Among the Alaskans Author:Julia McNair Wright Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. A STOR Y OF THE PAST. WHEN the year 1867 opened, the Russian drum-beat and the Greek church-bell woke the echoes more than halfway around the w... more »orld. From the Baltic Sea, St. Petersburg and Novgorod ; across the Dnieper, the Volga and the Ural ; over the steppes and the Siberian wastes; along the Obe and the Yenesei and the Lena; down the peninsula of Kamt- chatka and beyond Behring's Straits and Behring's Sea; into Alaska, up the Yukon and to the Mackenzie,—echoed the drum and pealed the bell. Then Bayard Taylor wrote: " And may the thousand years to come— The future ages wise and free— Still see her flags and hear her drum Across the world from sea to sea." The American part of her possessions Russia ceded to the United States in Octoher, 1867, for the sum of seven million two hundred thousand dollars. With the territory came into our hands Indian, creole and Russian inhabitants—of the last but few, of the first an aggregate of tribes given by the census of 1880 as thirty thousand. These tribes are classed by most writers under four divisions, marked by certain variations of tongue and customs, but not as indicating a remote different ancestry. William H. Seward, after visiting Alaska, says: " I have mingled freely with the multifarious population—the Tongas, the Stick- eens, the Kakes, the Hydahs, the Sitkas, the Kootnoos and the Chilcats. Climate and other circumstances have indeed produced some differences of manners and customs between the Aleuts, the Kolos- chians and the interior continental tribes, but all of them are manifestly of Mongol origin. Although they have preserved no common traditions, all alike indulge in tastes, wear a physiognomy and are imbued with sentiments peculiarly noticed in China and Japan." They have Asian or Indo-Euro...« less