by
their earth-bound predecessors who explored by dog and afoot.
A danger well-known to the air mail between New York and Cleveland,
too well-known in most parts of the so-called temperate zone, is that
of ice forming on wings to make the plane heavy and, what is more
serious, to change its aerodynamics so that it becomes unmanageable.
This occurs in what the people of New York and Cleveland think of as
cold weather. Accordingly, in our discussions of polar flying we just
assume that because it is much colder the danger to the flyers, through
ice formation, must be that much greater than on the New York-Cleveland
winter run. This gets by 90 per cent of the readers and is one of our
most effective devices in keeping the polar districts unreal. The fact
is, of course, that ice forms on wings chiefly at temperatures between
freezing and fifteen degrees below that point (between 30° above zero
and 15° above). When it gets colder you have comparatively little icing
trouble with a plane.
The Arctic and Antarctic have their chief social usefulness as proving
grounds for heroes. The stay-at-homes are thrilled by that courage,
that devotion to the aims of science, which leads men to expose
themselves to the terrors of a frozen and lifeless wilderness. In order
that the said terrors shall have their maximum appeal to the reading
public there should be a good many of them. One of the things commonly
dreaded is illness, and it is therefore desirable to have it believed
that the polar risks include the greatest possible number of diseases.
Recent deficiency-disease study has been helpful through showing that
one at least of the vitamins can be produced by sunlight falling on
the human skin. Obviously, then, the members of exploring parties are
going to suffer great deprivation, are going to be in imminent risk of
their lives, because of the long absence of the sun in winter. This
belief has been utilized in two chief ways: You take along ultra-violet
lamps and then make a great play on the forethought of a commander who
enlists the newest powers of science towards protecting from disease
the members of his courageous band. Or else you have the expedition
go into the field without the lamps, and then work up a suspense on
whether by cleanliness, regular exercise, amusements, and strict
medical supervision it may turn out possible for the men to retain
their health until the sun comes back after the Long Polar Night.
On the whole, disease scares have been managed satisfactorily by the
public relations departments of at any rate the larger expeditions;
but until just recently there was a serious exception. It had been
found by many explorers, and had been so often reported as to reach
the public consciousness, that head colds and the related diseases of
the pulmonary passages were rare on polar journeys. Some said they had
been practically absent. For instance, it was reported on one of the
British expeditions that nobody had a cold for several winter months,
that everybody then caught cold from germs which emerged when boxes of
clothing were unpacked, and that when this flare-up was over no more
head colds appeared through the rest of the year.
Obviously the polar explorer is deprived of half his chance to be
courageous if the life and the climate are represented as normally
healthful. The growing awareness that cold prevents colds had to be
dealt with. Simplest was, no doubt, to counteract this through the
old belief that cold produces colds. Notable help in the campaign was
received from the cough-drop industry.
CHAPTER V.
STANDARDIZED WOLVES
Those who want to believe that wolves do not run in packs should read
only the first two-thirds of this chapter. For believing in wolf-packs,
read the sections “Crumbs for Believers” and “Wolves for Posterity.”
The section “Wolves and Babes” can be read safely by believers and
non-believers, for these are an entirely different (though standard)
species and the nursing complex, save for one classic exception, seems
to be confined to Hindu wolves.
To read all sections may prove not merely difficult but also
confusing--may we hope even befuddling.
* * * * *
Everybody knows that wolves run in packs. One of the standard
definitions of pack is: “A large number of predatory animals, such as
wolves, banded together for the purpose of hunting their prey.”
That used to be an undisputed statement of the case. But now there is
an argument about whether any wolf-pack ever really existed, with the
scientists nearly all on one side, the general public nearly all on the
other, and the sportsmen divided about half and half.
On the affirmative side we have the undoubted fact that “everybody
knows,” especially in Russia, that wolves do run in packs. If you want
to refresh your mind as to what Russian wolf-packs are believed to be
like, you can do so easily and pleasantly by turning to Willa Cather’s
_My Antonía_, page 63. The people Miss Cather is going to feed to her
wolves are the very diet to which Russian wolves are most accustomed--a
wedding party. There are six sleighs drawn by three horses each and
carrying from six to twelve passengers. There is starlight on the snow
and the road is through a forest. The first distant wolf howl does not
drown the tinkle of the sleigh bells or the laughter of the wedding
guests. But the rallying cry is answered from many sides, the leaders
of the pack draw nearer, and fear grips every heart. The bride sobs on
the groom’s bosom and the drivers lash their horses to breakneck speed.
The rear sleigh upsets, the passengers sprawl out over the snow and
the wolves are on top of them in a moment. The screams of horses being
eaten alive are more dreadful than the shrieks of people whose entrails
are being torn out. The cries of terror from the remaining sleighs are
as loud as the cries of pain from the dying. The wolves are silent
now--they have other work to do.
And so the story goes on for sleigh after sleigh in Miss Cather’s
story, and in all the typical stories, until only the bridal sleigh
is left. About forty or fifty people and fifteen horses have now been
eaten, but the wolves are still hungry and going strong. There are
hundreds of them, you see, and wolves have proverbially good appetites.
Nothing will save the last sleigh but throwing the bride to the pack.
This Miss Cather accordingly does, and so do half the other authors
of tales. But it seldom happens that quite everybody is eaten.
Somebody has to be saved, to give the narrator a chance to portray the
survivor’s life of shame and remorse through many effective pages that
lead to a distant and friendless grave.
Such tales as Miss Cather’s we usually consider to be “true in spirit”
only, since they occur in novels, but we take them for sober fact when
we read them in books of travel or in newspapers. The press stories
excel the books in verisimilitude, for they tell us what is said to
have happened yesterday or last week. They give the names of places
that are on every map, they frequently mention the widow and orphaned
children, they sometimes tell that the funeral of the fragments left by
the wolves was conducted by the home lodge of Masons. There is every
detail to prove that what you see in the _Sun_ (or the _Bee_ or the
_American_) is really so.
If you look in the index to the news published by the New York _Times_,
you will discover scores of authentic-looking wolf-pack stories. I have
the space to reproduce here only a sample:
WOLVES DEVOUR 3 MEN IN NORTHERN ONTARIO
_An Elderly White Trapper and Two Indians Fall Victims to a Horde of
Hungry Beasts_
Port Arthur, Ont., Dec. 27--A great roving band of hungry timber
wolves has devoured three men.... Last Saturday an elderly trapper
left his cabin in the woods seventy miles north of Ignace to mush
down to the settlement for his Christmas mail.... There was no mail,
however, and the old man said he would come back Christmas morning.
At noon he had not arrived. The postmaster sent two Indians to follow
the trail....
About two miles from the settlement the Indians found a spot pounded
down in the snow. There was blood. Bits of dog harness torn to shreds
were scattered about. In the midst of them the Indians found human
bones. They hastened back to report their discovery. The lure of the
bounty on wolves, however, urged the Indians to take the trail again,
with extra ammunition. They sped behind the dog team into the woods as
the villagers waved good-bye. They did not return.
Yesterday a new searching party departed. They found another patch
trodden in the snow, with much more blood, about two miles from
the first. The two guns the Indians had carried were lying in the
crimsoned snow. Scattered about were bones, bits of clothing and empty
shells.
The carcasses of sixteen dead wolves--some half eaten--lay stretched
in a circle about the remains of the two Indian hunters.
I quote from the New York _Times_ of December 28, 1922. The story, from
what is justly considered one of the world’s greatest and most reliable
newspapers, gives proof of the cunning no less than of the ferocity of
the North American wolf. Judging from the evidence, the pack must still
have been hungry when they got through eating the trapper (perhaps he
was small and skinny), so they lay in wait to finish their meal on
the search party, which they evidently knew was coming. Then, still
hungry, and fearing the size and prowess of the second search party,
they reluctantly ate a few of each other for dessert before retreating
into the shadows of the forest. That was discretion and admirable
generalship. They fought when there was a chance to win, and then
withdrew before superior numbers.
There are plenty of such wolf stories in the papers, and now and then
others even more impressive. During 1926, for instance, in the pages of
the New York _Sun_ packs of wolves held Italy under a reign of terror;
a bit later in the New York _Times_ villages in Siberia were barricaded
against wolves. Two million cattle and many people were killed.
Thus stands the evidence for the affirmative--wolves _do_ run in packs.
They devour wedding parties in Russia and they eat trappers and Indians
in Canada. They terrorize Italy and lay siege to towns in Siberia--in
the papers, at least.
But there are skeptics who do not believe all they see in the papers or
read in books of travel. These iconoclasts tell you that every story of
a wolf-pack that you ever read or heard is fib, fiction, or folklore,
and that there never has been a pack of wolves in Russia, America, or
anywhere except in people’s imagination. That seems a hard position to
defend, but they go at it valiantly. Their defense lies in both logic
and fact. For the logic they ask you to consider the caribou-hunting
wolf as a sample.
Their argument begins with the generally accepted fact that there
are more than ten million wild caribou in Northern Alaska, Northern
Canada, Northern Siberia and the Arctic islands. From these at least
two million caribou are born every year; two million must, therefore,
die, or the numbers would increase. Certainly less than 10 per cent of
these are killed by human hunters. None die of old age and very few of
accident or disease, for if a caribou is old or sick it moves slowly
and is soon overtaken and devoured. This means that wolves kill every
year a good many more than a million and a half caribou.
In summer, when their puppies are being brought up, the northern wolves
live in part on eggs, fledgling or moulting birds, and rodents. But in
winter the birds have flown south, the rodents are safe asleep in their
frozen burrows, and almost the only thing a wolf can find to eat is
caribou. I know how wolves kill caribou, and I can offer some personal
testimony on wolves in general, for I was born on Lake Winnipeg in
a wolf country; I was brought up among wolves and coyotes in Dakota
before it became “civilized” and was split up into North and South
Dakota; I lived for some ten years in the Arctic, supporting myself
most of the time by hunting. I have shot wolves with a rifle and have
seen hundreds of them either trotting quietly along or loping steadily
in pursuit of caribou. I have seen the tracks of thousands following
game, and have found signs of hundreds of tragedies where they had
killed some bird or beast. I have asked dozens of Arctic Indians
(Slaveys, Dogribs, Loucheux) and hundreds of Eskimos about how the wolf
hunts, and there has been no divergence between what they have told me
and what I have seen.
A wolf cannot run nearly as fast as a caribou, and must capture it by
tiring it out. That is the essence of all I have seen and all I have
been told. It means that, before it is killed, each caribou has to
be pursued by the wolves from several hours to several days--nobody
knows exactly how long. All hunters agree that (except for newborn
calves) the youngest caribou are the swiftest and staunchest runners.
The ones killed by wolves are therefore chiefly the old bulls and old
cows. A cow may weigh two or three hundred pounds, and a bull three or
four hundred, live-weight. Nearly half of that is waste. The wolves
are, then, pursuing anything from 100 to 200 pounds of food. For, no
matter how large the caribou herd may be when the chase begins, they
eventually scatter, and the pack, if there is a pack, finds itself
pursuing the single slowest animal.
Suppose, now, there are 200 or 300 wolves, as in Miss Cather’s
heart-rending story. She provided hers with six sleigh loads of
Russians, six to twelve in a sleigh, and three presumably fat horses
hitched to each. That would make a square meal for even 300 wolves.
But it would be far otherwise if the 300 followed a single 300-pound
caribou for three days, or even one day. They would be so hungry
that the beast, divided by 300, would be to the pack no more than a
tantalizing appetizer. There would be nothing for it but to resort to
another well-known habit of the fiction wolf and use their whetted
appetites on each other--eating, let us say, a dozen to correspond to
the soup course, a dozen for the fish, and two dozen for the roast,
with at least another dozen of the youngest and tenderest for dessert.
But the continued practice of dining on each other like that would
soon reduce a wolf-pack below fiction and movie standards. In fact,
you might as well do without a pack altogether; for it is scarcely
worth the bother to build one up to the required size, just to have it
disappear again in a few weeks by the members of the troupe swallowing
one another.
Those who are trying to prove that the wolf-pack really exists will
perhaps admit that the abstract logic of pack hunting seems a little
faulty, but will insist, and quite rightly, that logic does not amount
to a hill of beans when contradicted by facts. The pack stories, they
will tell us, are simple truth. Newspapers may exaggerate, but the
better ones never invent. Besides, nearly everybody has an uncle or
an aunt who had a grandmother or grandfather that was eaten or nearly
eaten by a pack of wolves.
That brings us to the evidence--are the wolf-pack stories true? To save
time, we shall take at once the testimony of a group of scientists
and practical hunters who ought to know because they make the study
of wolves their profession--studying also the testimony of everyone
they ever heard of who claimed to have seen a pack of wolves. They are
Americans, too, and within your reach, so you can write postcards to
them tomorrow and see what they really think. Don’t be diffident about
asking. You are probably a taxpayer. They are your servants, for they
work for the government that taxes you.
The branch of the government that studies wolves as a part of its
business is the Bureau of Biological Survey at Washington, and the head
of it is Dr. E. W. Nelson,[12] a lifetime student of wild animals. He
was four years among Arctic wolves in Alaska (1877-81) and has himself
studied wolves in Mexico and all over the United States. Furthermore,
he has under him other men who have studied wolves, among them Edward
A. Preble, who has spent much time in the sub-Arctic and Arctic forests
and prairies of Canada. But more significant still, there is under
Dr. Nelson’s successor’s direction the wolf-killing service of the
United States Government. This is a body of men who hold themselves
in readiness for telegraphic appeals from stockmen, usually in the
West, who find their animals being destroyed by wolves. They come and
exterminate the wolves “scientifically,” and the flocks and herds are
safe again.
In gathering material for a book I was writing about wolves, I
consulted Dr. Nelson. We agreed, first, that the accepted meaning of
the word pack, when applied to wolves is _a large number of wolves that
have come together to help each other in hunting_. In other words, one
mother with her puppies would not constitute a pack. Dr. Nelson felt
so positive about the nature of wolves in North America, from Mexico
to the Arctic, that he thought I would be safe in denying flatly in my
book that any wolf-pack ever existed on our continent. But, just to
make sure that no different opinion was held among people of authority
corresponding to his own, we formulated a letter which he addressed to
certain scientific students of wolves, and to all his wolf-killers.
As to how many wolves had been seen together, the various replies
naturally gave different answers, for experiences varied somewhat. But
they ranged only from two to five. They were unanimous in reporting
that if several wolves were seen together then these were always the
mother with her puppies, or conceivably the father and mother with
their puppies, and never a pack in the usual sense of that word.
Then what about the story of the wolves that killed the elderly trapper
and the two Indians on the front page of the _Times_? Surely that was
no family of puppies--sixteen dead wolves, killed by the Indians; a
few, presumably, killed by the old trapper, and enough left over to
eat up one white man, two Indians and part of sixteen dead wolves.
To make the inquiry into the truth of the story official and more
authoritative than if I were doing it myself, I suggested to Dr. Nelson
that he write to Ignace, Ontario. For checking up, I wrote also to
Mr. J. B. Harkin, Commissioner of National Parks, Ottawa, who was at
that time (1922) in charge of the administration of the game laws of
Canada, and therefore in a position to set in motion official machinery
to find out about this wolf story. Thus I received the same replies
from two directions, one through Dr. Nelson and the other through Mr.
Harkin. They were, in substance, that no such man as the old trapper
ever existed and that no white man had been killed by wolves. No such
Indians as described existed there and none had been killed by wolves,
whether in packs or otherwise, either in the vicinity of Ignace, or
anywhere in the world, as far as anyone living in the vicinity of
Ignace knew.
Hundreds of other tales about wolf-packs, published in newspapers or
books, have been traced by the United States Biological Survey and by
various students, including myself. In no case was evidence found to
support them. Just try it yourself on the next American despatch you
read. In spite of all the pretended details--the sorrowing family, the
Masonic funeral--it will be reasonable odds to bet dollars to doughnuts
that the story will turn out pure fiction, or at best will rest on
testimony no court of law would accept as proof.
The case seems to be definitely settled against the wolf-pack in North
America. But there still remains Russia. Well, why not let Russia
remain? No one seems to have checked wolf-pack stories in Russia for
everyone is so sure they are true. And perhaps they are. Besides, it is
a distant country, and the fancy must somewhere have play.
The book on wolves which the July, 1927, _Mercury_ said I was writing
is still being written (1936), or, rather, the evidence for it is
still being gathered. We use here from that accumulation sample case
histories which give the trend of the material.
Under a date line of Winnipeg, April 16, 1922, many or most Canadian
newspapers printed a story which I read in the Ottawa _Morning Journal_
about the body of a trapper, Ben Cockrane, having been found torn to
pieces north of Fisher River on Lake Winnipeg the previous Thursday.
“He had been attacked by a pack of timber wolves. His bones and pieces
of his clothing and a rifle with a broken stock were found nearby.
Before being killed, Cockrane shot seven wolves dead and clubbed four
to death, their bodies lying around his tattered remains being the only
evidence of his fight for life.”
That story had a personal interest. For I was born on Lake Winnipeg and
might, therefore, seem to have had as a child a narrow escape from the
ancestors of the pack which destroyed Cockrane--we were there in the
pioneer days back in the late 70’s, long before railways, when there
was only an odd cabin along the shores of the lake and when presumably
the wolves were even more numerous than now, and more predatory.
Investigation would be simple, too, for I could write to some of our
old neighbors or their descendants.
But the case was being handled so widely and with so much respect
by the press that a formal approach seemed indicated, one above the
suspicion of bias. Accordingly, two lines of inquiry were started, both
of them official. Nelson, at my suggestion, inquired on behalf of the
logical department of the United States Government. In Canada, Harkin
was then in charge of wild-life investigation for his government and
could use the machinery of the Dominion Parks Branch. When I placed the
newspaper report in their hands I received friendly assurance that the
case would be followed up both in their own interest and because of
their previous association with me in similar studies.
Under date of May 22 Harkin wrote that an investigation had been made
and that “Mr. Cockrane has stated ‘that the report of his death was
grossly exaggerated.’” On May 31, Nelson, after like findings, wrote:
“This amusing climax to the ferocious wolf tale is similar to that of
many other newspaper accounts of the killing of human beings by wild
animals, which the Biological Survey has run down during the last
thirty years or more. Such stories are almost invariably pure fiction.”
A third inquiry, made by a friend in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s office
at Winnipeg, brought a statement that when their representative
interviewed Mr. Cockrane he seemed annoyed and replied, I gather
somewhat petulantly, that as long as he could remember there had seldom
been so few wolves around as this year.
Sometimes when we trace the story of a pack devouring a group of school
children we find that it all started when a small boy stepped on a
dog’s tail and was bitten in the leg. There does not appear to have
been even that much local base for the Cockrane fabrication.
The Ignace, Ontario, story (given above in its _American_ _Mercury_
form) has in my files considerable documentation. On January 2, 1923, I
wrote Dr. Nelson in part:
“I wonder if you missed the interesting wolf story that appeared
in the New York _Times_ for December 28th. In case you did, I am
enclosing a copy.
“I am writing an article for publication in _Collier’s Weekly_ about
fake wolf stories and especially about the great wolf-packs that
gallop through our books and newspapers. Just as this article is being
prepared for publication out comes another story. I am so sure that
this one also is a fake that I am not holding up the publication of
the article. However, I hope very much that you will be able to put
a tracer on it and find out whether there is any truth behind this
particular version.”
Dr. Nelson replied January 4:
“... I saw the New York _Times_ article copied in a local paper and at
once considered it one of the typical wolf articles which appear in
the press, particularly every winter.
“In order, however, to get definite information on the subject, I am
writing to the postmaster of Port Arthur, Ontario, and also at San
Ignace, sending them copies of the article and asking them what basis
there is for a statement of this kind. I will let you know the results
when they are received....”
I had written similarly to A. Brabant, Fur Trade Commissioner, Hudson’s
Bay Company, Winnipeg, and to Harkin. Brabant, who later investigated
for me more fully, gave preliminary reply January 6:
“I believe that the wolf story which was enclosed with your letter of
the 2nd inst., is merely romance....
“As you are well aware, there are few, if any, cases of wolves
attacking people....”
G. D. Russell, Postmaster of Port Arthur, Ontario, wrote Dr. Nelson
January 17, 1923, in part:
“There have been similar stories circulated during the past years,
but all have been found to be untrue, and while wolves are a serious
scourge to wild animal life in the bush, and a source of annoyance
to settlers in the back country, in so far as they are not averse to
raiding their domestic fowl, yet the genuine evidence of men being
killed by them has yet to be established.
“This recent story originated at Ignace, 200 miles west of Port
Arthur. My personal opinion (and the consensus of opinion) is, that
there is not the slightest foundation of truth in it.”
The Postmaster of Ignace, John Davies, wrote Dr. Nelson January 18,
1923:
“Your letter to hand, RE: the killing of three men by wolves north of
Ignace. We in Ignace know nothing about this affair excepting what
we read in the papers. I don’t think there is a word of truth in it.
There are a lot of wolves which are doing a lot of damage among the
wild game but so far as tackling human beings, I have never had any
proof yet.”
The press discussion of the Ignace story was voluminous throughout
Canada, particularly in Ontario. On January 18, 1923, Harkin sent me a
quotation from “one of our local papers, under date the 17th instant”:
“... The scene of the tragedy was laid on a trail seventy miles north
of Ignace. The names of the victims of the wolves were not given.
Several old timers in Northern Ontario have ridiculed the story and
have claimed that wolves are not man-killers. A Toronto man ... wrote
to W. T. Thompson, dealer in furs at Ignace, asking as to the facts of
the story.
“Mr. Thompson is quoted as replying: ... ‘Wolves are very numerous
around here, but I have lived in this country for twenty-five years
and have yet to hear of anyone being killed by wolves. During the past
ten years, or over, I have been buying raw furs from trappers and
Indians and have never heard any such tales that turn out true.’”
Reverberations of the Ignace yarn continued to reach me for several
months. For instance, there came in a letter from an old friend,
Inspector G. L. Jennings, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (now
styled Royal Canadian Mounted Police), dated April 20, 1923. We shall
use the main part of it in another connection but print here extracts
from a cutting he sent taken from the Edmonton _Journal_ of February 10:
“Recently I read a letter concerning the habits of wolves. I had also
read some time ago of a tragedy in the woods of our north country in
which several men were pulled down and devoured by these animals,”
says Dr. J. S. McCullough, writing in the Toronto _Globe_.
“In the gold rush of 1897 or 1898, when so many men made an attempt
to get into the Klondike country via Edmonton, Athabasca Landing,
Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River, I was one of a party which
attempted a traverse from the Mackenzie River to Fort Norman to the
Stewart or McMillan River over the divide. I was obliged to come
back on account of sickness when we had got out about 60 miles on the
trail. After dividing the supplies with my partner I made the trip
back alone and as it was necessary that the onward-going party should
have two tents I did not even have a tent to cover me on the return
trip, but built little shelters of spruce, rolled in my sleeping bag
with only boughs with a fire at my feet, and this slight windbreak to
protect me from the winds and the wolves. Wolves there seemed to be
in plenty, judging from the terrifying howls at night, but they were
seldom seen. In my weakened condition from dysentery I made very slow
time on my return trip to the banks of the river, six miles below Fort
Norman, where there were several unoccupied, roughly-built log shacks.
With 75 to 100 pounds on my sled I would drag along five or six miles,
construct a stage and place my pack in safety, returning over the
ground until I had all my stuff moved up. At this time of year and in
this latitude I saw little of the sun, and frequently I made my move
at night if the light was good and not much wind.
“I found the wolves very curious, following along on my snowshoe
track, crossing and recrossing it, appearing at one side and ahead and
then on the other side ahead or behind, always, however, in silence.
I had been given to understand by Billy Paton, then of the Hyslop and
Neaggel Trading Company, that the wolves never attacked a man, and so
I traveled all alone, and very seldom with a weapon of any kind other
than a light camp axe, and, although I was very lonesome and very weak
and very down-hearted, I really never had any fear of the wolves.
There was one that I became pretty well acquainted with, a very large
and almost black fellow, who was afterward accidentally caught in a
bear trap which had been set by an inexperienced miner by the name of
Low Day. The trap was lost beneath the snow, and although Day knew
about where it was, we were all afraid to hunt for it for fear of
getting into it ourselves. The large, almost black, wolf that followed
my trail like a ghost in some mysterious way sat down on his haunches
right in the jaws of this trap, where we found him dead and frozen
stiff.
“I think that those of us who put in the balance of the winter on the
bank of the Mackenzie were all more relieved that the trap was thus
discovered than at catching the wolf. What I have said here makes a
very negative sort of wolf story, but the fact that I was out night
after night alone and that every time I went back over my trail I saw
fresh wolf tracks, and that through the long Arctic nights one could
almost always hear the howl or bark of the wolf probably chasing
hares, for the big game was driven away by the 40-odd men who had gone
over the country, leaving hungry wolves and little else but hares and
ptarmagan, would seem to prove that if ever the wolf would attack a
human being the conditions were right for them to do so as I plodded
my slow course back alone over this trail.
“... Personally I do not believe that the wolves of Canada ever attack
a living human being. They would in time probably become bold enough
to pick the bones of anyone dying or being frozen to death in the
bush country. I have talked of wolves to many bushmen and never yet
have I come across anyone who had bush experience but had an absolute
contempt for the wolf so far as being attacked by him or them went....
“I can quite believe that a person who had been fed-up on wolf stories
might take to a tree in fear when the wolves kept appearing and
disappearing as they will do on the trail of a woodsman as he marches
along at dusk, but I believe that it is only the wolf’s natural
curiosity that leads to his follow-up tactics. The black tail or mule
deer will often do the same thing if you pretend not to have seen
him....”
The Cockrane story, as said, never gave us investigators a trace of
foundation. One version of a basis for the Ignace story was contained
in a letter of January 12 from L. M. Gleeson, of 416 Victoria Avenue,
Fort William, Ontario, who wrote me on the letterhead of the Fort
William-Port Arthur Rotary Club:
“Replying to your letter of January sixth, re wolf story from Port
Arthur. I would say that the story was just a rumor. It originated,
I believe, by a trainman running between here and Ignace, Ont., and
as the story was re-told it was enlarged upon. I do know that the
newspaper here tried for sometime to get a confirmation of the story
direct from Ignace, but they were unable to do so. This story did not
appear in our local paper although it was telegraphed outside....”
A theory of the Ignace yarn, published long after, makes it a fable
devised for the good of a community. On January 16, 1933, the Portland
_Oregonian_ printed a letter from Ada Alice Tuttle, summarizing
investigations which she had made or was familiar with, the occasion
being that the “Ten Years Ago” column had revived the story:
“The occurrence was investigated by several persons, Dr. (William T.)
Hornaday among them. The explanation reveals the resourceful boss of a
lumber camp, solving an acute liquor problem. It seems that a number
of his men were in the habit of going to the nearest settlement to get
drunk. So, remembering the effect produced on the youthful mind by the
adventures of ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ he also invented a fairy tale,
suiting it to his audience by introducing plenty of action and lots of
gore. ... They swallowed the yarn, hook, line and sinker, and after
that stayed where they belonged, with the most admirable docility.”
As Dr. Nelson pointed out, the newspapers run dispatches on wolf-packs
chiefly in winter. This, according to the stories themselves, is
determined by laws of Nature. The rigors of the weather have banished
or destroyed the wild animals on which the wolves customarily prey;
besides, there is no doubt an increased metabolic rate, wolves, like
people, needing some of the caloric energy from the food they eat for
keeping themselves warm. In desperation the beasts gather in larger
and larger packs and finally in extreme cases attack houses or even
villages--the latter chiefly in some distant foreign country. In
America they seem to confine themselves to attacks on people that are
out in the woods. Usually we have to depend on word pictures by the
survivors for information regarding these encounters, but on December
9, 1923, the New York _Times_ was able to publish in its rotogravure
section two photographs from Sudbury, Ontario, giving the supporting
testimony of a camera. One of the pictures showed two men standing
knee-deep in snow as they defended themselves against a pack of wolves.
The caption was “A Tragedy Among the Snows of the Far Northern Woods.”
The summarized printed account said that, ammunition gone, two huntsmen
were set upon by a pack of fifteen wolves. They fought them off, one
using for a club the barrel of his gun, the other an axe. Before the
battle came to a decision a third member of the hunting party arrived
and was able to turn the tide with gunfire. The second picture has the
description:
“The aftermath of a bloody battle in the wilds. Huntsmen binding up
their wounds after hand to hand battle with pack of timber wolves from
which they were saved by the timely arrival of a third member of their
party.”
When I sent these pictures to Harkin for investigation, if he thought
well of it, and in any case for comment, he replied that he was fed up
with tracing stories of wolf-packs. It seemed to him a study of the
picture indicated that the wolves in the picture had all been dead for
some time. Apparently they had been allowed to freeze stiff in various
attitudes and had then been propped up in the soft snow to give the
semblance of an attacking wolf-pack.
Doubtless the three hunters were too excited during the battle and
forgot about taking pictures. So they had to re-enact the adventure for
the camera next day. The chief difficulty about that explanation was
that some of the “wolves” looked a bit like dogs.
Sure enough, time proved that the doggy look of the wolves had its
reason. On April 12, 1927, the Utica _Press_ carried a letter from B.
H. Divine in which he said, in part:
“The New York _Times_ published a picture a while ago of two men
with clubbed guns fighting for their lives against a pack of wolves.
Following this up I received word from the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police that the wolves in the picture were dogs very cleverly posed,
and the whole thing was a fake.”
During the next years there were few American stories of note although
striking accounts of packs and their depredations were printed from
Europe--these we shall discuss farther on. The American scene
brightened with January, 1926, when on the 17th the Chicago _Tribune_
presented to its readers the desperate situation then facing one of the
territories of the United States:
ALASKA TO WAR ON WOLF PACKS WITH AIR BOMBS
Shrapnel from Planes May Save Game
Juneau, Alaska--(Special)--Dropping bombs from airplanes upon packs
of big timber wolves is a method for destroying these game-killing
brutes, now advanced and approved by Governor George A. Parks. A
trial of the idea is planned for next month, generally known as the
hunger-month of winter, when wild life is at its lowest ebb and
gnawing pangs grip wolves, lynx and owls.
According to reports received at the governor’s office, female
caribou, deer, and domesticated reindeers have been repeatedly
attacked this winter by large bands of timber wolves. The destruction
among the female caribou is appalling.
The bull caribou in winter round-up together, peacefully content,
leaving the cows to protect themselves and yearling calves as best
they can. All are antlered, but they lack the weight of caribou bulls,
likewise the fighting strategy.
Air mail men operating in the Alaskan service have filed many reports
of instances where packs of wolves, hearing and seeing the planes in
the sky, gathered forces and raced the aviators, leaping and barking
at the birdlike machines after the manner of dogs barking at pigeons.
To the aviator it seemed that a large rock dropped into the packs
would easily kill or maim many.
The plan proposed is to drop bombs loaded with shrapnel and dynamite
into wolf-packs powerful enough to wreak terrific damage even hundreds
of feet away in all directions. Trappers and hunters believe that the
animals, seeing a bomb dropped, would instantly run to examine it,
thus bringing about their own destruction.
Timber wolves weighing 250 pounds, seven to eight feet in length,
have been killed by trappers this winter near Fairbanks. The same
breed of animal infests the territory from Ketchikan, far north in the
tundra, where herds of reindeer forage. The native herders report many
encounters with prowling brutes eager to pull down young reindeer.
A powder manufacturing concern has offered bombs free for the unique
hunting expedition.
The _Tribune_ account thus pictures not only a situation physically
serious but paints a discouraging view of the moral deterioration of
the Alaska bull caribou which were no longer willing to place at the
service of the smaller and weaker members of the herd their superior
antlers, greater weight and their fighting strategy.
But it was encouraging to read that the very head of the Alaska
territorial administration, Governor George A. Parks, was in charge
of the relief operations. I happened to know he was in Washington and
wrote him there February 19. His reply came dated February 23 from the
office of the Secretary of the Interior:
“Concerning the clipping from the Chicago _Tribune_, I am at a loss
to understand how it originated. I left Juneau, December 16, 1925,
and have been in Washington since early in January. I never have
authorized any such statement. It may be a fact that the bulls
separate from the rest of the caribou herd during the winter, but
my personal observation has been to the contrary. If any of the
pilots in the Air Mail Service have filed reports as alleged in the
newspaper account, these reports never have come to my attention. It
would be most unusual to hear a wolf bark like a dog. There may be
wolves in Alaska that weigh 250 pounds, but I do not know of any such
records.[13] I believe that it is conceded generally that a wolf-pack
usually includes only the members of the family--father, mother, and
pups--and they separate about the beginning of the next mating season.
I have no personal knowledge of any large bands of wolves, nor have
I been able to find any authentic cases where bands of wolves have
molested reindeer or caribou herds. Many times during my winter trips
through Alaska, I have been told about the wolf-packs, but so far as I
know the stories never have been founded on fact.
Geo. A. Parks
Governor of Alaska.”
Logically the Bureau of Biological Survey was concerned with the
situation and its Chief, Nelson, wrote me February 24:
“The other day I had a conference with Governor Parks on various
matters relating to Alaska and he showed me the copy of the Chicago
_Tribune_ clipping of January 17, a copy of which you sent me,
containing the weird tale of the plan to bomb wolves by the use of
airplanes. Governor Parks was inclined to be somewhat exercised over
the connection of his name with this absurd statement....
“Of course, the whole thing is an absurdity on the face of it ...
there is no such abundance of wolves in Alaska as indicated in this
article.... The claim that timber wolves weighing 250 pounds have been
killed near Fairbanks the present winter is another evidence of the
absolute unreliability of the article.”
This is trying to be a chronological statement but we are unable to
resist the temptation to print from a Washington despatch of the
_Associated Press_ as it appeared in the New York _Times_ of May 31,
1936:
“Plans for an airplane attack on savage packs of Alaskan wolves were
worked out today by three Federal agencies....
“Last Winter, Governor John W. Troy cabled for help....”
It may have seemed a bit far afield in 1926 to go all the way to Alaska
for stories of wolf-packs, so the _Associated Press_ in 1927, with a
Chicago date line of January 24, had a story which one paper used under
“Hunters to Renew Search for Wolves Near Chicago. First Venture Fails
to Disclose Marauding Pack Reported by Farmers.” However, there was
skepticism (that’s the difficulty of having the stories too near home)
and Leroy Davidson, former chief of the Cook County Highway Police, was
quoted:
“Wolves--bah! Last summer there was a camp of Campfire Girls in the
forest preserve. They had three dogs--the dogs were a mixture of
Airedale and police dog. When the girls broke camp they left the dogs
behind. I also had an Airedale. He ran away and joined the other
three. These four dogs are the ‘pack of wolves’ that are causing all
the commotion.”
That pronouncement threatened at first to be a wet blanket. However,
there is in my files a press cutting dated February 4 with the
heading: “Fliers Hunt Wolves on Edge of Chicago. Posse Has Had No
Luck.” So the story did keep going awhile.
When it requires ten days on the edges of Chicago to dispose of a
wolf-pack, even with the assistance of the chief of the Highway Police,
no wonder stories from Alaska have a considerable lease of life. Some
of them promise to become, and to remain, a part of the source material
of Alaskan natural history.
The year 1927 proved rich in American wolf tales, making up for the
comparatively lean years since 1923. My favorite of that season, and of
many years, I was able to trace through the help of my old friend Lee
Smits, free lance writer and also columnist for the Detroit _Times_.
It is not a story of a wolf-pack, but we digress a moment to place
chronologically a striking episode of a lone Michigan wolf. We quote
the St. Ignace _Enterprise_ of February 3, 1927:
LARGE TIMBER WOLF
Entered the Home of Robert Alexander and Attacked Woman and Children
Mrs. Robert Alexander and children were made the victims of a savage
attack by a large timber wolf in their home in Brevort township last
Wednesday. The animal, made desperate evidently by hunger forced its
way through the doorway of the kitchen and made a rush at the children
who were playing on the floor. Mrs. Alexander got between the wolf and
the children and called to her husband to get a gun, and she also was
leaped upon by the animal and borne to the floor. Before it could do
serious harm Alexander appeared with a gun and first kicking the wolf
from the prostrate form of his wife fired as the wolf made its escape
through the doorway and slightly injuring it. It was making towards
the woods when Mrs. Lottie Page, a neighbor, hearing the shot came out
of her home with a loaded shotgun in her hand and seeing the wolf made
a lucky shot killing the animal.
While wolves have been reported as being numerous in Brevort and
surrounding townships, and have done considerable damage, this is
the first instance that one has been known to have attacked a human
being. The Alexanders are of the opinion that the attack was caused by
starvation as the animal appeared to be weak from exhaustion.
On seeing this gem, I wrote Smits, who replied April 29:
“State Conservation Officer George Gish, Jr., who patrols the area
in which the ‘attack’ occurred, called at the Alexander home and was
shown the dead wolf. It was a small mongrel of the collie type, with
a bob tail, a white blaze, yellow in color, weighing not more than 40
pounds. There is an epidemic of ‘running fits’ or ‘fright-disease’
among dogs, and this dog may have rushed into the cabin while
delirious, or it may have merely been cold, hungry and lonesome. It
was a male dog. The rumor that the animal was a timber wolf started
when someone in the neighborhood ‘guessed maybe’ there was wolf blood
in the dog. Not because of its appearance, but because it came out of
the woods and acted strangely....
“... The story is from a paper at the county seat. It was carried
extensively over the wires....”
Although chiefly known to the literary world for his novel _Spring
Flight_, Smits is, among other things, one of America’s connoisseurs
of un-natural history. So he could not resist going on:
“Not only can many bartenders and hotel clerks in the backwoods give
you good wolf yarns--attacks on mankind--but old lumberjacks know, by
direct hearsay, of some desperate encounters. The editor of the daily
paper at Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., ... has for several years offered
$100 for an authenticated report of a wolf attacking a person in the
Algoma district of Ontario. No takers.
“The state prison at Marquette, Mich., fronts on Lake Superior and,
although on the outskirts of a small city, is at the edge of a strip
of wild country extending into rather large areas of swamp and timber
and offering cover for a fugitive for hundreds of miles. Very few
escapes are attempted, and the fear of wild animals is unquestionably
a deterrent. One gang got loose and were rounded up because they made
straight for roads and kept on them. They spent one night in the
brush, with a few hares, porcupines and owls about them, and perhaps a
fox or coyote, and said when they were caught that they all were sorry
they ran away when darkness closed in on them. They had a terrible
night. All city gunmen.”
That there are at times very special motives behind wolf-pack stories
appears from a letter from B. H. Divine, published in the Utica, New
York, _Press_ of April 12, 1927:
“To the Editor of _The Press_:
The following wolf story recently appeared in _The Press_:
‘Huntsville, Ont., March 31--While making his way to a lumber camp
near Algonquin Park, Elwood Bloss was pursued by a pack of wolves. He
fled onto the open ice, where the animals, 16 of them, surrounded him.
Their howling attracted the attention of a game warden, who arrived
before they closed on their intended victim. He shot seven before the
pack fled.’
Upon writing to the authorities at Huntsville for the truth of the
matter, I received the following letter from T. Muyhum, postmaster:
‘This story was first published here early in January last, but since
that time it has been pretty thoroughly exploded.
‘The young man (aged 22) started out to walk six or seven miles to the
railroad station early in the morning. The howling of some wolves at
a distance frightened him so badly that he did not recover for some
days. It was necessary to make some explanation of his condition,
and the truth sounded so inadequate he built the story to suit his
condition. It was soon into the papers, and after being contradicted
from the pack end he acknowledged that much of it was not true.’”
For some reason there did not come to my attention until 1931 a
support of wolf-packs by book reviewers and press commentators who
relied on a volume published in 1929, _The Last Stand of the Pack_, by
Arthur H. Carhart and Stanley P. Young. At last, said the reviewers,
a distinguished biologist and student of wild life has spoken out,
resentful about the sniping at wolf-packs by amateur naturalists.
Young was chief biologist of the U. S. Biological Survey, exclaimed the
champions of the pack, in consonant triumph. They were right, for I
looked him up in _American Men of Science_ and found this substantial
record:
“... U. S. Govt. hunter, bur. biol. surv., U. S. Dept. Agr., Ariz.,
17-19, in charge ground squirrel control work, 19, coyote control
crew, southeast N. Mex., 20, asst. leader predatory animal control,
20-21, leader, Colo-Kans. dist., 21-27, asst. head div. econ.
investigations, Washington, D. C., 27-28, prin. biologist in charge
div. predatory animal and rodent control, 28-....”
The reviewers did not notice, but I did, a sensational angle. To have
Young opposing Nelson was like Roosevelt falling out with Smith--the
chief of a division of the U. S. Biological Survey opposing that
retired chief of the Survey who had brought him to Washington. It was
a delicate situation but I had to get Nelson’s view and wrote him
discreetly April 28, 1932. He replied May 14 from California:
“... It will surprise me very much if he has recorded a pack of any
considerable size beyond that which you and I believe to be normal
(mother with litter of pups). I will look up the matter soon after I
return and talk to him about it. Will then write you....”
An invalid, and busy though officially retired, Nelson did not
communicate until March 22, 1933. There was to be no Smith-Roosevelt
situation, it now appeared, for the retired Chief said:
“Under date of March 14, 1933, Stanley P. Young of the Biological
Survey writes....
“‘With regard to your question on wolves, I heartily agree with you
that the great packs of wolves such as have been often described
in books and newspapers exist only in the minds of writers. In my
experience the typical wolf-pack consists of the two parents and
their young of the year. One is apt to see this so-called pack in
the late fall and up until the early spring. Also it is possible in
the formation of this so-called pack for two families of wolves to
intermingle for a short time in the fall of the year, particularly if
one family group is in close proximity to another, and a kill is in
progress. My experience, even under these conditions, however, is to
the effect that wolves of several families never unite in a long and
friendly association....
“‘It is therefore possible from the foregoing that newspaper writers
and authors have in mind the family groups of wolves rather than the
packs of adults. However, these writers usually give the impression
that these packs are made up of adult wolves. The greatest number of
wolves in one litter that I have ever seen totalled eight. This pack
was made up of the eight young, which were apparently whelped in early
March, and the old female and old male.’”
Nelson felt Young was a bit too generous “in explaining what the
writers have in mind in their tales of big packs. Really they are
drawing from an inexhaustible store of ignorance on the subject.
Probably less than 1 per cent of them ever saw a wolf in the wilds.”
The year 1933 closed on a note ominous for New York State. For the
_Herald-Tribune_ of December 30 reported:
“Lithgow Osborne, State Commissioner of Conservation, has assigned Ray
Burmaster, game protector of the Saranac Lake district, to exterminate
the wolves which have been seen in the northern counties in recent
weeks. Ten dozen snares and traps have been set in the wolf-infested
areas and seventy-five skilled hunters and trappers will be employed.
Wolves recently attacked two farm hands near Fort Covington, in
Franklin County.... The pack now at large numbers from twelve to
fifty.”
The New York _Times_, evidently not jealous, supported its rival the
_Herald-Tribune_ by saying in an editorial of January 5 that: “...
one pack hunting in Franklin County at this time is estimated at from
twelve to fifty in number....” They added that: “An application has
been made to the Biological Survey at Washington for the services of an
expert wolf trapper to rid New York of the unwelcome visitors.”
I wrote the Conservation Department of New York at Albany January 5,
and Lithgow Osborne, Commissioner, replied January 12:
“... we do not have any definite information to indicate that the
wolves which have recently appeared in the vicinity of Owls Head in
the Adirondacks are running in packs. We are sending one of our field
investigators, Mr. Darrow, into the region which the wolves apparently
inhabit, in an effort to determine just what the situation is. I shall
be pleased to request a report from him as to whether or not the
wolves are actually hunting in packs, and to see that the information
is forwarded to you sometime early in the spring.”
The Commissioner’s follow-up slipped and I did not remind him for two
years. On July 13, 1936, came a letter from John T. Gibbs, Deputy
Commissioner. He mentions several reports on the Adirondack wolves “all
of which resulted in our deciding that there were no packs of timber
wolves in the Adirondacks.”
One of the reports was from E. A. Goldman of the U. S. Biological
Survey. He had been in the region of the packs and “we crossed a fresh
track of one of these canine beasts in a remote section of the forest.
Owing to the softness and depth of snow it had been making slow
progress. The track, about one day old, appeared like that of a rather
small dog.”
Two animals from the supposed wolf-pack had been captured, but “general
appearances indicated, however, that both are dogs.”
The skin and skull from another animal killed was sent to the American
Museum of Natural History of New York. On February 15, 1934, H. E.
Anthony, curator, reported that in his judgment the relics were those
of a dog.
By 1935 the news magazine _Time_ had already secured a wide public
for its news radio broadcast. They had enough nobility or were secure
enough to print in their “Letters” of January 21, 1935, an indignant
protest from Manitoba against what the correspondent felt was their
nature-faking. Axel Nielsen wrote them from Cranberry Portage, Manitoba:
“Your radio representation of the wolf story (Dec. 21, 1934), was most
unconvincing. Don’t let yourself be taken in by such stories....
“For 15 years I have traded and prospected in the North, over a vast
territory, a belt 1,200 miles long by 500 wide, the top of all the
prairie Provinces and beyond. I have met wolves, traveled with them,
trailed them. They have trailed me too; they’re a curious lot. But
my own sleigh dogs were ten times more dangerous.... Your terrified
passengers were probably stretching the imagination valiantly, thanks
to the nursery version of wolves in general.... In all my experience,
all my questioning of Indians, whose language I speak fluently, I have
never yet discovered a single wolf half as dangerous as the ordinary
pasture bull, an irritable sow, or a gander.”
THE WOLF PACK IN THE OLD WORLD
The _American Mercury_, July, 1927, statement on the wolf-pack closed:
“The case seems to be definitely settled against the wolf-pack in
North America. But there still remains Russia. Well, why not let
Russia remain? No one seems to have checked wolf-pack stories in
Russia for everyone is so sure they are true. And perhaps they are.
Besides, it is a distant country, and the fancy must somewhere have
play.”
For many years I sought and found reliable information on conditions in
what is now the U.S.S.R. from a learned and far-traveled officer of the
Russian Navy, Commander N. A. Transehe, who was doing scientific work
in New York. One of our conversations dealt with packs of wolves.
Transehe had journeyed through recognized wolf districts of Russia
and Siberia so extensively that few could have had more experience.
He never saw more than single wolves or a pair (doubtless male and
female), except when it seemed clear that the group was one or both
parents with a litter. I suggested that doubtless the wolf-pack, then,
existed in Russia only as folklore, but this he considered did not
follow at all. “I have lived in New York several years,” he said. “I
have never been to Wall Street but I know there is a Wall Street. I
have lived in the United States without seeing the Rocky Mountains but
I know there are Rocky Mountains. It is that way with packs of wolves
in Russia. They are of common knowledge.”
This was the considered view of a Russian whose judgment I had often
found good. Also there were two of the foremost authorities on wild
animals in the United States, who had expressed to me the feeling that
Eurasian wolves might be quite different from ours and that we had
better not get too dogmatic about their not running in packs or in
general about their being just behavior replicas of American wolves.
These authorities were the above-cited Nelson, in several letters and
conversations, and C. Hart Merriam in a letter of December 9, 1924.
In 1926, with the hilarious Lake Winnipeg (Ben Cockrane) and Ignace
yarns fresh in mind, I found myself an after-dinner speaker at a New
York banquet of the Western Universities Club where Kent Cooper, then
recently elected General Manager of the _Associated Press_, presided.
The opportunity was too good, and I dealt with press faking, spinning
yarn after yarn and alleging, in some cases not correctly, that these
had been carried by the _Associated Press_.
On July 8, 1926, I received a letter from Jackson S. Elliott, Assistant
General Manager, saying that the _Associated Press_ was making “use of
the information you gave to us about the wolves not running in packs in
order to have our own service as near accurate as possible.”
Three things seemed to me: that the _AP_ carried fewer American wolf
stories during the next several years, that most American wolf stories
in the press during that time were not of _AP_ origin, but that stories
of wolf-packs from abroad failed to decrease in number.
Magazines were active in European tales. Through an article, “Russia of
the Hour,” by Junius B. Wood, the _National Geographic Magazine_, for
November, 1926, p. 521, said:
“It is only a step from Moscow ... into the wide open spaces. Wolves
and bears still roam in the Moscow district, and when the dull winter
dusk comes at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and the country is under its
white mantle of snow, hunger drives them to prey on mankind.
“They boldly attack villages and, this year, even assailed a railroad
train of cattle. No peasant ventures alone far outside his village,
and one group of 20 men, fancying safety in numbers, was attacked by a
wolf-pack. Several were killed and all seriously torn before the pack
was driven off.”
The author proved to be a correspondent of the Chicago _Daily News_,
with broad experience of travel, including Russia. I wrote him July 14,
1927, with interest in his picture of Russia under the Soviets, asking
several questions, mainly ones that would enable me to check on the
reports further:
On what railroad and near or between what towns was the cattle train
attacked, whence did the information come, when did the attack take
place? Could the author furnish corresponding information regarding the
twenty men attacked? What further information could he give regarding
wolves in Russia, as to their traveling or working in packs? What
sources for still more knowledge could he suggest?
Wood wrote from Paris, France, August 31:
“Your letter of July 14, in which a certain unidentified group
designated as ‘we’ requests further information concerning my
reference to Russian wolves in an article in the _National Geographic
Magazine_ has been forwarded to me here. From time to time this
coming winter when I return to the U.S.S.R. I will be pleased to send
you what information I receive on this subject as wolves are as active
a source of news in that country as bootleggers are in the U. S. A.
“This information was taken from Soviet newspapers. The attack on the
cattle train standing on a siding was later corroborated from other
sources. The attack on the villagers went into details to the extent
of giving the names of those killed. Both occurred in the winter of
1926-7. As I do not have my papers here and do not remember the names
of villages, railroad, casualties and other details requested in
questions 1, 2 and 3, I must postpone answering further until I return
to Moscow and have opportunity to look them up.
“Your statement ‘You know, of course, that of all wolf-pack stories
published by the American newspapers, more than 75 per cent are
without any foundation whatever, and that most of the rest are
based on some misapprehension’ indicates a clairvoyance worthy of
your fellow explorer ‘Doc’ Cook. It is the first suggestion which
has come to me that I ‘know’, or even admit such a theory. It is
far from proven.... (I) have serious doubts of your impartiality on
the gregariousness of wolves. Though entirely personal, my humble
opinion would accept the version of unscientific but not blind
natives, including rural correspondents, who are living with wolves in
preference to scientists’ dogmas which appeal to publishers and lyceum
managers....”
The letter then goes on to valuable and no doubt accurately quoted
statements by Russians on wolves, ending with: “Packs are reported as
varying from 5 to more than 100 which, while leaving the figures open
to doubt, cannot be entirely an optical illusion.”
The promised letter of information from Moscow did not come, but I
secured Moscow and general U.S.S.R. information from other sources.
Waldemar Jochelson, distinguished Russian traveler and anthropologist,
was then in New York and wrote me twice concerning the Wood article,
July 27 and August 11, 1927. The letters do not say it outright, but
there is to be inferred from them a view that wolf-packs do exist, or
at least may exist. In this Jochelson resembles most Russians whom I
know. But, again like most, he holds this belief, or this willingness
to believe, in spite of, rather than because of, his own experience. He
says in the August 11 letter:
“As to my own observations in Siberia before the railroad was built
and in places far away from the railroad after its construction I
may say that I never saw a single wolf in my numerous voyages except
puppies taken from wolf’s den.
“I was told by my reindeer drivers of instances when single wolves
attacking herds of reindeer seized calves in spite of the presence
of the herdsmen. I remember one case when a reindeer of my team came
running and fell exhausted at the entrance of my tent and the team
driver told me that the reindeer was pursued by a wolf.
“Siberian hunters told me the following on the habits of the Siberian
wolf. He does not like the woods, preferring the tundra and other open
places, where he can see and smell his prey from a distance. Grown up
wolves do not like company. Wolves have separate dens and she-wolves
abandon their puppies when they become able to hunt for themselves.”
The outstanding foreign wolf tale of 1927, not so much in itself as in
what it led to, was printed as an _Associated Press_ release by the New
York _Times_, February 9:
CAUCASUS WOLVES BOMBED FROM AIRPLANE; HUNGRY PACKS INVADE TOWNS,
KILLING PEASANTS
GENEVA, Feb. 8 (AP).--Wolves in the Caucasus have become so numerous
that the military authorities there sent an airplane to the infested
districts, where poison gas bombs were dropped on packs, killing 200
of the invaders, say reports received by the League of Nations.
Wolves are becoming a menace to the lives of peasants in remote
regions of Russia, Poland and some other countries of East Central
Europe, the reports say. Ferocious from hunger, these beasts, which
have multiplied surprisingly, are reported as frequently making
attacks on villages, and in some cases have killed and devoured
helpless peasants.
Austria reports that one farmer kept twelve wolves at bay with an
axe, wounding them all with powerful swinging blows, and that he was
finally rescued by villagers, who saved his life by quick bandaging of
bleeding arms and legs.
In the district of Vilna, Poland, packs of wolves, maddened by cold
and hunger, descended on the town of Ostrovsk and boldly attacked
the inhabitants, who, during several hours, were obliged to put up
an organized defense with rifle and shotgun before the savage enemy
retired. Poland is reported to have mobilized several regiments to
carry on an offensive against wolves.
From Russia come even more terrifying stories. In the rural region
wolves by hundreds attack villages and even boldly enter the smaller
cities in broad daylight. At Verchofourye five peasants were slain by
the beasts before the packs were driven off.
At Orenburg three packs entered the town from different points,
throwing the population into a panic and forcing all to barricade
themselves in their houses, from which they launched a steady fire,
finally killing all the wolves, which tenaciously refused to abandon
their attack.
Perhaps through too much Edgar Wallace and E. Phillips Oppenheim I got
on this story a slant which appears from a letter written by N. M.
Stiles, Foreign News Editor of the _Associated Press_, to their Geneva
correspondent, Joseph E. Sharkey, on February 24:
“Please recall your Wolf story which you sent us by mail. We used it
on February 8, but before it got to the wires we sent out a note to
editors suggesting its elimination for two reasons, the first being
that the incidents described were so extraordinary, the second being
that the statement that wolves travel in packs has been disputed.
However, although the story did not get on the wires, two of the New
York papers nevertheless printed it--the New York _Times_ putting it
in a box on the front page.
“Now comes a letter from Vilhjalmur Stefansson, in which he asks the
following somewhat startling and curious question:
‘Do you suppose the wolf dispatch you carried about two weeks ago
from Geneva could possibly have been some sort of a cipher message on
behalf of almost any sort of secret organization? If so, you are the
people to do detective work on its origin. I am putting out two or
three lines to trace it from the pseudo-natural history point of view.’
“As you recall we cabled you for confirmation of the story, and
you replied that the reports were received unofficially leanations
(League of Nations) circles also printed widely Swiss newspapers.’
Now when you come to read this story with the thought in mind that
the word ‘wolves’ might be a code word to identify some sort of an
organization, as for instance an anti-Bolsheviki outfit, the dispatch
does read most interestingly. One can imagine that the organization
was putting these messages over on the Swiss newspapers.”
Meantime I tried to find out directly how the League was connected
and wrote to the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association of New
York City. Their librarian, A. G. F. Aylmer, replied February 24 that
they could not understand how the wolf stories should interest the
League, and while, like me, they had seen the press despatch, they had
no direct information of any similar kind from Geneva. Their office
would let me know if they found later that there had been some League
connection.
The Stiles letter brought a reply from Sharkey, dated March 12. It puts
the case reasonably and shows, particularly in the last of our quoted
paragraphs, how normal it is in Europe to read, pass on, and believe
wolf-pack stories.
“Answering your letter of February 24 concerning the wolf mail story
let me say that this was founded on stories and despatches appearing
in Swiss newspapers and on confirmatory talks with secretaries of the
League of Nations....
“The League interest in the wolf reports is chiefly economic. The
reason was explained to me at the time by ... member of the League
information section....
“He told me about recent cases of wolf-packs attacking peasants in the
outlying districts. I have never before heard disputed the statement
that Russian wolves ‘carry on’ in packs. When I was in Siberia in
the winter of 1918-19 a detachment of the British Hampshire regiment
which ‘en-sleighed’ from Omsk to Ekaterinburg was attacked by a pack
of wolves. The soldiers killed most of them. Participants told me the
story personally and I wrote it at the time. The whole history of
Russia shows that wolves, desperate with hunger, will attack in packs.
The word pack means what it says.
“Since mailing you my story there has appeared a despatch from
Constantinople declaring that wolves had attacked people in the
outskirts. There is a general idea that the lack of arms in Russia
(the Soviet government not favoring extensive arsenals in the outlying
districts) has led to a big increase in wolves while the present
severe winter has brought the beasts out into the open to secure
food. I am sorry I have thrown away all my clippings. Certainly Mr.
Stefansson’s theory is startling and interesting and I shall follow
any new wolf despatch from a new angle, letting you know, of course,
the result.
“The wolf narratives have created no stir in Europe whatsoever because
they are regarded as entirely probable, given the circumstances
outlined above.”
In due course a letter came from the Information Department of the
League of Nations, dated Geneva, March 14, and signed by Arthur
Sweetser. This letter vouches for the generally high character of
the American press representatives at Geneva, the particularly high
character of Joseph E. Sharkey, and the authenticity of the news
conveyed by Sharkey so far as concerns its having been received by the
League of Nations organization and passed on by them. The general tenor
of Mr. Sweetser’s long and careful statement is that, without being
exactly able to prove the truth of the stories, he really knows them
to be correct, and that therefore the League is neither a victim of
propaganda nor indulging in any when it passes on information of this
kind. One section of his letter reads:
“... it is a fact that one of our officials has seen 6, 8, or 10 (he
does not remember the exact number) despatches from Eastern European
countries regarding the increasing depredations and boldness of
wolves.... The official in question is a native of that part of Europe
and his information, and the experience of his friends as to the
habits of wolves, differs from that of Mr. Stefansson.”
On June 1, Sharkey wrote me from Geneva:
“... there may be an inherent difference in the wolves found in North
America and those found in Russia, including, of course, Siberia.
I personally spent three months in Siberia during the winter of
1918-1919, and persons who had long lived there frequently spoke to me
about the depredations of wolves which seemed to run in packs....
“... I want to bring to your attention the testimony of a young
Frenchman who with others was conducting an aeroplane trip over
Ukraine during the latter part of the war.... He said: ‘I think I
can throw some light on that question, for when I and my colleagues
were flying over Southern Ukraine we distinctly saw a pack of wolves
marching slowly and somewhat solemnly through an opening in the
woods. The band seemed to have a distinct formation with one wolf
striding some feet ahead of the main pack as if he were their leader.
Stragglers were seen in the rear, but the whole band seemed to have a
distinct and almost military formation under a distinct leader.’
“I have talked again with the Polish friend whose father did a good
deal of hunting of wolves, and he repeated that there is no doubt but
that in Poland, where the wolves run over from Russia, the animals
operate in packs or groups.”
The _Associated Press_ received as late as March 23 pack despatches
from Geneva, “where interest in news of wolf activity is chiefly
economic.” One of the despatches closed with these three paragraphs:
“There is a general belief here that the lack of arms in the Russian
country districts has led to a big increase in the number of wolves,
while the severe winter has brought the beasts into the open to secure
food.
“Despite the assertions of many naturalists that wolves do not hunt in
packs those who have personal knowledge of wolf hunting, particularly
in Poland, assert that wolves, desperate with hunger, will attack in
packs.
“In the winter of 1918-19 a detachment of the British Hampshire
regiment in Siberia which went by sleigh from Omsk to Ekaterinburg
reported an attack by a pack of wolves. The soldiers killed most of
the animals by rifle fire.”
These despatches, though I saw them through the kindness of the
_Associated Press_, were not sent out to the newspapers--for the
reasons given in the already-quoted letter from their Foreign News
Editor. On June 22, Stiles wrote further:
“I have just read your article on wolves in the _American Mercury_,
and am reminded that I intended to send you a mail story on the
subject that we received some time ago from our then correspondent
in Moscow, Mr. James A. Mills. We did not make use of it, as it was
for the most part a denial of the wolf story that came from Geneva to
which you called our attention and which we had already endeavored to
‘kill.’”
The Mills contribution is valuable as a statement of the time from
Moscow and is, of course, wholly authentic to the extent that it is a
report of what was believed there then about wolves. We accordingly use
more than three-quarters of it:
“Moscow, March 17.--Soviet Government officials were amazed at reports
reaching the League of Nations recently that Russia was overrun with
wolves to such an extent that in the Caucasus region the military
authorities had to dispatch airplanes with poison-gas bombs to kill
the invaders. The wolves had become so numerous and ferocious, the
League reports said, that they devoured human beings and terrified
whole cities and towns.
“‘A wolf story is always as good as a fish story,’ said a prominent
Soviet official to the correspondent. ‘The more it is exaggerated, the
better it sounds. But such stories ought to be left to those whom the
late President Roosevelt called “Nature fakers.” It is in poor taste
for a dignified, serious organization like the League of Nations to
issue them. The story about an airplane being sent in pursuit of packs
of these wolves is pure fiction. Russia has its share of wolves, but
they are no more numerous nor savage than those of any other country.’
“That Russian wolves are no more abundant or ferocious than their
brother-wolves in other countries, is however, not strictly accurate;
for statistics show that not only are wolves on the increase in
Russia, but their depredations are much more extensive and costly
than formerly. The animals are also considerably larger, stronger
and fiercer than the average wolf. The increase in their number is
attributed to the peasants’ lack of rifles and shot with which to hunt
them. It is only within the last year that the Government, yielding
to complaints of the peasants that wolves were menacing their sheep
and cattle, organized special detachments of professional hunters to
exterminate the wolves, giving a premium for each animal killed.[14]
“The loss in sheep, cattle and horses caused by wolves during the last
year is estimated at $6,500,000. A full-grown Russian wolf can easily
kill a horse, cow, or even a bull. But he rarely, according to Russian
authorities on natural history, shows sufficient courage to attack a
man. Indeed, the wolf usually runs in terror at the sight of a human
being. Even when travelling in large packs, these Russian experts say,
wolves avoid meeting a man in daylight; they become dangerous only at
night, when they may collectively attack a person along a lonely, dark
road in the country.
“Throughout the day they usually sleep, wandering and hunting in
search of prey only in the dark. At such times, say the Russian
authorities, the most formidable weapon against the animals is not a
loaded gun, but a simple flare of artificial light, like a burning
match, a bonfire or an illuminated candle, wolves having mortal fear
of anything resembling fire.
“Wolves always live in families--the father, mother, two young wolves
born the previous year and two baby wolves born in February or March.
Throughout the Summer and Autumn they never leave the neighborhood
where their young were born. It is only during the mating season in
December and January that the male wolves, seeking their female kin,
form packs and roam for scores of miles at night.”
This statement would have been more convincing with the last paragraph
omitted. For perhaps the Russians might err on packs when they were
so wrong, or at least so far from what naturalists think they know,
about mating habits and size of litters among wolves. The usual view
is that instead of being whelped in pairs, as these Moscow informants
had it, wolves are born in litters ranging up to twelve, and that they
do not accompany the mother beyond six or eight months. It is a fresh
contribution, too, that wolf-packs consist of males that are searching
for females.
For the time being the packs had it--Sharkey’s suggestion (and Nelson’s
and Merriam’s) that wolves might be different in Europe seemed to be
carrying the day.
But there was the matter of wolves attempting to devour the Hampshire
regiment of British troops on its sleigh journey from Omsk to
Ekaterinburg in 1918-19. Sir Sidney Harmer of the Natural History
Museum, South Kensington, was a student of animal habits and of animal
lore. He should be able to get in touch with members of the Hampshire
regiment, and I wrote him June 23. The Museum’s Keeper of Zoölogy, W.
G. Calman, replied on the Museum’s behalf July 21 that the Hampshire
story was fading “as wolf stories generally do when they are more
definitely enquired into.” He forwarded a letter dated July 19 from
H. M. Howgrave-Graham, who is Secretary of the Metropolitan Police of
London and was (says _Who’s Who_) “Captain in the 1/9 Batln. Hampshire
Regiment in India and Siberia, 1914-19.”
“I was in Colonel Johnson’s Battalion (the Ninth Battalion of the
Hampshire Regiment) and it happens that I was in charge of the only
party which made any considerable sledge journeys during the winter
1918-19.
“My party tried to get to Orenburg from Omsk but didn’t get so far. We
went by train to Troitsk and from there we made two sledge journeys,
one to Verkhne Uralsk and back and one to Orsk and back. I remember
being told that we might see wolves and had hopes of doing so as we
travelled a good deal at night. But we were disappointed and never saw
or heard any signs of wolves at all....”
Junius B. Wood said in his above-quoted letter to me:
“Your statement ‘You know, of course, that of all wolf-pack stories
published by the American newspapers, more than 75 per cent are
without any foundation whatever, and that most of the rest are based
on some misapprehension’ indicates a clairvoyance worthy of your
fellow explorer ‘Doc’ Cook. It is the first suggestion which has come
to me that I ‘know,’ or even admit such a theory ... unless you can
show that you have tabulated and checked the individual inaccuracies
of ‘all’ the newspaper stories which you so sweepingly include, I am
extremely sceptical of your ‘75 per cent’ and have serious doubts of
your impartiality on the gregariousness of wolves.”
It had never been my intention to claim that three-quarters of all
cases had already been studied and found without any vestige of
truth. What I meant was that several students whom I know, among
them the Chief of the United States Biological Survey, had been
investigating for years the cases which came to their attention and
that three-quarters of these had proved without foundation--while
most of the rest, and perhaps all, were based on misquotations,
misunderstandings, and the like.
Particularly with regard to a distant and vast realm like the U.S.S.R.
it is hard to study all the cases reported. With increasing frequency
through my investigations I began to run upon the name of Sergius
Buturlin as a lifelong student of Russian and Siberian wild life and
as the foremost authority, among other things, on wolves. Accordingly,
I wrote him July 14, 1927, requesting as much general information and
as definite information as he felt like giving. He replied August 18:
“I began hunting when about 8 years old, now--I am sorry to say--some
46 years ago. And though my chief interest was always with birds, and
my first ornithological paper was published (in _Okhotnichia Gazeta_
or _Hunter’s Journal_, Moscow) in 1888, I was, and am still, very fond
indeed of big game shooting (bears, moose, wolves).
“I hunted much in the basin of middle Volga (governments of
Simbirsk--now Ulianovsk--Penza, Kazan, Nijny, Nijny-Novgorod) in
governments of Tula and Orel, in Livonia and Esthonia, in governments
of St. Petersburg--now Leningrad--and Novgorod, in Kirghiz country
(between Irtysh and Ob), Kulunda steppe, gov’ts. of Tomsk and Irkutsk,
and in the north: Arkhangelsk and Olonetz gov’ts., Kolguev, Novaia
Zemlia, Yakutsk, Verkhoiansk, middle and lower Kolyma, some parts of
Chukchee-land and Kamchatka.
“As from 1888 on I was always an active contributor to almost
all our hunters’ journals, Russian and German (we had _Baltische
Waidmann’s Blätter_), and from 1898 always took part, as now, in the
editorship of our best hunter’s periodicals, I had a vast amount of
correspondence with our most experienced shooting men.
“I can fairly say that we have now too much wolves in our country, but
I remember years--for instance, about 1900--when in my native Simbirsk
gov. and Penza gov. they were as plentiful as now.
“And never in my life have I seen more than 14 wolves in one pack,
and this only twice. And never have I heard a reliable account of
such a case. And I have known many old and experienced professional
trappers and hunters.
“Usual number is about 5-8.
“But I have seen--it was about half-past five in the morning on the
13th Oct. 1893, near my grandmother’s estate Lava in the middle part
of Simbirsk gov., Sura basin,--when a pack of 5 attacked a herd of
about 10,000 sheep, frightened about a thousand of them in a narrow
ravine and in a few minutes slayed 153 sheep--without even taking away
a single sheep, as I drove them away.
“I suppose if I didn’t happen to ride near by I would be informed
afterward by shepherds that they were attacked by 50 wolves. It was of
course too dark to see, but though there was no snow, the ground was
soft from rains, and I could count all their footprints in the morning
in the bush and woodland near this ravine.
“I am quite sure that wolves (at least in Russia and Siberia) hunt
only in family packs, that is, papa, mamma, young ones of the year and
often some ones of the previous brood. And this amounts to 5-8, more
rarely 9-10, and quite exceptionally 14 specimens.”
Privately we had disposed of the Russian packs of the winter 1927 but
in the newspapers they continued to do well. There appeared in Miami,
Florida, (and no doubt elsewhere), a despatch which we copy from the
_News_ of June 12:
“MOSCOW, June 11--Ten families were rushed to the Pasteur institute at
Moscow from Kalujsky, a small village of the Kuban district, after a
large pack of mad wolves had swept down the village street, invading
gardens and even entering several homes, biting the residents.”
By now the _Associated Press_ was keen on wolves--indeed had been for
six months when Stiles wrote on September 30 that there was in his
office a Polish representative who believed stoutly in wolf-packs and
that they had received (and, I gather, killed) a press despatch from
Warsaw:
“Polish military patrol Russian border attacked by pack wolves
dispersed them with gunfire.”
I had long been thinking to write my classmate John B. Stetson who was
Minister to Poland. This gave occasion, and he replied June 8, 1928:
“A long time ago I had your letter regarding the possible attacks of
wolves....
“While there is much talk about the danger of wolves attacking human
beings and while people relate incidents which occurred to them when
they have seen wolves which they thought were going to attack them,
etc., it is extremely difficult to find specific instances when
attacks have been made by wolves....
“I asked the Chief of the Frontier Guards to make an investigation of
the various border posts to see if any attacks had been noted along
the 1500 kilometer front between Russia and Poland. This region is
wild and not densely settled. I enclose herewith the letter which I
have received from him.”
The letter from General Minkiewicz had specific information on two
cases of wolves, each time three in a group, that had been fired on by
frontier guards.
As to whether wolves attack in large packs, the General says:
“Accounts of wolves attacking men sometimes appearing in the
press have their origin in the phantasy of correspondents seeking
sensational news.
“In a few cases, however, we have noted a very aggressive attitude
displayed by wolves and, if they did not dare to attack me, it was
only due to the fact that there were but few of them....”
The general commanding the frontier guard, then, had apparently never
heard that (around September, 1927) “Polish military patrol Russian
border attacked by pack wolves dispersed them with gunfire.”
Lee Smits had suggested my writing David C. Mills of the National
Association of Fur Industries as likely to be informed on wolf-packs.
Mills wrote from New York, December 9, 1927. A summary of his
three-page letter is:
Vladimir Eitington (of Eitington-Schild Co., 226 West 30th Street, New
York City) was once followed by wolves in Siberia until he camped and
built a fire. He thought there might have been 15 or 25, “but he says
that in the dark and under such circumstances, he could not make a
rational estimate.”
Many animals have the following habit. Mills cites from his own
experience wolves (two), coyotes (several), and bears.
Writer’s opinion, and that of his friend, is that wolves never kill
people. Specially cited here is John B. Burnham, noted American
authority on wild animals, former secretary of the American Game
Protective Association.
Mills thinks that “common knowledge” of wolves and suchlike is usually
wrong. Then he has his own summary:
“The information from Russian sources in re. the wolf myth is--
“1st There has never been a scientific investigation of the question.
“2nd That wolves, under ordinary conditions, do not attack humans.
“3rd That mad wolves sometimes enter villages and snap right and left
at anything or anyone. I presume this means rabies, as that disease is
also found in America among coyotes.
“4th That they have no knowledge of any authenticated case of wolves
in packs attacking travelers in sleighs, etc., but do not know that it
has never happened.”
In 1928, perhaps for variety, the newspaper wolf-packs transferred
their chief European activities to districts other than hackneyed
Poland and Russia. The American papers informed us soon after the New
Year (we quote the New York _World_ of January 6) that:
“... eleven peasant girls of the Czechoslovakian town of Maramaros
Sziget were devoured by wolves when returning from a neighboring
village through the forest.”
The Consul General of Czechoslovakia gave preliminary reply to my
inquiry on January 10, warning that stories of wolves “especially
stories from Vienna are always greatly exaggerated.” On April 2 he
wrote that “we have here the reply of the Administration of the
Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia stating that the report of killing of eleven
peasant girls by wolves in Maramaros Sziget is not true.” Further on
the letter says that some wolves were seen near Maramaros Sziget in
January “and this was the possible foundation for the wild report of
_Neue Freie Presse_.”
November 7 the _Evening Standard_ of London, England, printed a Moscow
despatch of even date:
“Wolves are becoming a menace to life in the country districts of
North Russia and Siberia....
“... A pack of several hundred attacked a priest and his wife while
they were driving from one village to another 100 miles south of
Moscow.
“While his wife held the reins, the priest beat off the wolves with a
whip. Suddenly a wolf bit one of the horse’s legs. It lurched forward,
throwing the priest from the wagon. He was killed by the wolves. The
horse carried the woman to safety.
“Similar attacks on persons are reported daily from all parts of the
country.--International News Service.”
On this the Chairman of the Amtorg Trading Corporation, Saul G. Bron,
wrote me November 25:
“These are termed in the Soviet Union as the ‘big Russian cranberry
tree’ tales. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that malicious
white-Russian propaganda agencies ... are working overtime and that
the comparative scarcity of reliable information about the U.S.S.R.
in this country makes a fertile field for the circulation of stories
about uprisings, wolves roaming the countryside, etc.”
October 25, C. K. Ogden (whom H. G. Wells has since discussed in the
Fifth Book of _The Shape of Things to Come_) wrote me from the Royal
Societies Club, London. He told that the De Reszke cigarette had small
prize cards in their packages and that the one on The Wolf said “dogs
and wolves hunt in packs.” He wrote them and they replied:
“We are sorry that we cannot give you any zoological authority to
maintain the view that wolves hunt in packs as stated on the back
of picture No. 26 of our Zoological Studies.... The error will be
corrected should we have a reprint of the series.”
Through laxity, or real failure of the sources, my wolf record is
blank for Europe and Asia during 1930 and 1931--there is no account
of tenderly-nurtured wolf children from India, of babies devoured in
Siberia, of forays of Rumanian wolves into Czechoslovakia. But in 1932
the times were more abundant and my records are bulky.
On January 10, 1932, Duncan Campbell Scott, president of the Canadian
Authors’ Association, descended to his more factual role of president
of the Royal Society and wrote from Ottawa with concern for my wolf
studies. He sent a press cutting headed “From Our Own Correspondent,
Vienna, Sunday”:
“While an express train from Bucharest was snowbound near Zloty and
awaiting help, a pack of hungry wolves bore down upon it.
“Having no firearms, the train staff emptied a luggage van and threw
into it raw meat from the restaurant car.
“Twenty or more wolves jumped into the van and began to fight one
another for the meat. The doors were promptly locked and later the
train proceeded on its journey to Kischinev, Bessarabia. On arrival 18
wolves were found alive, the rest having been torn to pieces.”
In view of the style of this despatch I have looked up Karel Capek
in _Who’s Who_ and _Britannica_ but cannot determine from the brief
sketches whether he was in Vienna during January, 1932.
How wolf stories rotate appeared two years later when C. K. Ogden sent
me what is essentially the same tale--though with a new city of origin,
a new date line, a few new frills. The cutting is unfortunately from an
unnamed paper of London, England--I dare not guess which paper, though
I think I recognize the style. It was from Budapest, December 19, 1933.
Like the one of two years earlier it was “From Our Own Correspondent.”
It ran:
“An unpleasant adventure which overtook the direct train from Bucarest
to Budapest is reported from Bucarest.
“During the night the train was held up by snowdrifts and obliged to
stand nine hours in an uninhabited part of Roumania. To the terror
of the passengers a pack of wolves surrounded the train, and the
situation was only saved by the wit of a conductor.
“An order was given that the luggage van should be emptied, and some
raw meat from the kitchen was then placed in the van and the doors
thrown open. When all the wolves were safely inside the van the doors
were shut, and the train continued its journey with these unusual
passengers.
At the station of Chrisina, in Roumania, the wolves were transferred
to cages which had been prepared for them.”
It is usually difficult to trace stories from the Balkans, perhaps
because their Ministers and Consuls there get tired of answering
questions about all the strange things we print from their part of the
world. For instance, I still covet the real truth on what appeared,
as Special Correspondence, in the New York _Times_, February 28, 1932,
from Bucharest:
“Two peasants on the way to market in Oradea Mare were attacked on the
highroad today by a pack of starving wolves. They were unarmed and,
after a brief attempt to beat off the animals with sticks, were pulled
down, killed and partly devoured.”
I queried the Roumanian Legation on this but never had a reply.
I have had better luck with the northern countries, perhaps because
there I know the ropes. The Director of the University Museum,
Philadelphia, wrote March 21 on behalf of himself and one of his
vice-presidents, passing on to me heartrending news:
WOLVES KILL GIRL IN FINLAND; INVADE VILLAGES FOR FOOD
Wireless to The New York _Times_.
“HELSINGFORS, March 4.--Villagers in Eastern Finland were terrorized
this week by an invasion of hungry wolves, roaming southward from the
frozen plains of Lapland.
“The beasts entered villages and even the outlying districts of towns
in search of food. The young daughter of a farmer in middle Finland
was attacked and killed by wolves while she was walking on a highway
near her home. Her parents found only bones and fragments of clothing
after the tragedy....”
I wrote Helsingfors, sending a copy of the _Times_ despatch. The
Intendent of the Zoological Museum replied March 20th:
“... it is not true that a young daughter of a farmer was attacked and
killed. A similar notice was found in our press, so that the telegram
to New York is therefore explicable. By an official investigation,
the whole thing turned out to be a manifestation of too vivid
imagination--somebody had found a bloody rag on the road, and thus the
story was immediately given. In the same way it is a real nonsense
that the wolves had penetrated into villages and towns. The whole
thing was about a couple of animals which killed a number of dogs
before they were driven away and killed.”
The cruel ingenuity of man towards wolves is a defensive reaction
to the cruel rapacity of wolves toward man. In fact, the wide
dissemination of stories about packs is a necessity in justifying the
extensiveness of the war we wage and the character of the weapons and
tactics we use. We would not be half so successful in protecting the
chickens of the farmer and the sheep of the rancher if we did not
constantly circulate reports of how wolves will attack anything from
a child playing on a cabin floor in Michigan to a regiment of British
troops in Siberia.
Some of the methods used against wolves are commonplace, not worth
describing, though we might name a few of them--trapping, shooting, the
use of poisoned bait, the finding of dens and smoking out of the pups
to be clubbed to death. One method is so peculiar that we describe it.
Under date of March 12, 1927, the _Associated Press_ received, but did
not issue to the newspapers, information upon the extent and manner of
wolf hunting in Poland.
“... for centuries wolf hunts have been carried out by Poles (1) by
the aristocrats as a sport, (2) by peasants as a means of livelihood.
The same method, which is gentle, as you will see, has been employed
by nobility and peasant.
“A live pig is attached by a leather rope at the rear of sleigh or
sled in which six or seven men take their places, all heavily armed.
The sleigh is drawn by two or three horses. Two men devote themselves
exclusively to protecting the horses from the onslaught of the wolves
which, led from their lairs by the screams of the suffering and dying
hog, rush in a pack after the swiftly moving sleigh. Two other men
empty their rifles at wolves from either side and two others do their
execution from the rear.
“... (Our informant) said his father has often hunted wolves, which
attack in packs, after this fashion.”
I might have traced this account through my aforementioned classmate
the Minister to Poland, and would have done so but for chancing upon
remarks of Sir Albert Gray before the Royal Geographical Society of
London as they are reported in that society’s _Journal_ for June, 1921,
p. 445. They are to the effect that people continue holding strange,
romantic, beliefs no matter how often these are exposed. He has in
mind chiefly the idea that wolves run in packs and quotes the (for the
time and place) annihilation of the idea by Baddeley in his _Russia in
the Eighties, Sport and Politics_, (London, 1921). I was on the track
of wolf-packs then and followed Sir Albert’s clue. I found the author
demolishing the pack to his own satisfaction and that he also pays his
respects to various beliefs regarding the methods of hunting wolves.
John F. Baddeley spent in Russia, of which a large section of Poland
was then a part, most of the decade following 1879 and much of those
years in hunting and in the company of sportsmen and naturalists. After
denying that wolves ever go in packs and after denying also that wolves
are numerous in Russia, he says, beginning on p. 149:
“The idea that wolves are very numerous in Russia has gained
substance, also, from the very natural tendency of certain sportsmen
to exaggerate their performances; and more especially is this the case
in regard to that form of sport in which wolves and sucking-pigs are
supposed to play the chief parts. According to published accounts--I
have one or two before me but will not pillory the writers--you
have only to take a sucking-pig (in good voice) and drive along the
highroad in a sledge any winter’s night, trailing behind you a bundle
of straw at the end of a string to represent piggy--who meantime must
be made to squeal his loudest--to enjoy excellent sport with the
numerous wolves that will assuredly come to the lure the first time of
asking. Here again I am regretfully forced to say that I never knew
a man of proved veracity who claimed to have bagged even one wolf by
this method, while one honest friend assured me that he had tried it
no less than seventeen times in places where wolves were known to
exist, but had only once had a shot at what he thought might be one.”
It may be, as claimed by this author, that wolves do not swarm in
from Polish forests at the squeals of a pig, but the belief that they
do is useful. Faraway, in Michigan for instance, stories detailing
the alleged Polish ingenuities will tend to lead American woodsmen
to cleverness of wolf-killing that, in the long run, saves the local
farmers a good many chickens and lambs.
A reporter friend tells that the wolf-pack is a standard joke among
the foreign correspondents in Europe, certainly in Vienna, and he has
passed on to me a crystallization of their attitude, as expressed by
the correspondent for a London paper:
The yarn is that the Orient Express was held up by a pack of wolves.
They began at the front end, eating the engineer and fireman, and
proceeded towards the rear, devouring everyone as they went until, in
the last car, they came upon a correspondent whom they spared on his
promise that he would give them adequate publicity.
CRUMBS FOR PACK BELIEVERS
The evidence has been, then, that wolf-packs which come up to motion
picture and folklore standards do not exist. But there still may be a
foundation of reality upon which the imaginative and inventive have
built their fabrications.
Students who scout the pack as ordinarily defined and pictured have
nevertheless agreed on certain things which, by multiplication,
magnification and misinterpretation, could start the pack idea going,
or at any rate might keep it going.
Obviously wolf pups will remain with their mother until weaned.
Doubtless the family breaks up before the young are quite full grown,
or when they are between five and eight months old. There may be as
many as twelve in a litter, fourteen by some views. When you meet
stories of packs with five to fifteen in them you can thus have a true
report of a family hunting, traveling or living together. If the story
describes a “gigantic leader of the pack” you may be sure that a family
is involved. With the even-sized pups taken for normal wolves, mama
looks colossal. If there are two gigantic leaders, then papa must be
traveling along.
A foremost authority for America, Nelson, and a foremost one for
Eurasia, Buturlin, differ on one point, though only in degree. Nelson
is somewhere between thinking it rare and thinking it improbable that
last year’s pups will be found still traveling with their mother after
this year’s become large enough to hunt; Buturlin thinks it rare but
sees no improbability. Accordingly, when Nelson credits a report of
say twenty wolves he is inclined to think that two families have come
together accidentally for a few moments, or are only following each
other accidentally instead of really traveling together. Buturlin feels
these are probably one mother’s litters of two years and that they are
in semi-permanent company.[15]
With such family groups for nuclei, the traveler’s tale, the peasant’s
yarn which the reporter believes, become easy. Just multiply by ten and
you have packs of 50, 100, 200. Zero is nothing. So what is a zero more
or less in a good yarn?
There are methods other than simple multiplication which can lead
reasonably to packs of great size.
In the Arctic and sub-Arctic I have stood at vantage points from which
I could see in one, two, or several directions from me scattered wolves
which, counted together, would make a “pack.” These are no more really
a pack of wolves than the scattered and unconnected pickpockets of a
city are a band of thieves. But assume the story is thrice repeated.
First version: I saw 100 wolves from one place. Second version: Jones
saw 100 wolves in one place. Third version: Brown says Jones saw a pack
of 100 wolves.
It might happen that two wolf families scent a caribou or a band.
Running up the wind they might so nearly come together, without really
joining, that a careless observer seeing the two packs running in
the same direction would take them to be one pack--this all the more
because groups that are indubitably a mother with pups will sometimes
string out half a mile as they lope in pursuit of caribou. But two
families strung out, say a mile from the first to the last of them,
would not make a pack in the sense of a band working systematically and
semi-permanently together.
With considerations such as these in mind, we examine seemingly
reliable testimony for considerable numbers of wolves having been
observed together.
“Considerable” needs defining. The wolf-killing service of the U. S.
Biological Survey were polled by Nelson and voted for two, three, and
at highest five wolves being seen together, these always mother or
parents with pups. Many have testified for seven in a family, however,
among them the zoologist, Dr. R. M. Anderson, Chief Biologist, Ottawa,
who has in Canada an official position similar to Nelson’s in the
United States. A few apparently good witnesses have testified to nine.
We are, then, chiefly concerned in this section with numbers larger
than nine and with their interpretation--were they really together and
then in what sense? How permanently were they together? Were they
family groups?
My voluminous correspondence on packs was, as said, begun in 1922 when
I realized that my own belief in wolf-packs, begun in _The Friendly
Arctic_ (see that book’s index) was untenable. We have already used
that part of the correspondence which attempted to trace packs reported
between 1922 and 1936, finding all that could be traced wanting. We now
canvass the rest of the evidence, using it in the main chronologically.
_The Encyclopedia Britannica_, Fourteenth Edition, says in its article
on wolves that: “Except during summer when the young families of cubs
are being separately provided for by their parents they assemble in
troops or packs.”
That edition is dated 1929. Seven years before, on March 27, 1922,
Anderson wrote to Nelson that during several years spent in Arctic and
sub-Arctic Canada and Alaska:
“... I never saw more than seven wolves in any band nor did I hear
of any larger bands than seven. A reliable Eskimo in my employ told
me that he was once followed by nine wolves on a river near Herschel
Island, and in the Joint Report, _Survey International Boundary, 141st
Meridian_, 1918, there is a report of nine wolves seen in a band on
the boundary.
“In that region the wolves are more often seen in bunches of two or
three, or singly, and the bunches of five or more are probably an old
female with her cubs of the year. Several that we killed out of such a
band at Langton Bay were all immature....
“I have heard occasional vague rumors of larger bands of wolves in
more southerly parts of Canada, but have never been able to verify any
such reports....”
In passing on to me, November 25, 1922, the information given by
Anderson, Nelson added:
“... I am satisfied that the stories of great packs of wolves banded
together to pursue caribou or any other game are based on the fertile
imagination of the writers and not on observations in the field. It
is common knowledge that the wolves pair more or less permanently and
are in no sense gregarious animals. At the end of each breeding season
and until well into the following winter, my field experience and the
information which has come to the Biological Survey from its large
force of hunters destroying predatory animals in the western states,
coincide in enumerating packs of wolves not exceeding the ordinary
normal number of the two parents and the litter of the season which
may vary from three or four animals up to ten or twelve. Such bands
of parents and their young of the year hunt together until well into
the following winter but with the approach of spring they separate
to mate.... There is a bare possibility that in pursuing bands of
reindeer or caribou, several of these family packs of wolves might
accidentally come together in pursuit but such union would be purely
fortuitous and of very temporary endurance.
“My observations and personal information obtained at first hand
extends from the mountains bordering the valley of Mexico, north to
the Arctic circle in Alaska and also the observations of our large
corps of hunters numbering several hundred men, who, during the
progress of their campaign against predatory animals in the western
states have killed between four and five thousand of these animals
within the last six years.”
Nelson wrote me January 4, 1923, after a fresh study of some Russian
evidence, that clearly they have there the same situation as we have
here, “the wolves running in family parties exactly as they do in
North America, running in great bands only in literature and folklore.”
On January 18 Harkin sent me a long quotation from a story he had found
in “one of our local papers, under date the 17th instant.” It is a long
statement, generally claiming that wolves are not dangerous. A section
bearing on our present theme is under the subhead “Whole Pack Fled.” In
northern Ontario the sledge was crossing a lake, on a winter evening,
toward an island:
“We were just making the point of this island, and what should we meet
coming from the other side but a pack of wolves. We just met there.
The leader, a big, grizzled, long-legged old chap, looked me over from
a distance of about twenty feet; the rest of the pack ranged behind
and alongside of him, their tails straight out for just about as long
as it takes to stiffen them out with fear. Then they broke. They just
flattened out on the ice and flew--twenty-one of them.”
We have used in another connection parts of a letter from Inspector
Jennings of the R.C.M.P., Edmonton, April 20, 1923, one of the most
informative of the whole wolf correspondence:
“... it appears timber wolves are becoming more numerous in the
McKenzie Delta, but do not appear to be running in packs. At Baillie
Island where a number were killed in the winter of 1921-22 they appear
to be running in packs of from four to seven. We have also paid
bounties at Tree River Detachment for wolves killed in the Coronation
Gulf. C. Klinkenberg, whom you remember, told me in 1921, when I was
North, of a fight he had with a she wolf and five yearling pups. He
was attacked by all of them, and only by the fortunate appearance of
his son with his rifle was his life saved.... The general impression
is that such bands, or what may be called a band, is generally a
family, and that it is only occasionally, when hunting for food, that
two or more families might come together and constitute a real pack.
“In regard to the McKenzie District, an old prospector who has
travelled from the headwaters of the Thelon River to the British
Columbia boundary in the West states that while east of the McKenzie
River wolves may be plentiful when Caribou are numerous, he has
never seen them in what may be called a pack, although at times in
the open several wolves may be seen together, but evidently working
independently. Below Simpson and also on the Liard River in the Foot
Hills, he has seen as many as twenty under one leader, but generally
the pack is from five to nine. The band of twenty was following a
moose track. At another time he states that when his party had killed
a moose, shortly after, a large grey wolf was seen on the opposite
side of the river. This wolf called a few times and was soon joined by
others to the number of ten....
“One of my officers in February, 1916, while traveling on the
McKenzie, about 30 miles below Simpson, came upon a band of seven, at
a place where a moose had been killed the previous day.”
December 19, 1924, Nelson reaffirmed his lack of evidence for believing
that two or more families ever made up a “temporary pack.” He also
defined the terms under which, for sake of argument, he might concede
theoretically, in the absence of evidence, that unions might take place.
“I am still skeptical about the formation of wolf-packs which are
made up of two or more families hunting in companionship. I have
no knowledge of any such combination, and knowing the habits and
characteristics of wolves doubt this occurring except under what might
be termed fortuitous circumstances. Two or more family parties of
wolves might incidentally come together in the pursuit of the same
game animal and join in the kill; but if they did so I should expect
a fierce battle to ensue between the different parties of wolves,
strangers to one another, just as would happen in the case of strange
dogs. Furthermore, I believe that should two or more family parties of
wolves thus come together in the immediate pursuit of game, they would
promptly spread into their original units as soon as the kill was made
or the chase ended. Wolves have much the same nature as dogs, and the
hostility that strange dogs show one to another is a good indication
of what might be expected on the part of wolves....”
C. Hart Merriam wrote January 12, 1925, quoting his own _Mammals of the
Adirondacks_ (New York, 1882):
“Comparatively few wolves are now to be found in the Adirondacks,
though twelve years ago they were quite abundant, and used to hunt in
packs of half a dozen or more.... The amount of noise that a single
wolf is capable of producing is simply astonishing, and many amusing
episodes of camp lore owe their origin to this fact. More than one
‘lone traveler’ has hastily taken to a tree, and remained in the
inhospitable shelter of its scrawny branches for an entire night,
believing himself surrounded by a pack of at least fifty fierce and
hungry wolves, when, in reality, there was but one, and (as its tracks
afterwards proved) it was on the farther side of a lake, a couple of
miles away.”
Merriam further quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s _Hunting Trips of a
Ranchman_ (New York, 1885):
“According to my experience, the wolf is rather solitary. A single one
or a pair will be found by themselves, or possibly with one or more
well-grown young ones, and will then hunt over a large tract where no
other wolves will be found; and as they wander very far, and as their
melancholy howlings have a most ventriloquial effect, they are often
thought to be much more plentiful than they are.”
In its care to avoid nature faking the _Associated Press_ refused to
circulate a story which they received from Winnipeg and which Jackson
S. Elliott, Assistant General Manager, sent along for my wolf files
July 8, 1926. That account, however, runs well within family limits and
so has the probabilities for it. The applicable section runs that “the
hunter noticed a string of seven grey wolves crossing the prairie. He
waited until they approached and was successful in bringing down five
of them.”
The story seemed probably correct and gave a lead to further
information, so I wrote A. Brabant, Fur Trade Commissioner of the
Hudson’s Bay Company, Winnipeg, and received through him a valuable
letter from their A. C. Clark, Norway House, Manitoba, August 3:
“Carl Sherman, the trapper who killed the wolves referred to, is at
present in this locality, and I have been able to get the details of
the story referred to.
“Sherman is trapping on the Hayes River, about 150 miles north of
Oxford House Post. He was travelling north one day early in November
... and saw about 14 or 15 wolves making for the point on which he
stood. When they got to within 75 yards of him, he fired and brought
down the leader. By the time they got out of sight, he had killed
five.... They were all full grown, and all males. The wolves were not
dangerous, but made for safety, as soon as they got over the surprise
of the first shot. The wind was in the wrong direction for the wolves
to get the scent of Sherman.
“I can vouch for the above story being correct....”
This, then, is a remarkable story. The reader will find several things
in which it contradicts, or seems to contradict, Nelson, Buturlin, and
Anderson in so far as he was quoted (above) by Nelson. It fits badly
with the rest of our evidence but is nevertheless impressively vouched
for.
Information similarly difficult came in an undated letter July, 1927,
from Fred B. Kniffen of the Department of Geography, University of
California, Berkeley:
“... I have seen two wolf-packs.
“I had occasion to spend the winter of 1923-24 prospecting in the
upper Tanana region of Alaska. I hunted considerably as caribou meat
furnished an appreciable part of my diet and almost all of that of my
dogs. One afternoon I was seated on a little hill about a quarter of a
mile from a small lake. Through the natural pass below me the caribou
had been passing at the rate of several hundred a day. As I watched,
a file of wolves emerged from some brush on the opposite side of the
lake, skirted the shore and went off in the direction the caribou were
going. They seemed to be running roughly in a column of twos and I
counted about twenty-eight in the pack.
“One night I was awakened by the howls of my dogs responding to those
of some wolves. I stood in the doorway of my cabin and a little later
could distinguish the forms of five wolves against the snow of the
river, perhaps seventy-five yards away. The dogs were now growling,
apparently in fear. One shot dispersed the wolves....
“These events all occurred in late winter. It is quite possible that
an old she wolf and her pups may have accounted for a large part
of this but the large pack could hardly be explained away in this
fashion.”
Kniffen himself suggests a family explanation for his second pack. On
July 14 I suggested in a letter to him that _possibly_ the first set
were not a pack, either,--in the sense of having banded together for
cooperative hunting. I said that: “The wolves you saw following each
other, though there were twenty-eight, were (then) no more necessarily
a pack than eleven college men walking towards an athletic field are
necessarily the college team.”
The well-known and highly-regarded student of Canadian wild life, Tony
Lascelles, wrote for the Winnipeg _Free Press_ of April 25, 1936, an
article, “The Mammals of Manitoba.” A paragraph in it can be read as
supporting the traditional wolf-pack--I did not so read it but thought
others might. But Lascelles writes from Mistamick Lodge, Dauphin,
Manitoba, May 15, 1936, with reference to his use of the key word, that
“the pack is a family group and the maximum pack is a maximum family.”
With this we close the section of our discussion which is written for
those who like to believe that even the seemingly most absurd folklore
tale has developed from a nucleus of fact.
WOLVES AND BABES
The misanthropy of wolves, dramatic in their pursuit of wedding parties
and in the siege of stalled trains, is particularly horrible toward
little children. They eat them all up, rather jocularly in Red Riding
Hood, grimly in our newspapers. See, for instance, the tragic story
“Copyright, 1928, by the New York Times Company. By Wireless to The New
York _Times_:
“RIGA, Jan. 1.--A woman of the Unciany district of Lithuania, riding
with a child in a one-horse sleigh and pursued by a pack of wolves,
made a desperate effort to escape, but after a short, sharp race the
horse collapsed.
“The wolves tore the child from its mother’s arms, devoured it, and
then fell on the mother. Some peasants, hearing her cries, hurried to
the scene and rescued her, torn but still alive.
“As a result of the severe weather the depredations by wolves in many
parts of Russia are unusually alarming. The Soviet authorities are
carrying out an organized campaign against the danger by offering
rewards for wolves’ heads. In some districts detachments of the Red
Army are used.
“Packs of wolves have appeared in many parts usually immune,
especially in the Crimea.”
Reporters naturally have time for cabling such stories but ministers
at Washington and consuls-general in New York, though frequently kind
and helpful, are at times so buried in humdrum that you cannot get them
interested. I failed in tracing this despatch from Riga. Therefore we
can but deal in likelihoods and refer to the Michigan story of February
3, 1927, reported _ante_--it was nearer home and so we were able to
enlist the help of local investigators.
We are reluctant to pursue further this gruesome child-eating. The case
against the wolf in this respect is indeed black enough, what with
the inclusion of many babes among the people devoured already in this
chapter by the ravenous hordes. We turn with relief to a brighter side
of the case. In warm contrast are the maternally kind and otherwise
friendly wolves that have nursed and cared for children, sometimes even
twins, as in the case of Romulus and Remus. In our present century
there is never a decade, there is seldom a year, when newspapers do not
bring us well-attested cases.
Through the _Associated Press_ the New York _Times_ reported October
22, 1926 (from London, October 21):
“Two little ‘wolf girls’ were found recently living in a wolf’s den
near an isolated village in Bengal, British India. The story is told
by _The Westminster Gazette_, which received it from India, vouched
for by the Rev. Jal Singh of Midnapur, Bengal, and Bishop Pakenham
Walsh of Bishops College, Calcutta.
“Bishop Walsh relates that about the end of August, while visiting the
Rev. Jal Singh’s orphanage at Midnapur, Mr. Singh recounted how he
discovered the ‘wolf girls.’
“In a distant part of his district not long before, the villagers
pointed out to him a path they avoided because it was haunted by
demons. Investigation revealed a wolf den in which there were several
wolf cubs and two girls, about two and eight years of age, both
exceedingly fierce, running on all fours, uttering guttural barks and
living like wolves.
“The supposition was that they were abandoned as babies by their
mother or mothers and were found and adopted by the she wolf. With
much difficulty, the children were rescued, but the younger died soon
afterward.
“The elder child survived and is now at the orphanage. She was
gradually weaned from her savage ways, but she fought fiercely
against wearing clothes, and tore them off even after they were sewn
on her. For a time she refused to be washed and ate with her mouth in
a dish. Eventually she was taught to use her hands and say a few words.
“She still is weak mentally and neither cries nor laughs, but is
gentle with animals, preferring the company of dogs to children.”
Sir Sidney Harmer, British student of wolves, wrote November 15, 1926,
that the _Westminster Gazette_ had told him they knew the bishop of the
story existed and believed the wolf children also were real. Sir Sidney
closed:
“I have myself no information on the subject, and I do not know
of anyone else who could help you. We are inclined to be a little
sceptical.”
I never did get farther with the investigation of this particular case.
Reports that were traced, though not by me, appeared several times
the next year. The first, “Copyright, 1927, by The New York Times
Company--Special Cable to the New York _Times_, Allahabad, British
India, April 5,” said that:
“Herdsmen near Miawana, seventy-five miles from here, found a small
Indian boy supposed to be about 10 years of age, in a wolf’s den. From
marks in the den it was obvious that the boy had been living there. He
was unable to talk or to walk properly, but went on all fours, lapped
water and ate grass.
“The boy was brought here, put in a special lockup and supplied with
food and medicine. At night he barked, bit himself and other people
and had to be tied down. He is very thin and emaciated, but his limbs
are otherwise well formed. He has a terrible scar on one side of his
face, as if he had been mauled by some animal.
“He has been taken to Bareilly for treatment at a mental hospital.”
The _Times_ furnished a supplementary note:
“This is the third case of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Jungle Book’ hero,
Mowgli, in real life which has been discovered in India within the
last ten months. Last September Bishop Walsh wrote to the Indian
_Social Reformer_ of Bombay of the case of two little girls who
had been found by the Rev. J. Singh in a wolf’s den near Bengal.
They revealed the same characteristics as the boy described in the
Allahabad dispatch. One of them soon pined away and died, but the
other rapidly became ‘humanized’ in Singh’s orphanage at Midnapur. It
was supposed that the girls, as is sometimes the case in India, had
been abandoned in the jungle by their parents on account of their sex
and had been mothered by a she wolf which had just been deprived of
her young.
“The same explanation would not account for the presence of the boy in
a wolf’s den near Miawana.”
Further news, similarly special and copyrighted, came by wireless from
London and was published April 27:
“Further information is now available about the so-called ‘wolf-child’
whose discovery near Miawana, British India, seventy-five miles from
Allahabad, provoked so much discussion. Some travelers tell of similar
discoveries extending back many years, but medical authorities are
inclined to dismiss them as fables.
“The boy found in Miawana is judged to be between 7 and 12 years
old and in general appearance is said to be little different from an
ordinary child, but in his actions betrays signs that are declared to
point to his bringing up with wolves. He can stand up and walk, but
sometimes prefers to crawl, sitting on his haunches with legs curled
up and propelling himself forward with the palms of hands....
“He is said to display certain instincts even lower than those of his
alleged foster parents....”
On July 10, a long, undated communication marked “London,” said that:
“News of the discovery of another alleged wolf-child in India has
started a brisk controversy here over the authenticity of such
children. No previous wolf-child has occasioned so much stir in
scientific quarters as has the boy discovered by Indian herdsmen a
few weeks ago in a wolves’ cave near Miawana, seventy-five miles from
Allahabad.
“Some of the best known medical men in London have called the story
incredible. Old Indian army officers have replied by asserting that
they have actually seen wolf-children....”
whereupon the _Times_ devotes more than a column to a statement
generally in support of the India despatches. Among those in favor is:
“Rudyard Kipling, whose Mowgli of the ‘Jungle Book’ is the best known
wolf-child in fiction, has for once withdrawn his veto on newspaper
interviews, and is quoted as saying that wolf-children ‘are by no
means impossible.’ The author goes on to say:
“‘There have been other instances of them. They say that the Miawana
boy crawls on the hands and knees: I think it much more likely that
it would be the knees and elbows. That was the way of the other
children who, like Mowgli, were adopted by wolves and knew all the
mysteries of the jungle. That way leaves their hands free to seize
their prey and to defend themselves.’”
This long article, dealing with many cases of wolf-children, says that:
“... the one commonly known as the Secundra wolf-boy, is the best
authenticated case within the memory of living man. This boy was
captured in 1867 by a shooting expedition in the unfrequented jungles
of Bulandshahr. The hunters surprised a stray wolf, which they
followed to a small mound of earth with a flat-topped rock sticking
out of the mound. A small, strange-looking animal was asleep in the
sun on the rock. To the amazement of the hunting party, it proved to
be a boy, who leaped from the rock as soon as he saw the hunters and,
running on all fours, disappeared into a cave along with the startled
wolf.
“The hunters were either unable or afraid to go further; but, feeling
that something ought to be done, they returned to Bulandshahr and
consulted the Magistrate. They were advised to go back to the cave and
smoke out the wolf and its weird companion. This they did. The wolf
was shot as soon as it rushed out and its companion was pounced upon
and captured after a severe struggle, during which several members of
the party were bitten. Two wolf cubs were also killed and the party
returned to the Magistrate to claim a reward for the dead wolf and the
dead cubs, and to exhibit the human being they had captured.
“The wolf bounty was paid and the wolf-boy was sent to the Secundra
Orphanage. He was thought to be about 7 or 8 years old. For a long
time he tore off the clothes that were supplied him and persisted in
eating his food from the ground. As the years went by he became more
docile and eventually was baptized, taking the name of Sanicher, which
is Hindustani for Saturday, the day on which he was captured. His head
was small, his forehead low and narrow; his eyes were large and gray
and restless. He squinted incessantly and when walking lifted his feet
high like a man walking through wet grass, his entire body moving in a
series of jerks as he stepped along.”
Interest, sympathy, resentment were among the feelings commonly
expressed by those who wrote “Letters to the Editor” during the
outstanding wolf-child year of 1927. An undated cutting from the
New York _Times_, probably around July 15 or 20, has a letter from
Jacqueline Nollet:
“Have men for ‘humanity’s sake’ the right to take this Miawana boy
away from his mother-wolf and from his brotherly playmates, from the
jungle’s new and enthralling life, and to condemn him instead to an
existence devoid of companionship and a life of utter misery...?
“Since the wolf-man is no longer free to pursue his own mode of living
and is considered as a near-animal, could not the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals interfere and have a law voted to the
effect that a child saved from starvation, loved and protected by the
wolves against ferocious beasts, might be left to live with his wolf
family? And if the boy must be taken away from the wild, could not man
take a lesson and be as merciful as a wolf and spare the life of the
foster-mother and her cubs?
“Let us hope never to see repeated the act of the magistrate of
Bulandshahr who planned and rewarded the murder of the wolf family of
the Sanicher boy....”
The scientists were more hard-boiled. For instance, Herman B.
Sheffield, M.D., of New York City, wrote July 10, evidently fresh from
reading the long historical summary in the _Times_ of that date:
“Judging by the article on the ‘New Wolf Child Found in India,’ I
surmise that there are still a large number of civilized people,
including scientists, who seriously believe that ‘wolf-children’
exist in reality instead of in fiction. As a matter of fact, such
‘wolf-children’ are frequently met in daily practice and are nothing
but microcephalic idiots.
“These children are born with small, often dome-shaped, heads in
consequence of undeveloped, small brains. Owing to their extreme
restlessness and awkward power of locomotion, their habit to hop from
place to place often resembles that of a rabbit, goat or monkey.”
As the _Times_ reported, there was keen interest in London. The
Over-Seas League was naturally concerned and published in their journal
_Over Seas_ a statement by “A Member” which says that:
“Valentine Ball (previously quoted) mentions that he asked an eminent
surgeon of his day what he thought of all these stories, and the reply
was, ‘I don’t believe any of them.’ The medical profession of to-day
seems to share this lack of conviction....
“No one, apparently, has ever found a child living in an animal’s lair
and left it there, returning from time to time to observe how it was
progressing and to find out how it was fed. There is no trustworthy
evidence to show that the children so far reported as wolf-children
have ever survived for more than a few hours or days away from human
care before they were discovered and restored to such care. There is
no recorded case which could not be explained on the theory that the
child had wandered from home or been abandoned within a day or two
of its being rescued, and it is a well-known fact that Indian mothers
will sometimes ‘lose’ in the jungle mentally defective children,
which goes far to account for the imbecility of all so-called
wolf-children....
“All the stories of alleged wolf-children rest on native evidence, and
native evidence is by no means always to be relied upon as faithful
records of fact. The world of reality has its limits. The world of
imagination, especially of Eastern imagination, is boundless.”
Somewhere in the reports on most children nurtured by wolves there is
comment that, even after they had been taught by their human captors
to eat meat, they continued fond of roots, and even of grass. Is it
possible, then, that the wolves which bring up children are of a
kindlier disposition than ordinary wolves for the reason that they are
vegetarians?
WOLVES FOR POSTERITY
As said at the beginning of this chapter on wolves, we write for
every shade of belief. This last section is for a group first in our
thoughts, because largest--the lovers of romance, the enemies of the
cant of science, the vast multitude of free believers in the freedom to
believe.
True, the attacks on the wolf-pack are numerous. But what do they
amount to? They are not campaigns by great armies, they are at most
guerrilla warfare. More accurately, they are sniping.
For example, the chief of a biological survey writes letters to a
friend of his, poohpoohing wolf-pack stories, and the friend perhaps
shows them around a bit. Not half of the few who see the letters will
be affected--everybody knows what scientists are, a self-elected Brain
Trust dictating to all of us as to what we may and may not believe. If
the letter is shown in any place like a smoking room, it is talked down
by several who know people who know other people who have been treed,
pursued, or at the very least scared half to death by immense packs of
wolves.
Or a pack story in the newspapers gets a large head on the front page;
the denial comes a week later in small type on an inside page where no
one reads it. Again the pack triumphs.
The disgruntled may have for a time the active support of a
news-gathering organization, as above mentioned for the _Associated
Press_, but the most they can do is to caution their own direct
employees to be careful. They may not dictate to their affiliates, as,
for instance, the _Associated Press_ trying to dictate to the _Canadian
Press_ or to _Reuter’s_. Besides, they could not hold their own as
purveyors of readable news if they left to rivals the wolf-children
of India, the sieges of trains by wolf-packs in the Balkans, or that
increase of wolves in the U.S.S.R. which (everybody at that time
agreed) resulted from the substitution of communism for capitalism.
You may manage, perhaps, to get printed a diatribe against packs in
a highbrow journal, as I once did in the _American Mercury_. But you
cannot make new disbelievers in wolf-packs by addressing the readers
of such a magazine, for the badge of their sophistication is that they
are disbelievers already in whatever the rest of the world believes. If
you ever made nearly everybody sceptical on wolf-packs the _Mercury_
clientele would start believing in them--which is, of course, a
digression.
We shall close this chapter with a triumphant, because sufficient,
proof that wolf-packs are a reality. To accomplish this we use the
democratic method, adjudication by majority vote.
We shall have support for wolf-packs from that most popular appeal to
the people, our greatest of weeklies, the _Saturday Evening Post_, with
its millions of sold copies and no doubt several readers per copy.
We shall have on our side, too, the most orthodox and the broadest
appeal to the scientists, which is through the American Association
for the Advancement of Science and through their kind of affiliate
_Science Service_. They do not have so large a membership as that of
the _Post_, but it is effective since it overlaps but slightly the
circle of the _Post’s_ readers. The members of the Association include
most professors and other teachers of science in our various schools
and colleges, most scientists in the employ of commercial companies
(at least those in the higher brackets), and most of those employed by
the national, state, and other governments. Their official journal,
_Science_, goes to every library of consequence in the United States,
and widely through other countries. _Science_ is read for excerpts and
for ideas on behalf of newspapers and magazines. Then a great many of
the papers subscribe to _Science Service_, and even use it.
If we can show that the _Post_ and _Science_ (including _Science
Service_) are on the side of the wolf-pack, we have it winning hands
down.
On January 9, 1932, C. B. Ruggles had in the _Post_ an article,
“Neighboring With Wolves.” We are told, or given to understand, in this
and other of his _Post_ contributions, that Ruggles yields to few in
the extensiveness and intensiveness of his northern lore. He has not
merely been in Alaska; he has actually lived there. He must have been
way up north, for he tells about the sun that “it would, for one hour
and fifteen minutes, skirt the earth’s rim before sinking below the
horizon for another twenty-odd hours of opaque-lidded slumber.” We have
been told a little earlier about a Light of Delusion--“The Eskimos call
this kind of light Woosha Kua”--which plays strange tricks with your
eyesight. Still, apparently, it was not, in the Ruggles judgment, due
to the Woosha Kua that he saw wolves pursuing caribou in great detail
and that “There were twenty-seven wolves in the pack.”
About this time I happened to give a talk before a small group at the
University Museum, Philadelphia. I must have said something about
wolf-packs and the Director, Dr. Horace H. F. Jayne, must have given my
address to Max C. Goodman, of 3143 West Diamond Street, Philadelphia,
who in turn must have written to C. B. Ruggles, at Freedom, Oklahoma,
telling that Ruggles and I seemed in disagreement on wolf-packs.
These things are inference, for there is a gap in my records. I have,
however, a copy of a letter from Ruggles, dated January 19, 1932, sent
me by Goodman, which runs in part:
“Nature causes wolves to gather in monstrous packs in all parts of the
wilderness the last part of December or the first part of January.
Eskimos call these large wolf-gatherings, ‘KA-MA-CHUA’ (Mate choosing
season) for this is about four or five weeks prior to wolf mating time
and the Eskimos as well as the Northern trapper believe nature has
brought these gatherings about for the young and unmated wolves to
choose their mates, believed for life.
“I am writing you the above for the sole purpose of you taking it up
with the greatest and most noted naturalist that you might find. If
you should find that Mr. V. Steffenson’s statement is false, kindly
investigate other positive statements that he has made regarding the
Arctic....
“I hope to hear from you again and in regard to the results of your
investigation of my statement as well as the investigation of the
statement of V. Steffenson.”
Goodman was to submit the Ruggles statement and mine about wolves to
“the greatest and most noted naturalist that you might find.” So I
wrote Goodman on January 25 a letter in about 90 per cent disagreement
with Ruggles and taking substantially that position contrary to his
which is stated in the first section of the present chapter. Goodman
submitted this letter and the Ruggles one, which we quoted just above,
to the often-mentioned Chief of the U. S. Biological Survey, Dr. E.
W. Nelson. Nelson wrote Goodman from the Hotel Johnson, Visalia,
California, February 10. Again we quote in part:
“Your letter came to me just as I was preparing to leave Washington
for California--hence, the delay in my reply.
“I have been interested by the letters from Ruggles and Stefansson and
am in complete accord with the statements in Stefansson’s letter. Mr.
Ruggles appears to be imbued with the old folklore idea about huge
packs of wolves roaming wild regions of the North.
“In common with most people, as a young man, I had the same ideas
derived from the commonly published misstatements on the subject.
Then for more than twenty years as a field naturalist, much of the
time in wolf country and later for more than that length of time
administrating the field work of other naturalists and hunters in wolf
country, I came to a definite knowledge that the typical wolf-pack
consists of the two old wolves and their young of the previous spring.
These ‘packs’ may number from three to more than a dozen animals,
according to the number of survivors of the litter of young. Sometimes
a wolf may have a dozen young. There is no doubt that, by chance, two
or perhaps more litters might come together, but such association
would be extremely brief. I have never known or had definite
information of such an instance and it is given as a mere possibility.
“For many years, the Biological Survey in Washington investigated
every published account of devastations and of the killing of people
by wolf-packs in the United States and Canada by writing to the
postmaster or others living near the scene of the alleged work of
wolf-packs and without a single exception, they proved to be purely
imaginary.
“Under my direction, one of the best field naturalists in the
Government Service spent more than a year in the Tanana River country
of Alaska in the very district where Alaska papers published accounts
of great wolf-packs destroying caribou and although he traversed that
country in various directions in winter, he saw only occasional wolf
tracks in the snow and never a sign of the alleged packs....
“My information is from my own observations and from hundreds of other
reliable men in the field in wolf country.”
Once more there is, superficially, a defeat of the wolf-pack. Really
the pack won, for the _Post_ is read by several million people of the
type who believe what they see in that sort of publication, while the
quadrangular Goodman-Nelson-Ruggles-Stefansson correspondence could
have had an effect upon only one of the four. Ruggles knew already
there were packs, so we could not convince him there weren’t. Nelson
and I knew there weren’t any, so Ruggles could not convince us there
were. Goodman remained the only one who may have been affected, and he
may have swung either way. I believe Dr. Jayne saw the correspondence,
but from his record I think he was likely enough prejudiced already
against the pack. Perhaps a dozen or two of Goodman’s friends saw the
correspondence, and perhaps some of them were influenced. If so, they
may have gone in either direction. Therefore, the balloting, _Post_
readers against some of the letter readers, must have gone something
like a million to one in favor of the pack.
The authenticity of the wolf-pack might have been secure for years on
the strength of just the one Ruggles article in the _Saturday Evening
Post_. But they have carried more articles by Ruggles, and may have
carried further eyewitness testimony. Then certainly there are many
journals, only a little down from the _Post_ in their sway of the
public mind which have borne witness. Packs are going strong in the
movies and, as shown heretofore, they appear frequently in the daily
press. The general verdict is, therefore, clear.
But we said above that we would range scientists with the true
believers. This we do by referring to the previously described journal
_Science_, from which we quote in part an item that appeared in the
issue of February 28, 1936:
“Wolf fighters, skilled in warfare against these voracious
pack-hunting beasts, are asked for in an emergency wire from Governor
John W. Troy, of Alaska, recently received at the Department of the
Interior.... Vicious gangs of wolves have been raiding the reindeer
herds owned by natives of northern Alaska.... Native hunters have
proved unable to cope with the animals, but it is believed that about
four hunter leaders, each with a few assistants, could in a swift
campaign break up the marauding bands.”
Thus we have the official journal of a foremost scientific body
vouching for wolves as pack-hunters, as being in gangs and in bands.
But a testimony from Canada is in a way more striking than any can be
from the United States, for wolves are by common consent more numerous
and widespread there. As in the United States, the Canadian Government
takes special cognizance of them, for they prey on flock and fowl.
There is, then, _Bulletin No. 13, New Series_, Dominion of Canada,
Department of Agriculture, “The Habits and Economic Importance of
Wolves in Canada,” by Norman Criddle. On p. 6 we read:
“Parent wolves live in pairs during the summer months, but as the
young develop they form with them small bands, which meeting with
other families in their wanderings, acquire the proportions of packs.
These packs break up again in February....”
We close our case by repeating and insisting that attacks on
wolf-packs are not serious--they are no more than sporadic sniping.
The _Saturday Evening Post_, _Science Service_, and the Department
of Agriculture of the Dominion of Canada, powerful and worthy of all
respect and confidence, are in this relation spokesmen too for a
popular and a scientific multitude. The wolf-pack, then, is secure
even as things stand. But conditions are bound to trend steadily in
their favor. As living beasts, wolves are getting fewer with the
colonization of the wilderness, but wolf-pack stories do not thereby
get fewer--witness how they come again and again from districts where
wolves no longer exist. The fewer the living wolves the less the chance
of their being so studied that evidence against the pack habit can be
gathered. Finally there will be no wolves left, except in zoos. The
belief in packs will have survived the means of refuting it. It will
have become a truth.
CHAPTER VI.
BEYOND THE FRONTIER
The following chapter was originally a serious complaint against the
schoolbooks of Canada, but, in the light of more mature thinking along
the lines of standardization, it appears to us now that the points we
have made against the textbooks are really points in their favor. We
have established (Chapter I.) that the standardization of error would
simplify our thinking, thus making life easier and, to that extent,
better. We must commend Canada for her pioneer work in our theory,
especially when, as we readily perceive, it is done at the expense of
her own development, therefore in a spirit of true self-sacrifice.
The lower schoolbooks we shall quote in this statement, for contrast
with university teaching, are: _Ontario Public School Geography_,
authorized for use in the public schools of Ontario; _The Teacher’s
Manual_, authorized for use of teachers in Ontario; _Public School
Geography_, authorized for use in the public schools of Alberta;
_Manual of Geography, I_, authorized for use of teachers and high
school students of Alberta; Dent’s _Canadian Geography Readers_, Book
II, optional or supplementary reading in several provinces; _The
Canadian School Geography_, authorized for use in the public schools
of British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Saskatchewan;
_Canadian Readers_, authorized for use in the public schools of
Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Most of these
books are dated 1928 or 1929. All of them were bought from displays for
the present school season.
The observed temperatures about to be quoted in this article for
contrast with the textbooks are, unless otherwise stated, taken from
the records of the Dominion Meteorological Service. Some of the other
facts used are from Government reports; most of the rest are from my
own observation through ten winters and thirteen summers spent in the
Arctic, during which I traveled there afoot about 20,000 miles--a good
opportunity to see conditions as they are.
Studying the books purchased, I found that practically all of the
geographies were still holding to the ancient Greek philosophical view
that the farther north you go the colder it is, no matter what the time
of year. One book expresses it, “The temperature steadily decreases
from the Equator to the Poles,” and the others have the same idea
worded differently. The climate of the North is “especially unfavorable
for both plants and animals.” In the Arctic “terrible blizzards often
rage for days together.”
Postponing our discussion of the more important season of summer,
what are the facts about the Canadian winter? One is that children
in certain wheat-raising sections of Alberta, who probably shudder
with sympathy for the poor Eskimos, are themselves living in a region
that has minimum winter periods colder than any Eskimo is known to
have lived through. Few Eskimos have ever seen sixty below zero. The
probable lowest temperature for the North Pole itself is twenty degrees
warmer, say fifty-eight or sixty below. The lowest temperature recorded
on the north coast of Canada is fifty-two below. But we have the
following minima from the southern third of Canada: Quebec, sixty-three
below; Ontario, sixty below; Manitoba, sixty-three below; Saskatchewan,
seventy below; Alberta, seventy-eight below.
There is probably, then, no Eskimo living who has felt a temperature
as low as thousands of our children face going to school in prosperous
communities of southern Canada. If there are Eskimos who have felt cold
equal to that of some of our farming communities, they belong to tribes
that winter inland, well to the south of the coast dwellers.
As to blizzards and snowfall: excluding the Atlantic and Pacific
coasts, the line of heaviest snowfall in Canada is approximately at
the Canada-United States border. Storms are, on the average, fewer and
milder in the Arctic than in any other equally large area on earth, as
the great explorer, Nansen, pointed out more than thirty years ago. It
is for these reasons among others that trans-Arctic flying is steadily
pushing to the front as the practical solution of commerce by air
between the Old World and the New.
However, from the strictly economic point of view, it makes little
difference what we teach in the schools about the winter temperatures
of Canada. Mining, for instance, can be carried forward in any climate,
for among the successful coal mines are those of Alabama, 1,000
miles south of Winnipeg, and those of Spitsbergen, 2,000 miles north
of Winnipeg. In factory work the expenditure for fuel varies and
is an important charge against operation, but still there are great
industrial centers developing all the way from Birmingham to Montreal.
Blizzards are perhaps unpleasant. I have met in the Arctic numbers of
Royal Canadian Mounted Police who had been stationed at Regina, in
southern Saskatchewan, not so far from the United States border, and
I don’t remember finding one who did not think Regina blizzards as
bad as any they had seen on the north coast of Canada. Yet Regina is
considered one of the fine Canadian cities and its chief handicap of
late years has been not the cold nor blizzards of winter--it has been
the dryness of the hot summers. July temperatures are frequently higher
in that part of Saskatchewan than in the Miami part of Florida.
Cold may distress you, but Montreal is larger than New Orleans. Of the
two Red River valleys, the one in Louisiana is warmer, but the one in
Manitoba is better for wheat. Winnipeg, which handles more wheat than
any city in the world, has an average temperature for the year that is
just at the freezing point--thirty-two F.
Winter temperatures, then, have little effect upon the prosperity of
lands or the growth of cities, nor do blizzards signify. It is the
summer temperatures that matter, and the length of the summer, for upon
them depend the economic vegetations that give food to the people and
feed to grazing animals.
The greatest economic damage to Canada that is wrought by the public
schools is, therefore, in describing incorrectly its northern summers.
For the schools teach as a principle that the farther north you go the
colder the summers become. They do further harm by misrepresenting not
only the summer temperatures of Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada but also
the length of the growing season.
As to the heat and length of the northern summer, and some of their
direct results, the textbooks approved by various provinces teach the
following things among others: “In northern Canada and northern Alaska
... during the short summer the very slanting sunlight is unable to
raise the temperature much above the freezing point,” says a geography
approved by several provinces. “There is no warm season (in the
Arctic),” is how we are told the same thing in a manual of geography
authorized by a department of education for the guidance of teachers,
and printed not by a commercial house, but by a King’s Printer. Every
province has some officially approved textbook that states or implies
that hot weather--eighty to ninety degrees in the shade--does not
occur in the Arctic at all, and that it occurs rarely even in those
parts of the Northwest Territories that lie between the Arctic Circle
and Edmonton--which is just south of 54° and corresponds to Leeds in
England, Copenhagen in Denmark, and Moscow in Russia.
This would be sad if true. But the summer temperatures in the Mackenzie
district of the Northwest Territories hard up against the Arctic
Circle really go to ninety-six degrees, while the highest for Prince
Edward Island, in southeastern Canada, is only ninety-two. The highest
temperature recorded since 1900 in Winnipeg is one hundred degrees and
the same temperature has been recorded in Alaska by the United States
Weather Bureau at Fort Yukon, north of the Arctic Circle. Temperatures
ranging from eighty to ninety degrees are common both in the Canadian
and Alaskan Arctic.
Some of the lower school geographies give the real facts of Arctic
summer temperatures, but do not correlate them so as to enable an
ordinary student to realize that what the textbook says elsewhere
about the summer never being warm must be incorrect. The texts state,
for instance, that in midsummer the sun delivers about half as much
heat per hour in the Arctic as it does at the equator. Elsewhere
they mention that the Arctic day is twenty-four hours long and the
equatorial day only twelve hours long. What they do not draw attention
to, thus failing to enlighten the careless reader, is that there is no
difference between the result of half the heat-delivery for double the
time and double the heat-delivery for half the time.
It is just because half the heat for double the time is as good as
double the heat for half the time that you expect, and do get, tropical
heat in those north polar lowlands (and they are extensive) where sea
breezes do not seriously interfere.
Having described the climate in such unfriendly terms, perhaps it is
consistency that impels the Canadian textbooks to make the vegetation
correspond with it. “Much of this vast area,” says one, “is a treeless
wilderness of rock and swamp, covered with mosses and lichens which
provide food for the caribou and musk ox.” “In the extreme north,”
says another, “(there is) a cold desert where, however, vegetation is
not entirely wanting; for in the marshes in summer the ground becomes
covered with reindeer moss on which the caribou and musk oxen feed.”
“Why cannot trees grow there?” asks a third, to which the general
textbook reply is that the winters are too cold for them. A reading
selection continues the work of the geographies with, “In that land
there is little but ice and snow.”
But what are the facts? One is that inside the Arctic Circle mosses and
lichens are not so prevalent as they are inside the textbook covers.
By tonnage they comprise less than ten per cent of the vegetation. The
other ninety per cent is represented by flowering plants. In all my
Arctic experience I have never found a region where mosses and lichens
prevailed over the flowering plants. I had to visit a section near
Churchill, Manitoba, 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle, to see that
sort of country.
What about trees? A hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle in Canada
the Forestry Branch of the Department of the Interior has reported
trees seventy feet high, straight, and fourteen inches through. Similar
trees go at least twice that height beyond the Circle in Siberia.
Moreover, the textbooks imply in most cases, and specify in one,
that winter cold limits the growth of trees; but the coldest known
spot north of the equator--Verkhoyansk, in the Yakutsk Province of
Siberia--has a dense forest of both evergreen and deciduous trees,
although the recorded temperatures go down to ninety-three degrees
below zero.[16] The Prairie Provinces which have approved this book
are themselves in part treeless. Would they appreciate the intimation
that this is because of the cold? And if so, how can they reconcile
the teaching of their schools with the fact that the largest treeless
sections of the Prairie Provinces themselves are in their southern
parts, the largest forests in the northern?
The Canadian textbook allegation that in the Arctic “there is little
but ice and snow” conveys to the child among other things the idea
that there is a heavy snowfall. Instead, the snowfall, as previously
mentioned, is heavier in the most southerly hundred miles of Canada
than in the most northerly hundred. Or again, the pupil may think the
statement means that in July and August there is more snow or ice on
the ground in the North. But the fact is that British Columbia has ten
times as much snow in July (permanent snow) as the whole of the much
larger section of our continent designated the Northwest Territories.
The part of Alaska which lies in the temperate zone has a hundred times
as much permanent snow as there is in the Arctic section of Alaska. In
the south Alaska mountains the snow line comes down to sea level; in
the north Alaska mountains it is 4,000 to 6,000 feet above the sea.
Lest the child may think that the desolation and worthlessness are
largely confined to the Arctic Circle proper, a fifth-year Canadian
reader instructs him in part as follows: “Long before the treeless
wastes are reached, the forest ceases to be forest except by
courtesy.... On the shores of Great Bear Lake--which is, of course, in
the Temperate Zone--four centuries are necessary for the growth of a
trunk not so thick as a man’s wrist.... Still farther north the trees
become mere stunted stems set with blighted buds that have never been
able to develop themselves into branches; until, finally, the last
vestiges of arboreal growth take refuge under a thick carpet of lichens
and mosses, the characteristic vegetation of the Barren Grounds.”
The textbook editor borrows this heartening description, and much other
cheerful information about Canadian resources and climate, from a
book entitled, humorously enough, _Greater Canada_. If a country thus
described be indeed a “Greater Canada,” then we wonder what those may
believe who are really pessimistic.
Against this “Greater Canada” view let us set the facts, uncontested by
those who have lived on Great Bear Lake and have traversed the forest
north of it to where it meets the Arctic prairie. Instead of being no
bigger around than your wrist, the larger trees on Bear Lake are a foot
and a half through, and a hundred feet high. There is no such gradual
diminution in size as the author makes out. We have already mentioned,
for instance, the Forestry Service report which describes trees seventy
feet high a hundred miles north of Great Bear Lake and within five
miles of the beginning of the Arctic prairie. Again there is Big Stick
Island, northeast of Great Bear Lake, a clump really beyond the tree
line. It is only a few acres, and yet the trees are a foot through,
tall and straight.
I have come in from the Arctic prairie to the northernmost forest at
various points on the thousand-mile front ranging from the Colville to
the Coppermine, and I have never seen the peculiar trees of _Greater
Canada_ with “blighted buds that have never been able to develop
themselves into branches.” Once, for instance, when I discovered trees
just a few miles inland from Franklin Bay in a section where I did
not expect them, I entered in my diary the unusually (for me) poetic
description that I had seen “a little band of Christmas trees climbing
the hillside.” They were of such proportions as to branch and stem that
they would have been saleable at Yuletide in any of our cities.
We have commented before on the textbook idea that the chief vegetation
of the Arctic, or even of the “Barren Grounds,” is mosses and lichens.
Here we comment rather on the name itself--Barren Grounds. According
to a bulletin of the Department of the Interior, the epithet “Barren
Grounds” was originally applied to the prairie districts between
Winnipeg and Calgary. When growing knowledge showed how absurd the name
was for that section, it was not abolished as it should have been, but
was, so to speak, lifted up and transported from the southern prairies
across the northern forest to the northern prairies and there set down
to do its part in holding back the development of the North as it
already had held back for awhile the development of the West.
I was born and brought up in that West which was originally called
“Barren Grounds,” and have often said that had I been transferred in
my boyhood by magic from the prairies, across which I used to ride
as a cowboy, to the prairies of Banks Island, 200 miles north of the
north coast of Canada, I should have known on waking up that I was
not in my home district, but I could not have decided offhand that I
was not somewhere in northern North Dakota or southern Saskatchewan.
Dropping on my knees and playing Sherlock Holmes, I could have decided
by careful study of the vegetation and soil that I was in a strange
place, but looking off to the sky line I should have felt at home.
There would have been the same rolling prairie, with perhaps somewhat
less grass but with a great many more flowers. Had it been winter there
would have been snow on the ground in both places, but less in Banks
Island than in Saskatchewan.
With such experience of the trees, grasses and flowers of southern
and of northern Canada, it is easier for me to read the lower school
textbooks as works of humor than of sober instruction. But children
take them seriously, and it is difficult to look upon the results as
merely funny.
The ground frost of northern Canada is made a handicap in the
textbooks. But in real life as often as not it is useful. “Fields of
ice and snow and a permanently frozen subsoil effectively limit man’s
movements in the Arctic ... regions,” says one of them, and that is a
just sample of what most of them say or imply.
The first advantage of frozen subsoil is that there can be no dry
season. The growers of cereals and vegetables now count on that in
Alaska. So do the reindeer ranchers. For if the season has less rain
than usual it means only that the ground will thaw deeper than usual,
and the roots of the plants will reach farther down for their water.
The only thing the rancher has to guard against is the trampling out
of the forage vegetation by the animals, just as he would if he were
an Australian sheep farmer. So far as dry seasons are concerned, he
can graze the same numbers on a given ranch for any period of years, a
thing the Australian cannot do, for his feed varies with the rains.
A second advantage, less important, but spectacular and about to come
much into public view, bears upon flying. For where there is a frozen
subsoil there is no underground drainage, and rain and thaw waters stay
where they fall. This creates innumerable lakes all over the country,
providing flyers with natural landing fields for pontoons in summer
and skis in winter. That is one reason why accidents are fewer in the
Arctic than in temperate or tropic flying. If you are a mile high and
you develop engine trouble, you can always glide to a safe landing
where the subsoil is frozen.
Those who have kept track of the advance of the Hudson Bay Railway from
The Pas to Churchill, even if it be only through press despatches, are
familiar with a third advantage, for the ground frost has simplified
and made cheaper and easier the building of that important pioneer
line. In so far as the cost of construction is derived from taxes, the
people of the whole of Canada have benefited in purse from the very
condition which they formerly thought would increase the building costs.
Coming back again to Arctic vegetation in the textbooks, we find a
reader approved for school use in four provinces saying: “There are no
trees in this cold land, but there is a kind of hard brown moss that
grows under the snow.” There are known to be more than 300 species of
Arctic moss. These the textbook ignores along with more than 700 kinds
of flowering plants. And why does this one moss that is known to the
textbook compiler do its growing under the snow? Isn’t it poor judgment
for even a moss to wait idle during the hot summer and to begin to
grow in the fall when snow comes? Or--and I gather this from the
complete selection--perhaps the author believes that a snow covering is
permanent in the Arctic. The fact is, of course, that Arctic land is
permanently snow-covered only on or near mountains. Most Arctic lands
are low and, like the Prairie Provinces, they have snow in winter and
none in summer. In Peary Land, the most northerly land on earth, there
are bees and butterflies in the rolling meadows of flowers and grass.
The textbook statement that musk oxen feed on moss is perhaps a
minor error from the point of view of this article, but it shows how
widespread are the inaccuracies. All those who have studied this animal
report that it lives mainly on grasses, sedges, and browse.
Up to this point, the geographies have, in the main, agreed to disagree
with the scientists. On the question of animal life they begin to
disagree with each other. Some of them, having talked so convincingly
of sparse vegetation, continue this idea. For, since many of the Arctic
animals are herbivorous, if the text admitted that there are large
numbers of them, the children might well begin to puzzle as to what
they lived on. Therefore we find one author saying that the Eskimos
live almost wholly on animals and that their “available food supply is
scanty.” A school reader has it that “there are very few (musk oxen)
left. They keep them in a park with a high wire fence about it.”
Others, however, report large herds of caribou and musk oxen, and some
go so far as to mention polar bears, wolves, foxes, hares, seals and
fish. But we gather from the texts that these animals lead a precarious
existence.
As a fact, few known waters are richer in fish, whales and seals than
those of the Arctic. The caribou of Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada number
several hundred for each single Eskimo, and yet travelers who have
described bands of thousands, and even herds of a hundred thousand
moving together, have never reported any noticeable depletion in the
vegetation.
In the case of musk oxen, there are probably 4,000 wild for every
forty that are in fenced parks. These wild musk oxen are in no danger
of extinction at present, for most of them are on islands that are
uninhabited, many of them never even visited by Eskimos.
Having invented a fictitious country and named it Eskimoland, the
textbooks find it necessary to invent a fictitious people, and the
Eskimos are misrepresented even more than the territories they inhabit.
They are supposed to be all alike, though some of them live farther
away from others than Canada is from Mexico, and have less contact.
Their climate has only one description in most textbooks, although
they really live in several different climates. The materials of
the description of land and people, so far as they are not invented
have, however, been gathered from many Eskimo countries, many Eskimo
climates, and many Eskimo peoples. The result is a patchwork portrait
which resembles no Eskimo who ever lived. Then they make this patchwork
man live in a patchwork country. One is as real as the other.
The schoolbook accounts of the Eskimo presumably arouse in the child
both pity and amusement. Here are some of the quotations:
“The Eskimo has an environment which forces him into constant conflict
with Nature. He is in continual danger of freezing and starving to
death.”
“The Eskimo suffers from intestinal diseases, malnutrition and scurvy,
and his resistance to disease is greatly lowered.
“The ravenous eating of tallow candles and soap by Eskimo children is
well attested.”
“When the Eskimo boy is thirsty, he drinks oil.”
Against this picture stands in my mind my own experience of living more
than ten years as an Eskimo among Eskimos. To me it seems that as a
race they have more leisure than city dwellers, for instance. Some of
the geographies mention their ivory carving and ornamental ceremonial
dress, but they leave it a mystery how a people under terrific strain
for a livelihood find time for such things. My observation has been
that in many communities the needed work to provide food, shelter
and clothing requires from the Eskimo less than half of our standard
eight-hour day. Four hours of work and eight of sleep give him twelve
hours of leisure. Accordingly, a man will spend a week carving an
ivory handle which he could have made plain in half a day. A woman who
could sew a warm coat in two days will spend two months making one not
so warm (but in her opinion prettier) by cutting up whole skins and
piecing them together in complicated designs. Entire communities spend
weeks singing and dancing and listening to story-tellers spinning out
long tales of adventure with spirits and with men. The winters, so
frightful in the textbooks, are their holiday season, spent in carrying
out elaborate festivities.
Most of the textbooks say or imply that most or all Eskimos live in
snow or ice houses in winter. This is geographical hodgepodge. No
Eskimos live in ice houses, or at least I never heard of it. Some
live in snow houses, but more than half the Eskimos in the world have
never seen them. In the textbooks all snow houses are called “igloos,”
but the word _iglu_ simply means house in general, or dwelling. It is
misleading to imply that snow houses are known to all Eskimos and used
by most of them. In many districts the snow house, being unknown, is
not even represented by any word in the vocabulary. Many Eskimos live
in houses built of earth and wood, or with bone rafters and walls of
stone and earth. There are several other types of dwelling.
The case is worse about the use of oil. According to the above textbook
quotation and many similar, they drink it. Before my recent study of
Canadian lower school texts, I had heard that they did this for two
other reasons--one that they liked it, and the other to keep warm. It
remained for a Toronto textbook to advance the new explanation that
they do it to quench thirst. But to have this true, the laws of both
physiology and chemistry would have to be changed. Physiology teaches
that thirst is quenched only by water, and chemistry that there is in
oil no water which the human stomach is capable of extracting.
The Eskimo stomach is similar to your stomach. If you think he drinks
oil for any reason, I would suggest that you take about a water tumbler
of whatever oil you prefer. If you have a strong will you may be able
to get it down, but the chances are three in four that you will not be
able to keep it down. If you are the one in four who can keep it down,
you will very soon wish that you weren’t.
The truth is that Eskimos use oil with their food, as we do salad oil
or gravy. They eat it but they don’t drink it, and, therefore, instead
of being weird monstrosities, they are just like us in this respect, as
they are in most fundamental human things.
One textbook says that a cold climate produces people who are stunted
in mind and body. For body the Eskimo might be described as of average
stature rather than small. Mentally their teachers usually report them
to be near the European average.
That brings us to the question of the spread of European education in
the Far North. A school reader says: “There are no books in that land
and (the Eskimos) could not read them if there were.” If this were
true, it would bear out the allegation that the Eskimos are stupid,
for the Danes began trying to teach them reading and writing about
two centuries ago. They found them apt pupils, the knowledge gained
by one or a few spreading by native instruction from house to house
and village to village. The work since then has been shared by two
governments, the Danish and that of the United States--Canada has,
as yet, taken no direct educational action. Effective cultural work
has been done by the churches, among them the Anglicans, Lutherans,
Moravians, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Roman Catholics. It would
be strange if the efforts of all these bodies, some going back two
hundred years, left it still a justifiable criticism of Eskimos that
they cannot read or write. As a matter of fact, more than half the
total Eskimo population of Greenland, Labrador, Canada and Alaska
can read and write some language, generally their own. They publish
some of their own books and have (in Greenland) a magazine that has
appeared regularly since 1867. Editors, proof-readers, type-setters,
engravers, printers, subscription solicitors and the rest have all
been Eskimo through all that time. No other language has been employed
in connection with the journal. It is as Eskimo as the _Spectator_ is
English.
Which, by the way, is more interesting, the fiction that “the Eskimo”
does not know what a book is, or the fact that one of the older
journals in the western hemisphere is in Eskimo?
That Eskimo children eat soap is ridiculous on the face of it. I have
never seen Eskimos eat candles, nor heard of a case. But if they did
eat tallow candles it would be no stranger than the eating of tallow in
any other form. Tallow is only suet, and many a well-ordered meal in
our country still includes suet pudding.
As for the “deficiency diseases and scurvy,” the Eskimos are, as far as
we know, free from them so long as they live on their own accustomed
diets. Once they begin to live on white men’s groceries and neglect
to secure fresh meat, these diseases grow. Dr. William A. Thomas, of
Chicago, found in Labrador, for instance, that the Eskimos who suffered
most were those nearest the trading stations and most supplied with
white men’s food. In the sections beyond the reach of the traders, or
little affected by them, the deficiency troubles vanished.
As to commercial dealings with the outside world, we are instructed
by the geographies in contrary ways. On page 12 of one of them, the
printed matter says: “The Eskimos have almost no trade with other
people. They must depend on their own country to supply their wants.”
But on page 123 of this same book, there is a photograph of six power
schooners--not whaleboats--with the caption “Eskimo Whaleboats, Fort
McPherson!”
It is, as a matter of fact, one of the important industries of Edmonton
to supply Eskimos with power schooners. I have seen a photograph from
the Arctic, sent me by an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
showing $100,000 worth of these in a single view. The same engines
that produce electric light for these Eskimos on shipboard in summer
are used by them sometimes to light their houses in winter. Some have
separate Delco electric lighting systems for their homes.
But the teachers of Edmonton, the city which furnishes most of these
supplies, use now, or did use recently, textbooks which state or imply
that the Eskimos have no boats except skin canoes, and no light except
seal-oil lamps. Nor can you defend the books by suggesting that they
are talking of fifty or a hundred years ago. The context shows that
these allegations are supposed to fit the present.
To balance all these unfavorable truths about the northern half of
Canada, I have been able to discover in the school texts one--and only
one--favorable mistake. A geography says, “Mosquitoes are found all
over the North American continent except in the extreme north.” Anyone
who has been there will tell you that the contrary is the fact. Until
you approach the Arctic you do not know how bad mosquitoes can be.
A thing which the incorrect schoolbooks are doing is to dampen that
current enthusiasm about the Far North of Canada which is due to the
beginning of actual mining in the Middle North, where Flin Flon and
Sherritt Gordon are already words to conjure with.
For these mines are in the sub-Arctic, which, according to the
textbooks, is almost as bad as the Arctic itself, a land barren because
of the cold. Mining is expensive where food is not produced locally and
where no one lives except the miners and their dependents. There is, in
consequence, a fundamental need to colonize even the richest mineral
districts with a food-producing population. Sunlight and rainfall
are, therefore, the most important resources of any district, and the
younger generation of Canadians should be permitted to grow up with a
true understanding of how heat and water are distributed, and how these
are used by nature for the production of those plants upon which all
animal life, including the human, must in the last resort depend.
Canada is two things, a people and a country. We need truthful
histories for a reasonable judgment of our past; we need accurate
geographies for planning the future. The schoolboys and the schoolgirls
of today, most of them without university training, will step into
control of this land tomorrow. Their chief equipment for that task
is their education. What the university courses teach in advanced
geography and climatology is not propaganda but truth. Why not give
the pupils of the common schools the advantage of the same correct
description of the climate and its results, so that they, too, will
know how to prepare for the great spread of settlements northward that
must continue till inhabited Canada becomes as broad as it is long,
a nation drawing power from all its territories, even the farthest
islands in the northern sea?
CHAPTER VII.
OLOF KRARER
In the schools of many lands, including those which speak English, the
Eskimos are studied during the early grades. In my youth I learned many
strange things concerning them. We spoke of Eskimos and of Eskimoland
as if the people were all alike and lived in one place.
The Eskimos are a godsend to the schools. From their simplicity you
can get a parallel to the simplicity of our own remote ancestors and
also a contrast to the multiplicities of civilization. It is easy to
teach and to learn that, while in our land it is sometimes hot and
sometimes cold, there is a district south of us where it is always hot
and another north of us, Eskimoland, where it is always cold. This
impresses upon the child-mind that there is a balance and symmetry in
nature, which has been a favorite doctrine since Greek times.
Heat is life-giving (the school instruction went on); the hot lands
are luxuriant and beautiful. Cold is deadening; the cold lands of the
Eskimos are sterile, bleak, forbidding. Things develop to large size in
heat; cold has a stunting influence. Therefore, trees become smaller
and smaller as you go north until you come to the last cringing shrubs.
Beyond them, in a treeless waste, are the Eskimos, a little people,
themselves stunted by the cold. In their bitter struggle to eke out
the scantiest of livings they cower, wrapped in furs, inside huts of
snow which give them bare shelter from the furious Arctic blizzards. To
keep warm they eat the most warming food, which is fat; so they live on
blubber. They grease their bodies with oil as a further protection from
the cold, and they drink oil. Though we need varied meals, a balanced
ration, the Eskimos are strangely able to live on animal tissues alone
and they eat their meat raw, usually warm from a recently slaughtered
beast or else frozen.
But, marvelous to relate, in spite of all these things, the Eskimos are
a jolly, happy little people. They serve thus a double moral purpose.
The gruesome view of their land and of their life makes us better
contented with ours; we see from their happiness under conditions of
misery that really it isn’t so bad, in comparison, to be poor and
jobless down here. We should all, therefore, be contented and happy.
In view of the large place held by Eskimos in our scheme of child
training, the misfortune is serious that our educators, particularly
the writers of our schoolbooks, have been forced to get their Eskimo
material at second hand from the writings and lectures of explorers.
The situation was made worse in that a good many explorers lacked the
imagination and the literary gifts necessary for making possible the
desired insight into the heart and soul of these present-day survivors
of Stone Age man.
It is a major good fortune that American educators have had opportunity
for close relation with at least one Eskimo, Olof Krarer.
* * * * *
The autumn 1912 I came south after four consecutive years in the
Arctic, making several reports, one of them that among some hundreds
of Eskimos who were not known to have been in touch with Europeans I
had seen ten or more who were as light in complexion and eye color as
if they were anything from one-quarter to three-quarters European. A
reporter changed my statement to convey the impression that I had found
near Coronation Gulf several hundred Eskimos all of whom were blond.
This reporter has since claimed, probably with more right than anybody
else, that he made me famous. Certainly there was a big newspaper
hubbub.
In a barrage of letters to the press there came one from Ithaca, New
York. The writer was a professor of Cornell. He tried to bring into
an acrimonious discussion a quiet, urbane tone. It was not fair, he
contended, to denounce Stefansson as a charlatan for having claimed to
discover a new race of blond people in the Far North, for these people
indubitably exist. But neither was it fair to praise his “discovery”
vociferously, as some were doing, for blond Eskimos were so well known
that they were, for instance, a matter of his own experience and that
of his family. For he and his wife had had the pleasure some years ago
to entertain in their home one of them who had come to Ithaca as a
lecturer. She was a woman named Olof Krarer, small of stature like the
rest of her people, with light hair and with blue eyes of quite the
Scandinavian type. She had made a favorable impression.[17]
The letter from Cornell stirred childhood recollections. I had heard
my mother and the neighbors talk of a strange and pathetic girl who
came with them on the emigrant ship from Iceland in 1876. She must
have been nearing twenty but she was small for a child of ten, a
dwarf. She was vivacious, ambitious, and talked of the opportunities
for distinction and advancement which awaited her in the New World.
Her fellow-immigrants did not know whether to laugh or weep. She was
clever, but her physical handicap seemed more than her gifts could
surmount.
The party of colonists landed in Nova Scotia. After a year in that
province many of them traveled west through the Great Lakes and by
way of the Red River of the North to Lake Winnipeg, where my parents
settled and where I was born.
In 1880 our family moved to Dakota Territory and so did Olof’s, but she
had gone off on her own and was probably in Winnipeg. Some years later
we heard in North Dakota that she was in a circus exhibiting herself as
an Eskimo. The Icelanders (who until recently were proud of being about
the least adulterated Nordics in Europe) were at first scandalized
and inclined to attempt stopping the imposture. On second thought
most if not all of them felt that little harm could be done to their
nationality by the fraud compared to the tragedy it would be for this
handicapped woman to be exposed and deprived of the one thing which
gave her a livelihood and a tolerable life. We know now that she even
won respect and affection--witness the above Cornell testimony and much
shall be hereinafter cited.
There was presently in the Icelandic community in North Dakota a
connected story of Olof Krarer. I do not know whether it was brought
or whether it just grew. No doubt it was partly imagination; equally
without doubt it was partly true.
Our North Dakota version of the story ran that Olof had been waitress
in a hotel. Seeing how small she was, the guests asked about her and
were told, sometimes by herself and sometimes by the hotel people, that
she was an Icelander. The comeback was usually: “How interesting! We
never saw an Eskimo before.” Olof would then explain that Icelanders
were not Eskimos and that their blood was chiefly Norwegian with a
little mixture of Irish.[18] The interest waned. There were plenty of
Norwegians around; the Irish were no rarity. That sort of dwarf was
hardly a seven days’ wonder.
But there were new guests in the hotel daily, new questions about
Olof, and new accents for the tiresome: “How interesting! We never saw
an Eskimo before.” She became bored, annoyed, outraged. Finally she
stopped explaining that Icelanders were not Eskimos and simply flounced
off. The interpretation of that was, poor thing, she was ashamed of
being an Eskimo. Her silence now gave consent.
One day a local clergyman appeared. He said that the young people of
his church had a mid-week meeting and they would be so interested if
Olof would come down and talk to them informally about the Eskimos.
They would be glad to pay her five dollars.
I go back to what my mother said of the pathetic ambition and
anticipations of the dwarf. I imagine how, perhaps at first through
embarrassment Olof did not correct the minister. When his invitation
came to the five-dollar offer she was already realizing that her chance
had come. She agreed to give the talk.
Combining testimony of the Cornell professor with that of my mother, I
imagine further that Olof went to the town library next day, or to some
bookish friend, and read up on the Eskimos. Then, to the best of her
ability, she improvised a story of an Eskimo childhood and gave it at
the mid-week church meeting. It was accepted and she was on that road
which took her to the lyceum platform and the circus. As we shall see,
it took her to other places, to fame and to a lasting influence upon
American education and thought.
My memories, temporarily revived in 1912 by the Cornell professor’s
letter, had receded vaguely into the background when, in 1922, I had a
secretary, Miss Dorothy Daggett. She came from a week-end one Monday
morning and asked whether a young man whom she had met at the house
party might come and consult me about an extraordinary yarn which he
had picked up in Florida and which he had already sold tentatively to
a magazine. She had urged him not to print without consulting me, for
the story was about an Eskimo and seemed to her spurious. She did not
think that a young man ought to risk publishing that sort of thing at
the beginning of a literary career.
In due course John Schoolcraft arrived and told the following story
which I quote from notes made at the time:
THE STORY OF OLAF CRERAR
as told by
John Schoolcraft
The Eskimo woman, Olaf Crerar, says she was born on the north coast of
Greenland in a village of thirty or forty houses, with an average of
four people in each house. A family of eight children in that country
is equivalent to one of twenty in this. The average family has two or
three.
One day two big white men came into their village, the first big men
they had ever seen and the first whites. The North Greenland Eskimos
are blond themselves, but owing to the smoke in their houses they
didn’t know it. The two big men were Icelanders. After living in the
village about a year, they persuaded Olaf’s father to go on a long
journey with them. He had no idea where he was going but he consented,
and, as is always the case on long hunting trips, he took his family
with him. They started across the ice and it took them something like
three months to make the journey from northern Greenland to northern
Iceland. When they came to the Gulf Stream it was partly open. There
they went from one ice floe to another, like Eliza crossing the Ohio.
They finally got to Iceland.
Olaf was about sixteen when she left Greenland (or perhaps she was
twenty). She stayed in Iceland something like four and a half years.
At the end of that time, all of her family were dead except herself
and her father. They died from the change in climate. There was a
missionary there who took a great interest in her and baptized her
into the (Lutheran) church. Her Eskimo name was Ahbo. The missionary,
in giving her a Christian name, wanted to get one as close to the
Eskimo as possible, so he called her Olaf. I don’t know where she got
her last name, which sounds like Crerar.
Olaf suffered so from the Icelandic climate that the missionary
decided to send her and her father with some friends of his to Canada,
thinking its climate would probably be better for them both than the
Icelandic. He started them off on a boat with a company of Icelanders,
and there may have been some Swedes and Norwegians. They landed at
Quebec.
Olaf was knocked around from pillar to post in the United States and
Canada for awhile, with this funny little father of hers. At that time
she was 40 inches high, 45 inches around the waist, and weighed 136
pounds. Her father was smaller than she.
She told that she had been a nursemaid and implied that she had worked
in hotels. On one occasion she was taken sick in a hotel in St. Paul
and a doctor visited her who had been in Greenland and who knew a few
words of her language.
Then Mr. Slayton of the Slayton Lyceum Bureau ran across her and
thought she would be a good lecturer, so he took her into his home and
together they worked up a lecture. She went around the country for
something like twenty-five years (she is sixty-two now) lecturing. For
the last few years of this time she was not only a lecturer but a sort
of collector for Mr. Slayton. He would give these (lyceum) courses and
she would be the last one on the course and would collect the money
from those who had sponsored the course. The understanding was that at
his death she was to have a home in his house as long as she lived.
She did live with Mrs. Slayton for a number of years.
While in Florida she met the people named Stone who took her back to
Michigan with them--Mr. I. K. Stone, Maple Street, Battle Creek,
Michigan. She is living there now and has been with them two or three
years. She is always telling them how in Greenland people always
tell the truth. It is a great shock to her, she says, to come into a
civilization where they don’t tell the truth. So in the household,
when they aren’t kidding each other, they have the saying, “This is
Greenland.”
Olaf says that the people up in northern Greenland where she was born
continue to grow until they are thirty-five. When mature they are very
small, like herself, and they mature slowly. They don’t marry until
they are twenty-five, and children don’t walk until they are three.
She says that the mothers do not nurse their children at all. As soon
as a baby is born they give him a piece of whale meat and tell him to
carry on. Many life processes there seem greatly slowed down.
However, a person of sixty is very old. They die off rapidly from what
Olaf thought was something like tuberculosis. It was a wasting disease
and usually ended with hemorrhage. She thought it was brought on by
the change in going from the heated hut into the cold air outside.
North Greenland children are born either in the light time or in the
dark time (the well-known six-month day and six-month night). When a
child is born, the mother picks out a certain kind of bone. Since they
live on polar bears, walrus and seals more than anything, it might be
a bone from one of these animals. She has a little bag on the wall and
drops into it a certain distinctive kind of bone for each child, and
as each light time or dark time comes around she drops another bone
of this same sort into the bag. In that way she can keep track of the
children’s ages. The children are forbidden to touch that bag, and if
they do the punishment is severe.
Olaf said these people believed in one big good spirit and one big
bad spirit, and there are also little good spirits and little bad
spirits. The big good one sent the little good ones around, and
similarly with the bad spirit. When a person dies he becomes a good
or bad spirit according to the way he has lived. Asked what was their
standard of good and bad, she replied that if during this sickness,
which evidently came on them all, the man or woman was patient and
unselfish, then he turned into a good spirit. Those who were cross and
complaining turned into bad spirits.
If a woman is sick she is put into one corner of the hut and no one
pays any attention to her. If she is given anything, it is given
furtively. In the case of a man he is taken off and put in a hut
by himself. The reason is that sickness is brought about by one of
the bad spirits, and if you favor the sick person you bring the bad
spirit’s attention to yourself.
The language is extremely simple, with a great many words which by
different intonations mean different things. They count up to ten
and have one word which means ten and some more, which may be eleven
or eleven million. The hardest thing for her to do in Iceland and in
this country was to learn to think. The Eskimos talk a little about
the fire and a little about the polar bear and walrus, but have no
abstract ideas. The vocabulary is very small. There is absolutely no
vegetation in North Greenland, with the exception of some seaweed. The
reindeer there, which are very poor and which the people do not use
for food purposes at all, live on fish.
These Eskimos have no steel, and when a man goes on a long trip where
he can’t carry a fire, he makes a fire by striking a stone against a
walrus tusk. He may work hours and hours to get a spark.
When a young man wants to marry, he picks out the girl he is
interested in and stops hunting. He goes to the house of this girl
and gets his food there for some time. If the girl’s parents continue
to make him welcome, he knows he is acceptable. Then he has to get
the girl out of that house into some other house in the village (it
doesn’t matter which one) without being seen. His success constitutes
the wedding ceremony. If he fails, he is punished by death. Failures
occur and the death penalty is actually inflicted.
The facts on Olof put Schoolcraft in a position from which he could
find no escape. His literary conscience would not permit him to use
the story in its original form, after he had found that it was a hoax;
his humanitarian instincts would not allow him to expose the old lady,
who was, after all, harmless in his view compared to the hordes of
charlatans who get by. As long as her friends believed in her she
would have a home, and these were probably her last few as well as
her declining years. Schoolcraft, who needed both money and _kudos_,
gritted his teeth and canceled his bargain with the editor.
You have guessed it. The young and high-minded author received his
reward. Dorothy Daggett is now Mrs. John Schoolcraft.
No more than Schoolcraft could we publish, until Olof Krarer’s death.
But the responsibilities we feel towards that small minority who seek
the facts, dictated eventual publication and therefore the immediate
gathering of testimonies, documents, and explanatory theories.
The first step was to enlist the help of Miss Thorstina Jackson, a
graduate student at Columbia University, whose father, Thorleifur
Joakimsson Jackson, had been historian of the Icelandic colonization in
North America--chiefly Minnesota, North Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan
and Alberta, but also Nova Scotia and Utah. Many of his studies had
been published, but there were others in manuscript. On canvass, these
sources did not yield much directly, but Miss Jackson (now Mrs. Emile
Waters) knew just how to follow up the investigation.
From the various replies to her letters it was possible to establish
Olof’s baptismal name, the names of her parents, her birthplace and
date of birth. For a time we were following the wrong track on these
points, for the first answer to our queries stated that Olof was the
daughter of Jonatan Halldorsson. Jackson’s pioneer sketches did not
list Olof as a child of this family and a later correspondent, G. J.
Hallsson, of Hallson, North Dakota, in a letter dated May 26, 1926,
gave the right clue:
“... I feel certain I know the person you refer to. It must be Olof
Solfadottir, from Langamiri in Hunavatnsysla. This girl was a dwarf in
stature....”
At this time Miss Jackson made a trip to Iceland. While there she
went to the Government library in Reykjavik and obtained from
the _Kirkjubok_ (Book of Church Records) a copy of Olof’s birth
certificate. We quote a translation of the Icelandic document which she
forwarded:
BIRTH CERTIFICATE
_Ólöf Sölvadóttir_
Born 15 February 1858 baptized 17th of the same month.
Parents: Sölvi Sölvason and Solveig Stefánsdóttir, man and wife of
Outer Langamyri.
The above is correct according to the register of Audkul Parish.
Certified
The National Archives, Reykjavik, 13 July, 1926.
(Signed) Hannes Thorsteinsson.
The following year the identification was further confirmed and
documented by B. L. Baldwinson, of 729 Sherbrook Street, Winnipeg,
Manitoba, as will appear.
All the accounts of Olof’s early years in Canada, before she assumed
the character of Miss Krarer the Eskimo, swayer of American educational
destinies, are vague and the details vary, but the general outlines are
similar. As a continuation of the above Hallsson letter, we quote a
version, differing somewhat from my memory of my mother’s:
“... She (Olof) had been living with her father in Winnipeg and left
him in 1880 to live with an English couple. They were then resident
in Winnipeg but I have no doubt they were really traveling players
who had some connection with a large company of actors. I believe
that shortly thereafter they left Winnipeg for the United States, for
(soon) after she got south across the line she was recognized as the
same girl, although she had then already assumed her Eskimo character.
Why she did this, I am unable to explain. I knew her very well and
lived in the same neighborhood. For that reason I would consider it
remarkable if she did anything seriously reprehensible so long as her
conduct was fully governed by her own desires. She seemed to have a
good and firm character and was intelligent above the average.
“According to my understanding, it seems clear that the woman who
adopted her came to be largely in control of whatever she did.”
The most complete and thoroughly documented information came from
Baldwinson, who enclosed with his letter on November 16, 1927, a
statement which we quote in full.
“_Olof Solvadottir_
“Born at Ytri Longumyri in Blondudal in Hunavatnssyslu in Iceland
about the year 1860 or 1861.
“Her father Solvi Sölvason, farmer.
“Her mother Solveig Stefansdottir: his wife.
“Solvi lost his wife in Iceland and remarried there; his second wife
was Soffia Eyjolfsdottir, a widow. They emigrated from Iceland to
Canada in the year 1876 and settled a short distance north of the town
of Gimli in Manitoba and remained there for about 3 years until they
moved to Winnipeg in or about the year 1879, where they resided for a
period of 2 years. They then moved to Hallson in N. Dakota, built a
house and resided there for several years, until they moved to Seattle
in the state of Washington. There they built a house in Ballard and
remained there until their death.
“Olof Solvadottir is a dwarf. She left her family while they lived
in the Gimli district and went to Winnipeg to secure work. There she
joined up with an American traveling tent show and has since been lost
to all her relatives though she is known to be alive and well and in
the care of wealthy benefactors in the United States. Her nearest
relatives are:
(Here followed names and addresses of three brothers and a sister, in
the U.S.A. and Canada, and of a relative in Iceland.)
“This information is given by Magnus Bjornson, 11 McDonald St.,
Winnipeg, who is a foster brother to Olof since she lost her mother
in Iceland, and also by her brother at Westbourne as to names and
addresses of her brothers and sisters. The two photos herewith
enclosed are taken from photos the property of Magnus Bjornson.”
The accompanying letter from Baldwinson said in part:
“... Magnus Bjornson, Olof’s foster brother ... ran into Olof in a
circus a few years after she had begun to exhibit herself. She then
pretended not to recognize him, which he said suited him well enough,
for he did not want to be the cause of her getting into trouble about
her (pretended) nationality.”
An earlier letter from Baldwinson contained an explanatory note on some
photographs which were enclosed.
“I have also secured two pictures of her, one by herself, the other
with the man that she is said to have been married to--both of them
are wearing wedding rings.”
This photograph shows the figures of equal stature. The body
proportions are those of dwarfs.
Following these inquiries my activities in the Olof Krarer case were
long suspended. And then, in Utica, New York (1932), I met Miss Frances
A. Finch who, as a child, had known Olof Krarer in Florida. She told me
something of her childhood recollections of this interesting character,
and later confirmed them by a letter which I quote in part, dated from
Skaneateles, New York, November 27, 1932:
“As you requested, I have gone into the question at home, but I think
that the enclosed material (photographs) is all I have that would be
of interest to you....
“Print No. 1 is the one I mentioned as having been taken during the
winter of 1917-1918. I was ten years old at the time. Miss Krarer and
I are standing on the same step. I presume I was of average height,
for now, at the age of twenty-five, I am about five feet two and a
half inches tall. (The picture shows the girl of ten considerably
taller than the old “Eskimo.”)
“Miss Krarer was about fifty-eight years old when these pictures were
taken, and print No. 2 shows Miss Olaf with a bouquet presented her at
that year’s celebration of her birthday....
“... The woman with whom Miss Krarer lived was Mrs. (H. P.?)
Slayton.... Although Mrs. Slayton was considered the owner of
the Seven Gables Apartments, rumor had it that Olaf Krarer had a
substantial interest. I’ve been unable to verify the location of the
Seven Gables Apartments, pictured in print No. 3, except that it
stands at a corner of Williams Park in St. Petersburg, Florida.”[19]
In November, 1934, my friend, Miss Gretchen Switzer, of Columbia
University, told me that she was about to visit St. Petersburg. For
reasons two or three paragraphs ahead, she was interested in the case
of Olof Krarer. She followed up the information given by Miss Finch.
In St. Petersburg she was able to verify the name and address of Mrs.
Slayton (Mrs. W. P. Slayton) and the location of the Seven Gables
Apartments. She also talked with the clerk of the Princess Martha
Hotel, H. B. Boardman (now of The New Hotel Delaware, Ocean City, New
Jersey) who said that Olof was known there only as Olof the Eskimo. To
the best of his knowledge she had gone to Battle Creek and at that
time (1934) was in Chicago.[20]
Some years ago I became interested in the similarity between the
Krarer tradition and the views about Eskimos held in Teachers College,
Columbia University. I asked Miss Switzer, then a member of the New
College staff of Teachers College, where she had obtained her ideas
and it seemed she could trace a number of them to having studied in
the lower grades a book published by Rand McNally and Company, _Eskimo
Stories_ (copyright 1902). A check showed that the author, Mary Estella
E. Smith, of the Jenner School, Chicago, had for the last paragraph of
its introduction, dated June 14, 1902:
“The author acknowledges her appreciation of the valuable suggestions
made by Miss Olof Krarer, who read the book in manuscript, and whose
interesting autobiography appears at the close of the volume under the
title, ‘The Story of a Real Eskimo.’”
A little earlier in the introduction Miss Smith says that
“... various books have been consulted and drawn upon for basic
material, but special acknowledgment is due ‘My Arctic Journal,’ by
Josephine D. Peary, and ‘The Children of the Cold,’ by Frederick
Schwatka.”
Clearly Miss Smith did get a considerable part of her material from
the dry-as-dust fact school, and perhaps three-quarters of her book
would be in humdrum correspondence with things as they physically are.
But some of the more entertaining portions, likeliest to cling to the
mind of a learner, are seemingly based on the “valuable suggestions
made by Miss Olof Krarer.” Though perhaps small in quantity, beside the
contributions by Mrs. Peary and Lieutenant Schwatka, the Krarer section
of the schoolbook was bound to impress itself, for the author says to
the teacher at the head of the Krarer autobiography, _The Story of a
Real Eskimo_, that “this story should be read to the children before
they begin reading the book.”
We quote portions of _The Story of a Real Eskimo_:
“I was born on the east coast of Greenland, the least known to
civilization, about one thousand miles north and a little west
of Iceland. I am the youngest of eight children. As nearly as I
can remember,[21] my father’s house was on a low plain near the
seashore....
“Our house was built of snow....
“... Outside of the door was a long, narrow passageway, just high
enough for one of us little Eskimo people to stand up straight in.
That would be about high enough for a child eight years old in this
country; and it was only wide enough for one person to go through at
a time. If one wanted to go out and another wanted to come in at the
same time one would have to back out of the passageway and let the
other go first....
“Our fireplace was in the center of the house. The bottom was a large
flat stone with other stones piled about the edge to keep the fire
from getting into the room. When we wanted to build a fire we would
put some dried meat and bones on the stone; then a little dry moss was
put in, and then my father would take a flint and a whale’s tooth and
strike fire upon the moss. Sometimes it took a long time to make it
burn. After the fire started he would put some blubber upon it....
“... Our food is eaten raw and frozen. We have only the salt ocean
water, and if we had soft, fresh water we would not dare to use it,
for it would be like poison to our flesh with the thermometer 80° or
90° below zero. So, when we eat, we take a piece of raw meat in one
hand and a chunk of blubber in the other, and take a bite of each
until it is eaten. Then we carefully rub the grease and fat all over
our hands and face, and feel fine afterwards. My people have long
hair, made dark by the smoke and grease.
“There was no chance to play and romp inside the snow house. We
just had to sit still with our arms folded. It was in this way that
my arms came to have such a different shape from people’s arms in
this country. Where their muscle is large and strong, I have but
very little; and instead of that, I have a large bunch of muscle on
the upper side of my arms, and they are crooked so that I can never
straighten them.
“Sometimes we used to get very tired in the dark snow house and then
we would try a little amusement. Two of us would sit down on the fur
carpet, and looking into each other’s faces, guess who was the best
looking. We had to guess at it, for we had no looking-glass in which
to see our faces.
“The one whose face shone the most with the grease was called the
prettiest. If at any time we grew tired of it all, and ventured to
jump about and to play, we were in danger of being punished. When a
child was naughty, mother would place a bone on the fire, leaving it
there until it was hot enough for the grease to boil out. Then she
would slap it on the child. She was not particular where she burned
her child, except that she was careful not to touch the face....
“But it was not always so that we had to stay in the snow house. Once
in a while father would come in and say it was not so cold as usual,
and then we would have a chance to look around outside the snow house.
We never took long walks. There were some steep, jagged rocks in sight
of our village, and during the long daytime enough of the snow would
melt off to leave the rocks bare in a few places....
“Now, in order that you may understand our way of living better,
I will explain that we have six months night in Greenland, and
during that time nothing is seen of the sun.... Before and after the
night-time there was about a month of twilight....
“In the long day we had the hardest time, for then the sun shone out
so brightly that we would be made snow-blind if we ventured far from
home. The day was four months long, and if we did not have food enough
stored away in an ice cave to last us through, we would be in great
danger of starving.
“... My father’s name was Krauker, my name was Oluar. On arriving in
Iceland I was baptized Olof Krarer.
“One thing had a great deal of interest for us all. When the sun shone
out at the beginning of the daytime, it marked the first of the year,
as New Year’s day marks the beginning of the year in this country.
Then our parents would take out the sacks, each one of the family
having one of their own. In each sack was a piece of bone for every
first time that person had seen the sun. When ten bones were gathered,
they would tie them into a bundle, for they had not words to count
more than ten. In such a land was I born, in such a home was I brought
up. In such pleasures I rejoiced until there were about fifteen bones
in my sack.
“Then something happened which changed my whole life. Six tall men
came to our village. They proved to be Iceland whalers who had been
shipwrecked in a storm and who finally reached Greenland. When they
returned to Iceland my father’s family went with them....
“Eskimos have no idea of a book.... They think, in their ignorance,
they are the only people, and are consequently contented and happy.
“June 16, 1902.
“Olof Krarer.”
By her own account Miss Krarer had been born an Eskimo in Greenland;
those who claim to be her relatives state she was born an Icelander
in Iceland. Both countries, and the sea between them, are hazy to the
average reader and so a few remarks may be worth while.
Iceland is the largest country now inhabited by Europeans which had no
aborigines when discovered. It is, too, the largest in the northern
hemisphere of those islands which do not show, archeologically or
historically, any evidence of pre-white human occupation.
The Irish discovered Iceland around or before A. D. 795; the Norsemen
first visited the country around 850 and say they found ahead of them
no people except the Irish. These things, so far as we know, are
undisputed.
The part of Greenland, where Olof claimed to have been born around
1860, “a thousand miles north and a little west of Iceland,” can never
have been inhabited during the last several thousand years, since that
distance takes you far into the interior, up on the inland ice where,
so far as we understand it, neither humans nor the animals upon which
hunters depend can have lived since prior to that Ice Age which,
millenniums back, gave the land its present cap of snow.
Be liberal with Olof and place her family on the seacoast of Greenland
north and a little east from central Iceland. We then have a district
that is believed by anthropologists and explorers not to have been
inhabited by Eskimos at or anywhere near the time when Olof was born.
If you wanted to be extremely generous, you might connect her story
up with the few Eskimos seen by Clavering, near what is now Shannon
Island, in 1823. Shannon is, true enough, some 500 miles south of
Olof’s claimed birthplace, but then it is also 500 miles north of where
her alleged family claim she was born. That is kind of fifty-fifty.
The Clavering people were, by his account and that of Sabine,
apparently just ordinary Eskimos, looking more or less as if they were
Chinese. Olof tells that her Eskimo relatives were blond, but then she
mentions that they did not know they were blond, they were so blackened
with the smoke from their lamps. Most travelers have explained that
Eskimos trim their lamps so carefully that they rarely smoke--but, if
we start out to be generous, why haggle over a few smudges of lampblack?
Except Olof’s there is no account of Icelanders going to eastern or
northeastern Greenland near the time she says, nor ever any time for
many decades before and after. So far as known, Europeans never visited
northeastern Greenland (1000 miles north of Iceland) until after Miss
Krarer became a prominent lecturer. Those Europeans were Danes, not
Icelanders.
Olof seems to be the only person who has claimed that the sea was ever
so frozen, or so filled with ice, between Greenland and Iceland that
people could walk across in the manner described by her, or in any
manner.
I know of one Eskimo having been in Virginia; I cannot find testimony,
except Miss Krarer’s, that any Eskimo ever was in Iceland. Just
possibly at some time during the Middle Ages some Icelander may have
brought an Eskimo from Greenland, but, if so, there is no account of
it. There is one account of a medieval Icelander who did see Eskimos
on the southern east coast of Greenland, but the narrative explicitly
states that when he sailed from there he left the Eskimos behind.
Iceland is among the countries which do not feel, or at least did not
until very recently, any such need for Eskimos in their system of
education as we feel in ours. You can see through authorities such
as Professor Ellsworth Huntington of Yale, in his _The Character of
Races_, that they are comparatively a learned people, so you would
expect book knowledge of the Eskimos which Olof might have picked
up. But other writers, for instance, Bayard Taylor in his _Egypt
and Iceland in the Year 1874_, have pointed out that the Icelandic
learning, next after dealing with their own antiquities, is heavily
preoccupied with Greece, Rome, and the Mediterranean countries
generally. The Icelanders tend to be classicists in their schooling and
reading.
It was, therefore, in one way unfortunate that Olof, when she came
to formulate the accounts of her Greenland childhood, had little
groundwork derivable from her Icelandic education or from the knowledge
of her friends and family. But in another way it was fortunate that she
had to pick up her ideas in America. For this made it simple to fit
herself to traditional beliefs, avoiding conflict with her hearers.
So in Miss Krarer’s account, as in the view previously common, the
Eskimos are (for instance) a small people, they grease themselves with
oil, they all live in snow houses, and they suffer long periods of
uninterrupted darkness followed by long periods of uninterrupted light.
The Krarer version of Arctic lore does introduce a few novelties, as,
for instance, where she says that:
“... we have six months night in Greenland.... Before and after the
night-time there was about a month of twilight.... The day was four
months long.”
That replaced the six-month day and six-month night. After all, she had
to contribute something novel or there could have been little advantage
in getting knowledge for American textbooks and supplementary readers
straight from a real Eskimo.
There is an almost tragic contrast between the Krarer division of
daylight and darkness and the one which has recently forced its way
into American school teaching, disturbing its symmetry. Like Miss
Krarer’s, this view attacks the even division between light and dark
but (and here is the tragedy) where Miss Krarer arrived at a darkness
period much longer than the daylight, the astronomers who are bothering
the schools claim a daylight period much longer than the darkness.
Their ratio is practically the same as hers, only reversed.
What a triumph it would have been for the little Eskimo had she only
reversed the naming of her four-month and eight-month periods! The
astronomers, right enough, are talking for the mathematical North Pole
and Miss Krarer for a point only a thousand miles north of Iceland;
but that discrepancy would not have been so hard to explain away.
After all, Miss Krarer was born at a time when many geographers still
believed Greenland extended to and beyond the North Pole, and she might
so easily have been mistaken as to whether she was born one thousand or
sixteen hundred miles north of Iceland.
As mentioned, it was the opinion among the Icelanders in North Dakota
that Olof Solvadottir, the normally blond and blue-eyed Nordic
dwarf, born in Iceland, had been induced by “the English couple” who
adopted her to take the character of the Eskimo Olof Krarer, born in
northeastern Greenland. The first the Icelanders knew of her changed
status was when they discovered her as a freak in a circus. According
to my mother’s version of how Olof came to assume the Eskimo character,
she went straight from waiting on table in a hotel to lecturing on a
lyceum circuit--there was no mention of an intervening circus career.
But there was a circus period, that seems clear. Perhaps the sequence
was small-time lecturing, circus, big-time lecturing.
At any rate, there is no reason to doubt the testimony which connects
Olof with a foremost bureau of lyceum’s heyday.
Some of the leaders in the modern celebrity business are old stagers
from the lyceum and Chautauqua days. Among these are O. B. Stephenson,
head of the long successful Emerson Lyceum Bureau, Orchestra Building,
South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, and the veteran field worker and at
present independent bureau manager, William H. Stout, Bluff Road
37, Greenwood, Indiana. From them and others we piece together the
following:
At the crest of the lyceum and Chautauqua business one of the most
successful organizations was the Slayton Lyceum Bureau, dating back
also well among the pioneers. They ranked almost if not quite with
such great institutions as the Redpath Bureau and produced some very
successful managers who later branched out for themselves, as for
instance, Charles L. Wagner, who was secretary for the Slaytons, a
dominant figure with them at that time, and who is now a New York
leader in concert management, with offices at 511 Fifth Avenue. It
seems clear that the Slaytons had nothing to do with Olof’s change of
state but received her as a full-fledged Eskimo from those earlier
patrons who may have been influential in changing her, or who at any
rate may have been with her at the time she changed and thus familiar
with the stages of the transformation.
The story of Miss Krarer’s entry into and success in the big-time
lyceum field is succinctly given by W. P. Slayton, son of the founder
of the bureau, who writes from the Hotel Lorraine, Chicago, June 30,
1936:
“As I recall, my Father, Henry L. Slayton, made a trip to Minnesota to
meet Miss Krarer with a view of making a contract for her appearance
under the management of the Slayton Lyceum Bureau. At that time she
was lecturing on Greenland with bookings arranged by a personal
manager. This was back in the Eighties, I believe.
“She was glad to come under our management and we booked her for the
next thirty years or until her eyesight failed and she had to give
up platform work. She filled over 2500 lecture engagements for us, of
which over eighty were delivered in Philadelphia alone.
“The last two years of her life were spent at the Old Peoples Baptist
Home in Maywood, Ill. She must have been over seventy years old. Her
height forty inches. A very interesting personality on the platform
and she had a host of friends all over the country.”
From the time, then, when Henry L. Slayton discovered her, Miss Krarer
was one of their chief and successful attractions. She was on the road
pretty well constantly, lectured in schools, universities, churches,
auditoriums, and under summer Chautauqua tents. Wherever she went she
appears to have made a favorable impression personally and to have
conveyed vividly her picture of that northeastern Greenland where she
said she had been born an Eskimo.
We have further proof of Miss Krarer’s success on the lyceum and
Chautauqua platforms from S. Russell Bridges, one of the leaders in the
lyceum field and now head of the Alkahest Lyceum Bureau of Atlanta,
Georgia. He writes under date of July 31, 1936:
“Yes, I remember the little Eskimo lady, Miss Krarer, whom we had on
one of our Chautauqua circuits, as I recall, in the summer of 1911.
Then the following winter she came down and filled a few lyceum
engagements. She was an excellent attraction who always made good with
her audiences, and besides, she was a good box office feature.
“... I recall trying to meet her when she first came down from Chicago
to begin her tour for us but I missed her at the station and followed
her on to the hotel where they had refused to give her a room until I
arrived and identified her....
“Another incident I recall is that she and William Jennings Bryan
appeared on our Chautauqua at Newnan, Georgia, the same date, he in
the morning and she in the afternoon, but they were both leaving at
the same time and when the train pulled in at the depot, I took her
baggage and went ahead and Mr. Bryan was following but when I got on
the platform of the train, she was trying to reach the step but could
not quite make it. Finally Bryan picked her up and put her up on the
platform as you would a child.”
The way in which Olof Krarer was presented to the public, the character
of her service, and the impression she made upon her audiences, we try
to show more concretely by quotations from a statement about her made
by the Slayton Lyceum Bureau (then of Steinway Hall, Chicago). The
document we have was likely printed in 1902 or 1903, according to an
informant who was in touch with Miss Krarer then. It is, therefore, of
about the period when The Little Eskimo was collaborating with Chicago
educators and publishers along those lines which, through _Eskimo
Stories_ and otherwise, have had so profound an influence upon American
schools. The statement runs:
“MISS OLOF KRARER has become one of the best known lecturers that ever
appeared on the lyceum platform. She does not appear as a freak or a
curiosity, but on her merits. The Bureau always guarantees that she
will give entire satisfaction to any audience, however critical. Large
sums of money have been made from her lectures by churches, charity
organizations and lyceums. Many a church debt has been raised and a
weak lecture course freed from debt by the receipts from one of her
lectures.
“For several years after the arrival of Miss Krarer in the United
States it was very difficult for her to live through the summer
months; she has, on the other hand, taken long rides during our
coldest days in winter, with only her ordinary apparel, without the
slightest discomfort, while those accompanying her were nearly frozen
to death.
“The simple story of her life, as she tells it, is more interesting
than a fairy tale. At the close of her lecture anyone in the audience
is at liberty to ask her any proper questions concerning her life and
native country. Some of the ablest legal talent in this country have
taken advantage of this privilege, but Miss Krarer is always equal
to every occasion and emergency. The Bureau, in her behalf, takes
this occasion to thank the many hundreds of people and the press of
the country for the uniform kindness and attention received at their
hands. During the past Miss Krarer has delivered more lectures than
her strength would really permit, and for that reason it will be
necessary in the future to limit the number of her engagements, but
first applications will receive most favorable dates.”
That the general claims of managers were no empty sales talk is borne
out by the specific statement that Miss Krarer had already (as of about
1902) lectured 85 times in Philadelphia, 16 times in New York, 14 times
in Chicago, 6 times in Baltimore, 5 times in Jersey City, Cleveland,
and Aurora (Ill.), and 3 times in Albany, N. Y., Syracuse, N. Y.,
Detroit, Mt. Pleasant, Ia., St. Louis, Cortland, N. Y., Toledo, O.,
Orange, N. J., Newark, N. J., and Dayton, O.
Before the close of her career she lectured several more years; a
corrected tally would give her more appearances in these cities than
here listed.
The direct statement of the Slaytons is well supported by
representative newspapers from the Atlantic coast to beyond the
Mississippi. We quote them as they are quoted in the (1902?) booking
circular of “Miss Olof Krarer, Esquimau”:
“Newark (N.J.) _Evening News_: An appreciative audience greeted Miss
Olof Krarer, the Esquimau lecturer, at the Irvington rink last night.
She is a pleasant-faced little woman, only three feet five inches
in height and weighing 120 pounds, who left Greenland with a party
of Icelanders and was educated by missionaries in Iceland. She told
many interesting things about East Greenland, of which so little is
known. In her native land, she said, ... There is only one social
distinction--the man who owns a flint for making fire is looked
upon as a big gun, but he is bound by custom to loan it freely and
without remuneration. Water--that is, fresh water--is unknown.... The
women of her country, she said, lived a life of pathetic idleness
and helplessness, with no housework, no washing, no fancy work, no
amusement and no cooking. All meat is eaten raw, and this is the sole
food. The main occupation of the men was hunting ... this being done
mainly in the twilight period, lasting four months of the year. The
remainder of the year is made up of four months of perpetual night,
lighted by stars and moon, and four months of daylight. The latter
is the hardest time for the Esquimaux, as large numbers of them are
afflicted with snow-blindness, caused by the dazzling effect of the
sun on the ice and snow.
“The only record of time kept by these primitive people is by means of
a bone bag--one bone dropped into a fur bag on the day on which the
sun is first seen each year.... Miss Krarer says her people ... are
becoming more stunted in growth and shorter-lived every generation....”
“Holyoke (Mass.) Paper: Last night a large audience assembled in the
city hall and listened to Miss Olof Krarer’s talk on ‘Greenland, or
Life in the Frozen North.’ Since her visit to this city two years ago
Miss Krarer has increased her knowledge of English and entertained her
audience finely. The lecture was the same as that given by her when
she lectured under the auspices of the Scientific Association. Last
evening, at the close of her lecture, Miss Krarer appeared in northern
costume, a genuine polar bear skin from its natural state, which she
had taken great pains to secure.... Miss Krarer still finds this
climate trying, and during the summer months seeks the coolest spot
she can find.... Tomorrow she speaks in Westfield, next in Warren.
Almost every night she is engaged and business increases every season.”
“West Chester (Pa.) _Republic_: Olof Krarer fairly captivated her
audiences at the Normal yesterday afternoon and last evening. The
story of the life of the inhabitants of Greenland became doubly
entertaining when related in the quaint broken English of this bright
and witty little native of that frozen land. The Normal School course
of lectures thus inaugurated promises to be exceedingly popular and
will no doubt have a large patronage.”
“Manchester (Iowa) _Union_: The lecture on Greenland by Miss Olof
Krarer at the city hall last evening in aid of the Orphans’ Home was
one of the most interesting and instructive lectures ever heard in
this city.”
“Vicksburg (Miss.) _Daily Commercial Herald_: Miss Olof Krarer’s
pictures of life from a Greenlander’s standpoint afforded a very large
audience at the opera house, last night, a unique experience, of which
not the least entertaining feature was the personality of the speaker.
She is scarcely taller than a ten-year-old girl, a neat, trim, plump
little woman, with very bright eyes and a countenance that has nothing
unfamiliar in its appearance, such a one as might be seen anywhere
in the United States and in no respect Mongolian or Indian.... Hers
is a plain, unvarnished story, that of a sensible, educated woman,
depicting the terrible conditions of life around the North Pole. It
was deeply interesting, however, and the audience frequently applauded
her. She sang ... an Esquimaux love-song, which would no doubt impress
a damsel of the frozen coast as something too altogether lovely. The
lecture was given under the auspices of the Circle of the Silver
Cross, King’s Daughters, and was a financial success.”
“Brooklyn (N.Y.) _Daily Eagle_: The hall of the Young Men’s Christian
Association was well filled last evening by an audience gathered
to hear the lecture of Miss Olof Krarer, an Esquimau lady from the
eastern shores of Greenland, her subject being ‘Greenland, or Life in
the Frozen North.’ Miss Krarer is the only Esquimau lady in the United
States and her lecture was unusually interesting....”
“Detroit (Mich.) _Free Press_: The speaker’s platform at Y.M.C.A.
hall last evening presented a very Arctic appearance, covered with
polar bear skins and white draperies, with a silver fox skin mounted
over the speaker’s stand. This was done to be in consonance with the
character of the evening’s entertainment, a lecture on the Esquimaux
of Greenland, by Miss Olof Krarer, a native of that hypoborean
region.... She was decidedly short, being only 3 feet 4 inches in
height, and weighing 100 pounds. Otherwise her appearance did not
vary strikingly from that of many a German maid, met with daily in
Detroit....”
“Sioux City (Iowa) _Journal_: At the Y.M.C.A. auditorium last night
Miss Olof Krarer, the Esquimau woman, lectured on the customs of her
people. The audience was intensely interested in the lecture.”
“Mount Pleasant (Iowa) _Free Press_: As a psychological study, the
little lady from Greenland, who gave her second lecture in this city
last Thursday evening, is probably unexcelled on this continent; and
as a study in heredity or the influence of vocation and environment
for successive generations upon the body she is equally so.... Miss
Krarer’s person bears corroborative testimony to the claim of her
being a native of Greenland, whose racial developments are as marked
and as universal as color in Caucasia or Africa; and the indices of
nationality in every unmixed people on earth.... But it is Miss Krarer
as an intelligent and agreeable lady that is most interesting. The
evolution from the national, natal condition of absolute non-exertion,
into the consciousness of being a responsible, immortal, spiritual
being; gracious in self-reliance, dignified in self-respect and potent
in an intelligent, conscious, self-hood; attractive in demeanor, and
gracious and punctilious in every point of social relations, she is
certainly the most interesting personality to the student of mind that
it is possible to find on this continent. The school people who failed
to see and hear this speaker failed to see and hear a most suggestive
object lesson in psychical development under the Christian idea of the
nature of God and man. It is through Mr. Fred Hope that Miss Krarer
was engaged to come to Mt. Pleasant. Having heard her in Washington,
D.C., and knowing the interest she awakened in her audiences in that
city, he induced the people of the Christian church to bring her here.
Should she ever come again, let those who did not hear her upon this
occasion be sure to do so.”
Thus through half a century, nearly forty years of which were active,
did Olof Krarer, blond Nordic dwarf who may never have seen an Eskimo
in her life, continue to entertain and impress those who saw her and
those who read about her. It does not appear from other sources, any
more than it does from press comments, that her authenticity as an
Eskimo was questioned by her friends, her managers, her audiences or
her readers. On this we summarize representative testimony.
Obviously a great and careful house like the Rand McNally Company
would not have accepted Olof Krarer as a collaborator on one of their
schoolbooks had they not at the time believed her to be what their book
says and implies, an Eskimo born in an Eskimo country. If possible, it
is still more clear that Miss Mary E. E. Smith and her fellow educators
were convinced of Miss Krarer’s authenticity. Plainly the confidence
of the educational world in Miss Krarer is still maintained for, as
mentioned above, what is usually considered the foremost school of
education in America, Teachers College of Columbia University, has on
its staff teachers who until recently developed no suspicion either
of Miss Krarer or of those views which at least some of them realized
came from _Eskimo Stories_. Strongest proof of all that the faith still
remains is the gratifying continued sale of _Eskimo Stories_, which
employees of the Rand McNally Company report as late as July, 1936.
The testimony is the same from the lyceum fraternity. Not perhaps quite
so meticulously careful as professional educators and the publishers of
educational books, they nevertheless tried to maintain a high standard
for their “attractions.” Remember, those were the William Jennings
Bryan and uplift days, when gate receipts were more likely to drop
than they are now if lecturers or their management fell below ethical
standards.
In a rather careful profession, then, the Slayton Lyceum Bureau stood
high and in considerable part through the very influence of Miss
Krarer. The Redpath Bureau, as well known in the lyceum world, has been
at the very top in every requirement. I have a letter from Miss Amy M.
Weiskopf, who was in close association when the Redpaths bought out
the Slaytons, and who is with the Redpath organization still, or with
its head, Mr. Harry P. Harrison. She says that she never doubted Miss
Krarer’s authenticity and that she never heard doubts of it.
An old friend of mine of high standing in the lyceum world and still
active, is the aforementioned William H. Stout. He heard Miss Krarer
lecture before the University of Indiana, had no doubts of her
authenticity himself, and heard none expressed.
Those who knew her respected and liked Olof Krarer. Through charm of
personality she confirmed the interest of the country, and particularly
of the schools, in that frozen wonderland of the remote north where
live those unique people, the Eskimos.
Olof died in 1935, but during the season 1936-37 teachers all over
the United States are carrying on her work through continuing into
its fourth decade of usefulness the book _Eskimo Stories_, which she
read in manuscript, on which she “made valuable suggestions” and which
contains her “interesting autobiography.” The teachers who use the book
are no doubt being careful to follow the author’s directions that Miss
Krarer’s autobiography, _The Story of a Real Eskimo_, which we quoted,
_ante_, should be read to the children before they begin reading the
book.
Olof Krarer belonged to three cultural agencies that have had their
ups and downs, the Chautauqua, the lyceum, and the circus. Chautauqua
has faded; the lyceum is emerging slowly (we hear) from a temporary
eclipse by the radio; the circus does pretty well, what with “Jumbo.”
But a greater cultural agency, the schools, in which Miss Krarer took
her place 34 years ago, has never suffered eclipse. The teachers go
marching on. In their ranks marches the forty-inch spirit of that good
trouper, Olof the Eskimo.
CHAPTER VIII.
HISTORY OF THE BATHTUB IN AMERICA
Those versed in fabricated history had moments of sheer delight the
forenoon of May 27, 1936, while listening to Dr. Shirley W. Wynne,
formerly Commissioner of Health for New York City, as he spoke over
station WEAF of the National Broadcasting Company on the subject “What
Is Public Health”:
“Even ordinary bathing, one of the simple factors in our personal
hygiene, had a hard time getting inaugurated in our grandfather’s day.
The city fathers in the good town of Boston ruled that it was unlawful
to take a bath except on a doctor’s advice; and that law remained in
effect from 1854 until 1862--think of it. In Philadelphia they were a
little more open-minded. The law in Philadelphia was that you couldn’t
take a bath between November and March. The cities of Hartford and
Providence discouraged bathing by raising the charges for water supply
about 400 per cent for people who owned bathtubs. In 1847, in Newport,
Rhode Island, a doctor tried to convert the people to the habit of
washing, though at the same time he conscientiously warned them that
the first bath or two might affect their hearts. The American Medical
Association immediately opposed him and said that bathing was NOT
compulsory to health, and the people needn’t wash unless they just
wanted to do so for some whimsical reason of their own. So you see
our great-grandfathers and even our grandfathers all belonged in that
category referred to inelegantly as the Great Unwashed.”
The source of joy to the connoisseurs in hoaxes was that the learned
ex-Commissioner of Health was reciting over the NBC what sounded a
whole lot like an abridgment of a certain contribution to the history
of the bathtub which was published in the New York _Evening Mail_ of
December 28, 1917. We have secured permission and herewith offer what,
in spite of much quoting and discussion, is probably the first complete
reprinting of this (the author is beginning to feel) overtenaciously
successful hoax:
“A NEGLECTED ANNIVERSARY[22]
_By_
H. L. MENCKEN
“On December 20 there flitted past us, absolutely without public
notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in American
history, to wit, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the introduction of
the bathtub into These States. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung
out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper
called attention to the day.
“True enough, it was not entirely forgotten. Eight or nine months
ago one of the younger surgeons connected with the Public Health
Service in Washington happened upon the facts while looking into the
early history of public hygiene, and at his suggestion a committee
was formed to celebrate the anniversary with a banquet. But before
the plan was perfected Washington went dry, and so the banquet had to
be abandoned. As it was, the day passed wholly unmarked, even in the
capital of the nation.
“Bathtubs are so common today that it is almost impossible to imagine
a world without them. They are familiar to nearly every one in all
incorporated towns; in most of the large cities it is unlawful to
build a dwelling house without putting them in; even on the farm they
have begun to come into use. And yet the first American bathtub was
installed and dedicated so recently as December 20, 1842, and, for all
I know to the contrary, it may be still in existence and in use.
“Curiously enough, the scene of its setting up was Cincinnati, then
a squalid frontier town, and even today surely no leader in culture.
But Cincinnati, in those days as in these, contained many enterprising
merchants, and one of them was a man named Adam Thompson, a dealer
in cotton and grain. Thompson shipped his merchandise by steamboat
down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, and from there sent
it to England in sailing vessels. This trade frequently took him to
England, and in that country, during the ’30’s, he acquired the habit
of bathing.
“The bathtub was then still a novelty in England. It had been
introduced in 1828 by Lord John Russell and its use was yet confined
to a small class of enthusiasts. Moreover, the English bathtub, then
as now, was a puny and inconvenient contrivance--little more, in
fact, than a glorified dishpan--and filling and emptying it required
the attendance of a servant. Taking a bath, indeed, was a rather
heavy ceremony, and Lord John in 1835 was said to be the only man in
England who had yet come to doing it every day.
“Thompson, who was of inventive fancy--he later devised the machine
that is still used for bagging hams and bacon--conceived the notion
that the English bathtub would be much improved if it were made large
enough to admit the whole body of an adult man, and if its supply of
water, instead of being hauled to the scene by a maid, were admitted
by pipes from a central reservoir and run off by the same means.
Accordingly, early in 1842 he set about building the first modern
bathroom in his Cincinnati home--a large house with Doric pillars,
standing near what is now the corner of Monastery and Oregon streets.
“There was then, of course, no city water supply, at least in that
part of the city, but Thompson had a large well in his garden, and
he installed a pump to lift its water to his house. This pump, which
was operated by six negroes, much like an old-time fire engine, was
connected by a pipe with a cypress tank in the garret of the house,
and here the water was stored until needed. From the tank two other
pipes ran to the bathroom. One, carrying cold water, was a direct
line. The other, designed to provide warm water, ran down the great
chimney of the kitchen, and was coiled inside it like a giant spring.
“The tub itself was of new design, and became the grandfather of all
the bathtubs of to-day. Thompson had it made by James Guinness, the
leading Cincinnati cabinetmaker of those days, and its material was
Nicaragua mahogany. It was nearly seven feet long and fully four feet
wide. To make it watertight, the interior was lined with sheet lead,
carefully soldered at the joints. The whole contraption weighed about
1,750 pounds, and the floor of the room in which it was placed had to
be reinforced to support it. The exterior was elaborately polished.
“In this luxurious tub Thompson took two baths on December 20,
1842--a cold one at 8 a.m. and a warm one some time during the
afternoon. The warm water, heated by the kitchen fire, reached a
temperature of 105 degrees. On Christmas day, having a party of
gentlemen to dinner, he exhibited the new marvel to them and gave
an exhibition of its use, and four of them, including a French
visitor, Col. Duchanel, risked plunges into it. The next day all
Cincinnati--then a town of about 100,000 people--had heard of it, and
the local newspapers described it at length and opened their columns
to violent discussions of it.
“The thing, in fact, became a public matter, and before long there
was a bitter and double-headed opposition to the new invention, which
had been promptly imitated by several other wealthy Cincinnatians.
On the one hand it was denounced as an epicurean and obnoxious toy
from England, designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the
republic, and on the other hand it was attacked by the medical faculty
as dangerous to health and a certain inviter of ‘phthisic, rheumatic
fevers, inflammation of the lungs and the whole category of zymotic
diseases.’ (I quote from the Western _Medical Repository_ of April 23,
1843.)
“The noise of the controversy soon reached other cities, and in more
than one place medical opposition reached such strength that it was
reflected in legislation. Late in 1843, for example, the Philadelphia
Common Council considered an ordinance prohibiting bathing between
November 1 and March 15, and it failed of passage by but two votes.
During the same year the legislature of Virginia laid a tax of
$30 a year on all bathtubs that might be set up, and in Hartford,
Providence, Charleston and Wilmington (Del.) special and very heavy
water rates were levied upon those who had them. Boston early in 1845
made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance
was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.
“This legislation, I suspect, had some class feeling in it, for the
Thompson bathtub was plainly too expensive to be owned by any save
the wealthy. Indeed, the common price for installing one in New York
in 1845 was $500. Thus the low caste politicians of the time made
capital by fulminating against it, and there is even some suspicion
of political bias in many of the early medical denunciations. But
the invention of the common pine bathtub, lined with zinc, in 1847,
cut off this line of attack, and thereafter the bathtub made steady
progress.
“The zinc tub was devised by John F. Simpson, a Brooklyn plumber, and
his efforts to protect it by a patent occupied the courts until 1855.
But the decisions were steadily against him, and after 1848 all the
plumbers of New York were equipped for putting in bathtubs. According
to a writer in the _Christian Register_ for July 17, 1857, the first
one in New York was opened for traffic on September 12, 1847, and by
the beginning of 1850 there were already nearly 1,000 in use in the
big town.
“After this medical opposition began to collapse, and among other
eminent physicians Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared for the bathtub,
and vigorously opposed the lingering movement against it in Boston.
The American Medical Association held its annual meeting in Boston
in 1849, and a poll of the members in attendance showed that nearly
55 per cent of them now regarded bathing as harmless, and that more
than 20 per cent advocated it as beneficial. At its meeting in 1850 a
resolution was formally passed giving the imprimatur of the faculty to
the bathtub. The homeopaths followed with a like resolution in 1853.
“But it was the example of President Millard Fillmore that, even more
than the grudging medical approval, gave the bathtub recognition
and respectability in the United States. While he was still
Vice-President, in March, 1850, he visited Cincinnati on a stumping
tour, and inspected the original Thompson tub. Thompson himself was
now dead, but his bathroom was preserved by the gentleman who had
bought his house from his estate. Fillmore was entertained in this
house and, according to Chamberlain, his biographer, took a bath in
the tub. Experiencing no ill effects, he became an ardent advocate of
the new invention, and on succeeding to the presidency at Taylor’s
death, July 9, 1850, he instructed his secretary of war, Gen. Charles
M. Conrad, to invite tenders for the construction of a bathtub in the
White House.
“This action, for a moment, revived the old controversy, and its
opponents made much of the fact that there was no bathtub at Mount
Vernon or at Monticello, and that all the Presidents and other
magnificoes of the past had got along without any such monarchical
luxuries. The elder Bennett, in the New York _Herald_, charged that
Fillmore really aspired to buy and install in the White House a
porphyry and alabaster bath that had been used by Louis Philippe at
Versailles. But Conrad, disregarding all this clamor, duly called for
bids, and the contract was presently awarded to Harper and Gillespie,
a firm of Philadelphia engineers, who proposed to furnish a tub of
thin cast iron, capable of floating the largest man.
“This was installed early in 1851, and remained in service in the
White House until the first Cleveland administration, when the present
enameled tub was substituted. The example of the President soon broke
down all that remained of the old opposition, and by 1860, according
to the newspaper advertisements of the time, every hotel in New York
had a bathtub, and some had two and even three. In 1862 bathing was
introduced into the army by Gen. McClellan, and in 1870 the first
prison bathtub was set up at Moyamensing Prison, in Philadelphia.
“So much for the history of the bathtub in America. One is astonished,
on looking into it, to find that so little of it has been recorded.
The literature, in fact, is almost nil. But perhaps this brief sketch
will encourage other inquirers and so lay the foundation for an
adequate celebration of the centennial in 1942.”
Varying motives in the fabrication of history lead to varying methods.
When the purposes are moral or political, as they seem to have been
with Parson Weems in his handling of Washington, there is no deliberate
straining at probabilities, there are no planted clues. But when
the purpose is outright spoofing, as Mencken says it was with the
bathtub, there is frequently a mendacious plant. Samples of these in
Mencken are that he tells you the bathtub’s first American home was
at the intersection of Monastery and Oregon Streets, in Cincinnati,
in the year 1842, and that a certain reference to bathing comes from
Chamberlain’s biography of President Fillmore. Now you can discover in
any big library, or by writing the friendly librarians of Cincinnati,
that while one of the two named streets, Oregon, may have existed there
in 1842, the second, Monastery, is not listed until decades later. They
will add that streets of these names have never intersected in that
town. At your local public library they will report on the telephone
that they cannot find any biography of Fillmore by Chamberlain.
Having in part given the victim fair warning, the Mencken type of
spoofer proceeds to be reasonable enough to trap the unwary. Much
of his tale of bathtub vicissitudes is, for instance, so reasonable
superficially, so much in accord with what has actually been the
history of the institution at other times and in other places, that
not only are health commissioners liable to get caught but they have,
on being caught, a pretty fair excuse. For, after all, you could, from
so-called real facts, obtain approximately the same pictures and
pretty roughly the same morals as you get from the fiction.
Indeed, one of the strongest arguments against troubling to fabricate
history or science is that, with judicious manipulation and suitable
reasoning, you can frequently extract from ordinary facts tales as
pleasing and conclusions as ethical as are commonly based on those
facts-by-definition which some call fictions.
Mencken probably felt that the numerous planted clews to his spoofing
intent would keep “A Neglected Anniversary” from remaining long
undetected. If so, he discovered presently that even he had overrated
the public’s discrimination. Then the initial delight with which
Mencken had watched the poor fish biting, started to fade. By 1926 it
seemed to him the yarn was getting altogether too firmly historical so
he began trying to call it off. On May 23 of that year he owned up that
he had invented the tale, pointing out its absurdities. This confession
was printed simultaneously in thirty American newspapers. One of
them, the Boston _Herald_, used the article on a leading page, under
a four-column head; three weeks later the same paper reprinted, as a
piece of news, the substance of the story as it had originally appeared
in 1917.
We give below a classified list, which does not attempt to be complete,
of some of the individuals, institutions and publications that took one
or the other side of the ensuing controversy over the bathtub hoax.
ACCEPTING THE HOAX
Support from Journalists:
_Scribner’s_, October, 1920.
A booklet entitled _The Story of the Bath_, published by the Domestic
Engineering Company of Chicago, 1922.
_New York Herald_, Paris edition, September, 1925, mainly quoting an
article in the _New York Sun_ by Ruth Wakeham.
_Chicago Evening American_, December 7, 1926, under heading “For and
About Your Home.”
March 21, 1927, Colonel W. G. Archer, representing National Trade
Extension Bureau of the plumbing and heating industry, in an address
before the Clearfield, Pa., Commercial Club at the Jordan Hotel,
Clearfield.
_Chiropractor_, 1927, an article called Splash, by A. J. Pufahl.
_Cleveland Press_, November 15, 1927, letter from E. Hershey, D.C.,
P.C.
A pamphlet entitled _Saga of the Bathtub_, by Walt Dennison, published
by the LeRoy Carman Printing Company of Los Angeles, California, 1929.
_American Baptist_ (Lexington, Kentucky), February 13, 1929, in an
article headed Selected--probably indicating quotation from some other
source.
_Baltimore News_, March 16, 1929, in a column headed “Baltimore Day by
Day,” by Carrol Dulaney (real name Richard D. Steuart).
_House Beautiful_, May, 1930, p. 535.
W. Orton Tewson, October 11, 1930, in a syndicated column, “The Attic
Salt Shaker,” quoting a Dr. Moody (possibly Dr. W. R. Moody, who had
recently printed a life of his father, Dwight L. Moody).
_Golden Book_, early in 1931, article by Lenora R. Baxter.
_New York Sun_, February 17, 1931, review of _Puritan’s Progress_, by
Arthur Train, indicating the book accepted the hoax as fact.
_Baltimore Evening Sun_, May 22, 1931, letter signed S. A. Fact.
_Tucson Daily Star_, December 1, 1931, interview with C. R. King,
manager of the Tucson branch of the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing
Company.
_New York Sun_, December 22, 1931--quoting the _Military Engineer_.
_New York Sun_, October 12, 1933, advertisement of “Blue Coal,” part
of which advertisement was an illustration showing a policeman, ca.
1842, threatening to arrest a man in a bathtub.
United Feature Syndicate, April 27, 1933, illustration by Russ Murphy
and Ray Nenuskay under the caption “How It Began”--illustration
showing Adam Thompson in his first bathtub in Cincinnati.
_New York Herald Tribune_, March 4, 1934, reprinted portions of above
article by Lenora R. Baxter, under heading “Baths in Disfavor for Long
Periods, History Recalls.”
_New York Sun_, January 6, 1935, news story.
_New York Times_, August 4, 1935, news story, “The Bathtub Wins Wider
Patronage.”
United Press Red Letter for September 26, 1935, “Bathtub Once Viewed
as Curse.”
J. Vijaya-Tunga, _New Statesman_ (London), October 5, 1935.
Central Press Association, November 15, 1935, _Scott’s Scrapbook_,
cartoon.
_Digest and Review_, December, 1935.
_Australia Age_ (Melbourne), December 31, 1935.
_Liberty_, March 21, 1936.
James N. Kane, _Famous First Facts_, published by H. W. Wilson & Co.
of New York (no date).
Support from Leaders of Thought:
Dr. John H. Finley (former president of the American Geographical
Society and of the College of the City of New York; now an editor of
the New York _Times_), in an article in the _Survey_, July 15, 1927.
Alexander Woollcott, radio broadcast for February 24, 1935.
Dr. Hans Zinsser (professor in the Medical School of Harvard
University), in _Rats, Lice and History_, Boston, 1935.
Dr. Shirley W. Wynne (former Commissioner of Health for the City of
New York)--cited _ante_.
Support from Governmental Agencies:
Federal Housing Administration clip sheet. Vol. 2, No. 9, February,
1935, sent out to newspapers throughout the U.S.
_Bulletin_ of the Department of Health of Kentucky, October, 1935.
EXPOSING THE HOAX
Exposure by Journalists:
Western Newspaper Union, November 28, 1930, syndicated article by
Elmo Scott Watson, under the title “James, Draw My Bawth”--apparently
printed in a great many small papers throughout the United States.
_Martha’s Vineyard Gazette_, April and May, 1931.
_Macon Telegraph_, August 31, 1932.
_Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger_, January 15, 1935.
_Editor and Publisher_, February 2, 1935, Marlen Pew, commenting on
the circulation of the bathtub hoax by the Federal Housing Commission.
_Baltimore Evening Sun_, April 16, 1935.
_Wilmington Evening Journal_, June 24, 1935.
_Passaic Herald News_, July 26, 1935.
_New Statesman_ (London), November 2, 1935, a letter signed J.M.G.,
exposing the story as printed in the October 5 issue of the same
magazine.
_Mobile Times_, December 28, 1935.
_Chicago Times_, January 23, 1936, editorial headed “A New True
Story,” first quoting a speaker who addressed the members of the
American Institute of Banking in Chicago. The speaker had related the
bathtub story; the editorial then went on to expose the hoax.
Exposure by Leaders of Thought:
Rev. Nolan R. Best, executive secretary of the Baltimore Federation
of Churches, letter to the editor of _Survey_, exposing the article
by Dr. John H. Finley. Paul Kellogg, the editor, wrote to Finley, who
replied July 31, 1927: “The bathtub information was furnished me by a
representative of the Cleanliness Institute.”
Curtis D. MacDougal, editor of Evanston, Illinois, _News Index_, made
an investigation of newspaper hoaxes, exposing, among others, the
bathtub hoax. A summary of his report was printed in the _Editor and
Publisher_, January 12, 1935. Later he embodied his material in an
article for the _Journalism Quarterly_. A summary of that article was
printed in the Worcester, Mass., _Gazette_ for August 10, 1935. Dr.
MacDougal printed a second article on the subject in the _Evanston
News Index_, August 9, 1935; in it he discussed especially the
apparent impossibility of putting such hoaxes down.
Exposure by Governmental Agencies:
Bureau of Municipal Research, Philadelphia. The Bureau’s exposure of
the hoax was printed in the _Philadelphia Evening Bulletin_, July 10,
1933, under the heading Bathtub Myth Exploded.[23]
History, whether real or fabricated, may lose or gain, may remain
unchanged or may change with time. These things are handily illustrated
by coupling statements from Mencken of 1917 and Wynne of 1936:
_Mencken_: “Boston early in 1845 made bathing unlawful except upon
medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it
was repealed.”
_Wynne_: “The city fathers in the good town of Boston ruled that it
was unlawful to take a bath except on a doctor’s advice; and that law
remained in effect from 1854[24] until 1862--think of it.”
_Mencken_: “... the Philadelphia Common Council considered an
ordinance prohibiting bathing between November 1 and March 15, and it
failed of passage by but two votes.”
_Wynne_: “The law in Philadelphia was that you couldn’t take a bath
between November and March.”
_Mencken_: “... in Hartford, Providence, Charleston and Wilmington
(Del.) special and very heavy water rates were levied upon those who
had them (bathtubs).”
_Wynne_: “The cities of Hartford and Providence discouraged bathing by
raising the charges for water supply about 400 per cent for people who
owned bathtubs.”
_Mencken_: “After this medical opposition began to collapse, and among
other eminent physicians Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared for the
bathtub.... The American Medical Association held its annual meeting
in Boston in 1849, and a poll of the members in attendance showed that
nearly 55 per cent of them now regarded bathing as harmless, and that
more than 20 per cent advocated it as beneficial. At its meeting in
1850 a resolution was formally passed giving the imprimatur of the
faculty to the bathtub.”
_Wynne_: “In 1847, in Newport, Rhode Island, a doctor tried to convert
the people to the habit of washing, though at the same time he
conscientiously warned them that the first bath or two might affect
their hearts. The American Medical Association immediately opposed him
and said that bathing was NOT compulsory to health, and the people
needn’t wash unless they just wanted to do so for some whimsical
reason of their own.”
That there is pleasant edification for believers in Menckenized
history we infer from its popularity; that the employment of the many
learned and famous commentators, disseminators and denouncers has been
remunerative, we hope; that there is occasionally a spot cash return
even to the man in the street we can show by an example:
A well-named periodical, _Liberty_, which encourages among other
freedoms the one to believe, has a feature, “Twenty Questions.” For
those who, in view of the following, may desire to try making an
honest dollar, we quote that “Liberty will pay $1 for any question
accepted and published. If the same question is suggested by more than
one person, the first suggestion received will be the one considered.
Address Twenty Questions, P. O. Box 380, Grand Central Station, New
York, N. Y.” Some time before March 21, 1936 (for we quote from that
issue) they had, then, paid one dollar for what appeared on that date,
p. 39, as question No. 17:
“In which city of the United States was it against the law to take a
bath in 1845?”
As directed, we turn to p. 48 and find under 17 the answer:
“In Boston, Massachusetts. It was then deemed unlawful to take a bath
except when prescribed by a physician.”
When, belated, I discovered this in _Liberty_, I wondered how the
Bostonians were taking what must be a steady barrage, and wrote the
Commissioner of Public Health, Dr. Henry D. Chadwick, who replied from
the State House, Boston, July 16, 1936:
“The story which you quote from the magazine, _Liberty_, is
periodically cropping out in various parts of the country.
“I obtained from W. J. Doyle, City Clerk of Boston, what I consider a
true statement of Boston’s attitude toward bathing in the early days,
and I enclose a copy.”
The Doyle statement said in part:
“In several forms during the past ten years an item has appeared in
various publications stating ... that the City of Boston at some time
by ordinance forbade the use of bathtubs, or bathing except on the
advice of a physician.
“The story has not the slightest foundation in fact. No such ordinance
was ever adopted either by the Town or City of Boston from its
settlement in 1630 up to the present time....
“... In 1843 an ordinance was enacted requiring that all prisoners in
the Jail or House of Correction should be given a weekly bath. So much
as regards bathing except on advice of a physician. The statement that
bathtubs were prohibited is so silly as to hardly merit denial, but it
is usually made referring to a mythical ordinance supposedly adopted
in 1848 and not repealed until 1870. No such ordinance was ever
adopted and no such ordinance was ever submitted to the City Council.
W. J. Doyle,
City Clerk.”
I was evidently a long way from being the first to query Boston
officials on Menckenized history, for the Clerk’s original statement,
of which I received the above copy, was dated May 24, 1929.
Incidentally, that dating explains his reference to “the last ten
years.” For Mencken’s “Neglected Anniversary” had been published less
than twelve years before.
How the Mencken fabricated knowledge is being used towards the end of
its second decade has cultural significance. We take a few samples.
Hans Zinsser, A.B., A.M., M.D., D.Sc. (hon.), is professor in the
Harvard Medical School. During 1935 his _Rats, Lice and History_, a
piece of trenchant writing, was a best seller, one of the much read
books that was also much discussed, filled with novel and startling
facts. One of these (perhaps no longer exactly novel) is on p. 285:
“The first bathtub didn’t reach America, we believe, until about 1840.”
During February 1935, the Federal Housing Administration issued, in
Clip Sheet, Vol. 2, No. 9, a statement on bathtub history:
“In 1842 Adam Thompson startled neighbors in Cincinnati by installing
a box-shaped affair lined with lead in his home. Shortly after, in
1845, historians on the subject say the city of Boston passed an
ordinance making it illegal to bathe unless a doctor had so ordered.
Not until the early days of the Civil War was the act removed from
that city’s statute books....
“Further indication of the manner in which early lawmakers viewed the
matter of personal cleanliness is seen in a resolution introduced
about 1843 in Philadelphia under which bathing would have been
prohibited by the city fathers from November to March! As it turned
out, the suggestion was tabled.
“When Millard Fillmore became President, the tide turned, due
principally to his installing a tub in the White House....”
But on July 25, 1936, Robert B. Smith, Assistant to the Administrator,
Federal Housing Administration, wrote:
“After this story was published, we found that the statements made
in it could not be substantiated so far as ordinances and laws
against bathing were concerned. The Health Commissioners of Boston
and Philadelphia both wrote us that they could find no trace of any
anti-bathing ordinances in their records....
“After this bathtub experience, we took care to have the statements
made in the Clip Sheet double-checked....”
August 4, 1935, the New York _Times_ was celebrating progress in
America’s metropolis. East Side tenants had made “demands for the
installation of that former luxury,” the bathtub. This reminded the
_Times_ that:
“It was with fear and travail that bathtubs were introduced in these
United States. One of the first bathrooms appeared in Cincinnati,
Ohio, about 1850, and certain clergymen hearing of it preached that
such luxury meant nothing less than degeneracy. The fading of the
glory that was Greece and the collapse of the grandeur that was Rome
were freely mentioned. The baths of wicked Caracalla also were cited.”
The _Bulletin_ of the Department of Health of Kentucky, October 1935,
said on p. 75:
“The first bathtub in the United States was installed in a Cincinnati
home in 1842. It was made of mahogany and lined with sheet lead.
Newspapers denounced it as undemocratic vanity. Boston, in 1845, made
bathing unlawful except when prescribed by a physician. Virginia
soaked the rich by taxing bathtubs $30 per year.”
A letter from J. Vijaya-Tunga was printed in the _New Statesman_,
London, for October, 1935. We quote an extract as reprinted in the
_Australia Age_ (Melbourne) for December 31, 1935:
“The first American bathtub was built in 1830. It was made of
mahogany and was 7 feet long and 4 feet wide. It was lined with
sheet lead and weighed more than 2,000 pounds. The invention was not
popular. Boston authorities made bathing unlawful, and Virginia put
a tax of $300 on each bathtub. Fifteen years later Boston declared
bathtubs illegal, except on medical advice.”
The _Age_ did not fall for the hoax but the _New Statesman_ apparently
did.
The Chicago _Times_ of January 23, 1936, quotes a speaker addressing a
Chicago meeting of the American Institute of Banking:
“‘The hardest job on earth for the average man,’ he said, ‘is to sit
and think. He’ll sit all right, but he won’t think, and that is why
the public always detests a new idea. Why, do you know that when the
first bathtubs were introduced in America intellectual Boston passed
an ordinance making it unlawful to bathe in a bathtub except on
medical advice?’”
The _Times_ treated this speaker editorially as the victim of a hoax
which, perhaps naturally, did not influence Vice Presidential candidate
Frank Knox’s Chicago _Daily News_, which said July 11, 1936, under the
heading “Bathtub Suffered Same Fate in U. S. as Most Pioneers,” that
“America’s first bathtub, according to a recent issue of
_Architecture_, was built in Cincinnati in 1842 and was made of
mahogany and lined with sheet lead.
“While still accepting the oft-quoted relationship of cleanliness and
godliness, the people of the day were not receptive to such fantastic
innovations, and the tub, suffering the fate of most pioneering
ventures, was denounced as a luxurious and undemocratic vanity.
Doctors, according to the magazine, termed it a menace to health.
“In 1843 Philadelphia prohibited by ordinance bathing between Nov. 1
and March 15, and Boston made bathing unlawful except when prescribed
by a physician. Also, bathtubs were taxed $30 yearly.”
A paper of which Knox is publisher stops in the heat of the Landon-Knox
campaign to support Mencken as a historian; Mencken swerves from
other forms of history-making the while to campaign for Knox as Vice
President. With these things happening at and just after the Republican
convention, we feel that God’s in His Heaven and that all should be
well at any rate with the making of history.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This was written when Gertrude Ederle was being showered with
ticker tape. Neither she nor the ticker stood quite so well three years
later.
[2] This was written in 1927. The press version of the “Blond” Eskimo
story, as opposed to my book version, is still going strong in 1936.
[3] It can be argued that the first European discovery of the Northwest
Passage was by Thomas Simpson (with whom Peter Warren Dease was
associated) in 1839. If this be not admitted, then the claim falls
to John Rae who worked both before and after the Third Franklin
Expedition, on which the Passage was also discovered. Thus the McClure
discovery in 1853 was either the third or fourth.
[4] Appendix X, Natural History, (p. clxxxix), _Journal of a Voyage
for the Discovery of a North-West Passage, 1819-20_, by William Edward
Parry, London, 1821.
[5] _Three Years of Arctic Service_, by Adolphus W. Greely, New York,
1886, p. 221.
[6] Op. cit., p. 105.
[7] Charles Mair and Roderick MacFarlane: _Through the Mackenzie
Basin_, Toronto, 1908, p. 175.
[8] Vilhjalmur Stefansson: _The Friendly Arctic_, New York, 1921, p.
584.
[9] Fridtjof Nansen: _In Northern Mists_, London, 1911, Vol. I, p. 131.
[10] Nansen: Vol. I, p. 133.
[11] Tyson’s winter latitude, to which he here refers, was 81⅔° N. For
our quotation see Tyson’s _Arctic Experiences_, New York, 1874, p. 195.
[12] Dr. Nelson died some five years after this paper was printed.
[13] Most authorities consider 105 to 110 pounds as very large for
northern male wolves.
[14] The United States has long had this type of service. As mentioned,
_ante_, it is administered from Washington by the Biological Survey.
[15] J. Stokley Ligon, American student of wild life, says: “I am
inclined to agree with Dr. Nelson regarding young of a previous year
not banding with parent animals and their young of a current year.”
(Letter March 17, 1928.) He writes in the same letter: “I have never
observed the big packs of wolves one hears and reads about.”
[16] Since this was written it has been ascertained that Oimekon, about
300 miles southeast and 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle, is colder
than Verkhoyansk, and is therefore now the coldest known spot on earth.
Like Verkhoyansk, the Oimekon vicinity is forested.
[17] Most things in this chapter are documented, but this letter is
paraphrased from a vivid memory. Some details may be wrong, but the
general trend is right.
[18] In 1904-06 I was fellow and assistant instructor in anthropology
at Harvard. I had to read the examination papers but my seniors made up
the questions. It was a standard joke with them to slip in somewhere:
“In what country do the Eskimos live?” A good percentage of Harvard
men, ranging from sophomore to senior, could be depended upon to
answer: “The Eskimos live in Iceland.” That, my colleagues thought, was
a pretty good joke on me.
[19] We have prints of the photographs described above and two
additional ones--another of the apartment house and one that may be of
Olof by herself, though it is most too good looking and may be of Miss
Finch at the age of about 10.
[20] We note here some of the ways in which this ties in with, and
fails to tie in with, what Schoolcraft learned. Olof told him that it
was a Mr. Slayton who managed her lecture career, that after his death
she lived with Mrs. Slayton for a number of years. See his account for
why she left them. Then Olof met some people named Stone (I. K. Stone,
Maple Street, Battle Creek, Michigan) who took her to Battle Creek
where she had then (1922) been living for two or three years.
[21] Youthfulness at the time Olof left Greenland, as hereinafter
stated, is said to have been useful in circus sideshow and on the
lyceum platform--if challenged Miss Krarer used to say, modestly, that
since she had for sources only vague childhood memories she might very
well go wrong on particulars. But in general, she maintained, she
was conveying an undeceptive first-hand impression of Eskimos and of
Eskimoland.
[22] The article was printed with an editorial note: “Here’s a series
of inspiring bath hour thoughts suggested by H. L. Mencken’s discovery,
through official channels, that America’s first bathtub was built in
Cincinnati and put in operation on December 20, 1842. Adam Thompson,
its founder, got the idea on his visit to England, where Lord John
Russell had started the custom of bathing fourteen years before. So, if
any of the next best authors spring a freshly tubbed Englishman on you
in a story of the revolution, you’ll know he’s phony.”
[23] Mencken’s own summary of the first decade of struggle over the
bathtub hoax is given in his _Prejudices, Sixth Series_, New York,
1927, pp. 194-201.
[24] The discrepancy between this 1854 and Mencken’s 1845 may well be
due to a mere transposition of figures.
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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