110 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



skin coat called the " parkie " all over this Alaskan country outside 

 of the Sitkan archipelago. 



As these natives exist to-day there are only eighteen hundred, 

 a few more or less, of them, which is an immense shrinkage from 

 the Russian enumeration of six thousand five himdred made by 

 actual count of Baranov. They seem to be declining even now, 

 ^•ear by year, even as the Koloshians of the Sitkan region do, so 

 that the native jDopulation of the Kadiak district, if decreased * in 

 the next two decades as it has in the last, will hardly have a living 

 representative. No one can well avoid a train of fast-crowding 

 thought when he stops in contemplation of sickness and death as 

 it appears and is treated in savage settlements — the only medical 

 counsel that they ever have is their own individual instinct. Ignor- 

 ant as they are of the simplest anatomical details of their structure, 

 it is not surprising that they should surrender to disorders and 

 disease with that remarkable passive apathy which is so distinctive 

 of the sick everywhere in such communities. 



Indians, and these Aleutes and Kaniags, as they grow uj), have 

 no parental supervision whatever as to details of diet, of warm or 

 cool clothing, or of any of those many attentions which our children 

 receive from their parents. For the first ten or twelve years of 

 their lives they literally run wild, and are semi-naked or wholly so, 

 both male and female ; f this is their condition, then, at all seasons 

 of the year. Exposed as they are, in their manner of living, to 

 draughts, to insufficient covering, and damp, cold nooks for slum- 

 ber, in which the air reeks with odors too vile for the power of 

 language to express, naturally they lay a foundation, at the very 

 outset of their existence, for pulmonic troubles in all the varied 

 degrees of that dread disease. Consumption is, therefore, the 

 simple and broad term for that single ailment which alone destroys 

 the greatest number of these people, every season, in Alaska ; all 

 the natives, the Eskimo, the Aleut, the Kaniag, and the Indians 

 suffer from it alike, and they all exhibit that same stolid indifference 

 to its stealthy but fatal advancement — no extra care, no attempt to 



* The church records show that the people of the Kadiak district have 

 decreased as follows : 1796—6,510; 1818—3,430; 1819—3,252; 1822—2,819; 

 1863 — 2,217; 1880 — 1,813. Small-pox, measles, and other imported diseases 

 have caused this. 



f The little girls, as a rule, receive the earliest garments, generally nothing 

 hut a cotton shift and a torn blanket. 



