INNUIT LIFE AND LAND. 401 



its people. Though the course of the river is only one hundred 

 miles in length, yet we find upon it seven villages (one of them very 

 large), having an aggregate population of 1,826 souls. No other one 

 section of Alaska has so dense a population with reference to its 

 inhabited area. The river is, however, a broad one, being a mile 

 and a half in width, shoal and shallow, with deep pools and eddies 

 here and there. Its banks are low, and the valley through which 

 it runs is low and flat, with extensive bottom-lands that widen 

 out at places to a distance of fifteen miles between the ridges 

 and hills which direct its short course. Upon these flats grow 

 most luxuriant and lofty grasses, high as the heads of natives 

 literally concealing, as it were, the ' dense human occupation of its 

 extent. 



The Togiaks are the Quakers of Alaska ; they are the simplest 

 and the most unpretending of all her people ; they seem to live en- 

 tirely to themselves, wholly indifferent as to what other folks have 

 and they have not. They seldom ever view a white man, and then it 

 is only when they go down to the river's mouth and visit a trader 

 in his sloop or schooner. He never goes up to see them, for the best 

 of reasons to him they never have anything fit for barter save a 

 few inferior mink and ground-squirrel skins to trade. They have 

 no chiefs ; each family is a law unto itself, and it comes and goes 

 with a sort of free and easy abandon that must resemble the life 

 and habit of primeval time. What little these people want and can- 

 not get from each other, they do not go farther in search of, but 

 do without, unless it be small supplies of tobacco which they pro- 

 cure through other Innuits, second or third hand. 



Entire families of them, during the summer, leave their winter 

 huts and go out into the valley at such points as their fancy may 

 indicate, where they pass two and three months with absolutely no 

 shelter whatever erected during that entire lapse of time. When it 

 rains hard they simply turn their skin boats bottom side up, stick 

 their heads under, and consider themselves fully settled for protec- 

 tion from tempestuous wind and sleet-storms, or any other climatic 

 unpleasantness. How insensible to extremes of weather do these 

 bodies of the Innuits become their whole external form is as in- 

 sensible to heat or cold as their stolid features are ! Were they 

 living under Italian skies, they could not affect a greater disregard 

 for the varying moods of that mild climate than they do for the 

 chilly, boisterous weather of Alaska. The Togiakers never go far 



