stefansson-wrangel-09-27-060

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lead to the domestication of the ovibos,or musk ox, a project the importance of
which is outlined in one of my books, "The Northward Course of Empire." Besides
these I had to earn money not only for a living but also for paying into a bank
monthly the salaries of the Wrangell Island party of five. These things kept
me so busy that I had no time to go to Ottawa for a full discussion of the
Wrangell Island situation with the new Liberal Government of the Honorable
W. L. Mackenzie King which had replaced the Conservative regime of the Honorable
Arthur Meighen with whom I had previously been dealing.

I was also hampered by a naive faith in the inevitable triumph
of a good cause. It seemed to me the facts were all on our side with us and that people
would eventually take the time to look into them, whereupon everyone they would flock
to our side. This occured to me I thought this especially reasonable certain in a country like Canada
where within living memory the Prairie Provinces have changed from the supposedly
frozen wilderness of fifty years ago to the "bread basket of the world," and
where the development of Alaska from "Seward’s Ice Box” to an empire of wealth
was about as well known as it is in the United States. But I found that both lessons that lesson seems to have
been lost upon the majority of most Canadian editors and that they seldom analogize from the Manitoba
or Alaska of yesterday to the Frozen North in which they believe today. There
were are also those who seem to realize the coming value of the remote north but who
simply do not have the imagination to see their own advantage in developments
which probably will not yield profits for twenty or thirty years. These people
are logical according to their lights in refusing to do anything for posterity on
the ground that posterity has never done anything for them.

For years I had been writing long letters to the Prime Ministers
of Canada, to the Secretaries ministers of the Interior and to other influential people
setting forth in what appeared to me conclusive terms the background of our
northern work. It was another piece of childlike simplicity to feel that all
I had to do now would be to refer to this correspondence which the new