Stake a claim there for me, too.
We'll start right now with spade and shovel,
And dig out gold to beat the devil.
This immortal song proves that we are a lively crowd. With the banjo and autoharp as accompaniment, we demonstrate a "good time" while we feel like it.
Meanwhile, until further news, we shall continue to get ready between the songs. Brown and I and the two Harrys are making a sled.
Last Sunday we had a good-sized congregation for morning "services." Twenty-five white men were present, but only a few natives. We were wondering why the Eskimos were not coming, and Harry Reynolds went up to the village to see. He found them all playing poker. Harry finally persuaded two men to come, after they had won all the stakes. The rest kept on playing. Natives who cannot speak a word of English—and very few can—know how to play cards, and can read the numbers in their own language and count up faster than we. They play for lead, cartridges, tobacco, etc., but the stakes are never very large, owing to their limited means. Yesterday our cabin was full of Eskimos all day.
A couple of young men got hold of our crokonole board, starting in at ten in the morning and playing without a stop until ten at night. And they can play well, too; better than we can. We found that they were playing for tobacco, am! that in the house of a half-way missionary outfit who have just completed a chapel for the regeneration of the natives! A previously-prepared quid of tobacco, which may have done service as the stake for other games in the past, was enjoyed by the winner of each game, until he in turn was defeated, when the quid reverted to the original winner, and so on back and forth all day.
Native Visitors.
The Indians seldom spit out the tobacco juice, but swallow it. They seem to have cast-iron stomachs. When they smoke, they draw the smoke into their lungs and retain it several seconds before exhaling. I have many times watched an Indian inhale a great puff of smoke, but I have never seen it return again. Whether they swallow it, as they seem to do, or what becomes of it, I do not know. The women and even little children all smoke. I saw a funny sight last summer down near the Mission, and only regret that the camera was not along. A little "kid" about four years old, without a stitch of clothing on, except an officer's old cap, was strutting around the camp with an immense corn-cob pipe in his mouth, and he knew how to smoke, too. The question is, where did he get the pipe?