Adventures in Alaska

by Samuel Hall Young

One was a missionary to the Eskimos, on a small salary. At first his gold gave him much perplexity and trouble while he was being shaped to fit new conditions; but he rose finely to the occasion, gave a large part of his wealth to his church board for building missions and schools among the natives, and pursued his Christian way, honored and beloved, to broader paths of greater usefulness.

A second Swede was also a missionary, teaching the little Eskimos on a salary of six hundred dollars a year. His gold completely turned his head. He fell an easy prey to designing men and women. He became dissipated and broken in body and character. He tried to keep for his own use the gold taken from the claim he had staked in the name of his Mission. His Board sued him for their rights. Long litigation, in which he figured as dishonest, selfish and grasping, followed, his church getting only a small part of its dues. The last I heard of him he was a mere wreck of a man, disgraced, despised and shunned by his former friends. The anvil battering, the trial by fire, the hard blows, proved him base metal.

The third man was a Swedish sailor and longshoreman, ignorant and low, living a hand-to-mouth, sordid life, with no prospects of honor or wealth. His gold at first plunged him into a wild orgy of gambling and dissipation. He took the typhoid fever and was taken "outside." Everybody prophesied that he would simply "go the pace" to complete destruction.

But there was true steel in his composition. His moral fiber stiffened. He began to think and study. He broke away from his drunken associates. He sought the companionship of the cultured. A good woman married and educated him. He has become one of Alaska's wealthiest and most influential citizens, and his charities abound. The stern anvil shaped him to world-usefulness. It is all in the man!

Here at Nome I first made the acquaintance of that strange race in which I afterwards became so much interested—the Eskimo. At first they were a source of considerable annoyance. I always felt like laughing aloud when the queer, fat, dish-faced, pudgy folk came in sight. As we had to depend upon driftwood for our fuel, they would come several times a day, bringing huge basketfuls of the soggy sticks for sale at fifty cents a basket.

They soon learned that I was a missionary, and then they would come rolling along, forty or fifty of them at a time, and "bunch up" in front of my tent. If I were cooking dinner they were sure to gather in full force, and would lift up the flap of my tent, grinning at me and eyeing every mouthful I ate. I did not know enough of their language even to tell them to go away. Their rank native odors were overpowering in the hot tent. You could detect the presence of one of those fellows half a mile away if the wind were blowing from him to you. The combined smells of a company of natives, not one of whom had ever taken a bath in his or her life, and who lived upon ancient fish and "ripe" seal blubber—well, I'll stop right here!

One evening at a social in our warehouse-church we played the "limerick" game, which was then a popular craze. We would take a word and each one would write a verse on it. One of the words was Esquimaux. A number of the "limericks" were published in the Nome Nugget. With a man's usual egotism I can only remember my own, which I saw at intervals for several years in Eastern periodicals:

"Oh, look at this queer Esquimaux!
His nose is too pudgy to blaux.
His odors are awful;
To tell them unlawful.
The thought of them fills me with waux."

One day I was getting dinner in my tent and the usual company of natives watching the performance, when there came along a couple of men who had just landed and who, evidently, had never seen an Eskimo before. I overheard their conversation.

"Say, Jim," said one, "just look there. Did you ever see the like?" (A pause.) "Say, do you think them things has souls?"