No steamers can land at the island. Both passengers and freight have to be lightered ashore. The inner bay was filled with ice. We anchored five miles out. I went ashore with a friend in his gasoline launch which had been sent out for him. We left the _St. Croix_ at two-thirty, and we had to get out several times and pull the boat along the ice until we could launch her again in open water. At seven o'clock we reached the beach. I stepped ashore and took a look at what was to be my abiding-place for the next five years. Home was never like this! I was informed that the largest building in sight was the Steamboat Hotel. I took my way thither and was the sole occupant of this now-historic hostlery for more than a week. CHAPTER II THE LAND OF TOMORROW The writer lays no claim to being an historian, but a word in regard to Alaska's early history and how the country came to be a part of our national possessions may not be amiss. When the Russians first came to the island of Unalaska they learned from the natives there of a vast country lying to eastward, the name of which was _Alayeksa_. Their own island, one of the Aleutian group, they called _Nagun-Alayeksa_, which means "the land next to Alayeksa." As is usually the case, especially in primitive languages, the word was gradually modified and in time it assumed three different forms. The Russians called the country itself _Alashka_. The peninsula became _Aliaska_, the island _Unalaska_. In English the word changed once more to the present name, _Alaska_, which means "The Great Country." It is a fitting name. All honor to those two good Americans, Seward and Sumner, who in the teeth of the most withering scorn, ridicule, and even opprobrium, saved for our country her most glorious and valuable possession,--the land discovered and partly explored by Vitus Bering in 1741. The old saying that "Westward the star of empire takes its way" is not applicable to Alaska. She enjoys a reputation wholly unique in the history of nations. She is the only country acquired by any European power in America because of expansion _eastward_. The territory which lies between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River was our inheritance from the mother country. The two Floridas, Texas, New Mexico, and California we acquired, either directly or indirectly, from Spain. From France we purchased Louisiana. But about the middle of the sixteenth century there began in Russia a movement eastward similar to that which followed (westward) the American Revolution in our own country.