Salt Lake Tribune | 1919-12-03 | Page 4 | Blond Eskimos

i BLOND ESKIMOS. ! The popular belief that the "biond I Eskimos'' discovered by Stefansson in the far north are a lost tribe of Scandinavians Scan-dinavians in the Arctic is dealt a hard blow by James K. Crawford, who, after af-ter fifteen years in the ice, has 1.:-turned 1.:-turned to Seattle. lie was a member of Stefansson 's second expedition and was present when the "blond Eskimos" Eski-mos" were encountered. According to Crawford, the curious peopie are nothing noth-ing more than a, "throw back" of the first white explorers in the north. Crawford believes that there is little probability that these natives are descendants de-scendants of Eric, the Ped or any other j of the ancient Vikings. Jn Victoria Land, he says, there are at least three tribes or villages of natives among which these quaint Eskimos are to be found. There are. fewer than a dozen of them in the whole land, so far as the explorers were able to learn. . They had gray eyes, light eyebrows, reddish I brown hair, and their skin was slightly j lighter than their brethren, but the difference in skin color would not at first he noticed, being so much like that of other natives. The inhabitants made it known that they had never seen white men before, and this is regarded as probably true, since it is thought that Stefansson 's I party was undoubtedly the first in tha t part of the world in their time. Their ancestors, however, unquestionably did see white men. possibly explorers looking look-ing for new land who did not get back to civilization. Such expeditions are not infrequent in the history of the north. Crawford says the recurrence of the features of the whites in different dif-ferent villages is rare. There was only one little girl -who possessed pronounced pro-nounced markings, and she was the daughter of tw-o old iiaii.s as duskv as any in the A relic. I