Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 20

It cannot be stated, upon a survey of the last five or six years, that this profession has been carried out. The administration of the Bureau of Education has shared too much the common fault of other departments of the government in a detached and lofty, not to say supercilious, att.i.tude. Things are not necessarily right because a government bureau orders them, nor are government officials invested with superior wisdom merely by reason of their connection with Was.h.i.+ngton. It is just as important for a government school as for a mission school to be in harmony with its environment, to adapt itself to the needs of the people it designs to serve; and that harmony and adaptation may only be secured by a single-minded study of the situation and of the habits and character, the occupations and resources of the people.

To keep a school in session when the population of a village is gone on its necessary occasions of hunting or trapping, and to have the annual recess when all the population is returned again, is folly, whoever orders it, in accord with what time-honoured routine soever, and this has not infrequently been done. Moreover, it is folly to fail to recognise that the apprentices.h.i.+p of an Indian boy to the arts by which he must make a living, the arts of hunting and trapping, is more important than schooling, however important the latter may be, and that any talk--and there has been loud talk--of a compulsory education law which shall compel such boys to be in school at times when they should be off in the wilds with their parents, is worse than mere folly, and would, if carried out, be a fatal blunder. If such boys grow up incompetent to make a living out of the surrounding wilderness, whence shall their living come?

The next step would be the issuing of rations, and that would mean the ultimate degradation and extinction of the natives. When the question is stated in its baldest terms, is the writer perverse and barbarous and uncivilised if he avow his belief that a race of hardy, peaceful, independent, self-supporting illiterates is of more value and worthy of more respect than a race of literate paupers? Be it remembered also that many of these "illiterates" can read the Bible in their own tongue and can make written communication with one another in the same--very scornful as the officials of the bureau have been about such attainment.

One grows a little impatient sometimes when a high official at Was.h.i.+ngton writes in response to a request for permission to use a school building _after_ school hours, for a cla.s.s of instruction in the native Bible, that the law requires that all instruction in the school be in the English language, and that it is against the policy of Congress to use public money for religious instruction! When the thermometer drops to 50 below zero and stays there for a couple of weeks, it is an expensive matter to heat a church for a Bible cla.s.s three times a week--and the schoolhouse is already cosy and warm.

But the question does not reduce itself to the bald terms referred to above; by proper advantage of times and seasons the Indian boy may have all the English education that will be of any service to him, and may yet serve his apprentices.h.i.+p in the indispensable wilderness arts. And, given a kindly and competent teacher, there is no need of any sort of compulsion to bring Indian boys and girls to school when they are within reach of it.

The Indian school problem is not an easy one in the sense that it can be solved by issuing rules and regulations at Was.h.i.+ngton, but it can be solved by sympathetic study and by the careful selection of intelligent, cultured teachers.

After all, this last is the most important requisite. Too often it is a.s.sumed that any one can teach ignorant youth: and women with no culture at all, or with none beyond the bald "pedagogy" of a low-grade schoolroom, have been sent to Alaska. There have, indeed, been notable exceptions; there have been some very valuable and capable teachers, and with such there has never been friction at the missions, but glad co-operation.

The situation shows signs of improvement; there are signs of withdrawal from its detached and supercilious att.i.tude on the part of the bureau, signs which are very welcome to those connected with the missions. For the best interest of the native demands that the two agencies at work for his good work heartily and sympathetically together. The missions can do without the government--did do without it for many years, though glad of the government's aid in carrying the burden of the schools--but the government cannot do without the missions; and if the missions were forced to the re-establishment of their own schools, there would be empty benches in the schools of the government.

[Sidenote: THE THREAT OF EXTINCTION]

That the Indian race of interior Alaska is threatened with extinction, there is unhappily little room to doubt; and that the threat may be averted is the hope and labour of the missionaries amongst them. At most places where vital statistics are kept the death-rate exceeds the birth-rate, though it is sometimes very difficult to secure accurate statistics and to be sure that they always cover the same ground. The natives wander; within certain territorial limits they wander widely.

Whenever a child is born it is certain that if it lives long enough it will be brought to a mission to be baptized, but a death often occurs at some isolated camp that is not reported till long after, and may escape registration altogether.

Certain diseases that have played havoc in the past are not much feared now. For the last seven years supplies of the diphtheritic ant.i.toxin have been kept at all the missions of the Episcopal Church, and in the summer of 1911, when there was an outbreak of smallpox at Porcupine River, almost every Indian of interior Alaska was vaccinated, mainly by the mission staffs. Diphtheria has been a dreadful scourge. The valley of the upper Kuskokwim was almost depopulated by it in 1906. A disease resembling measles took half the population of the lower Yukon villages in 1900. In the last few years there have been no serious epidemics; but epidemic disease does not const.i.tute the chief danger that threatens the native.

[Sidenote: DWELLING AND CLOTHING]

That chief danger looms from two things: tuberculosis and whisky.

Whether tuberculosis is a disease indigenous to these parts, or whether it was introduced with the white man, has been disputed and would be difficult of determination. Probably it was always present amongst the natives; the old ones declare that it was; but the changed conditions of their lives have certainly much aggravated it. They lived much more in the open when they had no tree-felling tool but a stone-axe and did not build cabins. The winter residence in those days was, it is true, a dark, half-underground hut covered with earth and poles, but the time of residence therein was much shorter; the skin tent sheltered them most of the year. Indeed, some tribes, such as the Chandalar, lived in their skin tents the year round. Now an ill-ventilated and very commonly overcrowded cabin shelters them most of the year. It is true that the cabins are constantly improving and the standard of living within them is constantly rising. The process is slow, despite all urgings and warnings, and overcrowding and lack of ventilation still prevail.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE NATIVE COMMUNICANT.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: RAW MATERIAL.]

Perhaps as great a cause of the spread of tuberculosis is the change in clothing. The original native was clad in skins, which are the warmest clothing in the world. Moose hide or caribou hide garments, tanned and smoked, are impervious to the wind, and a parkee of muskrat or squirrel, or, as was not uncommon in the old days, of marten, or one of caribou tanned with the hair on, with boots of this last material, give all the warmth that exposure to the coldest weather requires. Nowadays fur garments of any sort are not usual amongst the natives. There is a market, at an ever-growing price, for all the furs they can procure. A law has, indeed, gone recently into effect prohibiting the sale of beaver for a term of years, and already beaver coats and caps begin to appear again amongst the people. It would be an excellent, wise thing, worthy of a government that takes a fatherly interest in very childlike folks, to make this law permanent. If it were fit to prohibit the sale of beaver pelts for a term of years to protect the beaver, surely it would be proper to perpetuate the enactment to protect the Indian. It would mean warm clothing for man, woman, and child.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN ESQUIMAU YOUTH.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A HALF-BREED INDIAN.]

[Sidenote: THE INDIAN TRADER]

The Indian usually sells all his furs and then turns round and buys manufactured clothing from the trader at a fancy price. That clothing is almost always cotton and shoddy. Genuine woollens are not to be found in the Indian trader's stock at all, and in whatever guise it may masquerade, and by whatever alias it may pa.s.s, the native wear is cotton. Yet there is no country in the world where it is more imperative, for the preservation of health, that wool be worn.

However much fur the Indian may catch and sell, he is always poor. He is paid in trade, not in cash; and when the merchant has bought the Indian's catch of fur he straightway spreads out before him an alluring display of goods specially manufactured for native trade. Here are brilliant cotton velvets and sateens and tinselled muslins and gay ribbons that take the eye of his women folk; here are trays of Brummagem knickknacks, bra.s.s watches, and rings set with coloured gla.s.s, gorgeous celluloid hair combs, mirrors with elaborate, gilded frames, and bra.s.s lamps with "hand-painted" shades and dangling l.u.s.tres; here are German accordions and mouth-organs and all sorts of pocket-knives and alarm-clocks--the greatest collection of glittering and noisy trash that can be imagined, bought at so much a dozen and retailed, usually, at about the same price for one. And when the Indian has done his trading the trader has most of his money back again.

The news that an Indian has caught a black fox, the most exciting item of news that ever flies around a native village, does not give any great pleasure to one who is acquainted with native conditions, because he knows that it will bring little real benefit to the Indian. There will be keen compet.i.tion, within limits, of course, amongst the traders for it; and the fortunate trapper may get three or four hundred dollars in trade for a skin that will fetch eight hundred or a thousand in cash on the London market; but if his wife get the solid advantage of a new cooking-stove or a sewing-machine from it she is doing well.

Food the Indian never buys much beyond his present need, unless it is to squander it in feast after feast, to which every one is invited and at which there is the greatest lavishness. If a son is born, or a black fox is caught, or a member of the family recovers from a severe illness, custom permits, if it do not actually demand, that a "potlatch" be given, and most Indians are eager, whenever they are able, to be the heroes of the prandial hour.

So he, his women, and his children go clad mainly in cotton, and there is abundant evidence that the tendency to pulmonary trouble, always latent amongst them, is developed by the severe colds which they catch through the inadequate covering of their bodies, and is then cherished into virulent activity by the close atmosphere of overcrowded, overheated cabins.

The missions help the Indians, especially the women and children, in this matter of clothing as much as possible. Every year large bales of good though left-off under and over wear are secured through church organisations outside, and are traded to the natives at nominal prices, usually for fish or game or a little labour in sawing wood. And this naturally does not ingratiate missions with the trading cla.s.s. One's anger is aroused sometimes at seeing the cotton-flannel underclothes and "cotton-filled" blankets and the "all-wool" cotton coats and trousers which they pay high prices for at the stores. The Canadian Indians, who are their neighbours, buy genuine Hudson Bay blankets and other real woollen goods, but the Alaskan Indian can buy nothing but cotton.

But far and away beyond any other cause of the native decline stands the curse of the country, whisky. Recognising by its long Indian experience the consequences of forming liquor-drinking habits amongst the natives, the government has forbidden under penalty the giving or selling of any intoxicants to them. A few years ago a new law pa.s.sed making such giving or selling a felony. These laws are largely a dead letter.

[Sidenote: UNPAID COMMISSIONERS]

The country is a very large one, very spa.r.s.ely populated; the distances are enormous, the means of transportation entirely primitive, and the police and legal machinery insufficient to the end of suppressing this illicit traffic, especially in view of the fact that a considerable part of the whole population does not look with favour upon any vigorous attempt to suppress it. Great areas of the country are without telegraphic communication, and in parts mail is received only once a month. One stretch of two hundred and fifty miles of the Yukon receives no mail at all during the winter months--more than half the year. In that instance, as in many others, the country has gone distinctly backward in the past few years. The magistrates--"commissioners" they are called, receive no salary, but eke out a precarious and often wretched existence on fees, so that it is frequently impossible to get men of character and capacity to accept such offices.

One would have supposed that amongst all the legislating that has been done for and about Alaska in the last year or two, one crying evil that the attention of successive administrations has been called to for twenty years past would have been remedied. That evil is the unpaid magistrate and the vicious fee system by which he must make a living. It is a system that has been abolished in nearly all civilised countries; a system that lends itself to all sorts of petty abuse; a system that no one pretends to defend. No greater single step in advance could be made in the government of Alaska, no measure could be enacted that would tend to bring about in greater degree respect for the law than the abolition of the unpaid magistracy and the setting up of a body of stipendiaries of character and ability.

The anomalies of the present situation are in some cases amusing. At one place on the Yukon it is only possible for a man to make a living as United States commissioner if he can combine the office of postmaster with it. A man who was removed as commissioner still retained the post-office, and no one could be found to accept the vacant judges.h.i.+p.

In another precinct the commissioner was moving all those whom he thought had influence to get him appointed deputy marshal instead of commissioner, because the deputy marshal gets a salary of two thousand dollars a year and allowances, which was more than the commissioners.h.i.+p yielded. One is reminded of some comic-opera topsyturvyism when the judge tries in vain to get off the bench and be appointed constable. It sounds like the _Bab Ballads_. The district court is compelled to wink at irregularities of life and conduct in its commissioners because it cannot get men of a higher stamp to accept its appointments.

[Sidenote: LIQUOR AND POLITICS]

The only policemen are deputy United States marshals, primarily process-servers and not at all fitted in the majority of cases for any sort of detective work. Their appointment is often dictated and their action often hampered by political considerations. The liquor interest is very strong and knows how to bring pressure to bear against a marshal who is offensively active. They are responsible only to the United States marshal of their district, and he is responsible to the attorney-general, the head of the department of justice. But Was.h.i.+ngton is a long way off, and the attorney-general is a very busy man, not without his own interest, moreover, in politics. An attempt to get some notice taken of a particular case in which it was the general opinion that an energetic and vigilant deputy had been removed, and an elderly lethargic man subst.i.tuted, because of too great activity in the prosecution of liquor cases, resulted in the conviction that what should have been a matter of administrative righteousness only was a political matter as well.

The threatened extinction of the Alaskan native was referred to as wanton, and the term was used in the sense that there are no necessary natural causes fighting against his survival.

Here is no economic pressure of white settlers determined to occupy the land, such as drove the Indians of the plains farther and farther west until there was no more west to be driven to. If such delusion possess any mind as a result of foolish newspaper and magazine writings, let it be dismissed at once. No man who has lived in the country and travelled in the country will countenance such notion. The white men in Alaska are miners and prospectors, trappers and traders, wood-choppers and steamboat men. Around a mining camp will be found a few truck-farmers; alongside road-houses and wood camps will often be found flouris.h.i.+ng vegetable gardens, but outside of such agriculture there are, speaking broadly, no farmers at all in the interior of Alaska. Probably a majority of all the homesteads that have been taken up have been located that the trees on them might be cut down and hauled to town to be sold for fire-wood. A few miles away from the towns there are no homesteads, except perhaps on a well-travelled trail where a man has homesteaded a road-house.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN AGED COUPLE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FOOTBALL AT THE ALLAKAKET, EXPOSURE 1-1000 SECOND, APRIL, AFTER A NEW LIGHT SNOWFALL.]

All the settlements in the country are on the rivers, save the purely mining settlements that die and are abandoned as the placers play out.

Yet one will travel two hundred and fifty miles up the Porcupine--till Canada is reached--and pa.s.s not more than three white men's cabins, all of them trappers; one will travel three hundred and fifty miles up the Koyukuk before the first white man's cabin is reached, and as many miles up the Innoko and the Iditarod and find no white men save wood-choppers.

There are a few more white men on the Tanana than on any other tributary of the Yukon, because Fairbanks is on that river and there is more steamboat traffic, but they are mainly wood-choppers, while on the lesser tributaries of the Yukon, it is safe to say, there are no settled white men at all. As soon as one leaves the rivers and starts across country one is in the uninhabited wilderness.

The writer is no prophet; he cannot tell what may happen agriculturally in Alaska or the rest of the arctic regions when the world outside is filled up and all unfrozen lands are under cultivation. Still less is he one who would belittle a country he has learned to love or detract in any way from its due claims to the attention of mankind. There is in the territory a false newspaper sentiment that every one who lives in the land should be continually singing extravagant praises of it and continually making extravagant claims for it. A man may love Alaska because he believes it to have "vast agricultural possibilities,"

because, in his visions, he sees its barren wilds transformed into "waving fields of golden grain." But a man may also love it who regards all such visions as delusions.

[Sidenote: FOOD AND FURS]

The game and the fish of Alaska, the natural subsistence of the Indian, are virtually undiminished. Vast herds of caribou still wander on the hills, and far more are killed every year by wolves than by men. Great numbers of moose still roam the lowlands. The rivers still teem with salmon and grayling and the lakes with whitefish, ling, and lush. Unless the outrage of canneries should be permitted at the mouths of the Yukon--and that would threaten the chief subsistence of all the Indians of the interior--there seems no danger of permanent failure of the salmon run, though, of course, it varies greatly from year to year.

Furs, though they diminish in number, continually rise in price. There are localities, it is true, where the game has been largely killed off and the furs trapped out; the Koyukuk country is one of them, though perhaps that region never was a very good game country. In this region, when a few years ago there was a partial failure of the salmon, there was distress amongst the Indians. But the country on the whole is almost as good an Indian country as ever it was, and there are few signs that it tends otherwise, though things happen so quickly and changes come with so little warning in Alaska that one does not like to be too confident.

The Indian is the only settled inhabitant of interior Alaska to-day; for the prospectors and miners, who const.i.tute the bulk of the white population, are not often very long in one place. Many of them might rightly be cla.s.sed as permanent, but very few as settled inhabitants. It is the commonest thing to meet men a thousand miles away from the place where one met them last. A new "strike" will draw men from every mining camp in Alaska. A big strike will s.h.i.+ft the centre of gravity of the whole white population in a few months. Indeed, a certain restless belief in the superior opportunities of some other spot is one of the characteristics of the prospector. The tide of white men that has flowed into an Indian neighbourhood gradually ebbs away and leaves the Indian behind with new habits, with new desires, with new diseases, with new vices, and with a varied a.s.sortment of illegitimate half-breed children to support. The Indian remains, usually in diminished numbers, with impaired character, with lowered physique, with the tag-ends of the white man's blackguardism as his chief acquirement in English--but he remains.

It is unquestionable that the best natives in the country are those that have had the least intimacy with the white man, and it follows that the most hopeful and promising mission stations are those far up the tributary streams, away from mining camps and off the routes of travel, difficult of access, winter or summer, never seen by tourists at all; seen only of those who seek them with cost and trouble. At such stations the improvement of the Indian is manifest and the population increases.

By reason of their remoteness they are very expensive to equip and maintain, but they are well worth while. One such has been described on the Koyukuk; another, at this writing, is establis.h.i.+ng with equal promise at the Tanana Crossing, one of the most difficult points to reach in all interior Alaska.

This chapter must not close without a few words about the native children. Dirty, of course, they almost always are; children in a state of nature will always be dirty, and even those farthest removed from that state show a marked tendency to revert to it; but when one has become sufficiently used to their dirt to be able to ignore it, they are very attractive. Intolerance of dirt is largely an acquired habit anyway. In view of their indulgent rearing, for Indian parents are perhaps the most indulgent in the world, they are singularly docile; they have an affectionate disposition and are quick and eager to learn.

Many of them are very pretty, with a soft beauty of complexion and a delicate moulding of feature that are lost as they grow older. It takes some time to overcome their shyness and win their confidence, but when friendly relations have been established one grows very fond of them.

Foregathering with them again is distinctly something to look forward to upon the return to a mission, and to see them come running, to have them press around, thrusting their little hands into one's own or hanging to one's coat, is a delight that compensates for much disappointment with the grown ups. In the midst of such a crowd of healthy, vivacious youngsters, clear-eyed, clean-limbed, and eager, one positively refuses to be hopeless about the race.

CHAPTER XII