64 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



sorts of disagreeable weather every summer and winter of his sub- 

 sequent existence, at very frequent intervals, soon destroyed pleas- 

 urable emotions. Therefore, he fashions his acute-angled wooden 

 hooks, his iron- tipped fish and seal spears, and polishes up his mus- 

 ket with none of those enjoyable antici2:)ations which possess the 

 soul of a white sportsman. 



In 1841-42 the best understanding of the Russian and English 

 traders agreed in reporting a population of over twenty thousand 

 Indians within the limits of the Alexander archipelago ; to-day the 

 same country can show no more than a scant seven thousand. The 

 inroads that small-j^ox and measles have made, by which these 

 savages were destroyed even as fire sweeps through and burns 

 drought-withered thickets, leave little doubt as to the great numer- 

 ical superiority of earlier days as compared with the present. This 

 decay and abandonment is everywhere exhibited now even in the per- 

 manent villages, where hovises have been deserted completely : some 

 are shut up, mouldering, and rotting away upon their foundations ; 

 others, large and fit for the shelter of fifty or sixty natives, will be 

 found tenanted by only two or three Siwashes. All the standing 

 carved posts in this entire region, with rare exceptions, are, as a rule, 

 more or less advanced into decay. A rank growth of weeds, dark and 

 undisturbed in some cases, presses up close to inhabited houses, 

 the traffic not being sufiicient to keej) them down. The original 

 features of these settlements, in a few years more of this unchecked 

 neglect and decay, will have entirely disappeared as they have 

 already at Sitka. At the present houi', however, we can go among 

 them, and readily call up to our minds what they once were when 

 they were swarming with occupants who were dressed in tanned- 

 leather shirts and sea-otter cloaks, as they thronged about the 

 ships of Cook and Vancouver. 



Slavery, which was originally firmly interwoven with the social 

 fabric of these people, has been about abolished — slaves themselves 

 to-day are very scarce, and are not much more so than in name. 

 They were the captives taken in savage warfare between opposing 

 clans, and were most horribly tortured and cruelly treated by their 

 masters. 



As a rule the young people marry young, after the stolid fashion 

 of Indians. They approve of joolygamy, but seldom do you find a 

 man with more than one squaw, simply because the women do not 

 contribute materially and primarily to the support of the family, 



