INNUIT LIFE AND LAND. 



383 



Fish they capture in the greatest abundance, and the variety is 

 quite fair. Salmon is the staff, and is found in all of the thousand 

 and one lakes and sluggish or rapid streams that run from them 

 into the greater rivers, where a mighty rush of the same fish is an- 

 nually made up in June and July from Bering Sea. In all of the 

 deeper lakes, and the big rivers, a variety of large white-fish and 

 trout are found, especially prized and searched for by these people 

 in midwinter, when they are trapped there in wicker-work baskets 

 and pole weirs under ice. 



The Big Mahklok. 



In round numbers these Eskimo, or Innuits, of Alaska, number 

 nearly eighteen thousand souls ; they inhabit the entire coast-line 

 of Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, with an exception of the Aleu- 

 tian chain and that portion of the peninsula west of Oogashik. The 

 numerous subdivisions of this great family are based wholly upon 

 dialectic differentiation, and as its elaboration would entail a dreary 

 and uninteresting chapter upon any reader save a studious ethnolo- 

 gist, it will not be itemized here. These Eskimo are all hunters 

 and fishermen ; those land animals to which we have made allusion 

 are pursued by them at the proper seasons of the year. They do 

 not have much, in the aggregate, of value to a trader ; it is chiefly 



