376 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



The red-roofed, yellow-painted walls of the old Kussian build- 

 ings, the smarter, sprucer dwellings of our traders, with lazy, 

 curling wreaths of bluish smoke, are brought into very picturesque 

 relief by the verdant slopes of Nooshagak's hillside, caught up and 

 reflected deeply by the swiftly flowing current of the river below. 

 The natives have festooned their long drying-frames with the crim- 

 son-tinted flesh of salmon ; bleached drift-logs are scattered in pro- 

 fusion upon a bare sandy high-water bench that stretches like a 

 buff-tinted ribbon just beneath them, and above, the dark, turbid 

 whirl of flood and eddy so characteristic of a booming, rising river. 

 A gleam of light falls upon a broad expanse of the estuary beyond 

 that point under which the schooner lies at anchor, and brings out 

 the thickly wooded banks of an opposite shore, causing us to note 

 the fact that, for some reason or other, no timber seems ever to 

 have spread down so far toward the sea on this side of the stream, 

 or where the settlement stands, since nothing but scattered copses 

 of alder- and willow-bushes grow on its suburbs or anywhere else 

 as far as an eye can range up the valley. 



We notice a decided difference in bearing and expression among 

 the natives here nothing like what we have studied at Oonalashka, 

 Kadiak, or Sitka. They are Innuits, or representatives of the most 

 populous savage family indigenous to Alaska, and are as nomadic as 

 Bedouins. They are the least changed or altered by contact with 

 our race. They are Eskimo, strictly speaking, and the natives of 

 Kadiak are almost strictly related to them. In portraying the phy- 

 sique, physiognomy, and disposition of these people, we find in an 

 average Innuit a man who stands about five feet six or seven inches 

 in his heelless boots ; his skin is fair, slightly Mongolian in its com- 

 plexion and facial expression ; a broad face, prominent cheek-bones, 

 a large mouth with full lips, small black eyes, but prominently 

 set in their sockets not under a lowering brow, as in the case 

 of true Indian faces. The nose is very insignificant and much de- 

 pressed, having between the eyes scarcely any bridge at all. He 

 has an abundance of coarse black hair ; never any of a reddish hue, 

 as frequently noted among the Aleutes when first discovered and 

 described by the Eussians. Up to the age of thirty years an In- 

 nuit usually keeps his hair cut pretty close to his scalp ; some of 

 them shave the occiput, so that it shines like a billiard-ball. After 

 this period in life he lets it grow as it will, wearing it in ragged, 

 unkempt locks. He sometimes will sport a well-developed mus- 



