Project Gutenberg's Short Sketches from Oldest America, by John Driggs

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Title: Short Sketches from Oldest America

Author: John Driggs

Release Date: January 21, 2008 [EBook #24391]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: THE PRINCESS AND HER COMPANION]

SHORT SKETCHES

FROM

OLDEST AMERICA

By
JOHN B. DRIGGS, M.D.

PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO.
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1905, by
GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY
_Published July, 1905_

Publishers' Preface

From the small size of this volume, one would hardly realize, perhaps,
what an immense amount of labor and patient research its writing must
necessarily represent. The author, who was first sent to northwestern
Alaska in the summer of 1890, and who, by the bye, has, with the
exception of two vacations of a year each, been constantly at his post
in that bleak country ever since, found himself one day landed, with
his possessions, upon the inhospitable sea-beach of the Point Hope
peninsula, where for weeks he was compelled to shelter himself from
wind and rain, as best he could, in an improvised tent made of barrels
and boxes with canvas thrown over them. Finally, the carpenters of some
of the whaling ships were got together and a house, which had been
framed in distant San Francisco, was put up for him, a few hundred
yards from the water's edge.

A mile or so away lay a large native village, the inhabitants of which
naturally regarded him as a great curiosity. But he found himself quite
unable to communicate with them otherwise than by signs, as the printed
vocabularies and grammars, with which he had been supplied, proved to
be inaccurate and practically valueless.

His house finished and no scholars being forthcoming, he proceeded one
day to capture a native lad whom he f