Wrapped in furs and rugs, we sit on deck, enjoying the panorama of sea and sky. Sun-lit mountains, white with the snows of a thousand years and green-clad foot hills covered with pines as thick as the weeds on a common. Here and there in a wild, dreary nook the glasses revealed an Indian trapper’s cabin. Here he lives and hunts and fishes. When he has a sufficient number of skins he loads his canoe and skims across the water, it may be eighty or a hundred miles, to a town, where he trades his furs and fish for sugar, coffee, tea, and the many things which he has learned to eat from his white brother. He is very fond of tea and rum. He does not bury his dead, but wraps them in their blankets and lays them on the top of the ground, that they may the more easily find their way to the Happy Hunting Ground. Then he builds a tight board fence five or six feet high about the lonely grave and covers it tightly over the top to keep out the wild animals which roam the mountain sides. A tall staff rises from the grave and a white cloth floats from its pinnacle. We sighted one of these lonely graves on the top of a small island on our second day out, and were reminded of that other lonely grave in the vale of the Land of Moab.
FJORDS OF ALASKA.
Bella Bella is an Indian town located on Hunter island. The houses are all two-story and nicely painted. There is nothing in the aspect of the town to indicate that it is other than a white man’s town, though the Indians who reside here were once the most savage on the coast. On a smaller island near by is a cemetery. Small, one-roomed houses are the vaults in which the bodies are placed after being wrapped in blankets. Here we saw the first grave stones. They stand in front of these vaults and are higher. On them are carved the owner’s name and his exploits in hunting or war in picture language.
The Silash Indians are very gentle and kind. If you are hungry they will divide their last crust with you. If you are cold they will give you their last blanket. They wear civilized dress, fish and hunt and are quite prosperous. Many hops are grown in the State of Washington and in the fall these Indians go down in their canoes to pick hops. They are preferred to white pickers, because of their industry and honesty.
Saturday night we crossed “Fifty-four forty or fight” and Sunday morning found us in Alaska.
FISHING HAMLET OF KETCHIKAN.