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placed a ridge pole. The ends and side walls of the house may then be built in
one of many ways. The Wrangell Island party used the side of a steep hill for
one end and snow clocks for the other three walls. Next, rafters are put up
with one end 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 floor to ridge pole, and if the tent is ten feet
wide and fourteen feet long the structure housing it would be at least fourteen
feet wide and eighteen long. Since the Wrangell party pitched two tents end to
end, the house which covered them must have had dimensions of at least fourteen
feet in width and twenty ^four sixfeet in length.*
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When the wood-burning stoves were put up in the two tents the
stovepipes would be long enough 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 the smoke down
into the stovepipe.

Through many years I have had many friends, both white
and Eskimo, living in such winter camps on the north coast of Alaska, and they have
sometimes been used by my own parties. There is the theoretical objection to
them that they shut out completely the sun's light, but this is only a
theoretical ^defect objection, for during the middle of winter the sun is either below
the horizon or else peeps above it at noon for only a few hours. When the sun
is up the occupants of the house are probably out of doors anyway, doing work
which begins in the morning before sunrise and ends in the evening long after
sunset.

There is a theory based on a priori reasoning that the absence of
sunlight is depressing to the human spirit. We have dicussed this elsewhere*
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* "the Friendly Arctic," pp.22-24.
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