Squaw on Ice

From Ottawa last week the Canadian Department of Justice radioed to the Royal Mounted Police schooner Stroche, frozen in Arctic pack ice, an order to release the Eskimo Squaw Kobvello whom seagoing Canadian Mounties arrested last December, charged with murdering one Fritz Schurer, a naturalized U. S. citizen.

But for the radio Squaw Kobvello could not have been brought to trial until the pack ice melts. Her case, Arcticly outside the realm of ordinary journalism and ordinary jurisprudence, was briefly summarized thus: "It is the custom in the Arctic for an Eskimo in need of a servant to follow his traplines and do other labor, simply to seize any single woman he sees and take her with him into the wilderness. Schurer did just that to her, Kobvello said. He seized her on Herschel Island, forced her to accompany him on a trapping expedition and made her do all the manual labor in connection with the trip. That was all right and according to custom. But when he attempted to kill Kobvello because he no longer needed her services, she rebelled and shot him to death. Schurer went into the Arctic in 1930 from Seattle on the trading schooner Patterson. He entered the U. S. from Germany in 1923."

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