BASE BALL IN AMERICAN COLONIES—STORY OF LEAGUE GAMES IN THE LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN—BASE BALL POPULAR IN ALASKA, HAWAII, PORTO RICO AND THE PHILIPPINES.
1894-1910
THAT Base Ball follows the flag is abundantly proven by facts set forth in these pages. It has been played by our soldiers and sailors wherever they have carried the stars and stripes. But no one seems ever to have conceived the idea of taking teams of "All-America" pennant winners to give exhibitions to polar bears and seals on arctic ice during the short days that prevail in December in the land of the "midnight sun." And yet no less a personage than Brigadier General Frederick Funston, the famous hero of the Philippine War, writing in Harper's Round Table, in 1894—three years before he won his fame and his high commission—describes a league season of Base Ball in Alaska under most remarkable conditions. Here is the story:
"On the 29th day of March, 1894, a party of eleven Tinneh Indians and myself, after a twenty days' snowshoe journey across the bleak tundras and mountain ranges of Northeastern Alaska, reached Herschel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, sixty miles west of the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Here, in a little cove, locked fast in the ice, were the steam whalers Balasna, Grampus, Mary D. Hume, Newport, Narwhal, Jeanette and Karluck, all of San Francisco. Some of these vessels had been out from their home port three years. The preceding October, after one of the most successful seasons in the history of Arctic whaling, all had sought shelter in the only harbor afforded by this defiolate coast to lie up for the winter. The ice-packs coming down from the North had frozen in all about
