80 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



axe can be still plainly recognized at many points of the western 

 coast of the sound, and on Montag'ue Island huge logs, as roughed 

 out nearly a full century ago, are l^'ing now, as they lay then, 

 slightly decayed in many instances ; the anticipation which felled 

 them was never realized, and they have never been disturbed con- 

 sequently. 



In these early colonial Alaskan days, Fort St. Coustantine, or 

 Noochek Island, was a very important trading-centre ; it was visited 

 by all the tribes living on the Mount St. Elias sea-wall to the 

 eastward as far as Yakootat, and also by the Copj^er Indians. 

 Then the sea-otter was abundant, and in its ardent chase those 

 Choogatch savages captured, incidentally, large numbers of black 

 and brown bears, marten, and mink. Now, with the practical ex- 

 termination of the sea-otter, we find a very poor lot of natives at 

 this once flourishing jiost ; but, for the means of a simple phys- 

 ical existence, they have no lack of an abundant supply of salmon, 

 seal-blubber and flesh — meat of the marmot, porcupine, and bear, 

 varied by the frequent k'illing of mountain sheep, which are found 

 all over this alpine range ; fine foxes are plentiful too. 



These Indians live in houses partly luiderground, which we shall 

 describe as we visit Kadiak, and in purely race-characteristics those 

 people also closely resemble the Kadiak Eskimo. From the north of 

 the Copper River, however, toward the Sitkau archipelago, the 

 Koloshian or Thlinket is dominant in the form and features of 

 those savages which we find in a few small and widely separated 

 villages that exist on the . narrow table-land between the high 

 mountains and the unbroken swell of the ocean. These natives all, 

 however, agree in describing their country as an excellent hunting- 

 ground, well timbered, and traversed by numerous small streams 

 which take their rise in the glaciers and eternal snows of the St. 

 Elias Alps. 



By some hajipy dispensation of the Creator every savage is so 

 constituted that here in Alaska, at least, he believes in his own par- 

 ticular area of existence as the very best realm of the earth — he 

 becomes homesick and refuses to be comforted if taken to Cali- 

 fornia or Oregon, enters into a slow decline, and soon dies if not 

 retui-ned to the dreary spot of^ his birth — a sad illustration of fatal 

 nostalgia. 



An Alaskan Indian or Innuit has very little of what may be 

 styled true slavish superstition ; certainly he is credulous, but he 



