CHAPTER XI
CARIBOU AND A NATIVE FAIR
July 15. Rainy and cold; cleared at seven in the evening. Left the head of Kotzebue Sound this morning at seven-thirty, for Cape Blossom, where the natives assemble from near and far to trade, but only one poor family was left. We went ashore and found them engaged in fishing for salmon with a net which was pushed out from the shore by a long pole sixty feet in length, made of three tied together. The Indians had gone fifteen or twenty miles up the coast, near Cape Krusenstern. Their tents were to be seen, looking like Oakland across the bay from San Francisco, so numerous they seemed. A small schooner, the Fowler, was at anchor there trading. Soon half a dozen canoes came alongside of us, and offered to trade, but asked big prices. The Captain obtained only two wolfskins, a deerskin, and a few muskrats, and bunches of sinew. [The Corwin then proceeded to Hotham Inlet and came to anchor about two miles from the native village called Sheshalek, inhabited by Kobuk and Noatak River Eskimos.]
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