Chief Yana Taowk Seemed To Take Pleasure In Kicking The Sitka
Bones That Lay In His Way, And Neither Old Nor Young Showed The
Slightest Trace Of Superstitious Fear Of The Dead At Any Time.
It was at the northmost of the Kupreanof Kake villages that Mr. Young
held his first missionary meeting, singing hymns, praying, and
preaching, and trying to learn the number of the inhabitants and
their readiness to receive instruction.
Neither here nor in any of
the other villages of the different tribes that we visited was there
anything like a distinct refusal to receive school-teachers or
ministers. On the contrary, with but one or two exceptions, all with
apparent good faith declared their willingness to receive them, and
many seemed heartily delighted at the prospect of gaining light on
subjects so important and so dark to them. All had heard ere this of
the wonderful work of the Reverend Mr. Duncan at Metlakatla, and even
those chiefs who were not at all inclined to anything like piety were
yet anxious to procure schools and churches that their people should
not miss the temporal advantages of knowledge, which with their
natural shrewdness they were not slow to recognize. "We are all
children," they said, "groping in the dark. Give us this light and we
will do as you bid us."
The chief of the first Kupreanof Kake village we came to was a
venerable-looking man, perhaps seventy years old, with massive head
and strongly marked features, a bold Roman nose, deep, tranquil eyes,
shaggy eyebrows, a strong face set in a halo of long gray hair.
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