432 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



laying the vessel's sails aback for a few minutes, or an hour, while 

 the dusky paddling crews of the oomiaks surrounding the schooner 

 exhibit their slim stocks of oil and ivory. 



These northern Innuits are not known anywhere to have a vil- 

 lage located far back from the sea save at three places, where, on the 

 Selawik, the Killiamoot, and the Kooak Rivers, are settlements of 

 a few people who are at least fifty and one or two hundred miles 

 inland ; but they . are the exceptions only to their rule of living. 

 Some thirty-five villages of these hyperborean Innuits of Alaska 

 are scattered along the coast between St. Michael's and Point Bar- 

 row ; they possess an aggregate (estimated) inhabitation of three 

 thousand men, women, and children. The Diomede and Prince of 

 Wales natives are the most active middlemen or commission mer- 

 chants among their people ; they conduct all the trade between 

 the Asiatic Chookchie savages and the American Innuits, chiefly 

 with those of Kotzebue Sound. Before a wholesale destruction 

 by our people, in 1849-57, of the whales that once were so abun- 

 dant in these waters, the life of those natives was a comparatively 

 easy struggle for existence, and they were far more numerous then 

 than they are to-day ; but a fleet of four and five hundred whaling- 

 ships, manned by the hardiest men of all nations, literally swept that 

 cetacean life from the North Pacific and Bering Sea, and drove it so 

 far into the Arctic Ocean that its remnant, which is still there, is 

 practically safe and beyond human reach. 



As you leave the Straits of Bering behind, your little vessel cuts 

 the cold, green waves of the Arctic Ocean rapidly, especially if under 

 the pressure of a warm southwester which funnels up stiffly through 

 the pass. You find nothing to catch your eye in all that long reach 

 from Cape Prince of Wales to the entrance of Kotzebue Sound, 

 which is an objective point of all the traders who come into the 

 Arctic. Here is the last safe Alaskan harbor for a sea-going vessel 

 as we go north. It is a big one ; and it is a famous place for a 

 geologist and Innuits alike. To the latter it is of especial signifi- 

 cance, since the small rivers which empty there mark an extreme 

 northern limit of salmon-running in America. 



The shores which bound this large gulf rise as perpendicular 

 bluffs, either directly from the water or from a shelving beach. In 

 some places the land is remarkably low (as it always is when bor- 

 dering the coast), and only so much raised above tide-level as to 

 render the idea probable that it is of an alluvial formation, the re- 



