ago these migrations took place there is not the slightest
knowledge to base even a surmise upon. The natives themselves have no
records nor even traditions, and the first point of contact between
white men and the natives of the interior is within three quarters of a
century ago. It may have been two or three families only which
penetrated to this region or to that and settled there, and what
pressure started them on their wanderings no one will ever know. Perhaps
some venturesome hunter pursuing his game across the highlands that
separate the Mackenzie from the Yukon was disabled and compelled to
remain until the summer, and then discovered the salmon that made their
way up the tributaries of the Porcupine. The Mackenzie has no salmon. Or
a local tribal quarrel may have sent fugitives over the divide.

When first the white man came to the upper Yukon, in 1846 and 1847, no
one knew that it was the same river at the mouth of which the Russians
had built Redoubt Saint Michael ten or twelve years before. The natives
of the upper river knew nothing about the lower river. It is an easy
matter to float down the Yukon for a thousand miles in a birch-bark
canoe, but an exceedingly difficult matter to come up again. It was not
until the voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, in their adventurous
fur-trading expeditions, met at the mouth of the Tanana River the agents
of the Russian Fur Company, come up from Nulato on the same quest, that
the identity of the Yukon and Kwikpak Rivers was discovered; and that
seems to have been well past the middle of the century. In the map of
North America that the writer first used at school, the Yukon flowed
north into the Arctic Ocean, parallel with the Mackenzie.

[Sidenote: AN INOFFENSIVE PEOPLE]

The Indians of the interior of Alaska are a gentle and kindly and
tractable people. They have old traditions of bloody tribal warfare that
have grown in ferocity, one supposes, with the lapse of time, for it is
very difficult for one who knows them to believe that so mild a race
could ever have been pugnacious or bloodthirsty. Whether it were that
the exigencies of subsistence under arctic conditions demanded almost
all their energies, or that a realisation of their constant dependence
upon one another checked the play of passion, they differ most widely
and, it seems certain, always differed most widely in character from the
Indians of the American plains. A personal knowledge of the greater part