Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3OEIGIN OF THE ALASKANS WHENCE came the natives of Alaska ? This subject has invited much speculation and many conjectures. In the absence of any recorded history concerning them, the question will probably never be positively determined. Some have come to one conclusion and some to another. The consensus of opinion, however, points to an Asiatic origin. The theory that they are of Mexican origin has few to advocate it and very little to support it. It rests on the one fact that articles common to both have been found in Alaska. This proves nothing. The early Spanish explorers might have been the importers of these articles. Kaces wholly independent of each other have many things in common. The Hindoo of India has some things in common with the Mexican; and yet who would assert that the former sprang from the latter? It is only natural that different people, though occupying the very antipodes of the globe, should hit upon some ideas and produce some things alike. Human needs, especially where people stand on the same plane of life, are very much the same. The first implements of all untutored races would naturally be of stone; their first weapons, clubs, spears, bows and arrows; their clothing,skins and furs. So the possession of some things in common does not prove relationship. The theory that the native of Alaska is an offspring of the North American Indian stands about on the same par with the Mexican. Professor Dall, a man of exceptional ability, rather favours this view. He maintains, in one of his reports, that the natives of Alaska were once inhabitants of the interior of America, and that they were forced to the west and the north by tribes of Indians from the south. He makes the rather remarkable statement that he can in no way connect them with the Japanese or Chinese, either by...