Some measure of protection, one thinks, must also be afforded against a predatory class of Indian traders, the back rooms of whose stores are often barrooms, gambling-dens, and houses of assignation, and headquarters and harbourage for the white degenerates--even if the government go the length of setting up co-operative Indian stores in the interior, as has been done in some places on the coast. This last is a matter in which the missions are helpless, for there is no wise combination of religion and trade. So this book goes forth with a plea in the front of it, which will find incidental support and expression throughout it, for the natives of interior Alaska, that they be not wantonly destroyed off the face of the earth. HUDSON STUCK. NEW YORK, _March, 1914._ PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION IT is gratifying to know that a second edition of this book has been called for and it is interesting to write another preface; it even proved interesting to do what was set about most reluctantly--the reading of the book over again after entire avoidance of it for two years. It was necessary to do it, though one shrank from it, and it is interesting to know that after this comparatively long and complete detachment I find little to add and less to correct. Upon a complete rereading I am content to let the book stand, with two or three footnotes thrown in, and the correction of the one printer's error it contained from cover to cover--an error that a score of kind correspondents pointed out, for it was conspicuous in the title of a picture. The tendency to which attention is drawn in the original preface, the pendulum swing from the old notion that Alaska is a land of polar bears and icebergs to the new notion that it is a "world's treasure-house of mineral wealth and unbounded agricultural possibilities" is yet more marked than it was two years ago. The beginning of the building of the government railway has given new impetus to the "boosting" writers for magazines and newspapers. Quite recently it was stated in one such publication that we need not worry about the destruction of our forests, for had we not the inexhaustible timber resources of the interior of Alaska to draw upon? And in the North itself--though no one there would write about the timber resources of the interior--in certain shrill journals the man who does not confidently expect to see the Yukon Flats waving with golden grain and "the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" of the Koyukuk and the Chandalar is regarded as a traitor to his country and his God. But it must be remembered that there are a number of journalists in Alaska who know nothing of the country outside their respective towns, and that "boosting" grows shriller, as Eugene Field found red paint grow redder, "the further out West one goes." When they get a newspaper at Cape Prince of Wales what a clarion it will be!