June-September 1879, Expedition to Alaska Image 44

This seems to be a [perfect] paradise for Indians. The streams & bays swarming with excellent fish, the woods abounding in berries & deer with abundance of wild sheep on the highlands. The salmon I sthe staple article of food, dried without salt & stored in compartments in their immense houses. Perhaps next in importance is the various berries, the huckleberrys are pressed into cakes & dried 184 & eatin with their fish. They need not leave the coast a mile to procure abundance of delicious food. The climate is rainy & cloudy but not at all cold 1/3 rainy 1/3 cloudy 1/3 clear or nearly so. May be regarded as a fair approximation. Barley & oats would undoubtedly ripin as well here as in the agricultural portions of Norway & Sweden. When the ground is [thoroughly] cleared & drained but this condition is by no means easily arrived at. The ground is one mass of moss roots & trunks more difficult to clear than may readily be managed by any but the early “bush settlers” of [Canada] & [Oregon] & in most places the bedrock is so near the surface that thehttps://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmj-all/2373/thumbnail.jp