42 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



this tangible evidence in your grasp, that in attempting to civilize 

 the Alaskan Indian the result is much more like extermination, or 

 lingering, deeper degradation to him than that which you so ear- 

 nestly desire. The cause of this failure of the missionary and the 

 priest is easy to analyze : it is due to the demoralizing precept and 

 example of those depraved whites who always appear on the field 

 of the Indian mission, sooner or later ; if they could be shut out, 

 and the savage wholly uninfluenced by their vicious lives, then the 

 story of Alaskan Indian salvage might be very different. Still, the 

 thought will always come unbidden and promptly these savages 

 were created for the wild surrounding of their existence ; expressly 

 for it, and they live happily in it : change this order of their life, 

 and at once they disappear, as do the indigenous herbs and game 

 before the cultivation of the soil and the domestication of animals. 



The Indians of Alaska, however, will never call upon the Gov- 

 ernment for food and reservations there is a great abundance on 

 the earth and in the waters thereof for them ; living as they do all 

 down at tide-water, at the sole source of their subsistence, they are 

 within the quick reach of a gunboat ; the overpowering significance 

 of that they fully understand and fear. There is a huge wilderness 

 here for them which the white man is not at all likely to occupy, 

 even in part, for generations of his kind to come, yet unborn. 



Sitka is the seat of that Alaskan civil government* which Con- 

 gress, after much deliberation, ordered in 1884 ; but the governor 

 lives here in much humbler circumstances than did his Slavonian 

 predecessors. As it would require a small fortune to rehabilitate the 

 " castle," the present chief -magistrate resides in one of those neatly 

 built houses which the military authorities erected shortly after they 

 took charge in 1867-68 ; it is not at all commanding, but has a 

 pleasant vista from its windows over the parade ground, and the 

 steamers' landing. 



While the most impressive feature of the Sitkan archipelago is 

 unquestionably that of the awe-inspiring solemnity and grand 



* This Act wisely does not establish a full-fledged form of territorial gov- 

 ernment in Alaska, because the lack of a suitable population to maintain 

 it reputably was conclusively shown by the census returns of 1880 : it creates 

 an executive and a judiciary ; it extends certain laws of the United States 

 relating to crimes, customs, and mining, over Alaska, and provides for their 

 enforcement. The land laws of the United States should also be made opera- 

 tive in Alaska, they are expressly omitted in the present act. 



