In some way foul and profane language falls even more offensively from Indians than from whites; for the same reason, perhaps, that it sounds more offensive and shocking from children than from adults. Sometimes the Indian does not in the least understand the meaning of the words he uses; they are the first English words he ever heard and he hears them over and over again.
So here another day and a half was spent in instruction. There are some forty souls in this tribe and they have had teaching from time to time, though not in the last few years, at the mouths of missionaries from Yukon posts. Most of the adults had been baptized; I baptized sixteen children. One curious feature of my stay was the megaphonic recapitulation of the heads of the instruction, after each session, by an elderly Indian who stood out in the midst of the tents. What on earth this man, with his town-crier voice, was proclaiming at such length, we were at a loss to conjecture, and upon inquiry were informed: "Them women, not much sense; one time tell 'em, quick forget; two time tell 'em, maybe little remember." So when we stopped for dinner and for supper and for bed, each time this brazen-lunged spieler stood forth and reiterated the main points of the discourse "for the _hareem_," as Doughty would say, whose account of the attitude of the Arabs to their women often reminds me of the Alaskan Indians. It was interesting, but I should have preferred to edit the recapitulation.
When all was done for the day and we thought to go to bed came an Indian named "Bum-Eyed-Bob" (these white man's nicknames, however dreadful, are always accepted and used) for a long confabulation about the affairs of the tribe, and I gathered incidentally that gambling at the telegraph station had been the main diversion of the winter. It seems ungracious to insist so much upon the evil influence of the white men--we had been cordially received and entertained at that very place, and our money refused--but there is little doubt that the abandonment of the telegraph-line will be a good thing for these natives. Put two or three young men of no special intellectual resource or ambition down in a lonely spot like this, with no society at all save that of the natives and practically nothing to do, and there is a natural and almost inevitable trend to evil. To the exceptional man with the desire of promotion, with books, and all this leisure, it would be an admirable opportunity, but he would be quite an exceptional man who should rise altogether superior to the temptations to idleness and debauchery. One may have true and deep sympathy with these young men and yet be conscious of the harm they often bring about.