28 



The canoe is to the North-west coast what the camel is to the 

 desert. It is to the Indian of this region, what the horse is to the Arab. 

 It is the apple of his eye and the object of his solicitous attention and 

 affection. The canoes are hewn out of one solid cedar trunk, and are 

 now seldom made over 30 feet long, although formerly they were made 

 over twice that length and carried several tons. Every year finds the 

 Indians more and more abandoning their old form of one-room houses, 

 earth floor and central fireplace, and adopting our manner of building. In 

 short, the Indian is day by day becoming more of a white man. He is still 

 fond of dogs, ad infinitum one might say, especially when one hears 

 the apparently preconcerted simultaneous howl ot the colony. Their 

 food, they mostly find on the tide flats, where the Indian table, too, is 

 set twice a day. The advance of civilization has not robbed the 

 Alaskan Indian of his means of sustenance, as the disappearance of the 

 buffalo has our North-west Indian. Commerce and civilization can 

 never rob the Alaskan Indian of his food. Sepulture as now practiced 

 is mostly by inhumation-at-length. They also buy cheap paper-covered 

 trunks into which the corpse is packed and placed in a small enclosure 

 or house, over which float streamers or flags to ward off the evil spirits. 

 Cremation and aerial deposition are not practiced now. The shamans, 

 or medicine-men, witch-craft, and slavery received their quietus after the 

 United States came into possession of Alaska. Similar it is with the 

 potlach, or grand party as we would call it, which served as in modern 

 society to a great extent to give a social standing. The Indian often 

 gives potlaches beyond his legitimate means ; he probably anticipated 

 the white man. At the ceremony of an Indian house-warming at 

 Wrangell it cost the host $5,000 in blankets and other presents. 



In conclusion I will speak briefly of the Survey being made in 

 Alaska by our Government. 



The definition, by treaty in 1825, of the boundary line of Alaska 

 was the outcome of, and a side issue in the protest of Great Britain 

 against the unwarranted assumption by Russia of exclusive jurisdiction 

 in Behring Sea. The British position was at the time tersely stated by 

 the significant words "We negotiate about territory to cover the remon- 

 strance upon principle.' 



