had rounded Devil's Rock, upon which the ill-fated Mexico was to strike only a few days later. At one o'clock we were within sight of Tow Hill, the most
On the following afternoon we began to put miles between our boat and Tow Hill, and were nearing the mouth of Masset Inlet. With one more tack we have rounded the point and are headed due south, and a favorable tide bears us rapidly down the inlet; a minute more and we sight Masset—a strange, quaint little sleepy village, with its tall totem poles and row of cottages.
Masset is one of the two villages which to-day make up all that is left of the Haida nation on the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Haidas numbered seven thousand in 1840, and counted over thirty villages. To-day there are two inhabited villages and less than one thousand Haidas. They are a doomed race. Wars, smallpox, gross immorality, a change from old ways to new ways—their fate is the common fate of the American, whether he sails the sea in the North, gallops over the plain in the West, or sleeps in his hammock in the