litical or social
organization beyond the family or the little group of relatives who
lived in a single camp. They had no permanent villages, but moved from
place to place according to the season in search of fish, game, and
birds. They lived this simple life not because they lacked ability but
because of their surroundings. Their kayaks or canoes are marvels of
ingenuity. With no materials except bones, driftwood, and skins they
made boats which fulfilled their purpose with extraordinary perfection.
Seated in the small, round hole which is the only opening in the deck
of his canoe, the Eskimo hunter ties his skin jacket tightly outside
the circular gunwale and is thus shut into a practically water-tight
compartment. Though the waves dash over him, scarcely a drop enters the
craft as he skims along with his double paddle among cakes of floating
ice. So, too, the snowhouse with its anterooms and curved entrance
passage is as clever an adaptation to the needs of wanderers in a land
of ice and snow as is the skyscraper to the needs of a busy commercial
people crowded into great cities. The fact that the oilburning,
soapstone lamps of the Eskimo were the only means of producing
artificial light in aboriginal America, except by ordinary fires, is
another tribute to the ingenuity of these northerners. So, too, is the
fire-drill by which they alone devised a means of increasing the speed
with which one stick could be twirled against another to produce fire.
In view of these clever inventions it seems safe to say that the Eskimo
has remained a nomadic savage not because he lacks inventive skill but
partly because the climate deadens his energies and still more because
it forbids him to practice agriculture.

Southward and inland from the coastal homes of the Eskimo lies the great
region of the northern pine forests. It extends from the interior of
Alaska southeastward in such a way as to include most of the Canadian
Rockies, the northern plains from Great Bear Lake almost to Lake
Winnipeg, and most of the great Laurentian shield around Hudson Bay and
in the peninsula of Labrador. Except among the inhabitants of the narrow
Pacific slope and those of the shores of Labrador and the St. Lawrence
Valley, a single type of barbarism prevailed among the Indians of all
the vast pine forest area. Only in a small section of the wheat-raising
plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan have their habits greatly changed
because of the arrival of the