The Thlinkits were once the most civilized and at the same time the most warlike of the native tribes. When the Russians came they found them living in well-built log houses and with an organized tribal system. They are to-day of greater intelligence than any of the other native tribes and are skilled craftsmen. The Athabaskans, on the other hand, with the exception of some of the most isolated Eskimo tribes, are the least civilized. Only those on the coast have any kind of tribal organization and this is not countenanced by the United States Government. Like the clansmen of Scotland, they seem to group themselves in families. The Aleuts were once quite prosperous, expert in the taking of the sea-otter, a very difficult animal to catch. The ravages of the Russian fur-traders almost annihilated the native population. They enslaved them and compelled them to capture the sea-otters for them. But the latter are now almost extinct and the Aleuts eke out a precarious existence by fishing and trapping foxes. They call their habitations barábaras and they resemble the igloos of the Eskimos.
It is the latter people that I know best and of whom I would speak most. There are no Indians in St. Michael. The native people here are wholly Eskimos, and one has to live among them to realize the moral descent of a once-fine native race. One must know them in order to comprehend the height from which they have fallen! In winter they live in their igloos. And an igloo is a place so unspeakably filthy that one can scarcely entertain a thought (much less a sight) of it. In summer they live in tents. Yet——. In spite of their uncleanliness, in spite of every other argument which may be urged against them, one always finds himself at the end of his ruminations admitting to himself that, after all, they are a fine native race! It is a conclusion at which he never fails to arrive even in the face of appalling evidence. The conviction will not be downed.
I have often walked about their summer camps at St. Michael, Nome and other localities. Always I have found the scene practically the same. One cannot help being struck with the industry which the Eskimos display. Every inmate of the tent will be at work! And each is at work upon something useful! Not one of them will be caught idle. The father usually will be seen carving a piece of ivory, or wood. The Eskimos are skilled carvers. While President Taft was in office a magnificent piece was sent him for his desk. It was carved from the tusk of a walrus by a native. In the tent the mother will be making mukluks, or fur boots, while the older daughter beats out and twists the caribou sinew into that strong thread with which the furs and boots are sewed. Let me add that they never come unsewed! The smaller children will each be engaged in some light task, such as making curios, or smoothing the first roughness off of the ivory from which the father, later, will carve something. Every member of the family will be engaged in producing something of value. Wherever one goes among the Eskimos he will be struck by this admirable trait.
They are a light-hearted, good-natured people, easily amused. They have a ready smile for you as you pass them by. Compared with the white man they are undersized. From my own six-feet-two they seem rather diminutive to me when I look down upon them, but they are by no means the dwarfs that people imagine them. The average height of the man is five-feet-four. Tall Eskimos are not unusual. They are well-built, graceful in movement and possessed of small hands and feet. The nose (in some of the tribes) is flat, but in others it is quite the opposite, and the mouth, although somewhat large, is always filled with beautiful teeth. Their smile is most attractive. I have seen many handsome Eskimos,—that is, they would be handsome if they were clean!
The centaur of old was no more a part of his horse than the Eskimo is a part of his boat. He is a born navigator,—as aquatic as a duck. He fashions for himself a small boat of skin in which he practically encloses himself. These boats are of two kinds and in their construction the Eskimo reveals his ingenuity. They are cunningly contrived and cleverly managed. With this primitive craft he performs all sorts of unbelievable stunts. An expert and daring fisherman is he. The smaller boat (called a kayak) is a sealskin canoe and is a rather tiny affair. It has circular hatches for one man. The bidarka (or bidocky) will hold two men. But the baidará is made of walrus hide and will hold from twenty to thirty persons. It will live in a heavy sea and is taken on long sea voyages. The stranger who travels even a short distance in one, however, usually does so with his heart in his mouth most of the time. The fabric belies its looks. It appears so flimsy as to be dangerous and the water is plainly visible underneath. But the natives walk boldly about in them. Every step depresses the skin for two or three inches, but long experience has taught them that the spot on which they stand will sustain the weight of a ton! I have actually seen them turn a summersault in the water with one of these home-made craft and come up smiling! Yet, strange to say, while they are, apparently, more at home on the water than on the land, few of them swim. Perhaps it is that the water is too cold.
Who that has seen these diminutive people venture forth into a treacherous and perilous sea with naught between them and death but this tiny home-made boat to do battle with the huge monsters of the ice-encumbered deep—the whale, the walrus and the seal—can question their courage? Not I! The Eskimo has made no effort to conquer his environment. More wisely he has adapted himself to it and constrained it to his needs. The land of his birth is inhospitable. His environment is savage. He wrings his sustenance from the land only by powerful effort, and human nature takes on a new dignity in the life of such people. Only the sturdiest of creatures, set naked in an Arctic world, could rise superior to such an environment.
As for the Eskimo woman,—in youth she is not unattractive, often quite good-looking, in fact. But I hereby testify that of all the hideously unattractive and ugly creatures known to the human race the full-blooded, middle-aged Eskimo woman carries off the palm. As it was in the beginning, before God said "Let there be light"—she is without form and void! She ages rapidly. She dresses as do the men, in the parka, a long, loose garment reaching to the knee, made of muskrat and reindeer skin in winter and of drill in summer, fur-seal boots and breeches. As the men are nearly always smooth-faced it is often difficult to tell them apart. They both use tobacco. And they are nothing if not economical! They chew it until every particle of flavor has vanished. Then they dry and smoke it!
A friend of mine, a well-known woman writer who once served the American Minister to China as personal secretary, one day confided to me that since the day she left the celestial empire (some fifteen years ago) she had never seen any dirt worth mentioning! Obviously, she has never glimpsed the interior of an igloo! With an American Army Officer of the Medical Corps I once visited one. We were told that it was one of the cleanest Eskimo villages in Alaska. The saints preserve me from a visit to the dirtiest one! An igloo is a windowless hut, shut tight against the air. It is usually crowded with a large family, grossly clad in skins which are poorly tanned, partly decayed. They are unspeakably fed, greasy of skin. Refuse of every kind was piled about the igloo and a recent thaw made the place a mass of liquid filth.
Of course, the reason for all this is apparent, and in a way unavoidable. Fuel is scarce and hard to obtain. Therefore, ventilation, with its waste of heat, would be fatally extravagant. Food is gathered in summer and stored for winter. When it comes out of storage much of it is decayed. Crowding is unavoidable and this means filth and infection. Water is scanty, cleanliness impossible. All this leads to the prevalence of disease and the disease most prevalent is tuberculosis. Moreover, this village which we visited has no doctor. The nearest one is seven miles away.
Conditions in Alaska, so far as medical relief for the natives is concerned, are distressing and inexcusable. Year after year, with persistent regularity, the Sundry Civil Appropriation Committee of the House strikes out the modest sum of seventy-five thousand dollars petitioned for by the Board of Education for medical relief work among the natives of Alaska. In all southeastern Alaska there is but one hospital for natives,—a Presbyterian institution at Haines. Dr. Romig, a former Moravian Medical Missionary in the Bristol Bay district in Bering Sea, gave as an estimate that forty per cent of the Eskimo population of this district, numbering some seventeen hundred people, were afflicted with transmissible diseases—chiefly tuberculosis, syphilis and trachoma. The physical condition of these people is pitiable in the extreme. Yet the government provides one physician and a small inadequate infirmary without proper equipment and maintained in an abandoned schoolhouse!