THE SCHOOLHOUSE FARTHEST WEST. 



The incidents and particulars of tliis story of school life in the far North were related at Seattle by Mr. V. C. Gambell, who 

 with his young wife taught the Eskimo school at St. Lawrence Island for three years. Their fate was a melancholy one. After a 

 visit, to their home during the winter and spring of 1898, they started to return to their school, and sailed from Seattle on the 

 schooner Jane Grey. Off Cape Flattery a heavy gale was encountered, during which the schooner sprung a leak, and sank within a 

 few minutes. Thirty-two of the passengers, including Mr. and Mrs. Gambell, perished. The Eskimo pupils of these brave teachers 

 looked in vain for them to reappear. While they were in Alaska, they had many strange and dangerous experiences. 

 Mr. Gambell's narrative was substantially as follows : 



Upon St. Lawrence Island, in the Bering Sea, 

 stands the schoolhouse which, of all those over 

 which the American flag flies, is farthest west. 

 There is a school at Point Barrow, in the Arctic 

 Ocean, which is farther north, but the one on 

 St. Lawrence Island is the farthest over toward 

 Siberia, to the northwest. 



St. Lawrence Island lies almost within the 

 Arctic Circle, at the southerly entrance to Ber- 

 ing Straits. Nothing larger than tundra grass, 

 lichens and a few low willows grow on its bleak, 

 copper-covered hills and frozen marshes. For- 

 merly there were three Eskimo villages, but in 

 1888-9, many of the natives died of starvation. 

 It is said that they had sold all they possessed to 

 smugglers in exchange for liquor. Now there is 

 one village of three hundred and fifty souls, at 

 the western end of the island. The people lived 

 almost wholly by hunting the walrus. 



The lumber for the first schoolhouse was 

 shipped from San Francisco, in 1891; and a 

 strong, plain structure, forty feet in length by 

 twenty in width, was bviilt by the carpenters of 

 the ship that brought it, on the outskirts of the 

 native village, at a cost of exactly one thousand 

 dollars. 



Mrs. Gambell and I were carried to the island 

 by the United States revenue steamer Bear, 

 and landed September 15, 1894. By way of in- 

 troducing us. Captain Healy announced to the 

 people through an interpreter that we were two 

 white teachers who would live at the school- 

 house and teach the children to "make book- 

 talk." He added a warning that they must treat 

 us well. 



Nevertheless, we were not without misgiving 

 when set ashore among these strange-looking 

 people, and reflected that after the J5ear left we 



