of all the natives of interior Alaska, gained by living amongst them and
travelling from village to village during seven or eight years,
furnishes but a single instance of an Indian man guilty of any sort of
violence against another Indian or against a white man--except under the
influence of liquor.

It is true that there are unquestioned murders that have been
committed--murders of white men at that; but in the sixty years from the
Nulato massacre of 1851, over the whole vast interior, these crimes can
be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are not a revengeful people.
They do not cherish the memory of injuries and await opportunities of
repayment; that trait is foreign to their character. On the contrary,
they are exceedingly placable and bear no malice. Moreover, they are
very submissive, even to the point of being imposed upon. In fact, they
are decidedly a timid people in the matter of personal encounter. In all
these characteristics they differ from the North American Indian
generally as he appears in history.

They are capable of hard work, though apparently not of continuous hard
work; they will cheerfully support great privation and fatigue; but
when the immediate necessity is past they enjoy long periods of feasting
and leisure. Having no property nor desire of property, save their
clothes, their implements and weapons, and the rude furnishings of their
cabins, there is no incentive to hard and continuous work.

After all, where is the high and peculiar virtue that lies in the
performance of continuous hard work? Why should any one labour
incessantly? This is the question the Indian would ask, and one is not
always sure that the mills of Massachusetts and the coal-mines of
Pennsylvania return an entirely satisfactory answer. As regards thrift,
the Indian knows little of it; but the average white man of the country
does not know much more. There is little difference as regards thrift
between wasting one's substance in a "potlatch," which is a feast for
all comers, and wasting it in drunkenness, which is a feast for the
liquor sellers, save that one is barbarous and the other civilised, as
the terms go.

It would seem that the general timidity of the native character is the
reason for a very general untruthfulness, though there one must speak
with qualification and exception. There are Indians whose word may be
taken as unhesitatingly as the word of any white man, and there are
white men in the countr