FUK-SEAL FISHERIES OF ALASKA. G5 



their condition when you first went there *? — A. Their condition is bet- 

 ter now than when I first went there. They are living in better cabins. 

 The company has erected some twenty-five or thirty. 



Q. iJas the company dojie that at an expense ? — A. Yes, sir; and the 

 houses are good, serviceable houses, and the most desirable men are 

 living in them. 



Q. That has nothing to do with the seal ? — A. Not at all. 



Q. When a supply is taken from Oonalaska up to the seal islands the 

 pay they receive has nothing to do with the pay going to tlie natives of 

 the islands lor taking the skins t — A. Not at all; they are paid outside 

 of tliat. 



Q. So they deprive the natives on the island of none of that money ? — 

 A. They do not receive anything from the proceeds ol' the catch at all. 

 There is a little misunderstanding about these men, I think. 



The real reason was not— in fact the island natives could do the work. 

 It wns for this reason : The Aleut on the islands is paid 40 cents for 

 driving, skinning, and salting a skin. All other work is paid $1 a day, 

 or 10 cents an hour or a fraction of an hour, and if he works overtime at 

 times they are paid double for overtime. The native wlio can make from 

 $25 to $35 a day during the season looks upon $1 a day for working in 

 the salt-house, bundling and handling the skins after they are salted, as 

 very small pay, and he is not as rapid in his work as he would be if he 

 worki'd for more money, i)referring not to do that work. To facilitate 

 the bundling of skins and getting them ready for shipment, the super- 

 intendent on St. Paul — now this plan has been pursued on St. Taul, 

 but never on St. George — instead of paying them $1 a day for the rea- 

 son a man says, '' I can bundle two hundred bundles a day, and there is 

 a man who only bundles one hundred, and he gets the same as I do, 

 so 1 will only bundle a hundred skins for a day's work," and so to ex- 

 pedite the work of bundling the superintendent gave them a cent a 

 bundle; so that a man who could bundle two hundred skins a day got 

 paid for two liuudred bundles, and a man who could bundle only one 

 hundred skins a day got only paid for one hundred. Some men could 

 bundle skins enough to make $2 to $2.50 a day. 



Q. When these people get too old to work and have not anything to 

 live on, what becomes of them 'I — A. If he has a family and they do not 

 support or provide for him the company supports him, and all widows 

 and indigent people. But to go back to this (juestion of the men irom 

 Oonalaska. The next years they informed the superintendent that 

 they wanted a cent and a half a skin. Of course there were no other 

 men to do the work, and a cent and a half had to go. They were in- 

 formed that if they pursued this policy we would have to bring men 

 there to do that work. They had a cent and a half that year. The uext 

 year, the sea otter hunting having been very poor for sonje time, there 

 were a great many poor people in Oonalaska that the company had to 

 support, because they could not see them starve ; so these men were 

 very glad to go to tiie seal islands and do any work unloading and 

 loading vessels and do this bundling. Any island man that wished to 

 work could work for $1 a day, or if he ])referred it he could loaf, as 

 we had men to do that work. In 18s2 and in 1883 there was an ei)i- 

 demic on St. Paul, and during that year out of a population of some- 

 thing over 300 souls there were 56 or 50 deaths. 



Q. What was tlie cause of that epidemic?— A. It was a kind of 



pneumonia the doctor called it. My o])inion is that the cause of it was 



on account of their method of living during the winter. The men, after 



the seal season is over and they have their money coming to them, like 



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