stefansson-wrangel-09-25-006-005

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years in a country where driftwood is absent and we had never used a dwelling
of the kind here indicated by Knight. After leaving my expedition Noice had
spent four years in Coronation Gulf among Eskimos to whom this type of dwelling
is unknown. But Maurer had spent a year at Herschel Island and Knight had
spent a year on the north coast of Alaska. In both these localities the Eskimos
and the white trappers alike are in the habit of using the sort of dwelling which Knight indicated and which we shall now describe.

The first step is the erection of the two uprights upon
which is placed a rudge pole. The ends and side walls of the house may then
be built in one of many ways. The Wrangell Island part used the side of a
steep hill for one end and snow blocks for the other three walls. Next,
rafters are put up with one end xxxxxxx of each rafter resting on the side
wall and the other on the ridge pole. If the tent to be pitched inside this
house is seven feet high the house would be nine or ten feet from the floor to
ridge pole, and if the tent is ten feet wide and fourteen feet long the house
would be at least fourteen feet wide and eighteen long. Since the Wrangell
party pitched two tents end to end, the house which covered themmust have had
dimensions at least fourteen feet in width and twenty-six feet in length.

When the wood-burning stoves were put up in the two
tents the stovepipes would be long enough according to this system to reach
up through the roof of the house built outside the tents and high enough above
to clear the ridge pole by one or two feet so as to prevent wind from eddying
over the ridge and blowing down into the stovepipe.

Through many years I have had many friends, both white and
Eskimo, living in such winter campe on the north coast of Alaska, and they
have sometimes been put up by my own parties. There is the theoretical
objection to them that they shut out completley the sun's light, but this is