This volume deals with a series of journeys taken with a dog team over the winter trails in the interior of Alaska. The title might have claimed fourteen or fifteen thousand miles instead of ten, for the book was projected and the title adopted some years ago, and the journeys have continued. But ten thousand is a good round titular number, and is none the worse for being well within the mark.

So far as mere distance is concerned, anyway, there is nothing noteworthy in this record. There are many men in Alaska who have done much more. A mail-carrier on one of the longer dog routes will cover four thousand miles in a winter, while the writer's average is less than two thousand. But his sled has gone far off the beaten track, across the arctic wilderness, into many remote corners; wherever, indeed, white men or natives were to be found in all the great interior.

These journeys were connected primarily with the administration of the extensive work of the Episcopal Church in the interior of Alaska, under the bishop of the diocese; but that feature of them has been fully set forth from time to time in the church publications, and finds only incidental reference here.

It is a great, wild country, little known save along accustomed routes of travel; a country with a beauty and a fascination all its own; mere arctic wilderness, indeed, and nine tenths of it probably destined always to remain such, yet full of interest and charm.

Common opinion "outside" about Alaska seems to be veering from the view that it is a land of perpetual snow and ice to the other extreme of holding it to be a "world's treasure-house" of mineral wealth and agricultural possibility. The world's treasure is deposited in many houses, and Alaska has its share; its mineral wealth is very great, and "hidden doors of opulence" may open at any time, but its agricultural possibilities, in the ordinary sense in which the phrase is used, are confined to very small areas in proportion to the enormous whole, and in very limited degree.

It is no new thing for those who would build railways to write in high-flown style about the regions they would penetrate, and, indeed, to speak of "millions of acres waiting for the plough" is not necessarily a misrepresentation; they are waiting. Nor is it altogether unnatural that professional agricultural experimenters at the stations established by the government should make the most of their experiments. When Dean Stanley spoke disdainfully of dogma, Lord Beaconsfield replied; "Ah! but you must always remember, no dogmas, no deans."

Besides the physical attractions of this country, it has a gentle aboriginal population that arouses in many ways the respect and the sympathy of all kindly people; and it has some of the hardiest and most adventurous white men in the world. The reader will come into contact with both in these pages.

So much for the book's scope; a word of its limitations. It is confined to the interior of Alaska; confined in the main to the great valley of the Yukon and its tributaries; being a record of sled journeys, it is confined to the winter.

There is no man living who knows the whole of Alaska or who has any right to speak about the whole of Alaska. Bishop Rowe knows more about Alaska, in all probability, than any other living man, and there are large areas of the country in which he has never set foot. There is probably no man living, save Bishop Rowe, who has visited even the localities of all the missions of the Episcopal Church in Alaska. If one were to travel continuously for a whole year, using the most expeditious means at his command, and not wasting a day anywhere, it is doubtful whether, summer and winter, by sea and land, squeezing the last mile out of the seasons, travelling on the "last ice" and the "first water," he could even touch at all the mission stations. So, when a man from Nome speaks of Alaska he means his part of Alaska, the Seward Peninsula. When a man from Valdez or Cordova speaks of Alaska he means the Prince William Sound country. When a man from Juneau speaks of Alaska he means the southeastern coast. Alaska is not one country but many, with different climates, different resources, different problems, different populations, different interests; and what is true of one part of it is often grotesquely untrue of other parts. This is the reason why so many contradictory things have been written about the country. Not only do these various parts of Alaska differ radically from one another, but they are separated from one another by almost insuperable natural obstacles, so that they are in reality different countries.

When Alaska is spoken of in this book the interior is meant, in which the writer has travelled almost continuously for the past eight years. The Seward Peninsula is the only other part of the country that the book touches. And as regards summer travel and the summer aspect of the country, there is material for another book should the reception of this one warrant its preparation.

The problems of the civil government of the country will be found touched upon somewhat freely as they rise from time to time in the course of these journeys, and some faint hope is entertained that drawing attention to evils may hasten a remedy.

Alaska is not now, and never has been, a lawless country in the old, Wild Western sense of unpunished homicides and crimes of violence. It has been, on the whole, singularly free from bloodshed—a record due in no small part to the fact that it is not the custom of the country to carry pistols, for which again there is climatic and geographic reason; due also in part to the very peaceable and even timid character of its native people.

But as regards the stringent laws enacted by Congress for the protection of these native people, and especially in the essential particular of protecting them from the fatal effects of intoxicating liquor, the country is not law-abiding, for these laws are virtually a dead letter.

Justices of the peace who must live wholly upon fees in regions where fees will not furnish a living, and United States deputy marshals appointed for political reasons, constitute a very feeble staff against law-breakers. When it is remembered that on the whole fifteen hundred miles of the American Yukon there are but six of these deputy marshals, and that these six men, with another five or six on the tributary rivers, form all the police of the country, it will be seen that Congress must do something more than pass stringent laws if those laws are to be of any effect.

A body of stipendiary magistrates, a police force wholly removed from politics and modelled somewhat upon the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police—these are two of the great needs of the country if the liquor laws are to be enforced and the native people are to survive.

That the danger of the extermination of the natives is a real one all vital statistics kept at Yukon River points in the last five years show, and that there are powerful influences in the country opposed to the execution of the liquor laws some recent trials at Fairbanks would leave no room for doubt if there had been any room before. Indeed, at this writing, when the pages of this book are closed and there remains no place save the preface where the matter can be referred to, an impudent attempt is on foot, with large commercial backing, to secure the removal of a zealous and fearless United States district attorney, who has been too active in prosecuting liquor-peddlers to suit the wholesale dealers in liquor.

There are, of course, those who view with perfect equanimity the destruction of the natives that is now going on, and look forward with complacency to the time when the Alaskan Indian shall have ceased to exist. But to men of thought and feeling such cynicism is abhorrent, and the duty of the government towards its simple and kindly wards is clear.

A measure of real protection must be given the native communities against the low-down whites who seek to intrude into them and build habitations for convenient resort upon occasions of drunkenness and debauchery, and some adequate machinery set up for suppressing the contemptible traffic in adulterated spirits they subsist largely upon. The licensed liquor-dealers do not themselves sell to Indians, but they notoriously sell to men who notoriously peddle to Indians, and the suppression of this illicit commerce would materially reduce the total sales of liquor.

Some measure of protection, one thinks, must also be afforded against a predatory class of Indian traders, the back rooms of whose stores are often barrooms, gambling-dens, and houses of assignation, and headquarters and harbourage for the white degenerates—even if the government go the length of setting up co-operative Indian stores in the interior, as has been done in some places on the coast. This last is a matter in which the missions are helpless, for there is no wise combination of religion and trade.

So this book goes forth with a plea in the front of it, which will find incidental support and expression throughout it, for the natives of interior Alaska, that they be not wantonly destroyed off the face of the earth.