418 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



providence and reckless disregard of the need of the morrow is 

 hard indeed for us to reahze. Many of the beasts of the field and 

 forest with which the savage is well acquainted set him annually, 

 but in vain, a better example. 



White traders during the last twenty years have so thoroughly 

 traversed the course of the Yukon, and, since our control of Alaska, 

 little stern-wheel steamers annually make trips from the sea, accom- 

 panied with retinues of white men — these incidents have thoroughly 

 familiarized the Indians here with ourselves. But the wilder In- 

 galeeks of the Tannanah, only six or seven hiuidred souls in niim- 

 ber, however, ai-e as yet comparatively unknown to iis. AVith an 

 exception of a white trader's visit to their country in 1875,* and 

 the recent descent of the Tannanah by a plucky young officer of 

 the United States Army,f these Koltchanes have been unknown 

 at home and wholly undisturbed by us. There are less than 

 sixteen hundred Indians living over the entire Yukon region — a 

 fact which speaks eloquently for an exceeding scantiness of the 

 population of that vast landed expanse of this interior of the Alas- 

 kan mainland — a great arctic moor north of the Kvichpak, which 

 is a mere surface of slightly thawed swale, swampy tundra, lakes 

 and pools, sloughs and sluggish rivers, in the summer solstice, 

 while the wildest storms of frigid winds, laden with snow and 

 sleet, career in unchecked fury over them during winter. Such an 

 extreme climate is the full secret of its marked paucity of human 

 life. But that desolation of winter does not prevent an immense 

 migration of animal life to this repellant section every summer from 

 the south. Myriads of water-fowl, such as geese, ducks, and the 

 smaller forms, breed and moult here then in all security, and free 

 from molestation, while great herds of reindeer troop over the 

 lichen-bearing ridges. The musk-ox, however, has never been 

 known to range here or anywhere in Alaska within the memory of 

 man. Its fossil remains have been disinterred from the banks of 

 the Yukon, at several places (just as those of the mammoth have), 

 but that, with a few bleached skulls, is the only record of this 

 animal we can find which we would most naturally anticipate meet- 

 ing with on such ground, apparently so well adapted for it. 



* Francois Mercier, according to whom " Ingaleek " signifies " incompre- 

 hensible." 



\ Lieutenant H. T. Allen, Engineer Corps, United States Army. 



