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It is a good opportunity for obtaining spears, toys, implements, and clothing of Indian manufacture, etc., if only I could spare the stuff to trade. With all the hundreds of people coming to the coast this year, the trade will be spoiled by next year, or I would send home for a box of articles for trade.

Educated Natives.

These natives really require very little outside of their own resources, so it is hard to tell what articles would be likely to strike their fancy. Load, powder, tobacco, calico and clothes would be the best things.

The prince or chief of this tribe of Indians was an intelligent young man about twenty-five years old. He could not speak our language, but, strange to say, his wife, who accompanied him, was educated and refined. She had received some schooling at Port Clarence. It was she who interpreted for all of us during our trading hours.

The natives came in families, and the children were not uninteresting. Not a baby was heard to cry, although in the canoe for hours at a time, nor would they try to move. These canoes or kyaks are very strange boats, and prove quite treacherous to the novice. It looks easy rowing in one of them. I had learned the trick during my hunting about Sitka two years ago, and could not be induced to try my hand in a hurry. Not so Casey, who went out by himself in Rivers' new kyak. He started out all right, shouting that it was like riding a bicycle, "very hard to keep balanced in." He was getting along finely, keeping near the vessel, when he grew over-confident, and a misstroke with the paddle set him out of balance, and boat and poor Casey went rolling over together in the water. He struggled and kept to the surface long enough for a rope to be thrown out to him, but he could not get his legs out of the hole in the kyak for several seconds. Seconds are hours in this blistering ice-water, and had he been further from home he could not have survived the chill.