ent of the country will be found
touched upon somewhat freely as they rise from time to time in the
course of these journeys, and some faint hope is entertained that
drawing attention to evils may hasten a remedy.

Alaska is not now, and never has been, a lawless country in the old,
Wild Western sense of unpunished homicides and crimes of violence. It
has been, on the whole, singularly free from bloodshed--a record due in
no small part to the fact that it is not the custom of the country to
carry pistols, for which again there is climatic and geographic reason;
due also in part to the very peaceable and even timid character of its
native people.

But as regards the stringent laws enacted by Congress for the protection
of these native people, and especially in the essential particular of
protecting them from the fatal effects of intoxicating liquor, the
country is not law-abiding, for these laws are virtually a dead letter.

Justices of the peace who must live wholly upon fees in regions where
fees will not furnish a living, and United States deputy marshals
appointed for political reasons, constitute a very feeble staff against
law-breakers. When it is remembered that on the whole fifteen hundred
miles of the American Yukon there are but six of these deputy marshals,
and that these six men, with another five or six on the tributary
rivers, form all the police of the country, it will be seen that
Congress must do something more than pass stringent laws if those laws
are to be of any effect.

A body of stipendiary magistrates, a police force wholly removed from
politics and modelled somewhat upon the Canadian Northwest Mounted
Police--these are two of the great needs of the country if the liquor
laws are to be enforced and the native people are to survive.

That the danger of the extermination of the natives is a real one all
vital statistics kept at Yukon River points in the last five years show,
and that there are powerful influences in the country opposed to the
execution of the liquor laws some recent trials at Fairbanks would leave
no room for doubt if there had been any room before. Indeed, at this
writing, when the pages of this book are closed and there remains no
place save the preface where the matter can be referred to, an impudent
attempt is on foot, with large commercial backing, to secure the
removal of a zealous and fearless United States district attorney, who
has been too active in prosecuting liquor