Contemplating this Indian church at Sitka, which has stood here for nearly three quarters of a century, and then glancing over it and into the savage settlement that nestles in its shadow, it is impossible to refrain from expressing a few thoughts which arise to my mind over the subject of the Indian in regard to his conversion to the faith and practices of our higher civilization. Nearly a whole century has been expended, here, of unflagging endeavor to better and to change the inherent nature of these Indians—its full result is before our eyes. Go down with me through the smoky, reeking, filthy rancheries and note carefully the attitude and occupation of these savages, and contrast your observation with that so vividly recorded of them by Cook, Vancouver, Portlock, and Dixon, and many other early travellers, and tell me in what manner have they advanced one step higher than when first seen by white men full a hundred years ago. You cannot escape the conclusion with this tangible evidence in your grasp, that in attempting to civilize the Alaskan Indian the result is much more like extermination, or lingering, deeper degradation to him than that which you so earnestly desire. The cause of this failure of the missionary and the priest is easy to analyze: it is due to the demoralizing precept and example of those depraved whites who always appear on the field of the Indian mission, sooner or later; if they could be shut out, and the savage wholly uninfluenced by their vicious lives, then the story of Alaskan Indian salvage might be very different. Still, the thought will always come unbidden and promptly—these savages were created for the wild surrounding of their existence; expressly for it, and they live happily in it: change this order of their life, and at once they disappear, as do the indigenous herbs and game before the cultivation of the soil and the domestication of animals. The Indians of Alaska, however, will never call upon the Government for food and reservations—there is a great abundance on the earth and in the waters thereof for them; living as they do all down at tide-water, at the sole source of their subsistence, they are within the quick reach of a gunboat; the overpowering significance of that they fully understand and fear. There is a huge wilderness here for them which the white man is not at all likely to occupy, even in part, for generations of his kind to come, yet unborn. Sitka is the seat of that Alaskan civil government[17] which Congress, after much deliberation, ordered in 1884; but the governor lives here in much humbler circumstances than did his Slavonian predecessors. As it would require a small fortune to rehabilitate the “castle,” the present chief-magistrate resides in one of those neatly built houses which the military authorities erected shortly after they took charge in 1867-68; it is not at all commanding, but has a pleasant vista from its windows over the parade ground, and the steamers’ landing.