their men in all soldierly
accomplishments during the two years' detail in Alaska. Whether the
prosperity of the liquor dealer be in any real sense the prosperity of
the country, and whether the rapid destruction of the forest be
compensated for by the wages paid to its destroyers, may reasonably be
doubted.

Three miles away is a considerable native village where the mission of
Our Saviour of the Episcopal Church is situated, with an attractive
church building and a picturesque graveyard. The evil influence which
the town and the army post have exerted upon the Indians finds its
ultimate expression in the growth of the graveyard and the dwindling of
the village.

This point at the junction of the two rivers was an important place for
the inhabitants of interior Alaska ages before the white man reached the
country. Tribes from all the middle Yukon, from the lower Yukon, from
the Tanana, from the upper Kuskokwim met here for trading and for
general festivity. It is impossible nowadays to determine when first the
white man's merchandise began to penetrate into this country, but it was
long before the white man came himself. Such prized and portable
articles as axes and knives passed from hand to hand and from tribe to
tribe over many hundreds of miles. Captain Cook, in 1778, found
implements of white man's make in the hands of the natives of the great
inlet that was named for him after his death, and they pointed to the
Far East as the direction whence they had come. He judged that they had
been brought from the Hudson Bay factories clean across the continent.
There are many Indians still living who remember when they saw the
first white man, and some were well grown at the time, but diligent
inquiry has failed to discover one who ever saw a stone axe used, though
some old men have been found who declared that their fathers, when
young, used that implement. Traces have been discovered of the
importation of edge-tools from four directions--from the mouth of the
Yukon; from the Lynn Canal, by way of the headwaters of the Yukon; from
the Prince William Sound, by way of the headwaters of the Tanana; as
well as from the Hudson Bay posts in the Canadian Northwest, by way of
the Porcupine River.

When the Russians established themselves at Nulato in 1842, and the
Hudson Bay Company put a post at Fort Yukon in 1846, Nuchalawoya, as
Tanana was called, became the scene of commercial rivalry, and it is
said that by the meeting