Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled | Page 3

United States district attorney, who
has been too active in prosecuting liquor-peddlers to suit the wholesale

dealers in liquor.
There are, of course, those who view with perfect equanimity the
destruction of the natives that is now going on, and look forward with
complacency to the time when the Alaskan Indian shall have ceased to
exist. But to men of thought and feeling such cynicism is abhorrent,
and the duty of the government towards its simple and kindly wards is
clear.
A measure of real protection must be given the native communities
against the low-down whites who seek to intrude into them and build
habitations for convenient resort upon occasions of drunkenness and
debauchery, and some adequate machinery set up for suppressing the
contemptible traffic in adulterated spirits they subsist largely upon. The
licensed liquor-dealers do not themselves sell to Indians, but they
notoriously sell to men who notoriously peddle to Indians, and the
suppression of this illicit commerce would materially reduce the total
sales of liquor.
Some measure of protection, one thinks, must also be afforded against
a predatory class of Indian traders, the back rooms of whose stores are
often barrooms, gambling-dens, and houses of assignation, and
headquarters and harbourage for the white degenerates--even if the
government go the length of setting up co-operative Indian stores in the
interior, as has been done in some places on the coast. This last is a
matter in which the missions are helpless, for there is no wise
combination of religion and trade.
So this book goes forth with a plea in the front of it, which will find
incidental support and expression throughout it, for the natives of
interior Alaska, that they be not wantonly destroyed off the face of the
earth.
HUDSON STUCK.
NEW YORK, March, 1914.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
IT is gratifying to know that a second edition of this book has been
called for and it is interesting to write another preface; it even proved
interesting to do what was set about most reluctantly--the reading of the
book over again after entire avoidance of it for two years. It was
necessary to do it, though one shrank from it, and it is interesting to
know that after this comparatively long and complete detachment I find
little to add and less to correct. Upon a complete rereading I am content
to let the book stand, with two or three footnotes thrown in, and the
correction of the one printer's error it contained from cover to cover--an
error that a score of kind correspondents pointed out, for it was
conspicuous in the title of a picture.
The tendency to which attention is drawn in the original preface, the
pendulum swing from the old notion that Alaska is a land of polar bears
and icebergs to the new notion that it is a "world's treasure-house of
mineral wealth and unbounded agricultural possibilities" is yet more
marked than it was two years ago. The beginning of the building of the
government railway has given new impetus to the "boosting" writers
for magazines and newspapers. Quite recently it was stated in one such
publication that we need not worry about the destruction of our forests,
for had we not the inexhaustible timber resources of the interior of
Alaska to draw upon?
And in the North itself--though no one there would write about the
timber resources of the interior--in certain shrill journals the man who
does not confidently expect to see the Yukon Flats waving with golden
grain and "the lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" of the Koyukuk
and the Chandalar is regarded as a traitor to his country and his God.
But it must be remembered that there are a number of journalists in
Alaska who know nothing of the country outside their respective towns,
and that "boosting" grows shriller, as Eugene Field found red paint
grow redder, "the further out West one goes." When they get a
newspaper at Cape Prince of Wales what a clarion it will be!
Truth, however, is not more wont than of old to be found in extremes,
and the author of this book believes that those who desire a sober view

of the country it deals with will find it herein. He claims no more than
that he has had adequate opportunity of forming his opinions and that
he has a right to their expression. It is now twelve years since he began
almost constant travelling, winter and summer, in the interior of Alaska.
He has described nothing that he has not seen; ventured no judgment
that he has not well digested, and has nothing to retract or even modify;
but he would repeat and emphasise a caution of the original preface.
Alaska is not one country but many countries, and so widely do they