_The Wit of Porportuk_, and it presented a native chief in
almost baronial state, with slaves waiting upon him in a large
banqueting hall and I know not what accumulated wealth of furs and gold.
Such pictures are far more flagrantly untrue to any conditions that ever
existed in Alaska than anything Fenimore Cooper wrote about the Five
Nations. There were never any slaves in the interior; there was never
any wealth amongst the Indians; there was never any state and
circumstance of life. And the more one lives amongst them and knows
them, the less one believes that they could ever have been a warlike
people, despite their own traditions. Sporadic forays, fostered by their
ignorant dread of one another or stirred up by rival medicine-men, there
may have been between different tribes--and there certainly were between
the Indians and the Esquimaux--with ambuscade and slaughter of isolated
hunting parties that ventured too far beyond the confines of their own
territory; and one such affair would furnish tradition for generations
to dilate upon. I have myself found all the men of Nulato gone scouting,
or hiding--I could not determine which--in the hills with their guns,
upon a rumour that the "Huskies," or Esquimaux, were coming; I have
known the Indians of the Yukon and the Tanana, and as far as the
Koyukuk, excited and alarmed over the friendly visit of a handful of
ragged natives from the Copper River to Nenana at Christmas time,
although in either case it must certainly have been fifty years since
there was any actual hostile incursion, and probably much longer.

[Sidenote: A GENTLE, TIMID PEOPLE]

They are a very timid people, and an exceedingly peaceable people. Years
and years may be spent amongst them without knowledge of a single act of
violence between Indian men; they do not quarrel and fight. Bold enough
in the chase, willing to face dangers of ice and water and wild beast,
they have a dread of anything like personal encounter, and will submit
to a surprising amount of imposition and overbearing on the part of a
white man without resorting to it. I knew a certain white man who
claimed a whole river valley north of the Yukon as his, who warned off
hunting parties of Indians who ventured upon it, and made them give up
game killed in "his territory." They came to the mission and complained
about it, but they never withstood the usurper. It ought to be added
that it always appeared more as the making good of a practic