362 SEAL JLIFE ON THE PRIBILOF ISLANDS. 



FOXES. 



After we pass the timber belt to the westward we find but very little 

 game, the only valuable land animal on the Aleutian chain of islands 

 being the fox, which until recently was a source of income to the natives, 

 who spent the greater part of the winter hunting and trapping the 

 animal. 



All that has been said about the wanton destruction of deer can be 

 said with equal truth about the wholesale poisoning by which whole 

 islands are stripped of their foxes in one winter, and the native hunter 

 and his children left to starve. So systematically is the work done and 

 so desperate are the gang engaged in it that those who know them best 

 are very careful to say least about them. 



Members of the gang are to be found wherever there is money to be 

 made suddenly by illegitimate means. In the fishing season they dam 

 the streams, capture the salmon by the quantity, and sell them to the 

 nearest cannery for what they will bring. They never take the trouble 

 to tear down the dams. They are to be found in schooners in the early 

 spring hunting the sea otter in forbidden waters. They go to Bering 

 Sea after seals, and last season some of them made a successful raid on 

 a trading post and robbed it of some 15 or 20 tine sea-otter skins, valued 

 at $7,000 to $10,000. 



Generally they wind up the year's plunder by selecting a group of 

 islands, where they spend the winter poisoning foxes and securing the 

 pelts. These are the men who are armed to the teeth with the best 

 modern breech-loading arms; men who own swift-sailing schooners, in 

 which they carry cargoes of whisky from British Columbia, and, follow- 

 ing the Alaskan coast and Indian settlements, peddle it out to natives 

 for whatever skins and trinkets they may have to spare, and having 

 made them drunk, they slip in and rob them of everything. 



No effort has ever been made to break up their nefarious business, 

 and now they swagger into court as though the Government were an 

 intruder, and listen awhile to the proceedings; just long enough to 

 assure themselves that their tools at the bar and in the jury box are 

 doing their duty to the gang. 



The perpetual presence of a revenue cutter that would patrol the 

 inner waters of Alaska from Cape Fox to Chilcat and Sitka, aided by 

 armed steam launches stationed at convenient points along the route, 

 is the only practical method that I know of by which the present dan- 

 gerous bands of outlaws can be suppressed. 



With boats at his disposal whenever needed, the marshal could 

 enforce the law, the collector could follow the smugglers to their ren- 

 dezvous and break up the whole business at one blow. As it is now, 

 all the officers in Alaska are utterly powerless to do anything, and the 

 consequence is the laws are defied and derided and spat upon. 



THE SEA OTTER. 



The most valuable of all the fur-bearing animals in Alaskan waters 

 and the most widely distributed is undoubtedly the sea otter, which, if 

 properly protected by the Government, is capable of giving profitable 

 employment to the native hunters for all time. 



Beginning at Sitka they were to be found till very recently all around 

 the coast and Aleutian Islands as far westward as Attou, a distance of 

 nearly 5,000 miles; but now, after a few years of hunting by the mod- 



