The Kirghis and Tartars of eastern Europe and Central Asia have held annual trading fairs from a time beyond which record does not go. Their restless progenitors, moving eastward, took the custom with them to the shores of the northern Pacific, northeast to Bering Sea and the limits of Siberia, and with them it must have crossed the narrow ice-ridden straits and found a resting-place in Arctic America. The great sandspit between Hotham Inlet and the waters of the ocean, at the head of Kotzebue Sound, has been the scene of this meeting for no one knows how many centuries. When the chinook winds melt the snows, and the Arctic ice pack retreats northward from Bering Sea and the straits, thither the tribes flock from hundreds of miles in all directions. Down the Kowak, the Selawik, and the Noatak rivers from the far interior come the taller, more distinctly Indian-featured men of the mountain fastnesses and scant timber, bringing jade from their mysterious hills, and fox, ermine, wolverine, and caribou pelts. From Point Hope and the coast far to the north come the squat tribes of the sea line with their ivory, blubber, whalebone, and white bearskins. From the Diomedes and East Cape sail the dwellers on the straits, their umiaks built up with skins on the sides, that the rush of waves may not whelm them in mid sea, their wives and children at the paddle, and their leathern sails spread to the favoring gale. From King’s Island, rocky eyrie to the south, where they dwell in huts perched like swallows’ nests on the side of sheer cliffs, come others, while even the far shore of Norton Sound sends its contingent. Wives, children, dogs, boats, sleds, and all earthly possessions they bring, leaving nothing behind but the winter igloo with its entrance gaping lonely where barbaric life had swarmed. They set up their topeks on the sandspit, which, for eleven months in the year so desolate and bare, now seethes with life. They visit back and forth. They exchange news of the berg-battered coast and the snow-smothered interior, and they trade. Hunting and fishing and trapping is business with an Eskimo; trade is his dissipation. During the weeks of this annual fair, things pass from hand to hand, and come back and are traded over again, in the pure joy of bargaining. Not only inanimate objects pass current, but the tribesmen, in the exuberance of barter, sell their dogs, their children, and sometimes their wives. It is a mad carnival of exchange.