Aleš Hrdlička

“ Eklutna—Fairbanks.—Since reaching Seward the almost incessant drizzles have ceased and the weather has been fine and pleasantly warm. Everything is green, grass is luxuriant, and there are many flowers.
The railroad journey is a regular scenic tour, with its crowning point a glorious view of Mount McKinley. The trains run only in the daytime. For the night a stop is made at a railroad hotel, in a quiet, picturesque location, at the edge of a good-sized river. They have foxes in cages here and a tame reindeer. There are no natives in this vicinity. ”

“ Those inhabiting the vicinity of Norton and Kotzebue Sounds are by far the finest and tallest, while those living between Cape Lisburne and Point Barrow are, like the tribes of the eastern portions of America, much shorter in stature, and bespeak the inferiority of the districts in which they live.
Both sexes are well proportioned, stout, muscular, and active. The hands and feet are small and beautifully formed, which is ascribed by some writers to their sedentary habits, but this cannot be the case, as probably no people take more exercise or are more constantly employed. ”

“ A connected series of facts and arguments which seem to indicate that the Eskimo are an exceedingly ancient people, whose dawn was probably ushered in by a temperate climate, but whose dissolution now approaches, amidst eternal ice and snow; that the early migrations of these people have been from the north southwards, from the islands of the Polar Sea to the continent and not from the mainland to the islands; and that the present geographical area of the Eskimo may be regarded as a primary center of human distribution for the entire polar zone. ”

“ The nose.—The nose of the western Eskimo promises to be of much importance in the study of Eskimo origins in general. Nowhere in this region is it like the nose of the northern or northeastern groups. It is decidedly broader. Its breadth is intermediary between that of the Alaska and other Indians and that of the northern and northeastern Eskimo, connecting with both, and these characteristics are so generalized throughout western Alaska and the Bering Sea islands that they can not possibly be attributed to Indian or other admixture. ”

“ Eskimo: "On the eastern side of the continent these poor people have always been separated by a marked line from their Indian neighbors on the south, and have been regarded by them with the most bitter hostility. On the west, however, they pass into the Eastern Siberians, on the one hand, and into the West-coast Indians, on the other, both by language and physical characters. They and the northern tribes at least of West-coast Indians, belong in all probability to a wave of population spreading from Bering Strait." ”

“ It is dangerous of approach to any except small boats. The only place that could be visited by me was Shishmaref, a good-sized thriving Eskimo village, on both sides of which along the sea are remains of old sites with burials. The more important old settlement was that to the east of the village. Here are found large and extensive heaps, the tops of which have recently been leveled for fox cages, the whole site belonging, regrettably, to a newly established fox farm. It is an old site, though probably occupied up to white man's times, and is doubtless of some importance. ”

“ No trace or indication of anything older than the double-grooved ax culture has thus far been seen anywhere in the valley; and large stretches of present banks are quite barren.
As we approach Nulato the horizon before us becomes hilly and mountainous. The sun is now fully out and its warmth is very pleasant. Pass an Indian woman paddling a canoe; later an Indian family going upstream in a motor boat. Most of these Indians possess a motor boat of some sort, and know how to run it, though it is not in their nature to be overcareful. ”

“ When compared with the bones of the whites and the negroes the Eskimo and Indians separate themselves in many respects as a distinct group, while the white and the negro bones are particularly distinct through the greater relative thickness of the humerus and tibia at their middle, and of the femur at its upper flattening; in other words the Eskimo as well as the Indians are more platybrachic, platymeric and platycnemic than the whites or the negroes. ”

“ This is a large island off the Alaskan coast, well below the present delta of the Yukon and some distance above Kuskokwim Bay. The island is one of the least explored, and the people living upon it one of the least known. It is only during the last few years that a trading and a reindeer post has been established on this island, and only the second year that there is a teacher. What little is known of the natives, a branch of the Eskimo, shows that they have many different habits from those farther north, in clothing, decoration, etc. ”

“ The men are nearly all more or less Eskimoid, and even the head is not infrequently narrower, fairly long, jaws much developed. The women, however, show the Eskimo type less, and the children in a still smaller measure—they are much more Indian. Yet even some women and an occasional child are Eskimoid—face flat, long, lower jaw high, cheek bones prominent forward (like welts on each side of the nose) , whole physiognomy recalling the Eskimo. The more Indianlike types resemble closely those of the upper Yukon. There is perceptible, too, some mixture with whites, particularly in the young. ”

“ Wind has so increased that the scow bumps and squeaks and there is danger of opening its seams. Therefore side to the beach and make lunch—a roast of fat pork, over-salted, canned spinach, dry bread, and black coffee. All on a simple, old, but efficient little stove in the boat. Our companion, the oculist, rides not with us but in a nice little green canoe with a plaything of a gasoline motor fastened to the backboard, but we all eat and sleep together. ”

“ The great and easily navigable river, extending for many hundreds of miles from west to east, could not but have played a material part in the peopling of Alaska, and quite probably in that of the continent, and all human movements along it must have left some material remains. It seems, therefore, a justified inference that the valley of the Yukon harbors human remains of much scientific value. ”

“ I believe, therefore, that H. Rink's opinion of an Alaskan origin of the Eskimo is not very probable. If pure type and culture may be considered as significant, I should say that the Eskimo west and north of Hudson Bay have retained their ancient characteristics more than any others. If their original home was in Alaska, we must add the hypothesis that their dispersion began before contact with the Indians. If their home was east of the Mackenzie, the gradual dispersion and ensuing contact with other tribes would account for all the observed phenomena. ”

“ The bank itself contains many specimens showing human workmanship, consisting of objects of stone, birch bark, bone, and rarely also of ivory, besides many fragments of pottery, many bones of wild Alaskan animals, and here and there a human skeleton. Some of these objects are low down in the bank. All the bones from the bank, including the human, and even the rare points of ivory, are semifossilized; the stone industry is peculiar; and the human remains differ plainly from both those of the later Yukon Indian and from those of the Eskimo. ”

“ The stream may one moment be like a great, liquid, softly flowing mirror, to be in a few minutes churned into an ugly and dangerous roughness from which every smaller boat must seek shelter. Its shores are inhospitable, except for the native fisherman and hunter, and torment man with swarms of gnats and mosquitoes. ”

“ Northeast and east of Shishmaref the coast is known even less than that to the west. A few miles off Shishmaref I saw from a distance—the boat could not approach nearer—what to all appearances was a large ridge of ruins, and from various maps and other sources information was obtained of several other sites, all of which represent former villages. From one of these sites on the Bucknell River Mr. Carl Lomen secured a fine piece of fossil ivory carving, and the site is said to be of much promise. The whole coast is a virgin field for archeology. ”

“ We must therefore imagine that the Thule culture, with all its peculiar whaling culture, has originated somewhere in the western regions, in an Arctic area, where whales were plentiful and wood abundant, and we are involuntarily led toward the coasts of Alaska and East Siberia north of Bering Strait, the regions to which we have time after time had to turn in order to find parallels to types from the Central Eskimo finds. ”

“ The Anvik people, it will be recalled, were the first Yukon natives seen by a white man. They were discovered in 1834 by Glazunof, and since then have occupied the same site, located favorably on a point between the Anvik and the Yukon Rivers. They belonged to the Inkalik tribe, a name given to them, according to Zagoskin, by the coast people and signifying "lousy," from the fact that they never cut their hair, which in consequence, presumably, harbored some parasites. Their village was the lowest larger settlement of the Indians on the Yukon, the Eskimo commencing soon after. ”

“ Extreme longevity is probably not unknown among them; but as they take no heed to number the years as they pass, they can form no guess of their own ages, invariably stating "they have many years." Judging altogether from appearance, a man whom we saw in the neighborhood of Kotzebue Sound could not be less than 80 years of age. He had long been confined to his bed and appeared quite in his dotage. There was another at Point Barrow, whose wrinkled face, silvery hair, toothless gums, and shrunk limbs indicated an age nothing short of 75. ”

“ In general the farther west we proceed the less exceptional on the whole the Eskimo becomes and the more he approximates the Indian, particularly the Indian of Alaska and the northwest coast. As this can not, in the light of present evidence, be attributed alone to mixture, it is plain that if it were possible to proceed a few steps farther in this direction the differences between the Eskimo and the Indian would fade out so that a distinction between the two would become difficult if not impossible. ”

“ The following table will show that physically the Inyu of North American coast does not conform to the typical idea of the Eskimo. They are robust, healthy people, fairer than the North American Indian, with brown eyes and straight black hair. The men are beardless until they attain the age of from 20 to 25 years, and even then it is very light and scattering, and is always clipped close in the winter; at this season they also cut off their eyebrows and tonsure their crown like a priest, with bangs over their forehead. Their hands and feet are extremely small and symmetrical ”

“ The young men have little beard, but some of the old ones have a tolerable show of long gray hairs on the upper lip and chin. * * * The Eskimo beard, however, is in no instance so dense as a European one.
The hair of the head is black and coarse, the lips thickish, and the teeth of the young people white and regular, but the sand that, through want of cleanliness, mixes with their food, wears the teeth down at an early age almost to the level of the gums, so that the incisors often have broad crowns like the molars. ”

“ The women * * * are often of pleasing appearance, sometimes quite pretty. They preserve their beauty much longer than Indian women. Their clear complexion and high color, with their good humor, make them agreeable companions, and they are often very intelligent. A noticeable feature is their teeth. These are always sound and white, but are almost cylindrical, and in old people are worn down even with the gums, producing a singular appearance. The eyes are not oblique as in the Mongolian races, but are small, black, and almost even with the face. The nose is flat and disproportionately small. ”