Arctic Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson reporting…
Inuit shelter construction
Winter caribou hunting camp during fall migration of Porcupine caribou herd, extreme eastern Brooks Range south slope, thirty to forty miles south of Shingle Point, Yukon, Canada.
October 25, 1906.
The village at which we had arrived was made of houses built on the general plan of the dome tent. First they had made a hemispherical framework of pliant willows with a floor space perhaps ten feet across, and a domeshaped roof, so high that a tall man could stand erect in the center. Sometimes the height of the house was determined by the height of the man that built it. One of our hosts, Ningaksik, was about six feet tall and his house was the loftiest.
When the preliminary framework had been made of strong willows, they had woven in among them smaller willows until the frame really resembled a basket. Into the spaces between the willows they had then stuffed wads of moss and over them had been laid a layer of moss. On top of the whole had been sifted soft snow. This made a house so warm that, although there was fairly good ventilation through a pipe in the roof, it was still not necessary to do any more than barely keep fire in the stove to maintain the house at as high a temperate as we consider comfortable in American houses. When cooking was going on, the houses became uncomfortable to me from the heat, although the Eskimos did not mind it. In general the Mackenzie River and Alaska Eskimos keep their winter houses anything from ten to twenty degrees warmer than the typical steamheated houses of our cities.
I found especial interest in watching the cooking in the house where they still used a fireplace. There was nothing in the way of a chimney nor was the fireplace at the side, as our pioneers used to have them. Instead, the fire was built in the middle of the floor. The fireplace is made of huge stones, not to hold in the fire nor yet to rest the pots on, but merely for the purpose of absorbing heat from the fire so that the stones shall give it out slowly after the fire has died. When the cooking is about to begin, the fireplace is filled with specially inflammable material—dry bark, twigs with resin in them, and the like. Directly above the fireplace is a square opening in the roof covered by deer skin parchment or some other translucent material. This skylight is the main window of the house.
Just before the fire is lighted the window covering is removed and when the match is applied the flames rise almost to the roof of the house. This conflagration is for the purpose of creating a draft suddenly and thus preventing any smoke from spreading through the house. While the fire is going a crevice is kept open at the bottom of the door on a level with the ground…
When the cooking is finished the fire is allowed to die down until there are only a few coals left. By that time the great boulders around the fireplace have become hot. The last coals are gathered in a pan, carried outdoors and thrown away, so that there shall be no smoke in the house when the parchment is again put over the skylight.
I have found by actual experience that even on a cold day the stones of the fireplace will usually retain enough heat so that a fire every six hours is ample to keep the house comfortable.
Stefansson, Vilhjalmur. Hunters of the Great North. George Harrap & Company Ltd., 1923. Pages 96-98.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962) was an arctic explorer and ethnographer known for going native during long expeditions. He relied on the native peoples he observed for his survival and learned their lifeways. His written descriptions are uniquely detailed as in the example quoted above. Stefansson’s long experience and voluminous writing commingled early twentieth century science and technology with native primitive methods to produce detailed expeditionary guidance for travel and living-off-the-land survival in arctic regions. Stefansson prepared thousands of pages for the US Army Air Corp as guide for arctic military operations during WWII. The condensed version is still available in the used book market.
Stefansson, Vilhjalmur. Arctic Manual: Prepared Under Direction of the Chief of the Air Corp, United States Army. Macmillan, 1944.
Stefansson is notable for his counter-narrative about meat consumption. He lived on meat alone, or nearly so, for long periods both in the field and experimentally, in New York City while under medical observation. He is credited with launching the dietary trend for healthy eating through nearly exclusive meat consumption, the present version is popularly known as the Carnivore Diet.