troops the Lutheran church was used by the post chaplain, a Methodist. The abandoned church is now in the last stage of ruin, the roof sunken in, and the walls dropping apart. The pipe-organ, brought from Germany forty years ago, was rescued by a young officer of musical tastes, and by clever repairing it was put in good condition, and found to be a very fine instrument.

Facing on this same church square is the warehouse and the office of the old Russian-American Fur Company. The solid log buildings have stood the ravages of time and the damp climate, and a mining-engineer and assayer has taken possession of it for his office. Quite appropriately the headquarters of the fur trade, which constituted the most valuable interest of the early days, is now the laboratory of an assayer, who tests the minerals upon which so much of the future importance of the territory

rests.

The officers' club-house, back of the Greek church, is still in a fair condition, but the tea-gardens and the race-course have vanished in undergrowth. A sturdy little fir-tree, rooted in the crevice of a great boulder or outcropping ledge of rocks in front of the clubhouse, is one of the curiosities of Sitka, and has been growing in that solid granite as long as anyone now living there can remember.

The sawmill, with its large water-wheel, is dropping to decay, the hospital building was burned while used as a mission-school, and it is hard to trace the site of the old shipyard, that was a most complete establishment in its day. For a long time it was the only yard on the coast, and vessels of all

nationalities put in there for repairs. The Russians had one hundred and eighty church holidays during the year, and observed them all carefully. English naval commanders, by keeping their own Sabbath, and having the Russian Sabbath and holidays celebrated by closing the shipyards and stopping work, used to have long stays in the harbor; and the impatient navigators, in view of the whirl of social life that marked the visit of a strange ship, fairly believed that the delays were managed by the governor's authority. At the foundries, ploughs were made and exported to the Mexican possessions south of them, and the bells of half the California mission churches were cast at the Sitka foundry.

At the end of the scattered line of houses that fringe the shore, the Jackson Institute, a Presbyterian mission-school and home, occupies a fine site, facing the harbor. The mission was founded in 1878, and named for the Rev. Sheldon Jackson, who has charge of the Presbyterian missions in Alaska, and the building is soon to be enlarged, to accommodate a larger number of pupils than were first gathered in it, under the care of Mr. and Mrs. Austin.

CHAPTER XII.

THE

SITKA - THE INDIAN RANCHERIE.

HE doorway of the Greek church, and the dial on its tower, face toward the harbor, and command the main street. Beyond the houses at the right there is a little pine-crowned hill, with the broken and rusty ruins of a powder-magazine on its slope, and on a second hill beyond is the graveyard where the Russians buried their dead. An old block house, that commanded an angle of the stockade, stands sentry over the graves, and the headstones and tombs are overgrown with rank bushes, ferns, and grasses. Prince Maksoutoff's first wife, who died at Sitka, was buried on the hill, and a costly, elaborately carved tombstone was sent from Russia to mark the spot. After the transfer and withdrawal of troops, the Indians, in their maraudings, defaced the stone, and attempted to carry it off. It was broken in the effort, and left in fragments on the ground. Lieutenant Gilman, in charge of the marines during the stay of the Adams, became interested in the matter, hunted for the grave in the underbrush, and undertook the work of replacing the tombstone. Beyond the Russian cemetery, on the same overgrown hillside, are the tombs of the chiefs and medicine-men of the Sitka kwan. The grotesque images and the queer little

burial boxes are nearly hidden in the tangle of bushes and vines, and their sides are covered with moss.

The Russians had a special chapel out on this hill for the Indians to worship in, as shown in old illustrations of Sitka, but the building has disappeared. There was a heavy stockade wall also, separating the Indian cemetery and village from the white settlement, but it has nearly all been torn down and carried off by the Indians during the years of license allowed them after the troops left, and only fragments of it remain in places.

Entering through the old stockade gate, the Indian rancherie presents itself, as a double row of square houses fronting on the beach. Each house is numbered and whitewashed, and the ground surrounding it gravelled and drained. The same neatness marks the whole long stretch of the village, and amazement at this condition is only ended when one learns that the captain of the man-of-war fines each disorderly Indian in blankets, besides confining him in the guard-house, and that the forfeited blankets are duly exchanged for paint, whitewash, and disinfectants. Police and sanitary regulations both are enforced, and the Indians made to keep their village quiet and clean. When all the Indians are home from their fishing and trading trips, and congregated here in the winter, they number over a thousand, and all goes merry at the rancherie. There are no totem poles, or carved, grotesquely-painted houses to lend outward interest to the village, and the Indians themselves are too much given to ready-made clothes and civilized ways to be really picturesque.

Annahootz, Sitka Jack, and other chiefs have

pine doorplates over their lintels, to announce where greatness dwells, but the palace of Siwash Town is the residence of "Mrs. Tom," Mrs. Tom," a painted cabin with green blinds, and a green railing across the front porch. Mrs. Tom is a character, a celebrity, and a person of great authority among her Siwash neighbors, and wields a greater power and influence among her people, than all the war chiefs and medicine-men put together. Even savage people bow down to wealth, and Mrs. Tom is the reputed possessor of $10,000, accumulated by her own energy and shrewdness. We heard of Mrs. Tom long before we reached Sitka, and, realizing her to be such a potentate among her people, we were shocked to meet that lady by the roadside, Sunday morning, offering to sell bracelets to some of the passengers. The richest and greatest chiefs are so avaricious that they will sell anything they own.

Mrs. Tom invited us to come to her green-galleried chalet in Siwash town, "next door to No. 17," at any time we pleased. On the rainiest morning in all the week we set our dripping umbrella points in that direction, and found the great Tyee lady at home. It was raw and chill as a New York November, but Mrs. Tom strolled about barefooted, wearing a single calico garment, and wrapping herself in a white blanket with red and blue stripes across the ends. Her black hair was brushed to satiny smoothness, braided and tied with coquettish blue ribbons, and her arms were covered with bracelets up to her elbows. She is a plump matron, fat, fair, and forty in fact, and her house is a model of neatness and order. On gala occasions she arrays herself in her