28 ALASKA. 



with a little i)owder and ball. The Aleuts want good clothes ; 

 they desire to dvess their women and children well ; they crave 

 tea, sugar, flour, &c., all of which are simply despised by the 

 savage, and, consequently, a little hunting will obtain all he 

 wants in return from the trader, and exertion beyond this, on 

 his part, appears to him simply absurd or ridiculous. 



While the sea-otter trade in Alaska, therefore, is well devel- 

 oped, the fur-trade on the mainland is by no means of the 

 importance it might be made to assume were the hunting as 

 energetically followed up as is that prosecuted by the people of 

 Kodiak and the Aleutian Islands ; the industry and energy, 

 however, of our traders will undoubtedly add largely every suc- 

 ceeding year to the yield, in creating desire among the Indians, 

 and thus stinudating exertion on their part in hunting so as to 

 insure its gratification. 



I shall not enter into a description of these Indians. Their 

 treacherous, indolent lives have been most accurately and fully 

 described by a score of writers ; one of the earliest, that of 

 Portlock and Dixon, in 178G, 1787, and 1788, reads as if it had 

 been written from my own notes taken this season, so little 

 have they changed in the main of habit and disposition. Of 

 course, when the Russians were obliged, in 1832,* to commence 

 the liquor-trade with them in self-defense against American 

 adventurers and the Hudson Bay Company, and the small-pox 

 in 1835 swept like wild-tire through all the villages on the north- 

 west coast, destroying nearly one-third of them, the combination 

 of two such terrible evils, whisky and the plague, demoralized 

 and diminished them to such an extent that they never have 

 recovered their former strength, nor is it now probable that they 

 will recover it. 



The number of Indians now living in the Territory is, accord- 

 ing to best authority and my judgment, between eighteen and 

 twenty thousand. Of this number, between ten and twelve 

 thousand belong to that district bounded on the north by Cook's 

 Inlet and south by Fort Simpson ; the remainder inhabit that 

 stretch of country reaching from Bristol Bay to Kotzebue Sound, 

 and back into the fiir interior, where there are several tribes, 

 supposed to be quite numerous, about which very little is 

 known even by the traders. 



On this coast-line of Alaska, betw een Bering's Straits and 



*Tbis was stopped in 1842. A treaty was made between tliem aud the 

 Hudson Bay Company. 



