DESJARDINS, JOSEPH ALPHONSE (370 - ENGLISH)

DESJARDINS   JOSEPH ALPHONSE  (370 - ENGLISH)

  DESJARDINS  JOSEPH  ALPHONSE

                      I copied a good part of the following from  the 

             book, ALASKA, written by a Frenchman from France,

             a Jesuit priest, and a missionary named Joseph Alphonse 

            Desjardins, who spent about 7 years in Alaska in all

            sorts of shelters.

                THE indigenous people among whom I lived uring my 

            sojourn in Alaska from 1908 to 1915 dwell in the central 

            valley of the Yukon.

Alaska, this immense peninsula situated in the North-West corner of the American continent, as large as one fifth of the United States, with a surface area of 600,000 square miles, is traversed from east to west by the Yukon River, one of the longest rivers in the world. Its source is in the Rocky Mountains and flows for 2000 miles into the large delta of the Bering Sea.

Alaska is the land of the Eskimos; it is a sterile, desolate area; it is the tundra; it is the frozen desert.  If one is describing the vast territory between the Arctic Circle and the Arctic Ocean, or if a large area of territory neighboring the Bering Ocean, this area of Alaska is truly the Sterile Land (the Barren Land), the land of the Eskimos, but if one wants to speak of the interior of the land, then that is another thing.  It is sometimes wild, untamed and very cold; but there is neither sterility nor desolation: some vegetables grow there and there are majestic forests which protect the land and the Natives from raging Arctic storms.