CHAPTER XXXV. REPORT ON EDUCATION IN ALASKA. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, BUREAU OF EDUCATION, ALASKA DIVISION, Washington, D. C., June 30, 1897. SIR: I have the honor to submit the twelfth annual report of the United States general agent of education in Alaska for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1897. There is in Alaska a school population of from 8,000 to 10,000; of these, 1,395 were enrolled in the twenty Government schools in operation during the fiscal year. Circle City-Miss Anna Fulcomer, teacher; enrollment, 43; population, whites, half-breeds, and natives. The development of the gold mines along the tributaries of the Upper Yukon has within the past two or three years attracted hundreds of miners, some of them with their families, into that region. Feeling the need for school facilities, on January 5, 1896, a mass meeting was held at Circle City, under the Arctic Circle, in the heart of the Birch Creek mining district, and the center of a population of several thousand, at which a petition for a trained public-school teacher was drawn up and subsequently forwarded to the Bureau of Education, and a volunteer lady teacher temporarily engaged. In their letter to the Bureau, the citizens guaranteed that they would erect a schoolhouse before the arrival of a professional teacher in September. To show that they were in earnest, over $1,100 was raised for school purposes and all the ladies in town were by the citizens constituted a school board. It was felt that such zeal should not be checked, and Miss Anna Fulcomer, who had previously done good service in the school at Unalaska, on the Aleutian Islands, was selected as teacher for Circle City. Miss Fulcomer thus describes her experiences: "I arrived here on August 17, 1896, finding no school building ready for me, and not a vacant house in town in which I could open the school. Consequently, I was obliged to wait, impatiently, until October 1, when the building was under roof; then I opened my school, in spite of the fact that the windows were not in and the doors were not hung. The men worked off and on while I was teaching, but it was not until December 12 that the work stopped. Since that time the schoolhouse has been as snug and comfortable as any place in town. During the winter nearly all the men in town left for the new gold diggings at Klondike, where they were more successful than they had been here. When the ice ran out of the Yukon the third week in May, these men came down the river, packed up their belongings, and moved to Klondike with their families. This is one reason for the sudden decrease in the school attendance during May. The other reason is that at last spring sunshine had come. "For seven months it had been so cold and stormy that the children could have no out-of-doors play life. In May the weather moderated, the sun shone warm and bright, the snow began to melt, ducks, geese, and song birds slowly came, and the children were fairly wild to be out of doors. It seemed almost as much of a sin to keep them in the house as it does to keep our faithful farm animals shut in the dim, musty barn and feed them on dry hay, when they deserve to be out frisking and enjoying the bright sunshine and eating the tender, fresh grass. Many native children dropped out, and I did not blame them. However, I kept on with an attendance of eleven and twelve pupils. But it suddenly grew intensely hot; all kinds of bugs and worms began to wake from their winter's sleep and came crawling out of the moss filling the chinks between the logs-bees, hornets, and our terrible pest, mosquitoes. Sometimes it was enough to make one's flesh creep. With such visitors as these the children could not study, so before long we had to stop school. ED 97-101 1601 |