-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--