The necessity of doing something in order to gain from the trader a few of the simplest articles, such as the natural resources of Attoo utterly failed to supply, has driven the natives to the care and conservation of blue foxes, which they introduced here many years past, and of which they secure, in traps, two or three hundred every season. The common red fox[80] of the whole Aleutian chain became extinct here in prior time; so, taking advantage of this fact, those blue foxes, so abundant and so valuable on the Seal Islands, were imported, and have ranged without deterioration, since ice-floes never bridge the straits that isolate this island from the nearest adjacent land, and upon which the common breed might cross over to ruin the quality of the fur of that transported _Vulpes lagopus_. They have also domesticated the wild goose, and rear flocks of them around their barraboras, being the only people in Alaska who have ever done so. It hardly seems credible, at first thought, but the village of Attoo makes San Francisco practically the half-way town as we go from Calais, Me., to it, our westernmost settlement! It is really but slightly short of being just midway, since Attoo stands almost three thousand miles west of the Golden Gate.[81] A strict geographical centre of the American Union is that point at sea forty miles off the Columbia River mouth, on the coast of Oregon. The nearest neighbors of the Attoo villagers are not of their own kith and kin—they are the Atkhan and Kamchadale Creoles and natives of the Russian Seal Islands, some two hundred miles west; but on our side they are separated by more than four hundred and thirty miles of stormy water from the first inhabited island, which is Atkha, where a much larger and a much more fortunately situated settlement exists on its east coast, at Nazan Bay. Here is a community of over two hundred and thirty souls, being all the people gathered together who previously lived in small scattered hamlets on the many large and small islands between Atkha and Attoo. They secure a comparatively good number of sea-otters, and are relatively well-to-do, being able to excite and sustain much activity in the trader’s store.