A native village of eighty or ninety souls, with its church and school, lies three miles up-stream from the town, so that the relative positions of village, town, and military post exactly duplicate those at Tanana. It must at once be stated, however, that this situation has not led to anything like the demoralisation amongst the natives at Eagle that thrusts itself into notice at the other place. Whether it were the longer training in Christian morals that lay behind these people, or better hap in the matter of post commanders (certainly there was never such scandalous irregularity and indifference at Egbert as marked one administration at Gibbon), or the vigilance during a number of consecutive years of an especially active deputy marshal and the wisdom and concern through an even longer period of a commissioner much above the common stamp,[F] or all these causes combined, the natives at Eagle have not suffered from the proximity of soldiers and civilians in the same measure as the natives at Tanana. Drunkenness and debauchery there have been again and again, but they have been severely checked and restrained by both the civil and military authorities.
It was pleasant during Holy Week and Easter to see so many of the enlisted men of the garrison taking part in the services in town; pleasant, especially, to see officers and men singing together in the choir, a tribute to the tact and zeal of the earnest layman in charge of this mission; and it was pleasant at the village to hear the native liturgy again and to see old men and women following the lessons in the native Bible.
Fort Egbert is abandoned now, another addition to the melancholy of the Yukon; its extensive buildings, barracks, and officers' quarters, post-exchange and commissariat, hospital, sawmill, and artisans' shops, a spacious, complete gymnasium only recently built, are all vacant and deserted. In the yards lie three thousand cords of dry wood, a year's supply; cut on the hills, awaiting the expected annual contracts, lie as many more--six thousand cords of wood left to rot! Some of us perverse "conservationists," upon whom the unanimous Alaskan press delights to pour scorn, lament the trees more than the troops.