stefansson-wrangel-09-27-038

79-A

Nome based, on the idea that there were a few necessities in the way
of hunting equipment and beyond that everything was in a sense a
luxury. Whether they bought chewing gum, a phonograph or a bag of
sugar, they were in their own minds deciding only for one luxury as
against another. Each luxury they took depended on their taste,
their slender finances, and upon the transportation problem, for
they were going to engage a schooner rated only as carrying ten tons.*

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*They originaliy planned to charter the schooner Orion, but they
eventually took the much larger Silver Wave.
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The outfit taken by the Wrangell party seemed adequate to
them but grotesquely inadequate to the "sourdoughs" and tradesmen
of Nome. Before determining the final form of the party, and indeed
while as yet I expected the Canadian