United States or Peru ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It appears that the houses composing the post were not finished when the Indians from the coast on Chilkat and Chilkoot Inlets came down the river to put a stop to the competitive trade which Mr. Campbell had inaugurated, and which they found to seriously interfere with their profits. Their method of trade appears to have been then pretty much as it is now very onesided.
Below the Post he managed to buy frozen horse hide for the dogs, the horses having been slain by the Chilkat cattle men, and the scraps and offal preserved by the Indians. He tackled the hide himself, but the hair worked into the bean sores of his mouth, and was beyond endurance.
Besides, he was going back to the North in a short time, and to act quickly was no less necessary. A thousand girls from the great department store of Sieber-Mason flowed along the sidewalk, making navigation dangerous to men whose feminine field of vision for three years has been chiefly limited to Siwash and Chilkat squaws.
A man caught in one of them runs the risk of losing his life, unless he can reach shelter in a short time. During the summer there is nearly always a wind blowing from the sea up Chatham Strait and Lynn Canal, which lie in almost a straight line with each other, and at the head of Lynn Canal are Chilkat and Chilkoot Inlets.
One night they tried to run away, but the zip-zip of his bullets in the snow brought them back, snarling but convinced. Whereupon, being only savage Chilkat men, they put their heads together to kill him; but he slept like a cat, and, waking or sleeping, the chance never came.
There were little graven images, a few of them looking somewhat idolatrous; and heaps upon heaps of nameless and shapeless odds and ends that boasted more or less bead-work in the line of ornamentation; but all chiefly noticeable for the lack of taste displayed, both in design and the combination of color. The Chilkat blanket is an exception to the Alaskan Indian rule.
"Last summer a Juneau butcher sent 40 head of cattle to Cudahy. G. Bounds, the man in charge, crossed the divide over the Chilkat Pass, followed the shore of Lake Arkell and, keeping to the east of Dalton's trail, reached the Yukon just below the Rink Rapids. Here the cattle were slaughtered and the meat floated down on a raft to Cudahy, where it retailed at $1 a pound.
A grant of $2,000 has been made by the province of British Columbia for opening it. "J. Dalton, a trader, has used a route overland from Chilkat Inlet to Fort Selkirk. Going up the Chilkat and Klaheela Rivers, he crosses the divide to the Tahkeena River and continues northward over a fairly open country practicable for horses. The distance from the sea to Fort Selkirk is 350 miles.
A low spoken affirmative came from the old creature, who had seated herself near the entrance. "I'll see if I can remember a few lines in Chilkat that I wrote some time ago," said the musician, as he again touched the strings.
We had but a poor glimpse of the glaciers on the Chilkat side, one a magnificent down-flow of pale-blue ice, the other a frozen river caught and compressed in between strangling hills.
Word Of The Day