THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

Evening Post, Issue 66, 15 September 1936, Page 18

THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

HARDY SETTLERS

FORTITUDE OF WOMEN

AIR PROVIDES HIGHWAY,

(From "Trie Post's" Representative.) VANCOUVER, August 12.

"The law of God and man," whose existence north of Fifty-three Kipling doubted a generation ago, is a living principle nowadays within the Arctic Circle, twenty-two degrees more remote from civilisation. Women— Engysjjjf and "Canadian. :'■mainly—have insisted on" it since they followed their husbands and menfolk further into the wilderness seeking romance and adventure, or exhibiting a resurgence, of that pioneer instinct displayed by the women who first settled Canada. The most northerly hospital in the world, at Aklaviky ■ was destroyed by fire in the middle of the night last winter. There is no fire brigade 200 miles north ,of the Arctic Circle, nor was there water, since all the streams, lakes, and rivers were frozen solid. \ Three nurses sleeping in the hos-, pital awakened" to find the building in flames. Nurse M. A. Solomon ran for the doctor, and aroused the Mounties at the barracks. Nurses Ruth Hamilton and Helen Hutcheson commenced evacuating the patients, nearly all of them Eskimos. Meantime, the nurses' quarters were consumed and the three women lost all their belongings. Nurse Hutcheson remained to assist Dr. Urquhart until a new hospital, now nearing completion, was erected; Nurses Solomon and Hamilton went "outside" by air, wearing men's clothes. They have now returned, taking with them an eager probationer. ■ Two thousand miles eastward across the White Silence is the remotest hospital in the world, at Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island. It is under the charge of Nurse Prudence Hpcken, who has been there for five years. Half a dozen white women there have contact .with the outside world once a year-when the Canadian Government steamer Nascopie calls late in the summer with a year's supplies. SHOPPING BY AEROPLANE. An Englishwoman of culture and refinement, who- lives, at Pangnirtung, pays for her yearly contact with the supply ship by insisting on doing the laundry.work for the Dominion Government officials who travel north by the Nascopie. A distant fur-trading post at Poyungnituk, on the Ungava Bay shore of Hudson Bay, is controlled by a young Scot, Robert Stewart. Last year he came out to be married. An aeroplane.took the honeymooners for the last 600 miles of their northern journey. When it did not return in three weeks' a search machine, equipped with radio, went after it and located it disabled on a river running into Hudson Bay. The journey was continued. . A housewife in a remote mining camp objected to paying sixteen dollars for a bag of flour and ten dollars for a bag of potatoes: "But it had to be freighted 150 mile 3by canoe," pleaded the storekeeper. That was five years ago. Today the irate housewife is the community's storekeeper and postmistress. Three times a week goods arrive by aeroplane. Flour is four dollars and potatoes three dollars a bag. She is content.

Astride the Arctic Circle is Cameron Bay, Unknown five years ago except to prospectors and mining men, who had just learned of the discovery by Labine of ores, containing radium, on the shores of Great Bear Lake. Today, bridge is part of the social life. Visitors drop in regularly, summer and winter, by air. There are restaurants, stores, a bank, and a church. The local Mountie is a son of Sir James Mao Brieri,: Dominion Commissioner of the famous force.

A public stenographer operates at Cameron Bay, and is kept very busy by. mining men whose offices are; two thousand miles distant in Vancouver. She lives in a log cabin, surrounded by a beautiful garden of flowers and vegetables, ■which ripen fast in the long daylight of summer. Fresh milk, eggs, and butter are brought by air from Edmonton, a thousand miles away. The ladies of the Arctic go shopping by air. : The latest beach fashions are worn on the shores of Great Bear Lake.