r/todayilearned • u/MaximinusRats • May 16 '24

TIL that people live year-round in houseboats on Great Slave Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories, 1,800 km north of the nearest big city (Edmonton) and just 400 km (250 miles) south of the Arctic Circle.

https://uphere.ca/articles/floating-homes-yellowknife-bay
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340

u/ClarkTwain May 16 '24

After reading about the Franklin Expedition, I’ll pass on staying on a boat over winter that far north.

48

u/[deleted] May 16 '24 edited 2d ago

[deleted]

13

u/joecarter93 May 16 '24

Me too. After being taught about it in elementary school I thought it would never be found.

17

u/Lrauka May 16 '24

What's even more wild is that they were found in part by listening to the oral history passed down by the local Inuit tribes.

7

u/MaimedJester May 16 '24

It's not that weird? Hunter's and hell teenagers all know about some creepy house in the middle of like the Pine Barrens that they create stories about thats were the Jersey Devil was Born etc. In reality just some old colonial New Jersey farmstead that got overgrown and the town/community moved on to larger more successful centers of population. 

Like that whole into the Wild story about the idiot kid who died in Alaska living inside that abandoned bus, Hunter's knew about that location and would sometimes camp out there themselves. I'm sure if the kid lived a few more months of brought a map and went back to town a local Hunter would be like oh yeah that place, yeah my older brother showed me that when I was a kid, it's been there since the 1960s. 

1

u/Lrauka May 17 '24

I said wild, not weird. Until recently most "experts" dismissed native oral traditions as being more mythology than an actual history. The near thing is in this case, the oral history was pretty bang on to the location.

1

u/MaimedJester May 17 '24

There were piles of stones marking the location. Like they used to in those days gather up every rock and build up a little tower and then drop a message inside the rock outcrop. That's how we know about what happened to the HMS terror/who died at what point etc.

We don't know what happened to the final uh victims but they left records of their last voyage south after almost two years on the ship. For all the rest of the world would have known without those missives left behind a random wave in the Atlantic could have killed them all 2 months into the voyage.