28 INTRODUCTION OF DOMESTIC REINDEER INTO ALASKA. 



Her macliiiiery was taken out and she was converted into a three- 

 masted schooner. While in the merchant service as a himber vessel 

 she was abandoned at sea off the coast of Oregon. Being recovered 

 and brought into i)ort, she was bought by Messrs. Lynde & Hough, of 

 San Francisco, who used her in their codfish trade. On March 7, 1893, 

 a heavy southwester dashed her upon the rocks at Sand Point, her flual 

 resting phice. Sand Point consists of a few houses belonging to Messrs. 

 Lynde & Hough, a hotel, and United States custom-house. Going 

 ashore I made the acquaintance of Mr. J. H. Bugbee, the agent, and 

 with him selected a ^ight for a schoolhouse. 



On the morning of May 12, feeling our way along, tlie fog horn sound- 

 lug, we turned north in the mists of Bering Sea through TJnimak Pass, 

 in the Aleutian chain, whose seventy islands stretch for a thousand 

 miles like gigantic step])ing stones toward Siberia. Attou, the west- 

 ernmost limit of the land possessions of the United States, is beyond 

 the one hundred and eightieth meridian and within the Eastern Hem- 

 isphere. Soon the fog lifted and we steamed through waters as smooth 

 as a mill pond. Bold headlands, toAvering innnacles of rock, mountain 

 slopes carpeted with mosses whose intense green was heightened by 

 great patches of snow here and there; volcanoes draped with cloud 

 and plumed with smoke delighted the eye as we glided along. In a few 

 hours we swept past Priest's Bock, an outlying pinnacle which bears a 

 resemblance to a priest of the Greek Church in his robes, and entered 

 Unalaska Bay. Twelve miles uj) the bay is the village of Unalaska or 

 Iliuliuk (the curving beach), the commercial center of western Alaska. 

 It is the i)ort of entry for Bering Sea. A deputy collector of customs? 

 deputy marshal, and a United States commissioner reside here. At 

 Unalaska are the headquarters of the Alaska Coinmercial Company 

 for the western and arctic regions of the Territory. At the neighboring 

 village of Dutch Harbor are the offices of the North American Commer- 

 cial Company, also controlling trading posts scattered over thousands 

 of miles of territory. During the summer mouths Unalaska is the ren- 

 dezvous for all the shipi»ing in that part of the world. The ships of 

 the arctic whaling fleet call here for coal, water, supplies, and mail, 

 and to leave news of the movements of the arctic ice and the catch of 

 whales, and receive tidings of the great world to the south. Since 1891 

 it has been the headquarters of the United States and British fleets 

 engaged in the Bering Sea j)atrol. 



In the vast territor^^ tributary to Unalaska are numerous waifs, many 

 of them the children of white men. Here at Unalaska the Methodist 

 Woman's Home Mission Society in 1889 entered upon the noble work 

 of taking these poor children out of tlieir squalor and mental darkness, 

 and by surrounding them with the influences of a Christian home to 

 lift them into a higher civilization. From a beginning with two orphan 

 waifs from the island of Attou, 1,000 miles west of Unalaska, the home 

 family had increased in June, 1895, to about thirty, and the trausfor- 



