54 Sketches of an Excursion to Southern Alaska. 



will be co-extensive with all home life, and its salutary influences will be dif- 

 fused abroad to transform society. This outlook of the school upon the domestic 

 and social renovation of the inhabitants, will alone justify the expediency of 

 maintaining it permanently. 



I have thus shown how the original basis of the Home for Girls should be 

 expanded upon an area of great and growing usefulness. I do not recommend 

 the introduction of such an institution in any other locality. This one will an- 

 swer for the Tlinket people. The demand for a similar " Home " exists at Sitka 

 and other points ; and we must not be betrayed into inconsiderate steps which 

 will involve expenditures that the benevolence of the church will not sustain, or 

 the expediency of which in any other place is an open question, until experience 

 teaches us. The natural and indispensable complement of this institution is 



A SIMILAR SCHOOL FOR BOYS. 



The purity and well being of the future homes of Alaska demand this pro- 

 vision for the young men, with all the force of an absolute law. And their 

 secular prosperity requires, with equal urgency, that they be trained to a 

 competent knowledge of the common arts and christian habits of civilized 

 ]ife. No time should be lost in equipping this school, which should be located 

 for obvious reasons, at Fort Wrangel, where the Tlinket tribes most do congre- 

 gate. The neglect of the physical and manual education of the aborigines in 

 other parts of our country, accounts, in a great degree, for the slender results 

 following the schools opened for their benefit. 



THE OUTCOME OF BOARDING SCHOOLS 



among the heathen is not in general satisfactory. My own examination of the 

 same among Indians on Reservations, leads to the like conclusion. There is 

 no adequate compensation. The seed sown seems soon to wither. The 

 children slide back into the old life and ways, chiefly, because there is no 

 elevation in society ; and the graduates are not numerous enough to create it. 

 There is no inducement to rise or improve. In the few whoever felt the inspi- 

 ration, it was smothered by the mephitic vapors cf the old sepulchre ; and the 

 others who never felt it, had nothing to lose, and subsided by speedily forgetting 

 what little they had been taught. 



Bnt when the mental training shall be accompanied with a practical knowledge 

 of the mechanical arts and farming, it will supply the means to keep above the 

 barbarism of their former state, and the motive will not be wanting. But the 

 boarding school does not accohiplish this, because most of the children are not 

 gathered into it. I have, therefore, strenuously advocated 



THE INTRODUCTION OF INDUSTRIAL DAY SCHOOLS 



for Indian children on all our Reservations, the Boarding School to be sustained 

 and recruited by youth chosen from the day schools, for their promising quali- 

 ties and aptness to teach. This class of schools I recommend without qualifi- 

 cation, for the Tlinket people. No reasonable doubt of their success can be 

 entertained. 



