also the site of the oldest missionary station on the
river, unless there were earlier visits of Russian priests to the lower
river, of which there seems no record, for in 1862 there was a clergyman
of the Church of England at this place. Archdeacon MacDonald was a
remarkable man. Married to a native wife, he translated the whole Bible
and the Book of Common Prayer into the native tongue, and his
translations are in general use on the upper river to this day. He
reduced the language to writing, extracted its grammar, taught the
Indians to read and write their own tongue, and dignified it by the gift
of the great literature of the sacred books. The language is, of course,
a dying one--English is slowly superseding it--but it seems safe to say
that for a generation or two yet to come it will be the basis of the
common speech of the people and the language of worship. It is chiefly
in matters of trading and handicrafts that English is taking its place,
though here as elsewhere it stands to the discredit of the civilised
race that blackguard English is the first English that is learned.

There seems ground to question whether the substitution of a smattering
of broken English for the flexibility and picturesque expressiveness of
an indigenous tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great
intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some
minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three
great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little
peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level
of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world
will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the
ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable
that the world will be the better or the happier. The advance of
civilisation would be a great thing to work for if we were quite sure
what we meant by it and what its goal is. To the ordinary government
school-teacher in Alaska, with some notable exceptions, it seems to
mean chiefly teaching the Indians to call themselves Mr. and Mrs. and
teaching the women to wear millinery, with a contemptuous attitude
toward the native language and all native customs. The less intelligent
grade of missionary sometimes falls into the same easy rut. So letters
pass through the post-offices addressed: "Mr. Pretty Henry," "Mrs.
Monkey Bill," "Miss Sally Shortan