Truth, however, is not more wont than of old to be found in extremes, and the author of this book believes that those who desire a sober view of the country it deals with will find it herein. He claims no more than that he has had adequate opportunity of forming his opinions and that he has a right to their expression. It is now twelve years since he began almost constant travelling, winter and summer, in the interior of Alaska. He has described nothing that he has not seen; ventured no judgment that he has not well digested, and has nothing to retract or even modify; but he would repeat and emphasise a caution of the original preface. Alaska is not one country but many countries, and so widely do they differ from one another in almost every respect that no general statements about Alaska can be true. The present author's knowledge of the territory is confined in the main to the interior--to the valley of the Yukon and its tributary rivers, which make up one of the world's great waterways--and nothing of his writing applies, with his authority, to other parts. The matter of the preservation of the native peoples still presses, and is nearer to the author's heart than any other matter whatever. The United States Congress, which voted thirty-five millions of dollars for the government railroad, strikes out year by year the modest additional score or two of thousands that year by year the Bureau of Education asks for the establishment of hospital work amongst the Indians of the interior, and the preventable mortality continues to be very great. In the last two years, largely as the result of the untiring efforts of Bishop Rowe on behalf of the natives, two modern, well-equipped hospitals have been built, with money that he and his clergy have gathered, on the Yukon River, one at Fort Yukon and one at Tanana; and these are the only places of any kind, on nearly a thousand miles of the river, where sick or injured Indians may be received and cared for.