stefansson-wrangel-09-27-016

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would have discovered my errors of fact or argument had I been wrong, losing
confidence rather than gaining it from hearing anything which I said that was
not strictly in accordance with the facts as they knew them or with the views
which they themselves had deduced from those facts. Knight was of an active temperament
but Maurer was more contemplative and his mind at least contained many theories
as well as the experiences from which they had been deduced. We all talked
these over now and then and we were seldom found themselves ourselves in disagreement.

While Knight and Crawford were constantly together as we traveled
from town to town, it was only occasionally that they saw Maurer, who was lectur-
ing on another chautauqua of the same ownership as ours that "covered" smaller
towns nearby than ours. Crawford made many attempts to get me to talk to him at
length about conditions as I found them and the methods in which I believed.
But I avoided this in general, urging him that it was more important he should
know the views of the men with whom he was going to be associated in the field.
If he was in doubt about these or thought they were in conflict with something
he had heard me say, he and Knight were to discuss such discrepanciesthem with me. That They did
so happened perhaps two or three times and we soon arrived at an understanding.
In fact, so far as I remember, the differences turned out to be apparent only.

It took us several weeks to get all details arranged. Most of
that time Crawford spent with me, and part of the time Knight and Maurer were
with us also. There never were happier boys than the two veterans. They were
so exuberantly happy that it was difficult to realize that they were twenty-eight
and not eighteen. Knight told by the hour stories from his three adventurous
arctic years. What Maurer contributed was equally enthusiastic and even more
to the point, for he had actually been on Wrangell Island for six months and was
in a position to tell the rest of us about the climate, the vegetation and the
abundance of sea and land game. Crawford was soon infected with their enthusiasm.
The contagion spread also to Milton Galle, a Texas boy of twenty, who had been