The Aleuts, a kind, gentle people, suffered much at the hands of their Russian masters in the past. The Aleuts living in sod huts are the Crofters of America.
The fine flower of the fauna of Alaska is found in the valley of the Koyukuk River. Here tusks and bones of mastodons are found imbedded in the sand banks and gravel bars.
Since the discovery of gold in Alaska the Indians have saved many lives. Born and reared amidst these wild surroundings, where winter white and hoary stands ever at the gate of the North, wagging his shaggy beard, they have partaken of the very nature of their own rugged mountains. The long Arctic nights and the intense cold have given these people hearts of steel and muscles of iron.
Are you ill? Are you starving? No mountain is too high, no snow too deep, but one of these heroes will climb the one or plunge undauntedly through the other to bring you succor.
In the chilly Arctic sea there lies a mysterious island, the home of the ice goblin, who kicked it loose from, no one knows where, so the legend runs, and towed it to its present location.
Its mountains are the highest, its gorges the deepest, and its fields and fiords the grandest in the world.
It was a most magnificent island before the goblin stole it and dragged it away into the great ice fields of the North. It was clothed in rich verdure. Birds sang, flowers bloomed, and gay butterflies hovered over them.
This was not at all to the goblin’s taste, so he threw a sheet of ice over mountain, field and fiord. In his ice castle on the summit of the loftiest peak reigns the great ice goblin, sending out storms over sea and land, and pouring ice, snow and glaciers down over the island to his heart’s content.
In the Arctic region a dark cloud called the “loom of the water” overhangs where ever there is clear water.
The Arctic sea! The land of the midnight sun! What a fascinating subject! What an inexhaustible field for those three happy brothers, the poet, the painter and the scientist! The land of jötums, penguins and ice packs. The land where night kisses morning. The realm of bright-haired Aurora and sable-robed Niobe.
Returning along the self same route the mind never tires nor the eye wearies of the matchless scenery. Like a moving panorama, grand, austere, majestic, sublime. Here reigns Vidar, the god of silence.