The liquor that the Hudson Bay Company and the Russian traders furnished to the Indians was very weak and very expensive, and the Kootznahoos rest some of their claims to distinction on the fact that the native drink, or hoochinoo, was first distilled by their people. A deserter from a whaling-ship taught them the secret, and from molasses or sugar, with flour, potatoes, and yeast, they distil the vilest and most powerful spirit. An old oil can and a musket barrel, or a section of the long, hollow pipe of the common seaweed (nereiocistum) furnish the apparatus, and the hoochinoo, quickly distilled, can be used at once. After any quantity of it has been made, its presence is soon declared, and the Indians are frenzied by it. Hoochinoo is the great enemy of

peace and order, and the customs officers can much easier detect a white man smuggling whiskey than catch the Indians in the distilling act. It is apparent enough when they have imbibed the rank and fiery spirit, but it is impossible to watch all the illicit stills that they set up in their houses, or hide in lonely coves and places in the woods. The man-ofwar is always on the lookout for indications of hoochinoo, and at the first signs a raid is made on a village, the houses and the woods searched, and the stills and supplies destroyed. With the cunning of a savage race they have wonderful ways of hiding it in underground and up-tree warehouses, and many exciting stories are told by the naval officers of the great hoochinoo raids they have taken part in.

Lumme or rum, these children of nature sometimes call the forbidden fluid, as, like their Chinese cousins, the Thlinkets are unable to pronounce the

letter r, and give the l-sound as its equivalent in every case. There are many points of resemblance between the Kootznahoos and the Orientals; and in writing of the origin of these Thlinket tribes of the archipelago, Captain Beardslee, in his official report, says:

"All of the tribes mentioned except the Kootznahoos seem to have sprung from a common origin; they speak the same language and have similar customs and superstitions, and from these the Kootznahoos differ so slightly that a stranger cannot detect the difference. Their legend is that originally all lived in the Chilkat country; that there came great floods of ice and water, and the country grew too poor to support them, and that many emigrated south; that the Auks are outcasts from the Hoonah tribes, and the Kakes from the Sitkas, and both tribes deserve to be still so considered; that the Kootznahoos came from over the sea, and the Haidas, who live on Vancouver's Island, from the south. I have imbibed an impression, which, however, I could not obtain much evidence to support, that all of the tribes except the Haidas are Oriental, in every respect they resemble the Ainos of Japan far more than they do our North American Indians, and that the Kootznahoos are of Chinese origin; while the Haidas, who are superior to all of the others in intelligence and skill in various handicrafts, are the descendants of the boat-loads whom Cortez drove out of Mexico, and who vanished to the north."

All this part of Admiralty Island is a coal field, and veins and outcroppings of lignite have been found on every side of it, and along the inlets and

creeks leading to the interior. A good coal mine would be worth more than a gold mine, in Alaska, and though seams have been discovered with regularity since 1832, none of the explorers seem to have found just the thing yet. In 1868 Lieutenant-Commander Mitchell explored Kootznahoo Inlet, leading into the heart of Admiralty Island, and at the head of the perilous channel opened a coal seam. In the following year, Mr. Seward's party went up to the Mitchell mine, and they were enthusiastic over its promises. The coal burned beautifully in the open air, but when the real tests were put to it, and it was tried in the boiler-room of the ship, it was found to contain so much crude resin that it was destruction to boiler iron. Geologically, the country is too young to have even any very good lignite beds, but the archipelago is now swarming with coal prospectors and coal experts, and there is such a general craze for coal that it may yet be forthcoming. At present the Nanaimo coal is depended upon entirely for steaming purposes, and the mail-steamer has to carry its own supply for the whole round trip, and take as freight the coal needed for the government ships at Sitka.

After Captain Hooper's mine of true coal at Cape Lisburn, on the Arctic coast, the most promising indications are at Cook's Inlet and around the Kenai peninsula. Although irrelevant in this connection, it perhaps naturally follows in this lignite vein to mention a coal mine accidentally discovered by an English yachtsman, Sir Thomas Hesketh, while cruising about Kenai. He treed an eagle on a hunting trip, and, other means failing to dislodge it, the sportsman

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set fire to the tree. The roots ran down into a coal seam, that, taking fire, was burning two years later, when the last ship touched there. Another escapade of the yachting party was to set a dead monkey adrift in a box, and when it washed ashore near Kodiak, the Indians, who had had a tradition that the evil spirit would come to earth in the shape of a little black man, fled that part of the island in terror and never went back.

CHAPTER XVIII.

KILLISNO0 AND THE LAND OF KAKES.

ROUND the point from Kootznahoo, a sharp

turn leads through a veritable needle's eye of a passage to Koteosok Harbor, made by the natural breakwater of a small island lying close to the Admiralty shore. This island was named by Captain Meade as Kenasnow, or "near the fort," as the Kootznahoos designated it to him. It is a picturesque, fir-crowned little island, and its dark, slaty cliffs are seamed with veins of pure white marble. Its ragged shores hold hundreds of aquariums at low tide, and in the way of marine curios there are, besides the skeletons of whales, myriads of star fish and jelly fish and barnacles strewing the beach; the acres of barnacles giving off a chorus of faint little clicking sounds as they hastily shut their shells at the sound of any one approaching.

On this little island of Kenasnow, the Northwest Trading Company has its largest station, Killisnoo, where codfish are dried, herring and dogfish converted into oil, and the air weighted with the most horrible smells from the fish guano manufactured there. The company has extensive warehouses, works, and shops on Kenasnow, and around the buildings there are gathered quite a village of Kootznahoo