Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 August 1885 — Seventy one Below Zero. [ARTICLE]

Seventy one Below Zero.

Seventy-one degrees below zero mean* one-hundred and three degrees below the freezing point. It was in the arctic regions, not far from Back’s Great Fish liiver,*when the author was conducting a homeward sledge journey to Hudson's Bay in the depth of an arctic winter—November, December, January, February, and March—that he experienced it. Severe weather—that is, intensely cold—had set in just before Christmas in 1879, the thermometer sinking down to 65 degrees below zero, and never getting above 60 degrees below, and we were having a very hard time with our sleighing along the river, our camps at night almost in sight of those we had left in the morning, so close were they together and so slowly did we labor along. Reindeer, on wdiich we were relying for our daily supply of food, were not found near the river, and being seen some ten or fifteen miles back from it, I determined to leave its bed and strike straight for home in Hudson’s Bay. Wd had been gone two or three days, and as we ascended the higher levels, thp thermometer commenced lowering, and on the 3d of January, 18t0, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, reached seven-ty-one degrees below zero, the coldest we experienced on our sledge journey of nearly a year in length, and the coldest ever encountered by white men traveling out of doors; for that day we moved camp some ten or twelve miles to the southeastward. The day was not at all disagreeable, I must say, until long toward the dreary night, when a slight zephyr, the merest kmd of motion of the leaves on a tree, or even sufficient to cool the face on a warm day, sprang up from ’the southward, and slight and insignificant as it was, it cut to the bone every part of the body that was exposed, and which fortunately w r as only the face from the eyebrows to the chin and about hal f oi the cheeks. We turned our backs toward it as much as possible, and especially after we had got into camp and got to work building our snow houses and digging through the thick ice of the lake for fresh water, and so lazily did our breath that congealed into miniature clouds float away to the northward, like the little light c rrus clouds of a summer sky, that we knew well enough how terribly cold it must be without looking at the thermometer that stood at 71 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. It is not so much the intensity of the cold, expressed in degrees on the thermometer, that determines the disagreeableness of arctic winter weather as it is the force and relative direction of the wind. I have found it far pleasanter with the thermometer at 50, 60, or even 70 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, with little or no wind blowing at the time, than to face a rather stiff breeze when the little tell-tale showed 50 degrees w r armer temperature. Even an arctic acclimated white man facing a good, strong wind, at 20 or 25 degrees below zero, is almost sure to find the wind freeze the nose and cheeks, and the thermometer does not have to sink over 4or 5 degrees to induce the Eskimos themselves to keep within their snug show houses under the same circumstances, unless want or famine demands their presence in the storm. With plenty in the larder for all the mouths, brute and human, none of them venture out in such weather.— Lieut. Schivatka.