buried his little daughter a few days before. A flagpole, with a small United States flag at half-mast, gave mute testimony to Jake's ideas of patriotism and mourning etiquette. His wife betrayed her state of grief by wandering about in a black dress, with a black umbrella held down closely over her head all of the time. At Killisnoo blackened faces were almost the rule, and every other native woman had her face coated with a mixture of seal oil and soot. A group of these blackamoors made a picture, as they sat inside a cabin door weaving their pretty baskets of the fine inside bark and roots of the cedar. One younger woman wore a silver pin sticking out through her under lip, another had a large wooden labrette in her lip; and when the photographer tried to take the group, their neighbors ran up and joined in the tableau. At Killisnoo, once, the anglers baited their lines. and hung them overboard, as inducements to the codfish. The lunch-gong summoned them below, but they tied their lines and trusted to some fish swallowing the hooks while they were gone. When the first angler came up and touched his line, his face glowed, and he began pulling in the weighty prize. When the line left the water a bottle was dangling on the end of it, tied with a sailor's knot, and hook and bait intact. The second angler drew up a dried codfish, and then, when they looked around for the captain of the ship, he was nowhere to be found. There are a few Kake Indians among the fishermen and workmen at Killisnoo, and their old home or proper domain is on Kouiu Island, further down. Chatham Straits. The Kakes are outcasts and renegades among the tribes, and, from early days, there has been reason for the bad name given them. They were hostile, treacherous, and revengeful, and were dealt with warily by the old traders. In 1857 a war party paddled a thousand miles down to Puget Sound, and at Whidby Island murdered Mr. Ebey, a former collector of customs at Port Townsend, in retaliation for an indignity put upon their men in the preceding year. They carried his head back with them, and great war dances followed the return of the avenging Kakes. At the north end of Kouiu Island are the ruins of the three villages destroyed during the Kake war, in 1869. The origin and incidents of this war are thus sketched in a private letter by Captain R. W. Meade, U. S. N., who commanded the U. S. S. Saginaw, at that time in Alaskan waters : "The war was due originally to the killing of a Kake Indian at Sitka by the sentry on guard at the lower end of the town. There had been some trouble with the Indians outside the stockade, and General Jeff C. Davis, who commanded the department, with headquarters at Sitka, had given orders to prevent all Indians from leaving Sitka during the night -I think it was New Year's night. He had asked me to co-operate with him, and my patrol-boats sent several canoes back to the Indian village. About daylight a canoe was discovered leaving the village. The soldier nearest the canoe hailed and ordered the canoe back, and as it did not go back after a third or fourth hail, fired, killing a Kake Indian. The canoe still continued to paddle off, and, though pursued by the boats of the Saginaw, that had seen the firing, escaped. Subsequently, in revenge for this, the Kake Indians murdered two Sitka traders, Messrs. Maugher and Walker, and General Davis determined to punish them by destroying their villages. I was asked to co-operate, and, although I think the trouble could have been avoided in the first place, yet, after the wanton murder of two innocent men, I felt it my duty to give the Kake tribe-a very ugly one- a lesson. We therefore took on board some twentyfive soldiers from the garrison at Sitka, and went to the Kake country. The Indians abandoned their villages on our approach, and three villages were destroyed by fire and shell. A stockaded fort was also destroyed by midshipman, now Lieutenant Bridges, of the Saginaw. The Indians were dismayed, and no further trouble, I believe, has occurred with them. There was no loss of life on either side—it was a bloodless war." The Kakes have never returned to these villages, and in diminished numbers they roam the archipelago, creating trouble and disturbances wherever they draw up their canoes. Their visits are dreaded equally by the natives and whites, and Captain Beardslee peremptorily ordered them out of Sitka when several war canoes, filled with a visiting party, came abreast of the rancherie, shouting and singing their peculiar songs. Their unpleasant reputation has, doubtless, kept settlers away from Kouiu Island, and there is not yet as much as a salmon cannery or packing house on its shores. The island is over sixty miles long, with an irregular, indented shore, and wherever the surveyors have followed its lines they have seen forests of yellow cedar. This timber will, in time, make Kouiu and the adjoining island of Kuprianoff the most valuable land sections in this part of the Territory. The yellow cedar is said to be the only good ship timber on the Pacific coast, and is the only wood that can resist the teredo, which eats up the pine piles under wharves in two years from the time they are driven. The trees are found five and seven feet in diameter, and attain the height of one hundred and fifty feet, and the fine, closely grained, hard, yellow wood was once exported to China in large quantities by the Russians. The Chinese valued it for its fine, hard texture, and they carved it into chests and small articles, and exported it as camphor wood. Its odor is by some said to resemble sandal wood, and, by others, garlic, but it takes a beautiful satiny polish, and will be as valuable as a cabinet wood as for ship timber. Some of it that has been sent to Portland has been sold at seventy-five dollars a thousand feet, and Mr. Seward prized very highly the fine cedar that he carried. home with him. As there has always been complaint of the quality of the Oregon timber, and vessels built of its pine could not be insured as A 1 but for three years, it may seem strange that no attempts have been made to utilize the vast forests of cedar scattered through the archipelago. Seven years ago a bill was introduced in Congress asking that one hundred thousand acres of timber land on Kouiu Island should be sold to a company, that guaranteed to establish a shipyard and build a vessel of twelve hundred tons burthen within two years. The same inscrutable reasons that for a long time prevented anything |