422 ALASKA INDUSTRIES. 



houses at St. Paul, the man ofteu has to get it. He trudges out with 

 a little woodeu firkin or tub on his back, and brings it to tlie house. 



The fact that among all the savage races found on the northwest 

 coast by Christian pioneers and teachers, the Aleutians are the only 

 practical converts to Christianity, goes far, in my opinion, to set them 

 apart as very differently constituted in mind and disposition from our 

 Indians and our Eskimos of Alaska. To the latter, however, they seem 

 to be intimately allied, though they do not mingle in the slightest degree. 

 They adopted the Christain faith with very little opposition, readily 

 exchanging their barbarous customs and wild superstitions for the 

 rites of the Greek Catholic Church and its more refined myths and 

 legends. 



At the time of their first discovery they were living as savages in 

 every sense of the word, bold and hardy, throughout the Aleutian 

 chain: but, now they respond on these Islands to all outward signs of 

 Christianity as sincerely as our own church-going people. 



Up to the time of the transfer of the territory and leasing of the 

 islands to the Alaska Commercial Company, in August, 1870, these 

 native inhabitants all lived in huts or sod-walled and dirt-roofed 

 houses, called "barrabkies," partly under ground. Most of these huts 

 were damp, dark, and exceedingly filthy. It seemed to be the policy 

 of the short-sighted Russian management to keep them so, and to treat 

 the natives not near so well as they treated the few hogs and dogs 

 which they brought up there for food and for company. Tlie use of seal 

 fat for fuel caused the deposit upon everything within doors, of a thick 

 coat of greasy, black soot, strongly impregnated with a damp, moldy, 

 and indescribably offensive odor. They found along the north shore of 

 St. Paul and at Northeast Point occasional scattered pieces of drift- 

 wood, which they used, carefully soaked anew in water if it had dried 

 out, split into little fragments, and, trussing the blubber with it when 

 making their fires, the combination gave rise to a roaring, spluttering 

 blaze. If this driftwood failed them at any time when winter came 

 round, they were obliged to huddle together beneath skins in their cold 

 huts, and live or die, as the case might be. But the situation today 

 has changed marvelously. 



When Congress granted to the Alaska Commercial Company of San 

 Francisco tlie exclusive right of taking a certain number of fur seals 

 every year for a period of twenty years on these islands, it did so with 

 several reservations and conditions, which were confided in their detail to 

 the Secretary of the Treasury. This officer and the president of the 

 Alaska Commercial Company agreed upon a code of regulations which 

 should govern their joint action in regard to the natives. It was a 

 simple agreement that these people should have a certain amount of 

 dried salmon furnished them for food every year: a certain amount of 

 fuel : a schoolhouse, and the right to go to and come from the islands as 

 they chose; and also the right to work or not, understanding that in 

 case they did not work, their places would and could be supplied by 

 other people who would work. 



The company, however, went far beyond this exaction of the Govern- 

 ment. It added an inexpressible boon of comfort, in the formation of 

 thosedwellingsnowoccupied by the natives, which wasneither expressed 

 nor thought of at the time of the granting of the lease. An enlight- 

 ened business policy suggested to the company that it would be much 

 better for the natives, and much better for the company too, if these 

 people were taken out of their filthy, unwholesome hovels, put into 

 habitable dwellings, and taught to live cleanly, for the simple reason 



