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Show Had Never Seen a Horse, Wandering Alaskan Indian Astonished at Beasts of Burden in Prospectors' Camp Dog Teams the Only Traffic Carriers Known to Him, "It is hard to believe that there are persons living in the western hemisphere hemi-sphere who never saw a horse," said Quartermaster John F. Rice at the Normandie, "but such is the case.' I well recollect when with the Aber-crombie Aber-crombie expedition in 1899 we found ourselves one September night several hundred miles from nowhere. Just as the sun was sinking over the Alaskan range the camp was startled by the report of a rifle. "We sprang to our feet, prepared for any emergency, when our native guide discovered across the narrow valley an Indian who had just brought down a caribou. By the use of signs and signals sig-nals he was induced to come into camp. After we had tanked him up with strong tea and loaded him to the guards with pork and beans his tongue limbered up and, through one of the guides, he informed us that he was a Matanuski, by the way, the fiercest tribe in Alaska, and that he was hunting hunt-ing caribou. At the time we discovered discov-ered him he was 150 miles from the encampment of his tribe, which shows that the fellow had his nerve with him. He had never seen a horse and our pack animals excited his eurlosity and wonder. He declared that no member of his tribe had ever seen a horse, all transportation in his coun try being conducted by dog teams hitched to sleds in winter, and by pack dogs in summer. What amused him most was to see the animals eat grass, and every time they would grab a mouthful of forage he would almost go Into convulsions, he thought it so funny. In an ethnological sense the Matanuskis resemble the Apache Indians In-dians of our plains. They subsist on the flesh of the caribou and brown bear, the counterpart of the Rocky Mountain grizzly, and quite as ferocious, fero-cious, and are greatly feared by the other tribes in Alaska because of their fierce disposition and warlike nature. Our guides, who were shore Indians, seemed to be afraid of the newcomer, and he treated them with haughty contempt. con-tempt. Whenever he would shoot a fierce glance at them they would quail like whipped curs, and slink away from his sight. "We found the shore Indians quite a jolly lot of fellows. Compared with, the Matanuskis they were quite sociable so-ciable and inclined to be obliging to white people. When camped on the Yukon quite recently I heard a small band of them singing the familiar song, 'There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night' and that other tender ten-der ditty, 'Goo-Goo Eyes.' " Wasning-ton Wasning-ton Star. |