1.Luka Mandriggan, an Aleute,49years of age11.Deemietri Veatkin,a Creole,48years of age
9.Philip Vollkov, a Creole,50 ” ”6.Aggie Kooshing, ” boy,18 ” ”
8.Matroona Vollkov, ”girl,15” ”3.Ivan, an Aleute boy,7” ”
10.Anoorka Meeseekin, ””11” ”5.Domian, ” ”12” ”
7.Fevronia Eevanov, ””9” ”2.Paraskeeva, ” girl,13” ”
4. Natalia, an Aleute girl, 12 years of age

Some of the Creole girls and women whom we observe in these settlements are exceedingly handsome, modest, and the only fault we can find with them is their absolute speechlessness—they cannot be induced to chat with us, though they seem to enjoy our presence. Most of them live in scrupulously clean houses, the floors scrubbed and sanded like a well holystoned ship’s deck, walls papered and decorated with pictures of saints and other pious subjects; old Russian furniture, chairs, settees, bureaus, and clocks of our own make; the bright, omnipresent “samovar” in which the boiling water for tea is never allowed to get cool; little curtains over the small windows, and big curtains puckered around the beds—everything is usually clean, tidy, and quiet within the Creole’s home.

The wants of the Creole are very few outside of what the country in which he lives affords him. He manages to so deal in sea-otter, and fox and bear skins as to get from the trader’s store what tea, sugar, flour, and cloth are required for his family. Beyond this exertion and that displayed in his gardening he rests wholly at peace with himself and all the rest of the world.

The Kaniags or Kadiakers, who are the natives of this island and contiguous islands, are in much greater numbers, and are to be found everywhere here in small hamlets that nestle in the deep fiörds and bays of Kadiak. They resemble the Aleutes so closely in outward form and characteristics that the full description given in a following chapter of those people will cover the whole ground of this inquiry, only let it be remembered that the Kaniag is a trifle taller than his Aleutian cousin, has a fairer skin, a somewhat broader face, and is considerably more muscular. Like the Aleutes, he has small feet and hands, small black eyes set in deep sockets, little or no beard, and an abundance of coarse, straight, black hair, which he cuts off roughly just above his shoulders; he has a trifle more beard and a better mustache, but this is a very fine distinction. He is lighter-hearted, freer, and more jovial, but has less patience during seasons of privation or epidemic disease.

When the Kaniags gather together they are exceedingly talkative, abounding in jokes, in the recitation of funny legends, and stories of every imaginable nature associated with their simple lives. As they paddle their bidarkas and bidarrahs in making long journeys, they enliven the labor by continuous songs, snatches from church tunes, or lively airs taught them by the Russians and later by our soldiers and traders. They are in every respect much more susceptible of emotional impulses than are the Aleutes. This greater sociability is well exhibited by the invariable erection, in every settlement, of a “kashima,” or public dance and work-house, or, in fact, a town-hall as we have it:—the Aleutes have nothing of the sort. They pass a good deal of their time on the land, traversing mountain trails in quest of bears, wolves, foxes, the land-otter, and the marmot, or “yeavrashkie,” which is made into that famous skin coat called the “parkie” all over this Alaskan country outside of the Sitkan archipelago.

As these natives exist to-day there are only eighteen hundred, a few more or less, of them, which is an immense shrinkage from the Russian enumeration of six thousand five hundred made by actual count of Baranov. They seem to be declining even now, year by year, even as the Koloshians of the Sitkan region do, so that the native population of the Kadiak district, if decreased[53] in the next two decades as it has in the last, will hardly have a living representative. No one can well avoid a train of fast-crowding thought when he stops in contemplation of sickness and death as it appears and is treated in savage settlements—the only medical counsel that they ever have is their own individual instinct. Ignorant as they are of the simplest anatomical details of their structure, it is not surprising that they should surrender to disorders and disease with that remarkable passive apathy which is so distinctive of the sick everywhere in such communities.

Indians, and these Aleutes and Kaniags, as they grow up, have no parental supervision whatever as to details of diet, of warm or cool clothing, or of any of those many attentions which our children receive from their parents. For the first ten or twelve years of their lives they literally run wild, and are semi-naked or wholly so, both male and female;[54] this is their condition, then, at all seasons of the year. Exposed as they are, in their manner of living, to draughts, to insufficient covering, and damp, cold nooks for slumber, in which the air reeks with odors too vile for the power of language to express, naturally they lay a foundation, at the very outset of their existence, for pulmonic troubles in all the varied degrees of that dread disease. Consumption is, therefore, the simple and broad term for that single ailment which alone destroys the greatest number of these people, every season, in Alaska; all the natives, the Eskimo, the Aleut, the Kaniag, and the Indians suffer from it alike, and they all exhibit that same stolid indifference to its stealthy but fatal advancement—no extra care, no attempt to shelter, to protect or to ward off in the slightest manner this trouble, until the very moment of supreme dissolution calls in a shaman and the sorrowing relatives.

After lung diseases, the next destroying factor of greatest power is embodied in the virulence of scrofulous affections, which take the form of malignant ulcers that eat into the vitals and slough away the walls of the large arteries. This most loathsome blood-poisoning renders a few settlements entirely leprous, especially so to our startled eyes when we visit them. And in this regard it is hard to find a village in the whole Alaskan boundary where at least one or more of the families therein has not got upon some one of its members the singularly prominent scars that attest this disease. Often a comely young girl or man will, in turning suddenly, reveal under the jaws or on the neck and throat, a disgusting, livid eruption which a scrofulous ancestry has cursed the youth with. Since most of this complaint is on the surface, as it were, we naturally would look for some care on the part of the afflicted native, even if for no other end than self-contentment and the ready alleviation of this cutaneous misery; but we will look in vain, the patient never gives it. On the contrary, it is utterly neglected, and by reason of the filthy habit of these people, it is immensely aggravated and made infinitely more violent. In regard to consumption this apathy on the part of the victim is not, in contrast, so very remarkable, since it is more concealed and not near so disagreeable both to the native and his associates.

Though consumption and scrofula are the two great indigenous sources of disease and death among the natives, yet there is still a list—quite a long one—of other ills, such as paralysis, inflammatory rheumatism and peritonitis, fits, and an abrupt ending of life in the middle-aged, called most graphically “general debility.” As might be inferred from the method and exigencies of aboriginal life in Alaska, these natives do not survive to any great age; rarely, indeed, will an authenticated case of the full limit of sixty years be recorded or observed—an overwhelming majority of them are old at thirty-five and forty. When a man or a woman in a settlement rounds the fiftieth year of his or her life, a noted example of the tribe is afforded; but should this age be attained, and the man then be free from rheumatic troubles or the death-grasp of scrofulous or pulmonic disease, he is sure to be afflicted with injured and defective vision, if not totally blind; the glint of snow and the intensely smoky interiors of every style of native dwelling so affect the eyes of these people that those organs of sight, in the middle-aged, are seldom without signs of decay—showing some one of the various stages of granular ophthalmia, as a rule.

Snow-blindness can be remedied and its pain abated by the use of peculiar goggles, which the savages know well how to make and use, but the greater evil of smoke-poison to the optic nerve is not obviated at all by any action on their part, though it would be easy so to do. They actually seem determined to live on so as to live as wretchedly in the future as they have in the past.