Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 19

316 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

veteran of the service. "There was a young fellow from Scotland with me as clerk, and we decided we'd take his arm off above the elbow. We put him on the kitchen table, and I found some morphine in the first-aid kit. It was outdated by a couple of years, so I fig-ured we'd give him a double dose. We overdosed the poor son of a gun and every hour or so we'd have a look to find out how bad it was. One of the symptorns was to watch his eyes and see how much they had contracted. His pupils got as small as pinpoints. He was really overdosed. The firstaid book said the remedy was to keep him moving. But he was out for the count. He couldn't move. So we got him off the table, and my clerk would roll the poor b.u.g.g.e.r across the kitchen floor one way, and I'd roll him back. Every once in a while we'd skin back the eyes to see if they were dilating, and we were just about exhausted when he began coming around. To liell with cutting his arm off after that. We forgot about it. In a day or two he started to get better.

It was the exercise that had started up his circulation again. He came around. Other-wise, we'd have taken his arm off-we had the saws and every- thing ready. . . ."

, Fhe best of the Bay men in the Arctic- characters like Ches Russell, Lorenz Learmonth, Scotty Gall, Sandy Liman, Bert Swaffield, Jimmy Ford, John Stanners, Bob Cruickshank and J.W Nichols-became true northerners, growing grey in the service, and as

*Apart from their rough but ready medical skill, some of the post managers were unusually ingenious, even inventing a better mousetrap. "Using a large ten-gallon pail, halffilled with water, I laid narrow pieces of board against it," recalled Hugh Mackay Ross. "Then I dangled a juicy piece of salt pork from a nail directly over the pail. "'hen the inice smelled the pork, they ran up the boards to get at it, and overbalancing, fell into the water and drowned."

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Leonard Budgell, who was one of them, remarked: "[We] accepted a more intimate responsibility for [our] customers. It was a good way to live, no matter what today's experts will tell you ... we could not have existed without that paternal feeling ... no one will ever convince me that it was not right in its time and place." Certainly that streak of paternalism characterized the FIBC's dealings. P.A.C. Nichols, who for a time was in charge of the Arctic stores, referred to the Inuit as "these simple, primitive folk of the Arctic" who had remained "unspoiled" but some of whom could now "see no reason to struggle for survival if the wherewithal to live can be acquired with little effort" so that "the temptation to relax and be looked after often becomes too strong to conquer." That att.i.tude was inst.i.tutionalized in The Eskimo Book of Knowleike, published and distributed bv the Company in 193 1. Its author, an HBC Factor and Oxford graduate named George Binney, utilized biblical cadence to praise the Company not only as ail agent of the British King but as a Divine presence. "Take heed," ran a typical pa.s.sage aimed at the Inult, warning them against doing business with independent fur traders that threatened the HBCs nionopoly, "strange traders will come ainong you seeking only your furs ... these wanderers are like the drift-ice; today they come with the wind, toinorrow they are gone A ith the wind. Of these strangers some will be fairer than others, as is the nature of men; but whosoever they be, they cannot at heart possess that deep understanding ofyour lives through which our traders have learned to bestow the care of a father upon you and upon your children."

The northern field nien may have been patronizing in their outlook and dictatorial in their methods, but they certainly weren't in the HBCS service for the itionev. "Sometimes we could be trading in the store for ov~r twenty-fOLir hours at a stretch without stopping," Ernie 318 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Lyall remembered. "We never got any overtime for this sort of thing, of course, or for any ofthe extra work we did evenings or weekends.... I was getting $120 a month when I started in Spence Bay in 1949, and $185 when I left the HBC in 1962."

The Company's influence grew in the first half of the second decade of the twentieth century, as the HBC became determined to take advantage of its monopoly by significantly expanding its northern presence. The move prompted Winnipeg's Free Ness to comment approvingly: "The Company will make a last stand against civ1lizjtion at the Arctic Ocean." But when the First World War disrupted European trade, the British government suspended London fur auctions, forcing pelt prices into dramatic, if temporary, decline. In the 1914-15 season, for the first time in its long history the Company halted its North American fur purchases, forbidding its traders to grant the natives new credit. Some of the HBC veterans ignored the sour directive and continued to distribute limited quant.i.ties of food and essential supplies to the Inuit and Indians, entering these shadowy transactions in "purgatory ledgers" that didn't show up in their posts'

regular accounts. But enough aboriginals were deprived of rations for one deadly season that, as the HBC's Philip G.o.dsell later observed, "I think any experienced trader will agree that the Hudson's Bay Company never fully regained their old-time prestige." In 1916, as the American fur market expanded, prices surged upward, more than doubling to $38 per white fox skin within the next four years, then nearly doubling again to $70 in 1928.

The trade became so lucrative that in some posts along the Mackenzie, the HBC owed considerable amounts in trade goods to its customers. By 1924 the Inuit ofAklavik had purchased a private fleet of thirtynine auxiliary-powered schooners and twenty-eight whaleboats, valued at $128,000.

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The 11BC was operating inore than two hundred northern posts, opening new stores as high in the Arctic as Gjoa Haven, where Amundsen had wintered during his traverse of the North West Pa.s.sage, and for a time even maintaining a string of trading outlets in eastern Siberia. Despite this rapid expansion, or perhaps because of it, the Mic began behaving like a bloated dinosaurbig, awkward and ,ilmost totally disconnected from its s.h.i.+fting environment. Writing of the trade along the Mackenzie, Heather Robertson noted in her evocative memoir of the IIP,(:,s Richard Bonnycastle that "the Company had lost control in the north. The economy was changing: Imperial Oil was developing the oil field A Norman Wells; prospectors were searching for gold and silver; fly-by-night free traders had introduced a cash econoiny among the natives. The Company's political base, the Indians-once the proud wives and children of fa in ous post factors, the loyal 'fainily' of a mighty patron-had been reduced to patients and pupils, cooks and ch.o.r.e boys; and the great factors themselves ... once feared as demi-G.o.ds, were more often than not the objects of laughter and ridicule for their pompous manners and foolish bra.s.s hats. The unthinkable was happening-the Hudsons Bay Company was losing money."

It was a measure of the Company's fiscal desperation that its directors took seriously the suggestion of an old Arctic hand to turn a fortune in breeling reindeer as a cheap subst.i.tute for beef. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Icelandic-Canadian who becarne the Arctic's most accomplished non-Inuit sledge driver, won fame leading three daring expeditions that added one hundred thousand square miles to the maps of Canada's Far North, charting its last sizeable unknown islands. Like Samuel Hearne andjohn Rae before him, Stefarisson was able to dash across the Arctic by adopting Inuit survival techniques instead of being burdened by what he derisively 320 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

described as "the portable-boarding-house school" methods of British adventurers. Stefansson genuinely believed that exploration required less courage than drivinga New York taxicab, with preparation and adaptability taking the place of mock heroics. "I know nothing whatever about courage,"

he was fond of pointing out. "Everything you add to an explorer's heroism you have to subtract frorn his intelligence." He predicted Canada's North could support thirty-five million reindeer because its grazing territory was superior to most senii-arld sheep lands-but n.o.body took him seriously except the 11BC. In 1920, the Company approved his scheme to establish a subsidiary to breed the ungainly beasts on Baffin Island, purchased 14,000 LapLnd reindeer in northern Norway, hired a dozen herders, and s.h.i.+pped the first contingent of 689 animals (plus ;,000 sacks of" moss) across the Atlantic aboard the Nascopie. Only 550 reindeer were still alive by the time the s.h.i.+p anch.o.r.ed off Amadjuak on the south coast of Baffin Island, the spot chosen by one of Stefansson's a.s.sociates as having the best moss. A storm immediately dispersed the seasick reindeer, and though there was indeed plentv of moss, it turned out to be the wrong variety. (The reindeer wanted to munch on Cladonia rangtfierina, which grew out of the soil in Lapland and thus contained delicious nutrients; the Baffin moss, which sproated out of bare rock, contained no nutritional equivalent.) "We soon found," reported Captain John Alikkelborg, the HBC official charged with the loony venture, "that the pastures would not permit us to keep a large herd under restraint; if we did, they would starve to death. Consequently, we had to divide them into flocks and let them spread over a wide area, after the style of the caribou.... Sometimes the caribou would come and mix with our reirideer-niore often the reverse-and that was the last we would see of them." Only 2 10 animals survived the winter, and with expenses NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 321.

Arctic explorer Vilbjalmur Stefansson

still mounting, HBC accountants calculated by the end of 1922 that each beast was nou worth $80.22. The $200,000 venture was eventually written off, though the Hudson's Bay Reindeer Company was still on the HBCs books as late as 1956.

Because the HBC operated in an area virtually inaccessible to visitors, its spreading northern presence was immune to criticism; any outsider wanting to live in the Arctic depended on its supplies. That protection from 322 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

censure was challenged in 1927 when Dr Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, went on an Arctic expedition with his sketching companion, A.Y.

Jackson, a founding member of the Group of Seven, whose work caught the enduring beauty of the -Arctic's desolation. The two men went along as guests aboard the Department of the Interior's supply s.h.i.+p Beothic and vis- ited most of the HBCs stations in the Eastern Arctic. Banting had embarked on the journey as an amateur painter badly in need of a vacation, but his medical training and essential humanity could not long be denied. His journal contained many astute observations, such as that "a native cannot live on white man's food or in white men's dress," a correct diagnosis of the unsuitability of woollen and cotton goods for Arctic wear and of salted and canned provisions for Arctic food. But he was harshest in his a.s.sessments of the 10C. "The company have systeiria ti call y possessed themselves of this country," he noted. "They have at each post an interpreter who puts before the native the company's view & teaches them that the great company will look after them & is their savior. While at the same time they hire them at ten dollars peryear to'retain'them as their men.

They buy their furs very cheap-in trade-tea-tobacco-woollens etc.-which are by no means as good for the native as his former life without these things.

At this port [Arctic Bay] we took on 2 3 bales of fox furs & there are said to be one hundred skins per bale--They sell at $50 to $60 per skin. 2300 x 50 = $115,000. Now where does the native come in? He hunts $100,000 worth of furs & the Company takes the profits."

In a Toronto Star interview after his return (given to a reporter while he thought he was speaking off the record), Banting expanded on his criticism, charging that the Inuit were getting goods worth only $5,000 in exchange for fox skins marketed at $100,000 and that the NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 323.

natives' resistance to disease was being lowered by the diet the Company encouraged its northern customers to eat. In a subsequent letter to an official at the Department of the Interior, he recommended that the Canadian government "take over full control of the fur trade throughout Eskimo territory. From the profits of the trade, proper administration could be carried out and steps be taken to improve rather than destroy the chances of the Eskimo race." The doctor, who because of his n.o.bel Prize was one of the best-known and most trusted Canadiam of his day, went on to comment that ,,the native should be encouraged to lay up a reserve of money or credit in time of plenty to take care of the inevitable lean years ... generally speaking, the policy of the trader has been to keep the F-skirno in his debt."

In the face of this and Banting's many other criticisms, Giovernor Charles Vincent Sale wrote a twentyseven-page letter to Deputy Minister W.W. Cory in which he denied the charges, claiming that "it is obvious that we must be interested in their [the Inuit] welfare since they are the people who, given reasonable opportunities, can best occupy and make use of the snow covered regions in which we operate, and where we have embarked so much of our capital." Banting's attack was a timely indication that the HBC could no longer insulate itself against outsiders questioning its divine right to rule. The North, especially the Arctic's western sector, was exploding with activity that would change the fur trade forever.

THE MACKENZIF RIVFR HAD 13ECOME a comfortable superhighway through the Western Arctic, with the 11BC.'s impressive fleet of thirteen s.h.i.+ps leading the way. By 1927, the Company was offering tourists thirty-fiveday round-trip cruises on the Mackenzie as far north as 324 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Aklavik for $325, including meals, and was unable to accommodate all the pa.s.sengers who swarmed in every summer to take advantage of the journey, advertised as being "2000,1VULES OFF THE BEATEN TRACK."* s.h.i.+ps such as the Atbabasca River boasted a cruising speed of thirteen knots, electric lights, and luxury salon accommodation for fifty-eight pa.s.sengers. Those were great days on the river. "You bad time, for there was no schedule but the riverboat's own," recalled Laco Hunt, a former I 113C Factor who took the journey many times. "You had time to niuse on the legends you'd heard about the great Northern lakes whose names echoed with history; about the fur-trading forts and the men who'd fought to put them in the wilderness....

The long procession of days brought a new rhythm to your life; it seemed to fall in with the pattern made by the mornings and afternoons filled with the sounds of birds, and the swift undercurrents of water, (lark blue with reflected sky."

That romantic vision was disrupted by construction of the Alberta and Greot Waterways Railway, known to every northern hand as the Muskeg Limited, which tapped the Mackenzie Basin into the country's main transportation network. The most disturbing influence was the dramatic mineral strike in the region by a Toronto prospector muried Gilbert LaBine. On the unseasonably cold morning of May 16, 193 0, at a forlorn inlet on the eastern sh.o.r.e of Great Bear Lake, a dav's walk from the Arctic Circle, he found a pluni-sized glob

*The meals the Company advertised received mixed reviews.

'",'ben one of the steamer captains asked a pa.s.senger, the Reverend Gerald Card, to say grace, the Anglican minister refused. "Indeed, I won't," he thundered. "After pai ingthe Hudsons Bay Company fiftN cents for:i meal, against w]kich even my stomach registersthe mostvigorous and continual protests, I fail tosee any reason why I should lift my voice in thanks to G.o.d!"

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of rock that turned out to be pure pitchblende. This would become the great Eldorado Mine, the source first of radium and later of the uranium that was used in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiros.h.i.+ma. The find, which trebled the world stock of radium (before LaBine's discovery, supplies of the precious metal amounted to only half a pound, worth $22 million), set off a mining rush. Would-be prospectors included a Russian prince who arrived with his princess, accompanied by a bearded valet, and an Arab sheikh who wandered aimlessly along the sh.o.r.es of Great Bear, his robes catching in the stunted conifers. The most ingenious method of discovering surface traces of the radioactive ore was that used by Tom Creighton, a veteran sourdough who had earlier helped stake the Flin Flon mine in northern Manitoba. Ile dropped undeveloped film on likely-looking rocky outcrops; the presence of pitchblende would show up as streaks of light.

At about the same time, major gold deposits were discovered at Beaverlodge, on the north sh.o.r.e of Lake Athabasca, while a Cominco prospector named Spud a.r.s.enault struck gold at Yellowknife. Most of the bushwhackers and goldseekers who poured into every part of the North arrived by airplane. LaBine himself had first spotted the pitchblende deposit from the back seat of C.H. "Punch" d.i.c.kins's primitive biplane.

Peering through the aircrafts humming shrouds, he noticed rocks sinudged with the peach-red hues that indicated cobalt bloom, one of the clues a.s.sociated with radium deposits-a mineral strike that would eventually create a world-scale mine. "I suddenly realized," he later recalled, "that I was in elephant country."

The first prospecting flight into the North had actually taken place a decade earlier, when Imperial Oil purchased two German-built 17 5 -h.p.

Junkers monoplanes to supply drilling crews during the oil rush at Norman 326 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

** %, 34.

One of'Imperial Oil's 175-h.p. Junkers that made thefirst prospectingflight into the Arctic

Wells. The monoplanes got only as far as Fort Simpson, where one of them crash-landed, breaking its propeller.

The aircraft was able to take off again after an HBC car penter named NValterjohnson fas.h.i.+oned a subst.i.tute out of toboggan boards held together with bab.i.+.c.he-glue distilled from moose hoofs. Those early bush pilots became reluctant heroes as they peered over the sides of their open c.o.c.kpits to verify their bearings, nervously checking their watches against fuel gauges, adjusting their goggles, praying that the far distant dot on the tun dra for which they were heading was actually there. The Inuit, who had never seen a streetcar or automobile, could easily distinguish a Junkers from a Fokker, Norseman, Beechcraft, Gypsy Moth or Beaver, but as one of their elders at Chesterfield Inlet remarked when gaziDg for the first time at a flying machine, "That is a bad thing to know just a little about." In the tradition of the voyageurs who dared to tread where others only dreamed of going, the fliers, most of them beached vet erans of Great War dogfights, transformed the North.

Probably the most enterprising pilot on those early runs NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 327.

aI

W.R. "Wop "May (rigbt) thikering witb bis BdIanca "Pacemaker, " Fort Chipewyan, 193 3

was Leigh Brintnell, whose tiny Mackenzie Air Service won the government mail contract for most of the Western Arctic. His arrangement with Ottawa called for hini to be paid according to how many pounds of mail he delivered to each settlement. lie had been granted the contract by drastically underbidding his rivals, who were certain he couldn't make a profit on existing traffic. They were right. But that didn't stop Brintnell. He purchase~ airmail subscriptions to the Edinontonjournal for nearly every log shack along the Mackenzie, automatically increasing his payload and trebling his income. WR. "Wop" May, who had duelled with Germany's Red Baron and flown under the Ifigh Level Bridge at Edmonton on a bet, became the first idol of Canada's air age, closely followed by Punch d.i.c.kins.

With its customary foresight, the IIBC refused to partic.i.p.ate in a new scheduled air service between Edmonton and the Mackenzie Valley. But it did employ d.i.c.kins on contract to fly bales of fur out of Fort Good Hope and in the winter of 1930 financed him on a medical mercy mission into Coppermine. The Companv 328 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

purchased its first plane-a twin-engined Beechcraft equipped with wheels, skis and floats-in 1939, only eleven years after nearly everyone else in its territories had taken to doing business by air. Paul Davoud, the 14B(I's first pilot, calculated that George Simpson's eighty-four-day dash by canoe in 1824 on his famous inspection tour from Lachine to the Pacific would now take only ten hours. Davoud flew I IBC executives on their first aerial inspection tour in the summer of 1940, much to the unwelcome surprise of local store managers, used to getting warnings of visits by Company bra.s.s via the staff moccasin telegraph. "We landed at Fort Resolution at five in the morning," Davoud recalled. "The post manager, with about a five days'

beard on him, was down on the dock, scratching his belly, wanting to knoA who I had aboard. When I told him I had 'the works'--the chief of the fur trade, head of Canadian operations, and the Governor, over from London-he groaned and was sure he'd be fired. He wasn't, but I don't think he was the same man after that." When the Beeclicraft set down at Fort Rae, one of the local aboriginals was shown through it. Pointing at the plane's luxurious fittings, an HBC executive asked the visitor whether he admired the white man's marvel. "Sure," was the laconic reply. "We paid for it."

An incursion into the North of a very different sort was the railway built to Churchill, on Hudson Bay. Proponents of the railroad claimed that exporting grain through the Bay would force the cm to reduce freight rates and cut the cost oftrans-s.h.i.+pping Liverpool-bound goods at Montreal. The project had been kicking around Parliament since 1884, awaiting funds and legislative sanction. Nine charters were approved, but actual construction didn't start until 1910. The line was originally planned to terminate at Port Nelson, near York Factory, and a $6-million, seventeen-span steel bridge was NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 329.

erected to a man-made island, where the new harbour was to be built. The First World War intervened, and when the railwa~ was finally completed in 1929, Churchill was its terminus, leaving Port Nelson abandoned, the sub-A-rctic's most expensive white elephant. Iwo years later, the Farnzvortb, a tramp steamer out of Newcastle-on-Tync, loaded Churchill's first commercial wheat s.h.i.+pment. For a time the harbour handled general goods, but soon its only customer was a reluctant Canadian Wheat Board, and the dream of building an ~Ilternative grain-export route faded.*

The failure of Churchill was partly due to its inauguration on the eve of the Depression, which also cut deeply into lIB(. profit and the fur trade in general. Arctic fox prices declined as much as 800 percent, and silver fox pelts plummeted in valut from $450 in 192 0 to only $9 by 193 9. The problem with i hat luxurious variety was not only the Depression but the new customers it attracted. Nearly every prost.i.tute in London and Paris suddenly decided she couldn't successfully walk the streets unless she was decked out in a silver fox stole-and with more and more tarts adopting the f ur as a badge of office, the bottom fell out of the market. The Depression cut severely into Company budgets. Operational costs were dramatically reduced b~ the closing of a hundred stores. At one Arctic settlement, coal rat ions grew so short that the HBC manager had to dismantle and burn his warehouse to keep warin. The HBCs presence in the Western Arctic was

-rhe train from Winnipeg to Churchill was still operating in the 1990s, but in a typical year it attracted only 5,616 pa.s.sengers, so that a $1 1.5-million annual federal subsi~v-or $2,047 a pa.s.senger for its thirtA -four-hour run-was required. Adam Corelli of the Financial'Dynff oj'Canada calculated that the same trip in a rented Mercede~ limousine m ould cost only S 1,566-if onlV there were a road.

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reduced to only three posts: Coppermine, Cambridge Bay and Tuktoyaktuk.

The Depression only aggravated the Company's less than generous staff policies. Post managers were usually moved to lower-paying positions for the last few years of their tenures, so that the pensions due them, caiculated asa percentage of thei r final years'pay, could be reduced.

But the HBC's management did come up with the occasional generous and humane decision. When Hugh Mackay Ross was appointed manager of the Saskatchewan district, he wanted to pension off Jock Mathieson, the veteran post manager at Beauval, who hadn't man), years to go in the service and was the main stumbling block to Ross's reorganization plans.

Ross sent his recommendation to the Company's Canadian hejdquarters, where his request for removing the old trader was denied. "They had carefully studied Mr. Mathieson's dossier," he later recalled, "and had concluded that because his son was attending the local school, it would be a hards.h.i.+p for the family to be si2nt where no school was available.

They further concluded that Mr. Mathieson's abilities as a competent post manager had always been in doubt, but no action had been taken by the Company. The fault, therefore, was the Company's, and not Mr.

Mathieson's, and he should remain at Bea uval until he reached Ul retirement." Ross pondered the ruling and after his initial disappointment had to admit that it was a wisc decision, one that inade him feel proud to be a "Bay man."

About the only improvement the Company made to its northern facilities during the 1930s was installation of short-wave transmitters that for the first time connected the isolated outposts with each other and the outside world. Except for the annual supply-s.h.i.+p visit and the occasional winter dog team, the Company's servants received no personal or corporate news until these radios NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 331.

HBC clerk Charles N. Stephen, with radio equipment at Lansdowne House, 1941

were installed, starting with Arctic Bay, Leaf River, Cape Dorset and Cape Smith in 1937.The twelve-watt Morse code sets were powered by windmill -operated generators and twelve-volt storage batteries that were nursed like colicky babies, kept warm by claiming the place of honour behind each staff house stove. The network grew to fifty-four stations-the country's largest-and was eventualiv converted to single sideband, and later to voice and radio telephones.

A more daring departure was the first modern Canadian beaver preserve, established near Rupert House on James Bay. The areas beaver ponds had been almost totally trapped out, leaving the Cree with nothing to trade, when the local I IBC manager, James Watt, and his wife, Maud, persuaded Company authorities to leave the few remaining beaver houses alone, so that the 332 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

animals would have a chance to multiply. Quebec designated a 7,200-square-inile beaver sanctuary, which was so successful that by 1940 trapping could begin again.

During the Second World War several northern locations were used for temporary airfields, as staging areas for military inanoeuvres and for Ferry Command operations. The largest undertaking was the great Canol pro- ject, which piped oil from Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River six hundred miles to a refinery built at Whitehorse for use in the North Pacific theatre of war. As the Arctic expert Graham Rowley noted, "In a country where old lard pails had been treasured, 45-gallon drums, not always empty, were discarded." One measure of the HBCs dominant influence among the Inuit at that time was this description of the Second World War, given by Octave Sivanertok of Repulse Bay in a 1979 interview with the CBCs Lorna Kusugak: "There was a big war. It was between the Bay and the Germans. The Bay won."

Yet in at least one way, the war years were merely an extension of the Depression. The Canadian government, pressured by more urgent priorities, perpetuated its benign neglect of the North.

What changed all that was the precipitous dive of white fox prices from thirty-five dollars to three dollars between 1946 and 1948. With their only cash crop all but wiped out, the Inuit found their social and economic framework altered. They had abandoned their hunting ethic to become trappers, and now, cut off for at least a generation from living off the land, they could not subsist on the low fur price~. Epidemics of such white men's illnesses as measles, influenza, tuberculosis, diphtheria and venereal diseases were spreading across the North. Families were starving and sled dogs dying, further reducing the ability of the Inuit to hunt.

There were some work opportunities, such as the opening of a nickel mine at Rankin Inlet, which operated between 1957 and NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 333.

1962, employing tip to eighty Inuit, and construction of the ninety-eight Distant Early Warning stations across the North in the mid-1950s. But they were too limited to have much impact. According to a 1960 survey, only 307 Inult (out of a total population of about 12,000) had jobs that year, and only 63 of thern worked for non-government agencies: 58 for North Rankin Nickel Mines Limited, 2 for missionaries and 3 for the Hudson's Bay Company. With such narrow employment opportunities, the Northerners grew increasingly dependent on government welfare. As Ottawa becarne more concerned about their ability to survive, the Inult themselves were being urbanized, ,i process that significantly raised their individual and collective aspirations. Paradoxically, the most significant of these urbanizing influences was tuberculosis, which at one tirne afflicted a third of the Iriuit population. "Fridentic upper respiratory diseases like tuberculosis, emphysema, an(] bronchitis motivated movement of the people into white mens settlements, mainly to hospitals in the South," recalled R.G. Williamson, an itrithropologist at the University of Saskatchewan.

"Ne-A, lifestyle expectations were created during their tirne at the treatment centres, as theN watched television and visited white people's hoines in Winnipeg, Brandon, Hamilton,Toronto, and Montreal. As material expectations were raised, the Hudson's Bav Company had to modernize its merchandising metho(fs and expand its lines. It begart to stock tailor-made cigarettes and moved Ironi selling mainly high-protein foods to such high-carbohydrate (and high mark-up) items as sweet biscuits, soft c(rinks, candv, and other funk foods. That w,,is a big change to the old fur trade posts, where keeping 2 ' 2-inch rialls in stockA as thought to be a bit of ~1 luxury."