stefansson-wrangel-09-25-007-017

17

ists can be held except by ignoring this and several other entries
of the same sort. On the basis of them the reader can
form his own conclusions without editorial help.

But in that cheerful entry the first sentence is ominous
to us, though the context shows it did not have that moaning to
Knight as he wrote it. For the next several days he evidently
thought of Crawford, Galle and Maurer as traveling steadily
toward Siberia; and after that he supposed them to he passing
in ease and affluence from settlement to settlement along the
Siberian coast toward the telegraphs at Nome. He speculates on
what I will think and do when I receive Crawford’s report about
Wrangell Island. So easy in their minds wore both he and the
Eskimo woman, Ada, that even after Knight’s death she never doubted
the safety of the others. When the supply ship landod six months
after the party left iso find her watching alone by Knight's body,
her first and constantly reported question was not if they were
safe but where were they? As I write, I have just been talking
with her in Seattle, She is still firm in the belief that they
are alive. "Why should they die?", she asks. "They were well
clothed, they had rifles, they had food, and the natives on the
Siberian coast are kind to travelers". But she thinks badly of
the Russians and insists: "How do you know they are not prisoners
among the Russians? If they are dead, how do you know the Russians
did not kill them?”