stefansson-wrangel-09-28-058a

155

published by Mr. Noice through the North American Newspaper Alliance
or this second contradictory story, will see that both disagree with
the truth no less than each of his versions disagrees with his other
version. * That will also become sufficiently clear to the reader who
* Footnote
on reverse
of this
sheet.
follows through the rest of this book. Here we will consider only the
one point that bears on the history of the manuscripts. We quote over
again a paragraph from the above newspaper statement: "Knight's diary
ceased March 21, 1923, the last entry being in a firm hand and with no
suggestion of death. Beyond this place, however, several pages were
torn from the book. The woman had started her dieary about two weeks
before Knight's stopped."

With regard to this we want to establish first, that
Mr. Noice was not misquoted by the reporter, for that sometimes hap-
pens. That this was not the case is shown by the fact that Mr. Noice
himself extracted this clipping from the New York World and mailed it
to Mr. J. I. Knight with the following letter:

"My dear Mr. Knight:

I thought you might be interested in the enclosed clip-
ping which shows that I have a different viewpoint of the Wrangell
Island story, as that first published I obtained from the Eskimo woman.

It is thru Mrs. Noice's efforts that the second story
was brought to light, and it is thru her desire to give the boys a
square deal, which she felt I had not done, that these discoveries were
made. It caused her much suffering until these facts were made known.

In this new light I see what a heroic character your
son was.

Yours sincerely,
(Signed) Harold Noice."

Having established that Mr. Noice was not misquoted by
the World, we emphasize next that he clearly intimates that it was Ada
Blackjack who removed and either destroyed or now possesses the ten
pages of Lorne Knight's diary that are still missing. In that connect-
ion we have carefully questioned over again the people to whom Mr. Noice had
earlier told his three different stories about the diary. Mr. Carl
J. Lomen is reasonably certain that when he examined Lorne Knight's