On the shore of the Arctic ocean near Tuktoyaktuk, two old Inuvialuit hunters gather driftwood to build a fire and heat a kettle of water for making tea. They share a lunch of fresh caribou meat and muktuk, the blubber taken from the sides of the beluga whale. They warm the caribou leg in the fire, and then cut off chunks of it, still dripping with blood. They alternate bits of caribou with fatty slices of muktuk, which has a rubbery consistency somewhat resembling that of squid or a chicken gizzard. It tastes distinctly of the ocean and leaves a fatty coating on the inside of the mouth. By contrast the fresh blood of the caribou tastes sweet, and the soft flesh has a flavor milder than beef and without a wild or gamy aroma.

The favorite food of the villagers comes from the white whale, or beluga, which usually reaches from fourteen to sixteen feet in length. The small-headed belugas congregrate in the food-rich Arctic waters in the summer, and they supply a nutritious food for the long winter. The beluga concentrates many vitamins and nutrients, including the easily destroyed Vitamin C, in its blubber. The preserved strips of muktuk supply a steady source of Vitamin C throughout the Arctic winter and prevent scurvy and related nutritional diseases even in people who eat no fresh plant food for several months.

This habit of eating uncooked meat led to these people being called Eskimo, which means “eaters of raw meat” in the language of their Algonquian-speaking neighbors to the south. Most of the world adopted this name for these people, and the people around Tuktoyaktuk became known as the Mackenzie Eskimo or Western Eskimo. Most of the native people of the American Arctic prefer to be called Inuit, or, in the language spoken by the people of Tuktoyaktuk, Inuvialuit, both of which mean simply “the people.”

Tuktoyaktuk sits in the northwest corner of Canada’s Northwest Territories near the borders of the Yukon and Alaska. At the northern extremes, most modern maps of the world are somewhat compressed and difficult to comprehend for those of us who usually live in temperate zones, at seemingly wider latitudes. Tuktoyaktuk lies closer to Siberia in the west and to Greenland in the east than to the contiguous forty-eight United States to the south.

At this northern latitude, the meridians of longitude become squashed together as they move closer to their merger at the North Pole. A hunter moving either east or west out of Tuktoyaktuk would cross a meridian every 23.72 miles, as compared to a hunter at the Equator who would have to travel nearly 70 miles between meridians. Even though it is at 133 degrees west longitude, Tuktoyaktuk occupies approximately the same longitude as Pitcairn Island and the Marquesas in the South Pacific, and could just as easily be said to be due north of Seattle. Tuktoyaktuk lies more than 3,000 miles northwest of Chicago. Washington, D.C., is as close to the Equator as it is to Tuktoyaktuk. Even a city such as Minneapolis, one of the most northern in the United States, lies as close to Havana, Cuba, as to Tuktoyaktuk.

Time becomes even more warped than geography for the southerner at this latitude of 70 degrees north. The sun disappears completely for six weeks in the winter, and for months it makes only a token appearance each day on the tip of the horizon. In summer, the sun refuses to set; instead, it whirls overhead in a clockwise circle, twenty-four hours a day. The time zones of the earth become virtually arbitrary at this latitude. The sun reaches its zenith in the summer sky between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, and the high temperature for the day frequently occurs at midnight.

Despite the high summer sun, temperatures in the summer usually fail to rise above the fifties (Fahrenheit), and a windy blast from the nearby polar ice cap easily sends the thermometer plunging back down to freezing. In January, the average daily temperature hovers around minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit, but cold fronts and winds in January can send it crashing down to nearly minus one hundred degrees.

The people of the Arctic coast of Canada, together with the tribal people of Siberia, endure the harshest climate in the inhabited world. Unlike Alaska, where the warm Pacific waters ameliorate the cold of the Arctic Ocean, and unlike northern Scandinavia, which benefits from the last drops of heat left in the Gulf Stream, the Canadian Arctic faces the full fury of winds circling the North Pole and its frozen ice cap. No mountains protect them; no tropical waters flow north to help them. Behind them lies the cold interior of the Canadian tundra; in front of them lies a thousand miles of solid ice.

Even in the summer, when the coastal edge of the ocean melts, the dark gray waters that lap the Tuktoyaktuk shore retain a bone-chilling cold that can kill a swimmer within thirty minutes. Occasionally a stiff wind sends the tide flooding into the village, but normally the water rises and falls on a rugged but placid shoreline covered with rocks ranging from sesame-seed-sized pebbles to stones as large as a bowling ball. Despite the variation in size and color, almost all of the stones have rounded edges, smoothed by eons of pounding by the Arctic seas and the scraping and pulling of advancing and receding winter ice.

The Inuit culture stretches along a thin coastal ribbon and adjacent rocky islands for five thousand miles from the eastern Pacific and Arctic shores of Siberia and the coasts of Alaska to the eastern shore of Greenland in the northern Atlantic. Over this whole area, the Inuit area share a mutually intelligible language. Living in small pockets and villages scattered over such a large portion of the Arctic, they created one of the most dispersed cultures on earth. Prior to the creation of modern Canada and the United States, the Inuit represent the only cultural group in the world ever known to live on the shores of three of the earth’s major oceans—the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Arctic.

In some ways, Tuktoyaktuk seems to be a place suspended in time. Three large oil companies already have drilled off its coast in the Beaufort Sea and found huge reservoirs of oil—perhaps the largest petroleum deposits in all the Americas. The oil is there, the companies are in place, and they are waiting until the right technological developments allow them to tap the oil and transport it south to the urban areas of the continent.

Some investigators have proposed that the oil companies build an overland pipeline like the North Shore pipeline across Alaska. A variation of this scheme would run the pipes underwater to make them invisible and thus less threatening to visitors. Other proposals include massive icebreaking oil barges that can plow through six feet of solid January ice and keep the oil flowing throughout the year. Yet another proposal advocates development of submarine barges that could float beneath the ice. In due time, one or another of these scenarios will be enacted to open up the Beaufort Sea reserves. When the international price of oil rises high enough, when another war in the Middle East threatens to cut off North American supplies, or when some of the other reserves begin to run dry, someone will come forward with the new technology to open the wells off Tuktoyaktuk.

Even though the approximately nine hundred Inuvialuit have left their traditional sod houses to live in uniform, government-supplied houses painted in institutional monochromes of brown or gray, the traditional skills of hunting and fishing play a major role in their sustenance. The evidence for the older way of life still lies scattered throughout the village. Caribou antlers cover the village roofs, where the hunters throw them to dry and bleach in the summer sun, beyond the reach of mischievous children and hungry dogs. Inside the homes, many of the Inuvialuit have decorated their walls with modern photographs of polar bear and caribou interspersed with family portraits and wall hangings of the Last Supper or Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

On the edge of Tuktoyaktuk, by the bay, rises an inconspicuous wooden shed painted white and ringed with ventilation slats punctuating the top of its walls. The small building proves to be much larger on the inside than it appears from the outside, because it leads to a passageway dug down into the permafrost, where the access tunnel divides into three tunnels, each lined with rooms about the size of a small van. This serves as the village freezer. Any hunter can bring his kill into the tunnel and store it in one of the large lockers. The meat in the lockers remains frozen throughout the year because it lies in the permafrost, never thawing, even on the warmest summer day.

Anyone digging only twelve to eighteen inches in the soil at the warmest time of the year will still hit the rock-hard layer of permafrost. Graves for the dead must be dug with jackhammers, and then only in the summer. The village cannot install water, sewage, or gas pipes through the ground because of the permafrost. Water and gas must be delivered to holding tanks in each home, and similarly sewage and other waste must be picked up and hauled away. Because of the permafrost, the houses must be built several feet above the ground, on pilings sunk fifteen feet into the ground. If the houses rested directly on the ground, their heat would create a slow but persistent melting of the top layer of permafrost and cause the house to sway and sink gradually into the thawing muck.

Traditional sledges and modern gasoline cans lean against the houses throughout Tuktoyaktuk. Although hunters frequently pull their sledges by snowmobile rather than by dog, many of the hunters use both. The dogs surround the village; they live outside even in the coldest weather, each one staked to a separate post in the ground. Their owners have trained the silent dogs not to fight and not to growl at one another. Like their wolf ancestors, huskies do not bark, but they sometimes howl.

Staked around the periphery of the village, the dogs serve as an early-warning system against predators. A few years ago a hungry male polar bear about seven years old wandered in from the ice cap. The polar bear is the world’s largest land carnivore, and it needs large quantities of meat. This particular bear had not reached full maturity; the polar bears in this area can grow to eleven feet in length. When a bear of that height rears up on its haunches, it can tower over a human from a height of fourteen feet.

Because of the age of the stray polar bear that wandered into Tuktoyaktuk, he had great strength, but he lacked experience in hunting; otherwise he would have avoided the tempting prey offered by the village of humans and their dogs. He first attacked a dog, and in the manner of the polar bear on the hunt, he killed three dogs in quick succession. The polar bear normally goes into a killing frenzy when it hunts, killing as many prey as it can before stopping to eat one of them. The dogs had been staked just beyond the path on which the children walk to school. If the dogs had not been staked there, the bear might easily have attacked the column of children making their way through the dark. The commotion made by the bear slaughtering the dogs roused the people of the village, and the hunters came out and killed the bear before it attacked a human.

In recent years, hunters have bestowed renewed respect on their dogs as the limits of the snowmobile became better understood. As one musher explained to me, “A Ski-doo doesn’t know the way home in a whiteout.” Among the Inuvialuit, men and dogs hunt as a team. A trained team of huskies knows how to surround musk oxen in the autumn and to drive them into their defensive formation, in which the larger animals form a circle with their horns facing outward. The dogs help to track caribou, but more dangerous game, such as the polar bear, requires all the cunning and strength of both the hunter and the dog team.

In the winter, the value of the dogs increases markedly. The Inuvialuit hunters rely on their dogs to sniff out the breathing holes of seals in the ice. Because the seal is a mammal, it must come up for air regularly. To accomplish this feat even while swimming under several feet of polar ice, the seal maintains a sequence of small breathing holes scattered throughout its territory. When covered by a thin layer of snow, the breathing hole becomes virtually invisible to the eye, but the husky’s keen sense of smell leads the hunter straight to the holes.

The polar bear hunters still occupy the top rung in the social hierarchy of respect among the Inuvialuit hunters. The hunt for nanook, as they call the polar bear, requires a lifetime of careful training and strict personal discipline, but the Inuvialuit, with their palates well-developed for variations in meat flavors, still prize the strong flavor of polar bear meat. The hunters of Tuktoyaktuk always take special parts of the kill to the row of small apartments that house the village elderly.

Our word Arctic derives from Greek, and means “bear.” It seems a fitting tribute to the polar bear, but in fact the ancient Greeks knew nothing of this large animal. They called the area to the far north arktikos because that was the region beneath the seven-star constellation of the Great Bear, also known to us by its Latin name, Ursa Major. We call the constellation the Big Dipper, but we kept the Greek name arktikos for the whole northern land below it.

Western science has had trouble categorizing the bear. For a while they called its genus Thalarctos, but the polar bear was the only animal so classified. Unlike the koala “bear,” which is not a true bear, the common name polar bear proved more appropriate than the scientific name because the polar bear really is a bear, clearly related to the black, brown, and grizzly bears farther south. Scientists have put the polar bear back into the genus Ursus with the other bears, and we now call it Ursus maritimus, “sea bear.”

The Inuvialuit eat or use virtually all of the animal, except its toxic liver which can kill a dog or a human. The native people either use or sell the polar bear pelt, but as with silver fox, seal, badger, and many of the other pelts taken by Inuvialuit hunters, the international prices have fallen as more fashion designers use synthetic materials, and as new restrictions in various countries limit their importation.

Southerners who have moved into Inuit territory in recent centuries have been forced to learn from the Inuit. The nineteenth-century whalers came annually and brought their own food supplies with them, but, unable to survive the Arctic winter with their own technology, they left before the winter freeze-up. More recently, as the United States and Canadian governments built their system of Distant Early Warning bases across the Arctic coast, oil and mineral prospectors entered and scientific researchers of various types have set up stations in the north. They all depended on long, fragile supply lines that connected them with their own societies to the south.

Because of the harshness of their land, their remoteness from the sources of manufactured goods, and the general slowness of whites to settle in their area, the Arctic natives experienced little outside interference in their traditional life prior to the twentieth century. They still practice many of the hunting skills that native people once shared throughout North America.

The natives of North America were some of the best hunters ever known anywhere in the world; their skill and accuracy frequently astounded the early European explorers. When the Arctic explorer Martin Frobisher made his voyage to Baffin Island, the skill of the Inuit so impressed him that he kidnapped a hunter to take back to England as a prize. The hunter’s skill with a harpoon thrilled Queen Elizabeth I so much that she invited him to harpoon her royal swans for the amusement of her court.

Despite the speed and accuracy of Native American hunters, their genius lay in their intimate knowledge of animal habits and in their sophisticated approach to hunting, which stressed tactics over technology. Rather than simply overwhelming their quarry with ammunition and firepower, the hunters cajoled and tricked it.

One method they used was to imitate the calls of birds and animals. The hunters made most of these whistles and calls by using only their voices, amplified or modified by cupping their hands over their mouths in various configurations. The Assiniboin hunters attracted the curiosity of buffalo cows by bleating like a buffalo calf. A young Inuit coming of age as a hunter was expected to imitate the calls of ducks, geese, gulls, and auks, as well as the less common guillemots, kittiwakes, puffins, and razorbills.

To reproduce sounds that the human voice could not make, the hunters manufactured whistles of wood, clay, antler, and bone to summon prey by imitating a courtship or distress call. The smallest and simplest of these calls consisted of nothing more than a blade of grass held between two fingers and blown to imitate the sound of a fawn in distress, a sound that could summon a doe. The Shoshoni banged rocks together to imitate the crash of male mountain sheep fighting, a commotion that usually attracted the curiosity of other mountain sheep. Similarly, hunters attracted deer during rutting season by clashing antlers together. The natives of the Canadian boreal forest summoned the attention of amorous male moose by pouring buckets of water into a stream or lake in imitation of a female moose urinating (Driver).

The natives of the Great Lakes crafted the largest animal calls. Ojibwa and Cree hunters rolled sheets of birchbark to fashion a megaphone that they used to amplify their moose calls, while the Dene, farther to the north, used a similar but smaller device to call the caribou.

In addition to calls and whistles, the Indian hunters manufactured decoys to lure animals or birds. Archaeologists have found ancient wooden and straw bird decoys throughout North America. The hunters placed the wooden ducks and geese out to float on ponds in order to attract real birds migrating overhead to land on the water.

Many hunters wore the skins of the animals they hunted as a means of disguising themselves and sneaking into the midst of the quarry. A sixteenth-century drawing by the Flemish engraver Theodore De Bry depicts three Timucua hunters stalking a herd of deer in Florida. De Bry’s drawings were first published in 1591 to illustrate the account of Jacques Le Moyne, who described in detail the Timucuas’ method of hunting, after his visit to America in 1564–65 (Swanton). This technique required of the hunter not only a convincing animal costume but also an intimate knowledge of the movements and behavior of the deer in order not to startle or frighten them.

Early French chroniclers described the Natchez hunters along the lower Mississippi River as always carrying on their belts the treated antlers and head of a deer, which they could slip on and use for hunting at any moment the prey might be spotted. An item of such practical use as the decoy mask easily lent itself to ceremonial use, and we know from historical records that such use of masks in dances and ceremonies was very common.

Using similar tactics, Indian hunters on the plains dressed in bison skins, which could be heavy and awkward, so they often preferred to use a wolfskin instead. Since bison in large herds showed little fear of wolves, which usually stalked only the sick or elderly strays, the hunters dressed as wolves and crept within easy bow range of the herd.

During the summer, when seals frolicked on the rocky shores of islands around the Arctic, Inuit hunters would dress in sealskins, and in some instances put on a special helmet carved to look like a seal head. With this disguise the men crawled onto shore, carefully imitating the movements and barks of the seals, and thereby infiltrating their gatherings. Inuit hunters made snow blinds that they pushed ahead of themselves as they slowly encroached upon an unsuspecting seal sunning on the ice. The hunters also made shields from polar bear skins and used them as white blinds that blended in with the snow, and from behind which they could sneak up on the seals. Seal hunters today still use the same technique, but they often substitute a frame of white linen for the polar bear skin or snow shield. They even carried a scratcher to imitate the sound of seal flippers scraping on the rocks.

Throughout the Americas, hunters used similar techniques of camouflage and imitation with the skins, horns, or antlers of virtually any large animal. When the hunters did not have a deerskin, sealskin, or buffalo hide at hand, they camouflaged themselves with plants that they tied onto their bodies, or with irregular patterns of paint that they wore on their faces and torsos, similar to warpaint but in darker camouflage colors rather than the bright reds and yellows of war.

Hunters all over the Americas still use many of these techniques. Men and women go out to hunt wearing camouflage clothes and sometimes camouflage greasepaint, and they carry with them bird decoys and assorted whistles and callers, without realizing that all of these devices came directly from ancient Indian hunters.

Native hunters also used a variety of traps. On the plains, where the eagle feather had such a high value, hunters devised a way to trap the animals without harming or marring the quality of the feathers. They dug a pit covered with branches and secured a small animal or bird on top of the branches as bait. A hunter waited silently in the covered pit beneath the bait. When the eagle seized the tied bait and could not pull it aloft, the hunter rose quickly up from the pit, grabbed the eagle, and strangled it. Considering the large beaks and vicious claws of the eagle, this hand-to-hand combat with the eagle seems more a proof of bravery and strength than of mere cunning.

Indian hunters devised ways to manipulate entire herds. On the Great Plains, hunters knew how to stampede the herds to run them to exhaustion and often to send part of the herd over an embankment. The hunters then harvested the carcasses that collected at the bottom. Paleo-Indians apparently used this technique thousands of years ago, but later generations of hunters refined it into a less wasteful type of herd management.

In central Canada, the practice of animal hunting and trapping reached a sophisticated complexity among the Chipewyans. Prior to the annual migration of the caribou, the Chipewyans erected a series of brush-and-pole figures that looked like scarecrows spread over many miles of the plains and tundra. The human-looking figures frightened the caribou, which steered their herds away from them. By carefully situating the scarecrows into a funnel formation, the Chipewyans could direct a small herd of caribou into a corral called a surround (Kopper). Made like a wooden stockade with timber and brush, the larger surrounds exceeded a mile in diameter and stood as permanent parts of the landscape. The neighboring Assiniboin to the south made a structure called a pound in a similar way, with logs and dirt.

Inuit living west of Hudson Bay erected similar traps for caribou, but in their central Arctic homeland they had no brush or pole from which to construct the large manikins. The Eskimo substituted large stone cairns called inukshuk (or inukshuik in the plural) on which they piled large, flat rock slabs on top of two upright slabs that resembled legs. The resulting inukshuk, which means “something like a person,” looked enough like a human to repel the caribou and thus push them toward a spot where the Eskimo hunters waited in ambush. In the timeless Arctic, one can still see the inukshuik standing, holding eternal vigil like the colossal statues of Ramses II that litter the Egyptian desert.

While the Inuit men waited in hiding to attack the caribou once driven to them, the women spread out at a distance from the ambush site, and howled in imitation of the wolf. As a reverse strategy of the summoning call, the howl of the wolf frightened the caribou and made them run faster in the direction of the waiting hunters in the ambush.

The Indians of New England, who specialized in hunting deer, used hunting techniques that paralleled those of the Inuit and Chipewyan hunters of caribou. In order to control the deer on the run, the Indians planted and maintained hedges up to a mile in length. These hedges subtly channeled the unsuspecting deer toward the waiting hunters at the vortex of the funnel (Cronon). In other parts of North America, Indians commonly used fire as a way to drive toward waiting hunters animals such as deer and buffalo, and also to flush out animals as varied as rabbits and alligators, depending on the region.

Even though the natives of America relied heavily on tactics, they crafted a variety of weapons. Hunters throughout North America used the bow and arrow as well as an older weapon, the spear. These formed the universal tool kit for the whole of the continent. In addition, the natives of various areas used special weapons suited to the particular natural resources and appropriate to the prey of that area.

The natives in roughly half of North America used slings for hunting small animals and birds. The Cree of Canada’s subarctic region hunted small animals with a bolo made from stones tied together with leather thongs. The hunter twirled the bolo overhead, and upon its release the rocks spun through the air and entwined the legs of the prey.

Hunters made an atlatl, or spear thrower, from a short piece of hardwood that could be carved with a handle at one end and a notch at the other. By holding the atlatl by the handle and inserting the butt of the spear into the notch, the hunter essentially was able to lengthen his throwing arm, thereby achieving much greater force behind his throw. With the atlatl, the spear traveled farther and hit harder. Even though the atlatl consisted of only a single stick with no moving parts, it constituted the first known tool made by humans to operate another tool. In this regard it was something of a mega-tool or a machine.

In the southeastern United States, among the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and others, hunters used blowguns made from hollow canes three or more feet in length and much like the ones still used in the Amazon forests of Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil. The hunters used these blowguns to shoot poison darts. The technology for this also predates the development of the bow and probably diffused into North America from Central America or the Yucatàn across the Gulf of Mexico.

The hunters of Tuktoyaktuk often guide affluent hunters and fishermen from the south. These men trek northward during the constant daylight of the summer, and they enjoy hunting or fishing for prey larger and more exotic than they can get down home. A hunting license for the larger prey can run several thousand dollars and requires the assistance of a licensed outfitter and guide. Still, the experience attracts hunters and fishermen willing to pay for the unique Arctic experience, even if it results in shooting only a rabbit.

Game hunting and fishing have become such an important part of the economy that the community college in Inuvik offers special courses on these subjects for Inuvialuit and Dene who want to become licensed guides. Regional planners and economic developers expect that as transportation into the area improves in the twenty-first century, ecological tourism and nature tourism as well as traditional hunting and fishing may become a major part of the economic base of the Arctic and subarctic regions.

The men of Tuktoyaktuk working as guides for hunters represent an ancient pattern in native-white relations stretching back to the first colonists who arrived in America from Europe. The colonists came with virtually no hunting experience in Europe. Even though the ancient European tribes had great hunters several thousand years ago, the overgrazing, overfarming, and overcrowding of Europe in subsequent centuries destroyed most of the hunting grounds. Many of the small forests that remained fell under the exclusive purview of the aristocratic landowners. They limited the hunting of stags, foxes, swans, ducks, boars, and even rabbits to themselves and their cadres of specially trained dogs, horses, and falcons.

A peasant or commoner caught hunting in medieval Europe faced severe punishment. The crime, which was called poaching, occupied many pages in the law books and was the subject of repeated royal edicts and decrees leading to some rather dramatic court cases. Lords used guards and special game wardens to protect their hunting grounds from poaching by peasants and other common people.

For the Europeans arriving to settle in America, hunting had virtually nothing to do with subsistence; it was a sport. Its practitioners dressed conspicuously and used elaborate equipment; large hunting estates were used as settings on which to stage grand ceremonial and theatrical hunts followed by sumptuous feasts. In England the hunt, particularly the fox hunt, eventually became an elaborate ritual of the landed gentry and their imitators, but it had nothing to do with providing food for anyone.

Not only were the new colonists ignorant of hunting, but as common people and usually city dwellers, they appeared haunted by a general fear and mistrust of hunting and of forests. They even considered it remarkably uppity of the Indians to spend so much time at what William Byrd II of Virginia called the “Gentlemanly Diversions of Hunting and Fishing” rather than in working. Even William Penn, who usually showed such great respect for the Indians, referred to their “Hunting, Fishing and Fowling” as “their pleasure.” (Axtell 1981). For the class-conscious colonists, the Indians’ audacity in hunting grossly violated the English notions of proper behavior. To the colonists the Indians were inferiors, and yet they claimed rights to hunt and perform other acts practiced only by aristocrats in Europe.

In America the colonists needed food. The early settlers could scarcely rely on shipments from England, and their crops often proved unsuited to American soil. Yet all around them in the forest and along the waterways flourished an abundance of deer, bear, elk, rabbit, squirrel, duck, goose, beaver, pigeon, and some formerly unknown but tasty regional game such as opossum, turkey, armadillo, alligator, bison, moose, caribou, musk ox, and antelope.

From the first colonization efforts in Virginia and Massachusetts, the newcomers depended on the natives for food. The Indians supplied large amounts of meat and fish as gifts to the colonists, who traded trinkets and other goods for a steady supply of protein.

In time, this supplying of meat by the Indians developed into a large-scale and well-organized Indian business. Indians supplied fresh and smoked meat as well as dried jerky and pemmican all along the frontier of America, but it was in the French and British holdings in Canada that this trade in game foods became most highly organized and institutionalized.

Particularly in the interior of Canada, or Rupert’s Land, where colonization came much more slowly and agriculture proved more difficult for the colonists, the Hudson’s Bay Company continued its traditional reliance on Indian hunters not only for furs but also for food to feed its army of employees. In time the hunting became the special domain of the Métis (pronounced MAY-tea), the French-Indian mixed-bloods who organized large annual buffalo hunts on the plains. Operating out of St. Boniface at the confluence of the Assiniboin and Red rivers at what is now Winnipeg, the Métis hunting parties frequently grew to several thousand hunters and had a highly organized and disciplined command chain. They traveled across the Great Plains of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta and into Montana and the Dakotas with large wooden carts pulled by oxen and horses. Made entirely of wood and rawhide with neither nails nor axle grease, the carts creaked with a piercing screech as the wooden wheels scraped ceaselessly against the wooden axles.

After the hunts, the Métis women skinned and butchered the animals on the spot where they fell. They cut the meat in long strips, dried it in the sun, or smoked it over fires to purge the moisture and thus preserve the meat. The Métis women dried the meat to make jerky, pounded it to make a powdery meal, and mixed it with dried berries and fat to make pemmican, the staple food that the Hudson’s Bay Company used to feed its employees through the long winter. Only after the women completely processed the entire slaughter did the Métis load the meat supply on their carts and then distribute it by cart and canoe throughout central and northern Canada (McMillan).

As the colonists of North America pushed the Indians back, and as European diseases decimated the Indian villagers, the colonists learned to hunt for themselves. They did not, however, learn the dramatic pageantry of European hunting on horseback; they learned the simple, direct methods of the Indians creeping silently through the forest in search of prey. Under the tutelage of the Indians, the colonists became frontiersmen. They substituted some pieces of their own European technology, such as the musket and later the rifle, in place of the Indian bow, spear, and blowgun, but in most respects the frontiersman followed Indian custom even to the point of wearing buckskin clothes, moccasins, and buffalo robes and coonskin hats in the colder weather. They also adopted the Indian equipment of canoe, kayak, snowshoes, waterproof ponchos, and snow goggles.

The Indians and colonists together synthesized a frontier culture from their two markedly different traditions, and the core of this frontier culture centered on hunting for subsistence. In this way, the Indians Americanized the settlers.