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.
[Illustration: A DOCILE FOLK, EAGER FOR INSTRUCTION.]
[Illustration: THE MISSION TYPE.]
[Illustration: WILD AND SHY.]
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 deg. 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.
[Illustration: THE NATIVE COMMUNICANT.]
[Illustration: RAW MATERIAL.]
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.
[Illustration: AN ESQUIMAU YOUTH.]
[Illustration: A HALF-BREED INDIAN.]
[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.
[Illustration: AN AGED COUPLE.]
[Illustration: FOOTBALL AT THE ALLAKAKET, EXPOSURE 1-1000 SECOND, APRIL,
AFTER A NEW LIGHT SNOWFALL.]
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.