Chapter 12

THE NATIVES OF ALASKA

WHEN one contemplates the native people of the interior of Alaska in the mass, when, with the stories told by the old men and old women of the days before they saw the white man in mind, one reconstructs that primitive life, lacking any of the implements, the conveniences, the alleviations of civilisation, the chief feeling that arises is a feeling of admiration and respect.

What a hardy people they must have been! How successfully for untold generations did they pit themselves against the rigour of this most inhospitable climate! With no tool but the stone-axe and the flint knife, with no weapon but the bow and arrow and spear, with no material for fish nets but root fibres, or for fish-hooks or needles but bone, and with no means of fire making save two dry sticks--one wonders at the skill and patient endurance that rendered subsistence possible at all. And there follows quickly upon such wonder a hot flush of indignation that, after so conquering their savage environment or accommodating themselves to it, that they not only held their own but increased throughout the land, they should be threatened with a wanton extermination now that the resources of civilisation are opened to them, now that tools and weapons and the knowledge of easier and more comfortable ways of life are available.

The natives of the interior are of two races, the Indian and the Esquimau. The Indian inhabits the valley of the Yukon down to within three or four hundred miles of its mouth; the Esquimau occupies the lower reaches of the Yukon and the Kuskokwim and the whole of the rivers that drain into the Arctic Ocean west and north. These inland Esquimaux are of the same race as the coast Esquimaux and constitute an interesting people, of whom something has been said in the account of journeys through their country.

[Sidenote: THE ATHABASCANS]

The Indians of the interior are of one general stock, the Athabascan, as it is called, and of two main languages derived from a common root but differing as much perhaps as Spanish and Portuguese. The language of the upper Yukon (and by this term in these pages is meant the upper American Yukon) is almost identical with the language of the lower Mackenzie, from which region, doubtless, these people came, and with it have always maintained intercourse. The theory of the Asiatic origin of the natives of interior Alaska has always seemed fanciful and far-fetched to the writer. The same translations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer serve for the lower Mackenzie and the upper Yukon and are in active use to-day through all that wide region, despite minor dialectical variations.

Near the lower ramparts of the Yukon, at Stephen's Village, the language changes and the new tongue maintains itself, though with continually increasing dialectical differences, until the Indians overlap the Esquimaux, six hundred miles farther down.

Fort Yukon is the most populous place on the river, and the last place on the river, where the upper language, or Takhud, is spoken. A stretch of one hundred and fifty miles separates it from the next native village, and the inhabitants of that village are not intelligible to the Fort Yukon Indians--an unintelligibility which seems to speak of long ages of little intercourse.

* * * * *

The history of the migrations of the Indians from the Athabascan or Mackenzie region is impossible to trace now. It is highly probable that the movement was by way of the Porcupine River. And it would seem that there must have been two distinct migrations: one that passed down the Yukon to the Tanana district and spread thence up the Tanana River and up the Koyukuk; and long after, as one supposes, a migration that peopled the upper Yukon. A portion of this last migration must have gone across country to the Ketchumstock and the upper Tanana, for the inhabitants of the upper Tanana do not speak the Tanana tongue, which is the tongue of the Middle Yukon but a variant of the tongue of the upper Yukon.

How long ago these migrations took place there is not the slightest knowledge to base even a surmise upon. The natives themselves have no records nor even traditions, and the first point of contact between white men and the natives of the interior is within three quarters of a century ago. It may have been two or three families only which penetrated to this region or to that and settled there, and what pressure started them on their wanderings no one will ever know. Perhaps some venturesome hunter pursuing his game across the highlands that separate the Mackenzie from the Yukon was disabled and compelled to remain until the summer, and then discovered the salmon that made their way up the tributaries of the Porcupine. The Mackenzie has no salmon. Or a local tribal quarrel may have sent fugitives over the divide.

When first the white man came to the upper Yukon, in 1846 and 1847, no one knew that it was the same river at the mouth of which the Russians had built Redoubt Saint Michael ten or twelve years before. The natives of the upper river knew nothing about the lower river. It is an easy matter to float down the Yukon for a thousand miles in a birch-bark canoe, but an exceedingly difficult matter to come up again. It was not until the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, in their adventurous fur-trading expeditions, met at the mouth of the Tanana River the agents of the Russian Fur Company, come up from Nulato on the same quest, that the identity of the Yukon and Kwikpak Rivers was discovered; and that seems to have been well past the middle of the century. In the map of North America that the writer first used at school, the Yukon flowed north into the Arctic Ocean, parallel with the Mackenzie.

[Sidenote: AN INOFFENSIVE PEOPLE]

The Indians of the interior of Alaska are a gentle and kindly and tractable people. They have old traditions of bloody tribal warfare that have grown in ferocity, one supposes, with the lapse of time, for it is very difficult for one who knows them to believe that so mild a race could ever have been pugnacious or bloodthirsty. Whether it were that the exigencies of subsistence under arctic conditions demanded almost all their energies, or that a realisation of their constant dependence upon one another checked the play of passion, they differ most widely and, it seems certain, always differed most widely in character from the Indians of the American plains. A personal knowledge of the greater part of all the natives of interior Alaska, gained by living amongst them and travelling from village to village during seven or eight years, furnishes but a single instance of an Indian man guilty of any sort of violence against another Indian or against a white man--except under the influence of liquor.

It is true that there are unquestioned murders that have been committed--murders of white men at that; but in the sixty years from the Nulato massacre of 1851, over the whole vast interior, these crimes can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are not a revengeful people. They do not cherish the memory of injuries and await opportunities of repayment; that trait is foreign to their character. On the contrary, they are exceedingly placable and bear no malice. Moreover, they are very submissive, even to the point of being imposed upon. In fact, they are decidedly a timid people in the matter of personal encounter. In all these characteristics they differ from the North American Indian generally as he appears in history.

They are capable of hard work, though apparently not of continuous hard work; they will cheerfully support great privation and fatigue; but when the immediate necessity is past they enjoy long periods of feasting and leisure. Having no property nor desire of property, save their clothes, their implements and weapons, and the rude furnishings of their cabins, there is no incentive to hard and continuous work.

After all, where is the high and peculiar virtue that lies in the performance of continuous hard work? Why should any one labour incessantly? This is the question the Indian would ask, and one is not always sure that the mills of Massachusetts and the coal-mines of Pennsylvania return an entirely satisfactory answer. As regards thrift, the Indian knows little of it; but the average white man of the country does not know much more. There is little difference as regards thrift between wasting one's substance in a "potlatch," which is a feast for all comers, and wasting it in drunkenness, which is a feast for the liquor sellers, save that one is barbarous and the other civilised, as the terms go.

It would seem that the general timidity of the native character is the reason for a very general untruthfulness, though there one must speak with qualification and exception. There are Indians whose word may be taken as unhesitatingly as the word of any white man, and there are white men in the country whose word carries no more assurance than the word of any Indian. The Indian is prone to evasion and quibbling rather than to downright lying, though there are many who are utterly unreliable and untrustworthy.

[Sidenote: SEXUAL MORALITY]

In the matter of sexual morality the Indian standards are very low, though certainly not any lower than the standards of the average white man in the country. One is forced to this constant comparison; the white man in the country is the only white man the Indian knows anything about. To the Indian a physical act is merely a physical act; all down his generations there has been no moral connotation therewith, and it is hard to change the point of view of ages when it affects personal indulgence so profoundly. The white man has been taught, down as many ages, perhaps, that these physical acts have moral connotation and are illicit when divorced therefrom, yet he is as careless and immoral in this country as the Indian is careless and _un_moral. And the white man's careless and immoral conduct is the chief obstacle which those who would engraft upon the Indian the moral consciousness must contend against.

The Indian woman is not chaste because the Indian man does not demand chastity of her, does not set any special value upon her chastity as such. And the example of the chastity which the white man demands of his women, though he be not chaste himself, is an example with which the native of Alaska has not come much into contact. Too often, in the vicinity of mining camps, the white women who are most in evidence are of another class.

[Sidenote: GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS]

The Indian is commonly intelligent and teachable, and in most cases eager to learn and eager that his children may learn. Here it becomes necessary to deal with a difficult and somewhat contentious matter that one would rather let alone. The government has undertaken the education of the Indian, and has set up a bureau charged with the establishment and conduct of native schools.

There are five such schools on the Yukon between Eagle and Tanana, including these two points, amongst Indians all of whom belong to the Episcopal Church, and five more between Tanana and Anvik, amongst natives divided in allegiance between the Episcopal and the Roman Catholic Churches. Below Anvik to the river's mouth the natives are divided between the Roman and the Greek Churches, and they are outside the scope of this book. On the tributaries of the Yukon the only native schools are conducted by the missions of the Episcopal Church, on the Koyukuk and Tanana Rivers, and have no connection with the government.

When, somewhat late in the day, the government set its hand to the education of the natives, mission schools had been conducted for many years at the five stations of the Episcopal Church above Tanana and at the various mission stations below that point. The Bureau of Education professed its earnest purpose of working in harmony with the mission authorities, and upon this profession it secured deeds of gift for government school sites within the mission reservations from the Bishop of Alaska.

It cannot be stated, upon a survey of the last five or six years, that this profession has been carried out. The administration of the Bureau of Education has shared too much the common fault of other departments of the government in a detached and lofty, not to say supercilious, attitude. Things are not necessarily right because a government bureau orders them, nor are government officials invested with superior wisdom merely by reason of their connection with Washington. It is just as important for a government school as for a mission school to be in harmony with its environment, to adapt itself to the needs of the people it designs to serve; and that harmony and adaptation may only be secured by a single-minded study of the situation and of the habits and character, the occupations and resources of the people.

To keep a school in session when the population of a village is gone on its necessary occasions of hunting or trapping, and to have the annual recess when all the population is returned again, is folly, whoever orders it, in accord with what time-honoured routine soever, and this has not infrequently been done. Moreover, it is folly to fail to recognise that the apprenticeship of an Indian boy to the arts by which he must make a living, the arts of hunting and trapping, is more important than schooling, however important the latter may be, and that any talk--and there has been loud talk--of a compulsory education law which shall compel such boys to be in school at times when they should be off in the wilds with their parents, is worse than mere folly, and would, if carried out, be a fatal blunder. If such boys grow up incompetent to make a living out of the surrounding wilderness, whence shall their living come?

The next step would be the issuing of rations, and that would mean the ultimate degradation and extinction of the natives. When the question is stated in its baldest terms, is the writer perverse and barbarous and uncivilised if he avow his belief that a race of hardy, peaceful, independent, self-supporting illiterates is of more value and worthy of more respect than a race of literate paupers? Be it remembered also that many of these "illiterates" can read the Bible in their own tongue and can make written communication with one another in the same--very scornful as the officials of the bureau have been about such attainment. One grows a little impatient sometimes when a high official at Washington writes in response to a request for permission to use a school building _after_ school hours, for a class of instruction in the native Bible, that the law requires that all instruction in the school be in the English language, and that it is against the policy of Congress to use public money for religious instruction! When the thermometer drops to 50° below zero and stays there for a couple of weeks, it is an expensive matter to heat a church for a Bible class three times a week--and the schoolhouse is already cosy and warm.

But the question does not reduce itself to the bald terms referred to above; by proper advantage of times and seasons the Indian boy may have all the English education that will be of any service to him, and may yet serve his apprenticeship in the indispensable wilderness arts. And, given a kindly and competent teacher, there is no need of any sort of compulsion to bring Indian boys and girls to school when they are within reach of it.

The Indian school problem is not an easy one in the sense that it can be solved by issuing rules and regulations at Washington, but it can be solved by sympathetic study and by the careful selection of intelligent, cultured teachers.

After all, this last is the most important requisite. Too often it is assumed that any one can teach ignorant youth: and women with no culture at all, or with none beyond the bald "pedagogy" of a low-grade schoolroom, have been sent to Alaska. There have, indeed, been notable exceptions; there have been some very valuable and capable teachers, and with such there has never been friction at the missions, but glad co-operation.

The situation shows signs of improvement; there are signs of withdrawal from its detached and supercilious attitude on the part of the bureau, signs which are very welcome to those connected with the missions. For the best interest of the native demands that the two agencies at work for his good work heartily and sympathetically together. The missions can do without the government--did do without it for many years, though glad of the government's aid in carrying the burden of the schools--but the government cannot do without the missions; and if the missions were forced to the re-establishment of their own schools, there would be empty benches in the schools of the government.

[Sidenote: THE THREAT OF EXTINCTION]

That the Indian race of interior Alaska is threatened with extinction, there is unhappily little room to doubt; and that the threat may be averted is the hope and labour of the missionaries amongst them. At most places where vital statistics are kept the death-rate exceeds the birth-rate, though it is sometimes very difficult to secure accurate statistics and to be sure that they always cover the same ground. The natives wander; within certain territorial limits they wander widely. Whenever a child is born it is certain that if it lives long enough it will be brought to a mission to be baptized, but a death often occurs at some isolated camp that is not reported till long after, and may escape registration altogether.

Certain diseases that have played havoc in the past are not much feared now. For the last seven years supplies of the diphtheritic antitoxin have been kept at all the missions of the Episcopal Church, and in the summer of 1911, when there was an outbreak of smallpox at Porcupine River, almost every Indian of interior Alaska was vaccinated, mainly by the mission staffs. Diphtheria has been a dreadful scourge. The valley of the upper Kuskokwim was almost depopulated by it in 1906. A disease resembling measles took half the population of the lower Yukon villages in 1900. In the last few years there have been no serious epidemics; but epidemic disease does not constitute the chief danger that threatens the native.

[Sidenote: DWELLING AND CLOTHING]

That chief danger looms from two things: tuberculosis and whisky. Whether tuberculosis is a disease indigenous to these parts, or whether it was introduced with the white man, has been disputed and would be difficult of determination. Probably it was always present amongst the natives; the old ones declare that it was; but the changed conditions of their lives have certainly much aggravated it. They lived much more in the open when they had no tree-felling tool but a stone-axe and did not build cabins. The winter residence in those days was, it is true, a dark, half-underground hut covered with earth and poles, but the time of residence therein was much shorter; the skin tent sheltered them most of the year. Indeed, some tribes, such as the Chandalar, lived in their skin tents the year round. Now an ill-ventilated and very commonly overcrowded cabin shelters them most of the year. It is true that the cabins are constantly improving and the standard of living within them is constantly rising. The process is slow, despite all urgings and warnings, and overcrowding and lack of ventilation still prevail.

Perhaps as great a cause of the spread of tuberculosis is the change in clothing. The original native was clad in skins, which are the warmest clothing in the world. Moose hide or caribou hide garments, tanned and smoked, are impervious to the wind, and a parkee of muskrat or squirrel, or, as was not uncommon in the old days, of marten, or one of caribou tanned with the hair on, with boots of this last material, give all the warmth that exposure to the coldest weather requires. Nowadays fur garments of any sort are not usual amongst the natives. There is a market, at an ever-growing price, for all the furs they can procure. A law has, indeed, gone recently into effect prohibiting the sale of beaver for a term of years, and already beaver coats and caps begin to appear again amongst the people. It would be an excellent, wise thing, worthy of a government that takes a fatherly interest in very childlike folks, to make this law permanent. If it were fit to prohibit the sale of beaver pelts for a term of years to protect the beaver, surely it would be proper to perpetuate the enactment to protect the Indian. It would mean warm clothing for man, woman, and child.

[Sidenote: THE INDIAN TRADER]

The Indian usually sells all his furs and then turns round and buys manufactured clothing from the trader at a fancy price. That clothing is almost always cotton and shoddy. Genuine woollens are not to be found in the Indian trader's stock at all, and in whatever guise it may masquerade, and by whatever alias it may pass, the native wear is cotton. Yet there is no country in the world where it is more imperative, for the preservation of health, that wool be worn.

However much fur the Indian may catch and sell, he is always poor. He is paid in trade, not in cash; and when the merchant has bought the Indian's catch of fur he straightway spreads out before him an alluring display of goods specially manufactured for native trade. Here are brilliant cotton velvets and sateens and tinselled muslins and gay ribbons that take the eye of his women folk; here are trays of Brummagem knickknacks, brass watches, and rings set with coloured glass, gorgeous celluloid hair combs, mirrors with elaborate, gilded frames, and brass lamps with "hand-painted" shades and dangling lustres; here are German accordions and mouth-organs and all sorts of pocket-knives and alarm-clocks--the greatest collection of glittering and noisy trash that can be imagined, bought at so much a dozen and retailed, usually, at about the same price for one. And when the Indian has done his trading the trader has most of his money back again.

The news that an Indian has caught a black fox, the most exciting item of news that ever flies around a native village, does not give any great pleasure to one who is acquainted with native conditions, because he knows that it will bring little real benefit to the Indian. There will be keen competition, within limits, of course, amongst the traders for it; and the fortunate trapper may get three or four hundred dollars in trade for a skin that will fetch eight hundred or a thousand in cash on the London market; but if his wife get the solid advantage of a new cooking-stove or a sewing-machine from it she is doing well.

Food the Indian never buys much beyond his present need, unless it is to squander it in feast after feast, to which every one is invited and at which there is the greatest lavishness. If a son is born, or a black fox is caught, or a member of the family recovers from a severe illness, custom permits, if it do not actually demand, that a "potlatch" be given, and most Indians are eager, whenever they are able, to be the heroes of the prandial hour.

So he, his women, and his children go clad mainly in cotton, and there is abundant evidence that the tendency to pulmonary trouble, always latent amongst them, is developed by the severe colds which they catch through the inadequate covering of their bodies, and is then cherished into virulent activity by the close atmosphere of overcrowded, overheated cabins.

The missions help the Indians, especially the women and children, in this matter of clothing as much as possible. Every year large bales of good though left-off under and over wear are secured through church organisations outside, and are traded to the natives at nominal prices, usually for fish or game or a little labour in sawing wood. And this naturally does not ingratiate missions with the trading class. One's anger is aroused sometimes at seeing the cotton-flannel underclothes and "cotton-filled" blankets and the "all-wool" cotton coats and trousers which they pay high prices for at the stores. The Canadian Indians, who are their neighbours, buy genuine Hudson Bay blankets and other real woollen goods, but the Alaskan Indian can buy nothing but cotton.

But far and away beyond any other cause of the native decline stands the curse of the country, whisky. Recognising by its long Indian experience the consequences of forming liquor-drinking habits amongst the natives, the government has forbidden under penalty the giving or selling of any intoxicants to them. A few years ago a new law passed making such giving or selling a felony. These laws are largely a dead letter.

[Sidenote: UNPAID COMMISSIONERS]

The country is a very large one, very sparsely populated; the distances are enormous, the means of transportation entirely primitive, and the police and legal machinery insufficient to the end of suppressing this illicit traffic, especially in view of the fact that a considerable part of the whole population does not look with favour upon any vigorous attempt to suppress it. Great areas of the country are without telegraphic communication, and in parts mail is received only once a month. One stretch of two hundred and fifty miles of the Yukon receives no mail at all during the winter months--more than half the year. In that instance, as in many others, the country has gone distinctly backward in the past few years. The magistrates--"commissioners" they are called, receive no salary, but eke out a precarious and often wretched existence on fees, so that it is frequently impossible to get men of character and capacity to accept such offices.

One would have supposed that amongst all the legislating that has been done for and about Alaska in the last year or two, one crying evil that the attention of successive administrations has been called to for twenty years past would have been remedied. That evil is the unpaid magistrate and the vicious fee system by which he must make a living. It is a system that has been abolished in nearly all civilised countries; a system that lends itself to all sorts of petty abuse; a system that no one pretends to defend. No greater single step in advance could be made in the government of Alaska, no measure could be enacted that would tend to bring about in greater degree respect for the law than the abolition of the unpaid magistracy and the setting up of a body of stipendiaries of character and ability.

The anomalies of the present situation are in some cases amusing. At one place on the Yukon it is only possible for a man to make a living as United States commissioner if he can combine the office of postmaster with it. A man who was removed as commissioner still retained the post-office, and no one could be found to accept the vacant judgeship. In another precinct the commissioner was moving all those whom he thought had influence to get him appointed deputy marshal instead of commissioner, because the deputy marshal gets a salary of two thousand dollars a year and allowances, which was more than the commissionership yielded. One is reminded of some comic-opera topsyturvyism when the judge tries in vain to get off the bench and be appointed constable. It sounds like the _Bab Ballads_. The district court is compelled to wink at irregularities of life and conduct in its commissioners because it cannot get men of a higher stamp to accept its appointments.

[Sidenote: LIQUOR AND POLITICS]

The only policemen are deputy United States marshals, primarily process-servers and not at all fitted in the majority of cases for any sort of detective work. Their appointment is often dictated and their action often hampered by political considerations. The liquor interest is very strong and knows how to bring pressure to bear against a marshal who is offensively active. They are responsible only to the United States marshal of their district, and he is responsible to the attorney-general, the head of the department of justice. But Washington is a long way off, and the attorney-general is a very busy man, not without his own interest, moreover, in politics. An attempt to get some notice taken of a particular case in which it was the general opinion that an energetic and vigilant deputy had been removed, and an elderly lethargic man substituted, because of too great activity in the prosecution of liquor cases, resulted in the conviction that what should have been a matter of administrative righteousness only was a political matter as well.

The threatened extinction of the Alaskan native was referred to as wanton, and the term was used in the sense that there are no necessary natural causes fighting against his survival.

Here is no economic pressure of white settlers determined to occupy the land, such as drove the Indians of the plains farther and farther west until there was no more west to be driven to. If such delusion possess any mind as a result of foolish newspaper and magazine writings, let it be dismissed at once. No man who has lived in the country and travelled in the country will countenance such notion. The white men in Alaska are miners and prospectors, trappers and traders, wood-choppers and steamboat men. Around a mining camp will be found a few truck-farmers; alongside road-houses and wood camps will often be found flourishing vegetable gardens, but outside of such agriculture there are, speaking broadly, no farmers at all in the interior of Alaska. Probably a majority of all the homesteads that have been taken up have been located that the trees on them might be cut down and hauled to town to be sold for fire-wood. A few miles away from the towns there are no homesteads, except perhaps on a well-travelled trail where a man has homesteaded a road-house.

All the settlements in the country are on the rivers, save the purely mining settlements that die and are abandoned as the placers play out. Yet one will travel two hundred and fifty miles up the Porcupine--till Canada is reached--and pass not more than three white men's cabins, all of them trappers; one will travel three hundred and fifty miles up the Koyukuk before the first white man's cabin is reached, and as many miles up the Innoko and the Iditarod and find no white men save wood-choppers. There are a few more white men on the Tanana than on any other tributary of the Yukon, because Fairbanks is on that river and there is more steamboat traffic, but they are mainly wood-choppers, while on the lesser tributaries of the Yukon, it is safe to say, there are no settled white men at all. As soon as one leaves the rivers and starts across country one is in the uninhabited wilderness.

The writer is no prophet; he cannot tell what may happen agriculturally in Alaska or the rest of the arctic regions when the world outside is filled up and all unfrozen lands are under cultivation. Still less is he one who would belittle a country he has learned to love or detract in any way from its due claims to the attention of mankind. There is in the territory a false newspaper sentiment that every one who lives in the land should be continually singing extravagant praises of it and continually making extravagant claims for it. A man may love Alaska because he believes it to have "vast agricultural possibilities," because, in his visions, he sees its barren wilds transformed into "waving fields of golden grain." But a man may also love it who regards all such visions as delusions.

[Sidenote: FOOD AND FURS]

The game and the fish of Alaska, the natural subsistence of the Indian, are virtually undiminished. Vast herds of caribou still wander on the hills, and far more are killed every year by wolves than by men. Great numbers of moose still roam the lowlands. The rivers still teem with salmon and grayling and the lakes with whitefish, ling, and lush. Unless the outrage of canneries should be permitted at the mouths of the Yukon--and that would threaten the chief subsistence of all the Indians of the interior--there seems no danger of permanent failure of the salmon run, though, of course, it varies greatly from year to year. Furs, though they diminish in number, continually rise in price. There are localities, it is true, where the game has been largely killed off and the furs trapped out; the Koyukuk country is one of them, though perhaps that region never was a very good game country. In this region, when a few years ago there was a partial failure of the salmon, there was distress amongst the Indians. But the country on the whole is almost as good an Indian country as ever it was, and there are few signs that it tends otherwise, though things happen so quickly and changes come with so little warning in Alaska that one does not like to be too confident.

The Indian is the only settled inhabitant of interior Alaska to-day; for the prospectors and miners, who constitute the bulk of the white population, are not often very long in one place. Many of them might rightly be classed as permanent, but very few as settled inhabitants. It is the commonest thing to meet men a thousand miles away from the place where one met them last. A new "strike" will draw men from every mining camp in Alaska. A big strike will shift the centre of gravity of the whole white population in a few months. Indeed, a certain restless belief in the superior opportunities of some other spot is one of the characteristics of the prospector. The tide of white men that has flowed into an Indian neighbourhood gradually ebbs away and leaves the Indian behind with new habits, with new desires, with new diseases, with new vices, and with a varied assortment of illegitimate half-breed children to support. The Indian remains, usually in diminished numbers, with impaired character, with lowered physique, with the tag-ends of the white man's blackguardism as his chief acquirement in English--but he remains.

It is unquestionable that the best natives in the country are those that have had the least intimacy with the white man, and it follows that the most hopeful and promising mission stations are those far up the tributary streams, away from mining camps and off the routes of travel, difficult of access, winter or summer, never seen by tourists at all; seen only of those who seek them with cost and trouble. At such stations the improvement of the Indian is manifest and the population increases. By reason of their remoteness they are very expensive to equip and maintain, but they are well worth while. One such has been described on the Koyukuk; another, at this writing, is establishing with equal promise at the Tanana Crossing, one of the most difficult points to reach in all interior Alaska.

This chapter must not close without a few words about the native children. Dirty, of course, they almost always are; children in a state of nature will always be dirty, and even those farthest removed from that state show a marked tendency to revert to it; but when one has become sufficiently used to their dirt to be able to ignore it, they are very attractive. Intolerance of dirt is largely an acquired habit anyway. In view of their indulgent rearing, for Indian parents are perhaps the most indulgent in the world, they are singularly docile; they have an affectionate disposition and are quick and eager to learn. Many of them are very pretty, with a soft beauty of complexion and a delicate moulding of feature that are lost as they grow older. It takes some time to overcome their shyness and win their confidence, but when friendly relations have been established one grows very fond of them. Foregathering with them again is distinctly something to look forward to upon the return to a mission, and to see them come running, to have them press around, thrusting their little hands into one's own or hanging to one's coat, is a delight that compensates for much disappointment with the grown ups. In the midst of such a crowd of healthy, vivacious youngsters, clear-eyed, clean-limbed, and eager, one positively refuses to be hopeless about the race.