There are two tribes at Juneau, located at each extreme of the town.  The water was black with canoes coming to the feast and dance, bringing gifts to the tyhee, who, in return, gives them gifts according to their wealth, and a feast of boiled rice and raisins and dog-meat.  The richest men of the tribe dressed, in the rear of the building, in the wildest and most fantastic garbs, some in skins of wild animals.  There was a full panoply of blankets, feathers, guns, swords, knives, and, as a last resort, an old broom was covered with a scarlet case.  Jingling pendant horns added to their usual order, and the savage faces were painted with red and black in hideous lines.  Anything their minds could shape was rigged for a head-dress, and finally, when all was ready, they ran with fiendish yells toward the beach, some twenty yards, and there behind a canvas facing the water they began their strange dance.

Only one squaw was with them, and she was the wife of the tyhee (chief) giving the feast.  The medicine man had a large bird with white breast, called the loon.  While dancing he picked the white feathers and scattered them on the heads of the others.  The other squaws were sitting on the ground in long rows in front of the canoes reaching to the water’s edge, about 200 feet below.

Their music was a wild shout or croon by all the tribe, and the dancing is a movement in any irregular way, or a swaying motion given to the time given by the voices, and they only advanced a few inches in an hour’s time.

The tribe approaching in canoes had their representative men dressed in the same styles, only gayer, if possible.  When the canoes glided onto the beach, four abreast, it was the signal to drop the canvas hiding the host and party, and advance a little distance to meet them.  Then they broke ranks and made way for the visitors to approach the house with their gifts of blankets or other valuables for the tyhee.  Most of the Indians convert their riches into blankets.  These nations, seen by the tourist in an ordinary trip to Alaska, seem very much the same in all points visited.  None of them are poor, all have some money, and many have

Wealth counted by thousands.

To be sure, some of them are in a measure Christianized, but the odors arising from the homes of the best of them are such as a civilized nose never scented before.  Rancid grease, dried fish, pelts, decaying animals, and human filth made the strongest perfume known to the commercial or social world.

[Illustration:  Granville channel, Alaska.  Reached via the Union Pacific Ry.]