Chapter VII: Olof Krarer

In the schools of many lands, including those which speak English, the Eskimos are studied during the early grades. In my youth I learned many strange things concerning them. We spoke of Eskimos and of Eskimoland as if the people were all alike and lived in one place.

The Eskimos are a godsend to the schools. From their simplicity you can get a parallel to the simplicity of our own remote ancestors and also a contrast to the multiplicities of civilization. It is easy to teach and to learn that, while in our land it is sometimes hot and sometimes cold, there is a district south of us where it is always hot and another north of us, Eskimoland, where it is always cold. This impresses upon the child-mind that there is a balance and symmetry in nature, which has been a favorite doctrine since Greek times.

Heat is life-giving (the school instruction went on); the hot lands are luxuriant and beautiful. Cold is deadening; the cold lands of the Eskimos are sterile, bleak, forbidding. Things develop to large size in heat; cold has a stunting influence. Therefore, trees become smaller and smaller as you go north until you come to the last cringing shrubs. Beyond them, in a treeless waste, are the Eskimos, a little people, themselves stunted by the cold. In their bitter struggle to eke out the scantiest of livings they cower, wrapped in furs, inside huts of snow which give them bare shelter from the furious Arctic blizzards. To keep warm they eat the most warming food, which is fat; so they live on blubber. They grease their bodies with oil as a further protection from the cold, and they drink oil. Though we need varied meals, a balanced ration, the Eskimos are strangely able to live on animal tissues alone and they eat their meat raw, usually warm from a recently slaughtered beast or else frozen.

But, marvelous to relate, in spite of all these things, the Eskimos are a jolly, happy little people. They serve thus a double moral purpose. The gruesome view of their land and of their life makes us better contented with ours; we see from their happiness under conditions of misery that really it isn’t so bad, in comparison, to be poor and jobless down here. We should all, therefore, be contented and happy.

In view of the large place held by Eskimos in our scheme of child training, the misfortune is serious that our educators, particularly the writers of our schoolbooks, have been forced to get their Eskimo material at second hand from the writings and lectures of explorers. The situation was made worse in that a good many explorers lacked the imagination and the literary gifts necessary for making possible the desired insight into the heart and soul of these present-day survivors of Stone Age man.

It is a major good fortune that American educators have had opportunity for close relation with at least one Eskimo, Olof Krarer.

* * * * *

The autumn 1912 I came south after four consecutive years in the Arctic, making several reports, one of them that among some hundreds of Eskimos who were not known to have been in touch with Europeans I had seen ten or more who were as light in complexion and eye color as if they were anything from one-quarter to three-quarters European. A reporter changed my statement to convey the impression that I had found near Coronation Gulf several hundred Eskimos all of whom were blond. This reporter has since claimed, probably with more right than anybody else, that he made me famous. Certainly there was a big newspaper hubbub.

In a barrage of letters to the press there came one from Ithaca, New York. The writer was a professor of Cornell. He tried to bring into an acrimonious discussion a quiet, urbane tone. It was not fair, he contended, to denounce Stefansson as a charlatan for having claimed to discover a new race of blond people in the Far North, for these people indubitably exist. But neither was it fair to praise his “discovery” vociferously, as some were doing, for blond Eskimos were so well known that they were, for instance, a matter of his own experience and that of his family. For he and his wife had had the pleasure some years ago to entertain in their home one of them who had come to Ithaca as a lecturer. She was a woman named Olof Krarer, small of stature like the rest of her people, with light hair and with blue eyes of quite the Scandinavian type. She had made a favorable impression.[17]

The letter from Cornell stirred childhood recollections. I had heard my mother and the neighbors talk of a strange and pathetic girl who came with them on the emigrant ship from Iceland in 1876. She must have been nearing twenty but she was small for a child of ten, a dwarf. She was vivacious, ambitious, and talked of the opportunities for distinction and advancement which awaited her in the New World. Her fellow-immigrants did not know whether to laugh or weep. She was clever, but her physical handicap seemed more than her gifts could surmount.

The party of colonists landed in Nova Scotia. After a year in that province many of them traveled west through the Great Lakes and by way of the Red River of the North to Lake Winnipeg, where my parents settled and where I was born.

In 1880 our family moved to Dakota Territory and so did Olof’s, but she had gone off on her own and was probably in Winnipeg. Some years later we heard in North Dakota that she was in a circus exhibiting herself as an Eskimo. The Icelanders (who until recently were proud of being about the least adulterated Nordics in Europe) were at first scandalized and inclined to attempt stopping the imposture. On second thought most if not all of them felt that little harm could be done to their nationality by the fraud compared to the tragedy it would be for this handicapped woman to be exposed and deprived of the one thing which gave her a livelihood and a tolerable life. We know now that she even won respect and affection--witness the above Cornell testimony and much shall be hereinafter cited.

There was presently in the Icelandic community in North Dakota a connected story of Olof Krarer. I do not know whether it was brought or whether it just grew. No doubt it was partly imagination; equally without doubt it was partly true.

Our North Dakota version of the story ran that Olof had been waitress in a hotel. Seeing how small she was, the guests asked about her and were told, sometimes by herself and sometimes by the hotel people, that she was an Icelander. The comeback was usually: “How interesting! We never saw an Eskimo before.” Olof would then explain that Icelanders were not Eskimos and that their blood was chiefly Norwegian with a little mixture of Irish.[18] The interest waned. There were plenty of Norwegians around; the Irish were no rarity. That sort of dwarf was hardly a seven days’ wonder.

But there were new guests in the hotel daily, new questions about Olof, and new accents for the tiresome: “How interesting! We never saw an Eskimo before.” She became bored, annoyed, outraged. Finally she stopped explaining that Icelanders were not Eskimos and simply flounced off. The interpretation of that was, poor thing, she was ashamed of being an Eskimo. Her silence now gave consent.

One day a local clergyman appeared. He said that the young people of his church had a mid-week meeting and they would be so interested if Olof would come down and talk to them informally about the Eskimos. They would be glad to pay her five dollars.

I go back to what my mother said of the pathetic ambition and anticipations of the dwarf. I imagine how, perhaps at first through embarrassment Olof did not correct the minister. When his invitation came to the five-dollar offer she was already realizing that her chance had come. She agreed to give the talk.

Combining testimony of the Cornell professor with that of my mother, I imagine further that Olof went to the town library next day, or to some bookish friend, and read up on the Eskimos. Then, to the best of her ability, she improvised a story of an Eskimo childhood and gave it at the mid-week church meeting. It was accepted and she was on that road which took her to the lyceum platform and the circus. As we shall see, it took her to other places, to fame and to a lasting influence upon American education and thought.

My memories, temporarily revived in 1912 by the Cornell professor’s letter, had receded vaguely into the background when, in 1922, I had a secretary, Miss Dorothy Daggett. She came from a week-end one Monday morning and asked whether a young man whom she had met at the house party might come and consult me about an extraordinary yarn which he had picked up in Florida and which he had already sold tentatively to a magazine. She had urged him not to print without consulting me, for the story was about an Eskimo and seemed to her spurious. She did not think that a young man ought to risk publishing that sort of thing at the beginning of a literary career.

In due course John Schoolcraft arrived and told the following story which I quote from notes made at the time:

THE STORY OF OLAF CRERAR

as told by

John Schoolcraft

The Eskimo woman, Olaf Crerar, says she was born on the north coast of Greenland in a village of thirty or forty houses, with an average of four people in each house. A family of eight children in that country is equivalent to one of twenty in this. The average family has two or three.

One day two big white men came into their village, the first big men they had ever seen and the first whites. The North Greenland Eskimos are blond themselves, but owing to the smoke in their houses they didn’t know it. The two big men were Icelanders. After living in the village about a year, they persuaded Olaf’s father to go on a long journey with them. He had no idea where he was going but he consented, and, as is always the case on long hunting trips, he took his family with him. They started across the ice and it took them something like three months to make the journey from northern Greenland to northern Iceland. When they came to the Gulf Stream it was partly open. There they went from one ice floe to another, like Eliza crossing the Ohio. They finally got to Iceland.

Olaf was about sixteen when she left Greenland (or perhaps she was twenty). She stayed in Iceland something like four and a half years. At the end of that time, all of her family were dead except herself and her father. They died from the change in climate. There was a missionary there who took a great interest in her and baptized her into the (Lutheran) church. Her Eskimo name was Ahbo. The missionary, in giving her a Christian name, wanted to get one as close to the Eskimo as possible, so he called her Olaf. I don’t know where she got her last name, which sounds like Crerar.

Olaf suffered so from the Icelandic climate that the missionary decided to send her and her father with some friends of his to Canada, thinking its climate would probably be better for them both than the Icelandic. He started them off on a boat with a company of Icelanders, and there may have been some Swedes and Norwegians. They landed at Quebec.

Olaf was knocked around from pillar to post in the United States and Canada for awhile, with this funny little father of hers. At that time she was 40 inches high, 45 inches around the waist, and weighed 136 pounds. Her father was smaller than she.

She told that she had been a nursemaid and implied that she had worked in hotels. On one occasion she was taken sick in a hotel in St. Paul and a doctor visited her who had been in Greenland and who knew a few words of her language.

Then Mr. Slayton of the Slayton Lyceum Bureau ran across her and thought she would be a good lecturer, so he took her into his home and together they worked up a lecture. She went around the country for something like twenty-five years (she is sixty-two now) lecturing. For the last few years of this time she was not only a lecturer but a sort of collector for Mr. Slayton. He would give these (lyceum) courses and she would be the last one on the course and would collect the money from those who had sponsored the course. The understanding was that at his death she was to have a home in his house as long as she lived. She did live with Mrs. Slayton for a number of years.

While in Florida she met the people named Stone who took her back to Michigan with them--Mr. I. K. Stone, Maple Street, Battle Creek, Michigan. She is living there now and has been with them two or three years. She is always telling them how in Greenland people always tell the truth. It is a great shock to her, she says, to come into a civilization where they don’t tell the truth. So in the household, when they aren’t kidding each other, they have the saying, “This is Greenland.”

Olaf says that the people up in northern Greenland where she was born continue to grow until they are thirty-five. When mature they are very small, like herself, and they mature slowly. They don’t marry until they are twenty-five, and children don’t walk until they are three. She says that the mothers do not nurse their children at all. As soon as a baby is born they give him a piece of whale meat and tell him to carry on. Many life processes there seem greatly slowed down.

However, a person of sixty is very old. They die off rapidly from what Olaf thought was something like tuberculosis. It was a wasting disease and usually ended with hemorrhage. She thought it was brought on by the change in going from the heated hut into the cold air outside.

North Greenland children are born either in the light time or in the dark time (the well-known six-month day and six-month night). When a child is born, the mother picks out a certain kind of bone. Since they live on polar bears, walrus and seals more than anything, it might be a bone from one of these animals. She has a little bag on the wall and drops into it a certain distinctive kind of bone for each child, and as each light time or dark time comes around she drops another bone of this same sort into the bag. In that way she can keep track of the children’s ages. The children are forbidden to touch that bag, and if they do the punishment is severe.

Olaf said these people believed in one big good spirit and one big bad spirit, and there are also little good spirits and little bad spirits. The big good one sent the little good ones around, and similarly with the bad spirit. When a person dies he becomes a good or bad spirit according to the way he has lived. Asked what was their standard of good and bad, she replied that if during this sickness, which evidently came on them all, the man or woman was patient and unselfish, then he turned into a good spirit. Those who were cross and complaining turned into bad spirits.

If a woman is sick she is put into one corner of the hut and no one pays any attention to her. If she is given anything, it is given furtively. In the case of a man he is taken off and put in a hut by himself. The reason is that sickness is brought about by one of the bad spirits, and if you favor the sick person you bring the bad spirit’s attention to yourself.

The language is extremely simple, with a great many words which by different intonations mean different things. They count up to ten and have one word which means ten and some more, which may be eleven or eleven million. The hardest thing for her to do in Iceland and in this country was to learn to think. The Eskimos talk a little about the fire and a little about the polar bear and walrus, but have no abstract ideas. The vocabulary is very small. There is absolutely no vegetation in North Greenland, with the exception of some seaweed. The reindeer there, which are very poor and which the people do not use for food purposes at all, live on fish.

These Eskimos have no steel, and when a man goes on a long trip where he can’t carry a fire, he makes a fire by striking a stone against a walrus tusk. He may work hours and hours to get a spark.

When a young man wants to marry, he picks out the girl he is interested in and stops hunting. He goes to the house of this girl and gets his food there for some time. If the girl’s parents continue to make him welcome, he knows he is acceptable. Then he has to get the girl out of that house into some other house in the village (it doesn’t matter which one) without being seen. His success constitutes the wedding ceremony. If he fails, he is punished by death. Failures occur and the death penalty is actually inflicted.

The facts on Olof put Schoolcraft in a position from which he could find no escape. His literary conscience would not permit him to use the story in its original form, after he had found that it was a hoax; his humanitarian instincts would not allow him to expose the old lady, who was, after all, harmless in his view compared to the hordes of charlatans who get by. As long as her friends believed in her she would have a home, and these were probably her last few as well as her declining years. Schoolcraft, who needed both money and _kudos_, gritted his teeth and canceled his bargain with the editor.

You have guessed it. The young and high-minded author received his reward. Dorothy Daggett is now Mrs. John Schoolcraft.

No more than Schoolcraft could we publish, until Olof Krarer’s death. But the responsibilities we feel towards that small minority who seek the facts, dictated eventual publication and therefore the immediate gathering of testimonies, documents, and explanatory theories.

The first step was to enlist the help of Miss Thorstina Jackson, a graduate student at Columbia University, whose father, Thorleifur Joakimsson Jackson, had been historian of the Icelandic colonization in North America--chiefly Minnesota, North Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, but also Nova Scotia and Utah. Many of his studies had been published, but there were others in manuscript. On canvass, these sources did not yield much directly, but Miss Jackson (now Mrs. Emile Waters) knew just how to follow up the investigation.

From the various replies to her letters it was possible to establish Olof’s baptismal name, the names of her parents, her birthplace and date of birth. For a time we were following the wrong track on these points, for the first answer to our queries stated that Olof was the daughter of Jonatan Halldorsson. Jackson’s pioneer sketches did not list Olof as a child of this family and a later correspondent, G. J. Hallsson, of Hallson, North Dakota, in a letter dated May 26, 1926, gave the right clue:

“... I feel certain I know the person you refer to. It must be Olof Solfadottir, from Langamiri in Hunavatnsysla. This girl was a dwarf in stature....”

At this time Miss Jackson made a trip to Iceland. While there she went to the Government library in Reykjavik and obtained from the _Kirkjubok_ (Book of Church Records) a copy of Olof’s birth certificate. We quote a translation of the Icelandic document which she forwarded:

BIRTH CERTIFICATE

_Ólöf Sölvadóttir_

Born 15 February 1858 baptized 17th of the same month.

Parents: Sölvi Sölvason and Solveig Stefánsdóttir, man and wife of Outer Langamyri.

The above is correct according to the register of Audkul Parish.

Certified

The National Archives, Reykjavik, 13 July, 1926.

(Signed) Hannes Thorsteinsson.

The following year the identification was further confirmed and documented by B. L. Baldwinson, of 729 Sherbrook Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba, as will appear.

All the accounts of Olof’s early years in Canada, before she assumed the character of Miss Krarer the Eskimo, swayer of American educational destinies, are vague and the details vary, but the general outlines are similar. As a continuation of the above Hallsson letter, we quote a version, differing somewhat from my memory of my mother’s:

“... She (Olof) had been living with her father in Winnipeg and left him in 1880 to live with an English couple. They were then resident in Winnipeg but I have no doubt they were really traveling players who had some connection with a large company of actors. I believe that shortly thereafter they left Winnipeg for the United States, for (soon) after she got south across the line she was recognized as the same girl, although she had then already assumed her Eskimo character. Why she did this, I am unable to explain. I knew her very well and lived in the same neighborhood. For that reason I would consider it remarkable if she did anything seriously reprehensible so long as her conduct was fully governed by her own desires. She seemed to have a good and firm character and was intelligent above the average.

“According to my understanding, it seems clear that the woman who adopted her came to be largely in control of whatever she did.”

The most complete and thoroughly documented information came from Baldwinson, who enclosed with his letter on November 16, 1927, a statement which we quote in full.

“_Olof Solvadottir_

“Born at Ytri Longumyri in Blondudal in Hunavatnssyslu in Iceland about the year 1860 or 1861.

“Her father Solvi Sölvason, farmer.

“Her mother Solveig Stefansdottir: his wife.

“Solvi lost his wife in Iceland and remarried there; his second wife was Soffia Eyjolfsdottir, a widow. They emigrated from Iceland to Canada in the year 1876 and settled a short distance north of the town of Gimli in Manitoba and remained there for about 3 years until they moved to Winnipeg in or about the year 1879, where they resided for a period of 2 years. They then moved to Hallson in N. Dakota, built a house and resided there for several years, until they moved to Seattle in the state of Washington. There they built a house in Ballard and remained there until their death.

“Olof Solvadottir is a dwarf. She left her family while they lived in the Gimli district and went to Winnipeg to secure work. There she joined up with an American traveling tent show and has since been lost to all her relatives though she is known to be alive and well and in the care of wealthy benefactors in the United States. Her nearest relatives are:

(Here followed names and addresses of three brothers and a sister, in the U.S.A. and Canada, and of a relative in Iceland.)

“This information is given by Magnus Bjornson, 11 McDonald St., Winnipeg, who is a foster brother to Olof since she lost her mother in Iceland, and also by her brother at Westbourne as to names and addresses of her brothers and sisters. The two photos herewith enclosed are taken from photos the property of Magnus Bjornson.”

The accompanying letter from Baldwinson said in part:

“... Magnus Bjornson, Olof’s foster brother ... ran into Olof in a circus a few years after she had begun to exhibit herself. She then pretended not to recognize him, which he said suited him well enough, for he did not want to be the cause of her getting into trouble about her (pretended) nationality.”

An earlier letter from Baldwinson contained an explanatory note on some photographs which were enclosed.

“I have also secured two pictures of her, one by herself, the other with the man that she is said to have been married to--both of them are wearing wedding rings.”

This photograph shows the figures of equal stature. The body proportions are those of dwarfs.

Following these inquiries my activities in the Olof Krarer case were long suspended. And then, in Utica, New York (1932), I met Miss Frances A. Finch who, as a child, had known Olof Krarer in Florida. She told me something of her childhood recollections of this interesting character, and later confirmed them by a letter which I quote in part, dated from Skaneateles, New York, November 27, 1932:

“As you requested, I have gone into the question at home, but I think that the enclosed material (photographs) is all I have that would be of interest to you....

“Print No. 1 is the one I mentioned as having been taken during the winter of 1917-1918. I was ten years old at the time. Miss Krarer and I are standing on the same step. I presume I was of average height, for now, at the age of twenty-five, I am about five feet two and a half inches tall. (The picture shows the girl of ten considerably taller than the old “Eskimo.”)

“Miss Krarer was about fifty-eight years old when these pictures were taken, and print No. 2 shows Miss Olaf with a bouquet presented her at that year’s celebration of her birthday....

“... The woman with whom Miss Krarer lived was Mrs. (H. P.?) Slayton.... Although Mrs. Slayton was considered the owner of the Seven Gables Apartments, rumor had it that Olaf Krarer had a substantial interest. I’ve been unable to verify the location of the Seven Gables Apartments, pictured in print No. 3, except that it stands at a corner of Williams Park in St. Petersburg, Florida.”[19]

In November, 1934, my friend, Miss Gretchen Switzer, of Columbia University, told me that she was about to visit St. Petersburg. For reasons two or three paragraphs ahead, she was interested in the case of Olof Krarer. She followed up the information given by Miss Finch. In St. Petersburg she was able to verify the name and address of Mrs. Slayton (Mrs. W. P. Slayton) and the location of the Seven Gables Apartments. She also talked with the clerk of the Princess Martha Hotel, H. B. Boardman (now of The New Hotel Delaware, Ocean City, New Jersey) who said that Olof was known there only as Olof the Eskimo. To the best of his knowledge she had gone to Battle Creek and at that time (1934) was in Chicago.[20]

Some years ago I became interested in the similarity between the Krarer tradition and the views about Eskimos held in Teachers College, Columbia University. I asked Miss Switzer, then a member of the New College staff of Teachers College, where she had obtained her ideas and it seemed she could trace a number of them to having studied in the lower grades a book published by Rand McNally and Company, _Eskimo Stories_ (copyright 1902). A check showed that the author, Mary Estella E. Smith, of the Jenner School, Chicago, had for the last paragraph of its introduction, dated June 14, 1902:

“The author acknowledges her appreciation of the valuable suggestions made by Miss Olof Krarer, who read the book in manuscript, and whose interesting autobiography appears at the close of the volume under the title, ‘The Story of a Real Eskimo.’”

A little earlier in the introduction Miss Smith says that

“... various books have been consulted and drawn upon for basic material, but special acknowledgment is due ‘My Arctic Journal,’ by Josephine D. Peary, and ‘The Children of the Cold,’ by Frederick Schwatka.”

Clearly Miss Smith did get a considerable part of her material from the dry-as-dust fact school, and perhaps three-quarters of her book would be in humdrum correspondence with things as they physically are. But some of the more entertaining portions, likeliest to cling to the mind of a learner, are seemingly based on the “valuable suggestions made by Miss Olof Krarer.” Though perhaps small in quantity, beside the contributions by Mrs. Peary and Lieutenant Schwatka, the Krarer section of the schoolbook was bound to impress itself, for the author says to the teacher at the head of the Krarer autobiography, _The Story of a Real Eskimo_, that “this story should be read to the children before they begin reading the book.”

We quote portions of _The Story of a Real Eskimo_:

“I was born on the east coast of Greenland, the least known to civilization, about one thousand miles north and a little west of Iceland. I am the youngest of eight children. As nearly as I can remember,[21] my father’s house was on a low plain near the seashore....

“Our house was built of snow....

“... Outside of the door was a long, narrow passageway, just high enough for one of us little Eskimo people to stand up straight in. That would be about high enough for a child eight years old in this country; and it was only wide enough for one person to go through at a time. If one wanted to go out and another wanted to come in at the same time one would have to back out of the passageway and let the other go first....

“Our fireplace was in the center of the house. The bottom was a large flat stone with other stones piled about the edge to keep the fire from getting into the room. When we wanted to build a fire we would put some dried meat and bones on the stone; then a little dry moss was put in, and then my father would take a flint and a whale’s tooth and strike fire upon the moss. Sometimes it took a long time to make it burn. After the fire started he would put some blubber upon it....

“... Our food is eaten raw and frozen. We have only the salt ocean water, and if we had soft, fresh water we would not dare to use it, for it would be like poison to our flesh with the thermometer 80° or 90° below zero. So, when we eat, we take a piece of raw meat in one hand and a chunk of blubber in the other, and take a bite of each until it is eaten. Then we carefully rub the grease and fat all over our hands and face, and feel fine afterwards. My people have long hair, made dark by the smoke and grease.

“There was no chance to play and romp inside the snow house. We just had to sit still with our arms folded. It was in this way that my arms came to have such a different shape from people’s arms in this country. Where their muscle is large and strong, I have but very little; and instead of that, I have a large bunch of muscle on the upper side of my arms, and they are crooked so that I can never straighten them.

“Sometimes we used to get very tired in the dark snow house and then we would try a little amusement. Two of us would sit down on the fur carpet, and looking into each other’s faces, guess who was the best looking. We had to guess at it, for we had no looking-glass in which to see our faces.

“The one whose face shone the most with the grease was called the prettiest. If at any time we grew tired of it all, and ventured to jump about and to play, we were in danger of being punished. When a child was naughty, mother would place a bone on the fire, leaving it there until it was hot enough for the grease to boil out. Then she would slap it on the child. She was not particular where she burned her child, except that she was careful not to touch the face....

“But it was not always so that we had to stay in the snow house. Once in a while father would come in and say it was not so cold as usual, and then we would have a chance to look around outside the snow house. We never took long walks. There were some steep, jagged rocks in sight of our village, and during the long daytime enough of the snow would melt off to leave the rocks bare in a few places....

“Now, in order that you may understand our way of living better, I will explain that we have six months night in Greenland, and during that time nothing is seen of the sun.... Before and after the night-time there was about a month of twilight....

“In the long day we had the hardest time, for then the sun shone out so brightly that we would be made snow-blind if we ventured far from home. The day was four months long, and if we did not have food enough stored away in an ice cave to last us through, we would be in great danger of starving.

“... My father’s name was Krauker, my name was Oluar. On arriving in Iceland I was baptized Olof Krarer.

“One thing had a great deal of interest for us all. When the sun shone out at the beginning of the daytime, it marked the first of the year, as New Year’s day marks the beginning of the year in this country. Then our parents would take out the sacks, each one of the family having one of their own. In each sack was a piece of bone for every first time that person had seen the sun. When ten bones were gathered, they would tie them into a bundle, for they had not words to count more than ten. In such a land was I born, in such a home was I brought up. In such pleasures I rejoiced until there were about fifteen bones in my sack.

“Then something happened which changed my whole life. Six tall men came to our village. They proved to be Iceland whalers who had been shipwrecked in a storm and who finally reached Greenland. When they returned to Iceland my father’s family went with them....

“Eskimos have no idea of a book.... They think, in their ignorance, they are the only people, and are consequently contented and happy.

“June 16, 1902.

“Olof Krarer.”

By her own account Miss Krarer had been born an Eskimo in Greenland; those who claim to be her relatives state she was born an Icelander in Iceland. Both countries, and the sea between them, are hazy to the average reader and so a few remarks may be worth while.

Iceland is the largest country now inhabited by Europeans which had no aborigines when discovered. It is, too, the largest in the northern hemisphere of those islands which do not show, archeologically or historically, any evidence of pre-white human occupation.

The Irish discovered Iceland around or before A. D. 795; the Norsemen first visited the country around 850 and say they found ahead of them no people except the Irish. These things, so far as we know, are undisputed.

The part of Greenland, where Olof claimed to have been born around 1860, “a thousand miles north and a little west of Iceland,” can never have been inhabited during the last several thousand years, since that distance takes you far into the interior, up on the inland ice where, so far as we understand it, neither humans nor the animals upon which hunters depend can have lived since prior to that Ice Age which, millenniums back, gave the land its present cap of snow.

Be liberal with Olof and place her family on the seacoast of Greenland north and a little east from central Iceland. We then have a district that is believed by anthropologists and explorers not to have been inhabited by Eskimos at or anywhere near the time when Olof was born. If you wanted to be extremely generous, you might connect her story up with the few Eskimos seen by Clavering, near what is now Shannon Island, in 1823. Shannon is, true enough, some 500 miles south of Olof’s claimed birthplace, but then it is also 500 miles north of where her alleged family claim she was born. That is kind of fifty-fifty.

The Clavering people were, by his account and that of Sabine, apparently just ordinary Eskimos, looking more or less as if they were Chinese. Olof tells that her Eskimo relatives were blond, but then she mentions that they did not know they were blond, they were so blackened with the smoke from their lamps. Most travelers have explained that Eskimos trim their lamps so carefully that they rarely smoke--but, if we start out to be generous, why haggle over a few smudges of lampblack?

Except Olof’s there is no account of Icelanders going to eastern or northeastern Greenland near the time she says, nor ever any time for many decades before and after. So far as known, Europeans never visited northeastern Greenland (1000 miles north of Iceland) until after Miss Krarer became a prominent lecturer. Those Europeans were Danes, not Icelanders.

Olof seems to be the only person who has claimed that the sea was ever so frozen, or so filled with ice, between Greenland and Iceland that people could walk across in the manner described by her, or in any manner.

I know of one Eskimo having been in Virginia; I cannot find testimony, except Miss Krarer’s, that any Eskimo ever was in Iceland. Just possibly at some time during the Middle Ages some Icelander may have brought an Eskimo from Greenland, but, if so, there is no account of it. There is one account of a medieval Icelander who did see Eskimos on the southern east coast of Greenland, but the narrative explicitly states that when he sailed from there he left the Eskimos behind.

Iceland is among the countries which do not feel, or at least did not until very recently, any such need for Eskimos in their system of education as we feel in ours. You can see through authorities such as Professor Ellsworth Huntington of Yale, in his _The Character of Races_, that they are comparatively a learned people, so you would expect book knowledge of the Eskimos which Olof might have picked up. But other writers, for instance, Bayard Taylor in his _Egypt and Iceland in the Year 1874_, have pointed out that the Icelandic learning, next after dealing with their own antiquities, is heavily preoccupied with Greece, Rome, and the Mediterranean countries generally. The Icelanders tend to be classicists in their schooling and reading.

It was, therefore, in one way unfortunate that Olof, when she came to formulate the accounts of her Greenland childhood, had little groundwork derivable from her Icelandic education or from the knowledge of her friends and family. But in another way it was fortunate that she had to pick up her ideas in America. For this made it simple to fit herself to traditional beliefs, avoiding conflict with her hearers. So in Miss Krarer’s account, as in the view previously common, the Eskimos are (for instance) a small people, they grease themselves with oil, they all live in snow houses, and they suffer long periods of uninterrupted darkness followed by long periods of uninterrupted light.

The Krarer version of Arctic lore does introduce a few novelties, as, for instance, where she says that:

“... we have six months night in Greenland.... Before and after the night-time there was about a month of twilight.... The day was four months long.”

That replaced the six-month day and six-month night. After all, she had to contribute something novel or there could have been little advantage in getting knowledge for American textbooks and supplementary readers straight from a real Eskimo.

There is an almost tragic contrast between the Krarer division of daylight and darkness and the one which has recently forced its way into American school teaching, disturbing its symmetry. Like Miss Krarer’s, this view attacks the even division between light and dark but (and here is the tragedy) where Miss Krarer arrived at a darkness period much longer than the daylight, the astronomers who are bothering the schools claim a daylight period much longer than the darkness. Their ratio is practically the same as hers, only reversed.

What a triumph it would have been for the little Eskimo had she only reversed the naming of her four-month and eight-month periods! The astronomers, right enough, are talking for the mathematical North Pole and Miss Krarer for a point only a thousand miles north of Iceland; but that discrepancy would not have been so hard to explain away. After all, Miss Krarer was born at a time when many geographers still believed Greenland extended to and beyond the North Pole, and she might so easily have been mistaken as to whether she was born one thousand or sixteen hundred miles north of Iceland.

As mentioned, it was the opinion among the Icelanders in North Dakota that Olof Solvadottir, the normally blond and blue-eyed Nordic dwarf, born in Iceland, had been induced by “the English couple” who adopted her to take the character of the Eskimo Olof Krarer, born in northeastern Greenland. The first the Icelanders knew of her changed status was when they discovered her as a freak in a circus. According to my mother’s version of how Olof came to assume the Eskimo character, she went straight from waiting on table in a hotel to lecturing on a lyceum circuit--there was no mention of an intervening circus career. But there was a circus period, that seems clear. Perhaps the sequence was small-time lecturing, circus, big-time lecturing.

At any rate, there is no reason to doubt the testimony which connects Olof with a foremost bureau of lyceum’s heyday.

Some of the leaders in the modern celebrity business are old stagers from the lyceum and Chautauqua days. Among these are O. B. Stephenson, head of the long successful Emerson Lyceum Bureau, Orchestra Building, South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, and the veteran field worker and at present independent bureau manager, William H. Stout, Bluff Road 37, Greenwood, Indiana. From them and others we piece together the following:

At the crest of the lyceum and Chautauqua business one of the most successful organizations was the Slayton Lyceum Bureau, dating back also well among the pioneers. They ranked almost if not quite with such great institutions as the Redpath Bureau and produced some very successful managers who later branched out for themselves, as for instance, Charles L. Wagner, who was secretary for the Slaytons, a dominant figure with them at that time, and who is now a New York leader in concert management, with offices at 511 Fifth Avenue. It seems clear that the Slaytons had nothing to do with Olof’s change of state but received her as a full-fledged Eskimo from those earlier patrons who may have been influential in changing her, or who at any rate may have been with her at the time she changed and thus familiar with the stages of the transformation.

The story of Miss Krarer’s entry into and success in the big-time lyceum field is succinctly given by W. P. Slayton, son of the founder of the bureau, who writes from the Hotel Lorraine, Chicago, June 30, 1936:

“As I recall, my Father, Henry L. Slayton, made a trip to Minnesota to meet Miss Krarer with a view of making a contract for her appearance under the management of the Slayton Lyceum Bureau. At that time she was lecturing on Greenland with bookings arranged by a personal manager. This was back in the Eighties, I believe.

“She was glad to come under our management and we booked her for the next thirty years or until her eyesight failed and she had to give up platform work. She filled over 2500 lecture engagements for us, of which over eighty were delivered in Philadelphia alone.

“The last two years of her life were spent at the Old Peoples Baptist Home in Maywood, Ill. She must have been over seventy years old. Her height forty inches. A very interesting personality on the platform and she had a host of friends all over the country.”

From the time, then, when Henry L. Slayton discovered her, Miss Krarer was one of their chief and successful attractions. She was on the road pretty well constantly, lectured in schools, universities, churches, auditoriums, and under summer Chautauqua tents. Wherever she went she appears to have made a favorable impression personally and to have conveyed vividly her picture of that northeastern Greenland where she said she had been born an Eskimo.

We have further proof of Miss Krarer’s success on the lyceum and Chautauqua platforms from S. Russell Bridges, one of the leaders in the lyceum field and now head of the Alkahest Lyceum Bureau of Atlanta, Georgia. He writes under date of July 31, 1936:

“Yes, I remember the little Eskimo lady, Miss Krarer, whom we had on one of our Chautauqua circuits, as I recall, in the summer of 1911. Then the following winter she came down and filled a few lyceum engagements. She was an excellent attraction who always made good with her audiences, and besides, she was a good box office feature.

“... I recall trying to meet her when she first came down from Chicago to begin her tour for us but I missed her at the station and followed her on to the hotel where they had refused to give her a room until I arrived and identified her....

“Another incident I recall is that she and William Jennings Bryan appeared on our Chautauqua at Newnan, Georgia, the same date, he in the morning and she in the afternoon, but they were both leaving at the same time and when the train pulled in at the depot, I took her baggage and went ahead and Mr. Bryan was following but when I got on the platform of the train, she was trying to reach the step but could not quite make it. Finally Bryan picked her up and put her up on the platform as you would a child.”

The way in which Olof Krarer was presented to the public, the character of her service, and the impression she made upon her audiences, we try to show more concretely by quotations from a statement about her made by the Slayton Lyceum Bureau (then of Steinway Hall, Chicago). The document we have was likely printed in 1902 or 1903, according to an informant who was in touch with Miss Krarer then. It is, therefore, of about the period when The Little Eskimo was collaborating with Chicago educators and publishers along those lines which, through _Eskimo Stories_ and otherwise, have had so profound an influence upon American schools. The statement runs:

“MISS OLOF KRARER has become one of the best known lecturers that ever appeared on the lyceum platform. She does not appear as a freak or a curiosity, but on her merits. The Bureau always guarantees that she will give entire satisfaction to any audience, however critical. Large sums of money have been made from her lectures by churches, charity organizations and lyceums. Many a church debt has been raised and a weak lecture course freed from debt by the receipts from one of her lectures.

“For several years after the arrival of Miss Krarer in the United States it was very difficult for her to live through the summer months; she has, on the other hand, taken long rides during our coldest days in winter, with only her ordinary apparel, without the slightest discomfort, while those accompanying her were nearly frozen to death.

“The simple story of her life, as she tells it, is more interesting than a fairy tale. At the close of her lecture anyone in the audience is at liberty to ask her any proper questions concerning her life and native country. Some of the ablest legal talent in this country have taken advantage of this privilege, but Miss Krarer is always equal to every occasion and emergency. The Bureau, in her behalf, takes this occasion to thank the many hundreds of people and the press of the country for the uniform kindness and attention received at their hands. During the past Miss Krarer has delivered more lectures than her strength would really permit, and for that reason it will be necessary in the future to limit the number of her engagements, but first applications will receive most favorable dates.”

That the general claims of managers were no empty sales talk is borne out by the specific statement that Miss Krarer had already (as of about 1902) lectured 85 times in Philadelphia, 16 times in New York, 14 times in Chicago, 6 times in Baltimore, 5 times in Jersey City, Cleveland, and Aurora (Ill.), and 3 times in Albany, N. Y., Syracuse, N. Y., Detroit, Mt. Pleasant, Ia., St. Louis, Cortland, N. Y., Toledo, O., Orange, N. J., Newark, N. J., and Dayton, O.

Before the close of her career she lectured several more years; a corrected tally would give her more appearances in these cities than here listed.

The direct statement of the Slaytons is well supported by representative newspapers from the Atlantic coast to beyond the Mississippi. We quote them as they are quoted in the (1902?) booking circular of “Miss Olof Krarer, Esquimau”:

“Newark (N.J.) _Evening News_: An appreciative audience greeted Miss Olof Krarer, the Esquimau lecturer, at the Irvington rink last night. She is a pleasant-faced little woman, only three feet five inches in height and weighing 120 pounds, who left Greenland with a party of Icelanders and was educated by missionaries in Iceland. She told many interesting things about East Greenland, of which so little is known. In her native land, she said, ... There is only one social distinction--the man who owns a flint for making fire is looked upon as a big gun, but he is bound by custom to loan it freely and without remuneration. Water--that is, fresh water--is unknown.... The women of her country, she said, lived a life of pathetic idleness and helplessness, with no housework, no washing, no fancy work, no amusement and no cooking. All meat is eaten raw, and this is the sole food. The main occupation of the men was hunting ... this being done mainly in the twilight period, lasting four months of the year. The remainder of the year is made up of four months of perpetual night, lighted by stars and moon, and four months of daylight. The latter is the hardest time for the Esquimaux, as large numbers of them are afflicted with snow-blindness, caused by the dazzling effect of the sun on the ice and snow.

“The only record of time kept by these primitive people is by means of a bone bag--one bone dropped into a fur bag on the day on which the sun is first seen each year.... Miss Krarer says her people ... are becoming more stunted in growth and shorter-lived every generation....”

“Holyoke (Mass.) Paper: Last night a large audience assembled in the city hall and listened to Miss Olof Krarer’s talk on ‘Greenland, or Life in the Frozen North.’ Since her visit to this city two years ago Miss Krarer has increased her knowledge of English and entertained her audience finely. The lecture was the same as that given by her when she lectured under the auspices of the Scientific Association. Last evening, at the close of her lecture, Miss Krarer appeared in northern costume, a genuine polar bear skin from its natural state, which she had taken great pains to secure.... Miss Krarer still finds this climate trying, and during the summer months seeks the coolest spot she can find.... Tomorrow she speaks in Westfield, next in Warren. Almost every night she is engaged and business increases every season.”

“West Chester (Pa.) _Republic_: Olof Krarer fairly captivated her audiences at the Normal yesterday afternoon and last evening. The story of the life of the inhabitants of Greenland became doubly entertaining when related in the quaint broken English of this bright and witty little native of that frozen land. The Normal School course of lectures thus inaugurated promises to be exceedingly popular and will no doubt have a large patronage.”

“Manchester (Iowa) _Union_: The lecture on Greenland by Miss Olof Krarer at the city hall last evening in aid of the Orphans’ Home was one of the most interesting and instructive lectures ever heard in this city.”

“Vicksburg (Miss.) _Daily Commercial Herald_: Miss Olof Krarer’s pictures of life from a Greenlander’s standpoint afforded a very large audience at the opera house, last night, a unique experience, of which not the least entertaining feature was the personality of the speaker. She is scarcely taller than a ten-year-old girl, a neat, trim, plump little woman, with very bright eyes and a countenance that has nothing unfamiliar in its appearance, such a one as might be seen anywhere in the United States and in no respect Mongolian or Indian.... Hers is a plain, unvarnished story, that of a sensible, educated woman, depicting the terrible conditions of life around the North Pole. It was deeply interesting, however, and the audience frequently applauded her. She sang ... an Esquimaux love-song, which would no doubt impress a damsel of the frozen coast as something too altogether lovely. The lecture was given under the auspices of the Circle of the Silver Cross, King’s Daughters, and was a financial success.”

“Brooklyn (N.Y.) _Daily Eagle_: The hall of the Young Men’s Christian Association was well filled last evening by an audience gathered to hear the lecture of Miss Olof Krarer, an Esquimau lady from the eastern shores of Greenland, her subject being ‘Greenland, or Life in the Frozen North.’ Miss Krarer is the only Esquimau lady in the United States and her lecture was unusually interesting....”

“Detroit (Mich.) _Free Press_: The speaker’s platform at Y.M.C.A. hall last evening presented a very Arctic appearance, covered with polar bear skins and white draperies, with a silver fox skin mounted over the speaker’s stand. This was done to be in consonance with the character of the evening’s entertainment, a lecture on the Esquimaux of Greenland, by Miss Olof Krarer, a native of that hypoborean region.... She was decidedly short, being only 3 feet 4 inches in height, and weighing 100 pounds. Otherwise her appearance did not vary strikingly from that of many a German maid, met with daily in Detroit....”

“Sioux City (Iowa) _Journal_: At the Y.M.C.A. auditorium last night Miss Olof Krarer, the Esquimau woman, lectured on the customs of her people. The audience was intensely interested in the lecture.”

“Mount Pleasant (Iowa) _Free Press_: As a psychological study, the little lady from Greenland, who gave her second lecture in this city last Thursday evening, is probably unexcelled on this continent; and as a study in heredity or the influence of vocation and environment for successive generations upon the body she is equally so.... Miss Krarer’s person bears corroborative testimony to the claim of her being a native of Greenland, whose racial developments are as marked and as universal as color in Caucasia or Africa; and the indices of nationality in every unmixed people on earth.... But it is Miss Krarer as an intelligent and agreeable lady that is most interesting. The evolution from the national, natal condition of absolute non-exertion, into the consciousness of being a responsible, immortal, spiritual being; gracious in self-reliance, dignified in self-respect and potent in an intelligent, conscious, self-hood; attractive in demeanor, and gracious and punctilious in every point of social relations, she is certainly the most interesting personality to the student of mind that it is possible to find on this continent. The school people who failed to see and hear this speaker failed to see and hear a most suggestive object lesson in psychical development under the Christian idea of the nature of God and man. It is through Mr. Fred Hope that Miss Krarer was engaged to come to Mt. Pleasant. Having heard her in Washington, D.C., and knowing the interest she awakened in her audiences in that city, he induced the people of the Christian church to bring her here. Should she ever come again, let those who did not hear her upon this occasion be sure to do so.”

Thus through half a century, nearly forty years of which were active, did Olof Krarer, blond Nordic dwarf who may never have seen an Eskimo in her life, continue to entertain and impress those who saw her and those who read about her. It does not appear from other sources, any more than it does from press comments, that her authenticity as an Eskimo was questioned by her friends, her managers, her audiences or her readers. On this we summarize representative testimony.

Obviously a great and careful house like the Rand McNally Company would not have accepted Olof Krarer as a collaborator on one of their schoolbooks had they not at the time believed her to be what their book says and implies, an Eskimo born in an Eskimo country. If possible, it is still more clear that Miss Mary E. E. Smith and her fellow educators were convinced of Miss Krarer’s authenticity. Plainly the confidence of the educational world in Miss Krarer is still maintained for, as mentioned above, what is usually considered the foremost school of education in America, Teachers College of Columbia University, has on its staff teachers who until recently developed no suspicion either of Miss Krarer or of those views which at least some of them realized came from _Eskimo Stories_. Strongest proof of all that the faith still remains is the gratifying continued sale of _Eskimo Stories_, which employees of the Rand McNally Company report as late as July, 1936.

The testimony is the same from the lyceum fraternity. Not perhaps quite so meticulously careful as professional educators and the publishers of educational books, they nevertheless tried to maintain a high standard for their “attractions.” Remember, those were the William Jennings Bryan and uplift days, when gate receipts were more likely to drop than they are now if lecturers or their management fell below ethical standards.

In a rather careful profession, then, the Slayton Lyceum Bureau stood high and in considerable part through the very influence of Miss Krarer. The Redpath Bureau, as well known in the lyceum world, has been at the very top in every requirement. I have a letter from Miss Amy M. Weiskopf, who was in close association when the Redpaths bought out the Slaytons, and who is with the Redpath organization still, or with its head, Mr. Harry P. Harrison. She says that she never doubted Miss Krarer’s authenticity and that she never heard doubts of it.

An old friend of mine of high standing in the lyceum world and still active, is the aforementioned William H. Stout. He heard Miss Krarer lecture before the University of Indiana, had no doubts of her authenticity himself, and heard none expressed.

Those who knew her respected and liked Olof Krarer. Through charm of personality she confirmed the interest of the country, and particularly of the schools, in that frozen wonderland of the remote north where live those unique people, the Eskimos.

Olof died in 1935, but during the season 1936-37 teachers all over the United States are carrying on her work through continuing into its fourth decade of usefulness the book _Eskimo Stories_, which she read in manuscript, on which she “made valuable suggestions” and which contains her “interesting autobiography.” The teachers who use the book are no doubt being careful to follow the author’s directions that Miss Krarer’s autobiography, _The Story of a Real Eskimo_, which we quoted, _ante_, should be read to the children before they begin reading the book.

Olof Krarer belonged to three cultural agencies that have had their ups and downs, the Chautauqua, the lyceum, and the circus. Chautauqua has faded; the lyceum is emerging slowly (we hear) from a temporary eclipse by the radio; the circus does pretty well, what with “Jumbo.” But a greater cultural agency, the schools, in which Miss Krarer took her place 34 years ago, has never suffered eclipse. The teachers go marching on. In their ranks marches the forty-inch spirit of that good trouper, Olof the Eskimo.