COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE. 93 



here in the coldest weather without any covering at all, and do. 

 Such a bed is a great and priceless luxury to them. 



No furniture annoys the Kenai housekeeper, unless the small 

 square blocks of wood used occasionally as stools or seats can be so 

 styled ; the grease and fire-boxes which we have seen in Sitkan 

 households are also duplicated here, but though made of wood 

 they are not so neatly put together. The traders recently have 

 introduced a very novel feature to the interior of nearly every 

 Kenaitze house ; it is the common, cheap, box-imitation, in minia- 

 ture, of a Saratoga trunk with lock and key. Those oddly contrasted 

 articles will be found everywhere among these people, who keep 

 in them all their valuables, such as charms, and toys for the 

 children, flashy handkerchiefs, small tools fashioned out of bits of 

 iron and steel, bags of thread and stripped sinews, needles, 

 ammunition, and their percussion-caps, which are to them as pearls 

 without price nothing so precious. Outside of this trunk-craze, 

 and their odd sleeping-rooms, these Indians do not live together or 

 act differently from the usual habit and manner of savages proper, 

 so familiar to us by reason of repeated descriptions published of 

 our own meat-eaters who live near by. They crave nothing from 

 the white trader save powder, lead, good rifles, percussion-caps, 

 tobacco, calico, and the sham trunks alluded to. 



The sun shines out over Cook's Inlet much more than it does 

 in the Sitkan region and the Aleutian Islands. The proportion of 

 fair, bright weather is larger than that experienced anywhere else in 

 all Alaska or its coast. The winter months here are not excessively 

 cold ; snow falls in December sometimes as late as 3d of Jan- 

 uary before the first flakes of the season arrive. By the first to 

 middle of May it has usually melted away on the lowlands, and the 

 grass springs up anew, green and luxuriant. Summer, and even 

 winter storms, are drawn along the lofty ranges of the Kenai Penin- 

 sula when all is serene and pleasant at the same time on the moors 

 and lowlands of the inlet shores. Often, too, the people of that 

 coast can look up to a continued falling of heavy rain and snow 

 on the mountain summits of the steep ridges across the inlet, while 

 they bask in unclouded sunshine, and have no interruption of its 

 comfort. 



We ourselves have as yet made but slight use of the natural 

 resources and advantages of Cook's Inlet. A party of San Fran- 

 cisco merchants have established at the mouth of the Kassilov 



