The Washington Historical Quarterly, Volume V, 1914Various
History
The Washington Historical Quarterly, Volume V, 1914
Various
Northwest, Pacific -- History -- Periodicals
This is a most interesting narrative of winter journeys with dog team
into many remote corners of the Yukon basin in Alaska from 1905 to
1913, connected primarily with the administration of the extensive
mission work of the Episcopal church among the natives of interior
Alaska.
It is the work of a man of trained mind who describes clearly and
entertainingly his own experiences from day to day in traveling through
drifting snow, over frozen rivers and lakes and across mountain ranges,
in temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero, making camps in the
open plains, on mountain sides, in log huts, and with Eskimos in their
igloos, and cooking his meals for himself and his helpers, and for his
dogs as well, under all the trying conditions of a subarctic climate in
mid-winter. Thousands of Alaskans go through similar experiences every
winter, but few have the ability to tell their experiences so clearly
and faithfully as Archdeacon Stuck has done.
The special value of this work, aside from its popular interest as a
narrative of winter travels in the interior of a new territory about to
be opened to development by the building of government railroads, is
threefold:
First--He calls attention very forcefully to the bad effects on the
natives of contact with a class of whites whom he calls "the low
down whites." He compares the good results of the mission work in
settlements remote from army posts and saloons, and the discouraging
results of the same kind of work in settlements where the natives are
preyed upon by immoral whites with bad whiskey as their principal
agency. He does not overdraw the facts. His words burn, but they are
true.
Second--He shows, from familiarity with the native languages, that
the Indians of the upper Yukon valley, above the mouth of the Tanana,
and of the entire Tanana valley, are Athabascans, speaking the same
language and having the same traditions as the Indians of the Mackenzie
river, while the Indians of the lower Yukon as far as Nulato, and of
the upper Kuskokwim, are of a wholly different primal stock, speaking
a language in no way related to that of the Athabascans. The Eskimos
along the coast, in the interior, and in the lower Kuskokwim, he
describes as all of one race with the Eskimos of the Arctic ocean
clear to the east of Greenland. He speaks highly of the Eskimos,
describing them as superior in character and in possibilities of mental
development to any of the tribes of American Indians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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