Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 February 1892 — Lapps at Home. [ARTICLE]

Lapps at Home.

\V*u visited a Lapp eiioainpincut nt Trornso. Tho schoolboy whoso composition on tho noblo rod man said “ Tho Indian washos only once ti year; l wish I whs an Indian,” should alter his wish mid petition to bo a Lapp, t’orthoro is urt extornal evidence tliut the latter washes more than once a lifetime, and that at ids birth when lie is entirely defenceless. In tho summer a camp of the wandering Lapps drive several hundred of their reindeer to a valley only a few miles from Trornso, and it was there that we saw them. They are huddled in domo-shaped huts of stone, turf und birch hark, full of smoko from ft tire in tho contor of the hut, which finds an exit only through a hole in the top of tho structure and through tho door when it is opened. They have tho yellowish complexion, high cheek bones and low forehead of tho Mongolian race. They are short in stature, dirty, vermin-brood-ing and wretched. Tho reindeer is their support and treasure. Tho uidmul supplies them with milk, meat, clothes nnd transportation. Nearly everything that they need is made from some part of this useful uidmul. There particular Lapps earn something by the sale to summer tourists of the sliin and articles made from tlie horns of the reindeer. The nomadic Lapps and Finns of northern Norway and Sweden are comparatively few in number, miserable, somi-hurburous. But the Finns in Russian Finland, whom we saw afterward on our way from Stockholm to St. Petersburg, arc a very different sort of people, settled traders and fishermen, with well-built oitiesof considerable size, like Helsingfors.—[Washington Star.