UNDER AMERICAN CONTROL. IMPROVEMENT. 215 



impossible for them to make much progress, no matter what the teach- 

 ing or the example set before them may have been while living, as 

 they were, in their damp, filthy subterranean houses; and more impos- 

 sible for them to live otherwise than underground until they were fur- 

 nished with fuel and building material. 



These were never supplied by the Russians, and the Americans ac- 

 cordingly found them, upon the cession of the territory to the United 

 States, living in miserable, unhealthy hovels totally unfit for human 

 habitation. The supports for the thatched roofs and turf sides of their 

 houses consisted of the pieces of driftwood or the jaw bones of whales; 

 light was admitted through the opaque medium of raw sea-lion skins, 

 stretched and shaved; the chimney was a hole in the rout', over which 

 a shin was drawn to retain the heat after the fire went out; their fuel 

 consisted of water soaked splinters of driftwood, upon which was 

 burned the blubber of the seal or whale, emitting the nauseous odors 

 of burning, rancid, ill-smelling animal fats. The smoke from the fire 

 left its greasy deposits upon everything about the premises and emitted 

 a stench endurable only by a sense of smell long inured to it. For light 

 in the long winter nights they had only a small burning wick supported 

 upon the surface of an open vessel of seal oil. Their food consisted 

 almost wholly of seal meat, with rarely a meal of fish or fowl, often- 

 times eaten raw in summer, and dried or partially dried and stored in 

 the inflated stomachs of sea lions for winter. A small quantity of rye 

 was furnished them, but their facilities for putting it in edible form 

 were of the most primitive kind, and to this was added a limited quan- 

 tity of tea and sugar, tobacco and rum. Their clothing was made of 

 skins or of such coarse cotton or woolen cloths as were imported in 

 very limited quantities for their use. 



The work which was exacted from the natives under Russian rule 

 was much harder than has since been put upon them. The islands 

 were provided with no teams of any description ; the boats were rude 

 affairs, built from pieces of driftwood, whalebone, whale sinew, and sea- 

 lion skins; the storehouses, workshops and tools were ill constructed 

 and inconvenient; all of the skins of the thousands of seals slaughtered 

 each year were transported on the shoulders of the laborers from the 

 field to the warehouses, a great amount of labor expended on each skin 

 in cleaning and drying it, and all were again shouldered from the ware- 

 houses to the boats to be lightered to the vessels. In all this work men, 

 women, and children participated, and each received the small stipend 

 of a lew kopeks per day or per skin, barely sufficient to pay for the tea, 

 sugar, coarse clothing, and articles of domestic use supplied from the 

 Company's store. Yet even this poor subsistence was furnished directly 

 or indirectly from the seals, excepting a few edible roots and wild vege- 

 tables and an occasional fish or fowl at certain seasons of the year. 

 There is absolutely no other source of subsistence at the seal island. 



Since the occupation of the territory by the Americans such a change 

 has taken place in the condition of the natives as occurs in the transi- 

 tion from barbarism to civilization; and such a change as has brought 

 about them those material evidences of civilization which require for 

 their support and maintenance a constant and assured income. The 

 villages as viewed from the exterior are indicative of their present 

 plane of living and are such as may be seen in the prosperous mining 

 and manufacturing sections of our country, comprising attractive 

 churches, well-designed school-houses, commodious storehouses, and 

 comfortable dwellings, all built iu regular order and painted white. 



