Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

FOOTNOTES:

[64] The Cossacks who came with Altasov were rough-looking fellows of small size, lean and wiry, with large, thin-lipped mouths and very dark skins. Most of them were the offspring of Creole Russian Tartars and women from the native tribes of Siberia. They were filthy in their habits. Naturally cruel, they placed no restraint upon their actions when facing the docile Aleutes, and indulged in beastly excesses at frequent intervals. The custom of the Cossack hunters after establishing on an island, was to divide the command into small parties, each of which was stationed in or close by a native settlement. The chief or head Aleut was induced by presents to assist in compelling and urging his people to hunt. When they returned, their catch was taken and a few trifling presents made, such as beads and tobacco-leaf.

[65] In 1804 Baranov (the Colonial Governor) went from Sitka to the Okotsk with fifteen thousand sea-otter skins, that were worth as much then as they are now, viz., fully $1,000,000. Last year the returns from Alaska and the northwest coast scarcely foot up four thousand skins; but they yielded at least $200,000 directly to the native hunters, being ten times better pay than they ever brought under Russian rule to these people.

[66] It is a fact, coincident with the diminution of the sea-otter life under the pressure of Russian greed, that the population of the Aleutian Islands fell off at the same time and in the same ratio. The Slavonians regarded the lives of these people as they did those of dogs, and treated them accordingly. They impressed and took, under Baranov’s orders, in 1790-1806, and his subordinates, hunting-parties of five hundred to one thousand picked Aleutes, eleven or twelve hundred miles to the eastward from their homes at Oonalashka, Oomnak, Akoon, and Akootan. This terrible sea-journey was made by these natives in skin “baidars” and bidarkies, traversing one of the wildest and roughest of coasts. They were used not only for the drudgery of otter-hunting in Cook’s Inlet and the Sitkan archipelago, but forced to fight the Koloshians and other savages all the way up and down those inhospitable coasts. That soon destroyed them—very few ever got back to the Aleutian Islands alive.

[67] The “bidarka” is a light framework of wooden timbers and withes very tightly lashed together with sinews in the form indicated by my illustrations. It is covered with untanned sea-lion skins, which are sewed on over it while they are wet and soft. When the skins dry out they contract, and bind the frame, and are as taut as the parchment of a well-strung bass-drum. Then the native smears the whole over with thick seal-oil, which keeps the water out of the pores of the skin for quite a long period and prevents the slackening of the taut binding of the little vessel for twenty-four to thirty hours at a single time. Then the bidarka must be hauled out and allowed to dry off in the wind, when it again becomes hard and tight. Most of them are made with two man-holes, some have three, and a great many have but one. The otter-hunters always go in pairs, or, in other words, use two-holed bidarkies.

[68] Sixteen to 18 feet long, 6 to 10 feet wide, with coarse meshes; made nowadays of twine, but formerly of seal and sea-lion sinews.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE GREAT ALEUTIAN CHAIN.

The Aleutian Islands.—A Great Volcanic Chain.—Symmetrical Beauty of Shishaldin Cone.—The Banked Fires in Oonimak.—Once most Densely Populated of all the Aleutians; now Without a Single Inhabitant.—Sharp Contrast in the Scenery of the Aleutian and Sitkan Archipelagoes.—Fog, Fog, Fog, Everywhere Veiling and Unveiling the Chain Incessantly.—Schools of Hump-back Whales.—The Aleutian Whalers.—Odd and Reckless Chase.—The Whale-backed Volcano of Akootan.—Striking Outlines of Kahlecta Point and the “Bishop.”—Lovely Bay of Oonalashka.—No Wolf e’er Howled from its Shore.—Illoolook Village.—The “Curved Beach.”—The Landscape a Fascinating Picture to the Ship-weary Traveller.—Flurries of Snow in August—Winds that Riot over this Aleutian Chain.—The Massacre of Drooshinnin and One Hundred and Fifty of his Siberian Hunters here in 1762-63.—This the Only Desperate and Fatal Blow ever Struck by the Docile Aleutes.—The Rugged Crown and Noisy Crater of Makooshin.—The Village at its Feet.—The Aleutian People the Best Natives of Alaska.—All Christians.—Quiet and Respectful.—Fashions and Manners among Them.—The “Barrabkie.”—Quaint Exterior and Interior.—These Natives Love Music and Dancing.—Women on the Wood and Water Trails.—Simple Cuisine.—Their Remarkable Willingness to be Christians.—A Greek Church or Chapel in every Settlement.—General Intelligence.—Keeping Accounts with the Trader’s Store.—They are thus Proved to be Honest at Heart.—The Festivals, or “Prazniks.”—The Phenomena of Borka Village.—It is Clean.—Little Cemeteries.—Faded Pictures of the Saints.—Attoo, the Extreme Western Settlement of the North American Continent.—Three Thousand Miles West of San Francisco!—The Mummies of the “Cheetiery Sopochnie.”—The Birth of a New Island.—The Rising of Boga Slov.

After “lying-to” in a fierce southwester for three whole days and nights, in which time the fury of the gale never abated for an hour, our captain had so husbanded his resources that, when the weather moderated, he was able to clap on sail and get under swift headway; then we quickly left the watery area of our detention and soon opened up a splendid vista of Oonimak Island, in the early dawning of a clear June day. This is the largest one of that longextended archipelago which stretches as an outreaching arm for Asia from America; it presents to our delighted gaze a sweep of richly-colored, rolling uplands, which either slope down gently to the coast at intervals, or else terminate in chocolate-brown and reddish cliffs abruptly stopped to face the sea breaking at their feet. Very high ridges, with summits entirely bare of vegetation, traverse the centre of the island from east to west, while the towering snowy cone of Shishaldin and the lower, yet lofty, head of Pogromnia—two volcanoes—rear themselves over all in turn.

There are a multitude of huge and cloud-compelling mountains in Alaska, but it is wholly safe to say that Shishaldin is the most beautiful peak of vast altitude known upon the North American continent; it rears its perfectly symmetrical apex over eight thousand feet in sheer height above those breakers which thunder and incessantly roll against its flanks, as these precipitous slopes fall into the great Pacific Ocean on the south, and Bering Sea to the north. A steamy jet of vapor curls up lazily from its extreme summit, but it has not been eruptive or noisy at any time within the memory of the Russians. No foothills, that crowd up against and dwarf the presence of most high mountains, embarrass your view of Shishaldin; from every point of the compass it presents the same perfect cone-shape; rising directly from the water and lowlands of Oonimak, it holds and continues long to charm your senses with its rare magnificence; the distance of our vessel, ten or twelve miles away, serves to soften down its lines of numerous seared and blackened paths of prehistoric lava overflow, so that they now softly blend their purplish tones into those of the rich-hued mantle of golden-green mosses and sphagnum which cover the rolling lower lands.

A GLIMPSE OF SHISHALDIN

The Volcano of Shishaldin, 8,500 feet The Volcano of Pogromnia Sopka, 5,500 feet

The beautiful Peak of Shishaldin as seen from the entrance to Oonimak Pass, in Bering Sea. A Summer picture looking East over Oonimak Island

As we draw into Oonimak Pass—it is the gateway for all sailing vessels bound to Bering Sea from American ports, we, in closing up with the land, almost lose sight of Shishaldin, and come into the shadow of the rougher and less attractive volcano of Pogromnia. It shows ample evidence of its origin by the streams of blackened frost-riven basalt and breccia which are ribbed upon its rugged sides; great masses of eruptive rock and pumice lie here and there scattered all over the broad-stubbed head of the mountain; tons and tons of this material have rolled from thence in lavish profusion and disorder, clear down for miles to the very waters of the sea and straits, strewing that entire route with huge débris. Seams of snow and ice lacquer, in white, thread the bold black crown of this, the “booming” or “noisy” volcano of the Russians. It has not been in action since 1820, when it then threw showers of ashes and pumice; but those fires in its furnace are only banked, as it has been smoking in inky brown and black clouds at irregular and frequent intervals ever since; loud mutterings, deep rumblings and wide-felt tremors of land and sea are aroused by it constantly. This Island of Oonimak has been always regarded by the Russians as the roof of a subterranean smelting furnace with many chimneys through which telluric forces ascended from the molten masses beneath. It has been, and is still, the theatre of the greatest plutonic activity in Alaska. Russian eye-witnesses have described violent earthquakes here where whole ridges of the interior and coast have been rent asunder, cleft open, from which torrents of lava poured and columns of flame and clouds of ashes, steam and smoke, have risen so as to be viewed and noticed for a circuit of hundreds of miles around. These manifestations were always accompanied by violent earthquakes, and tidal-waves which often submerged adjacent villages on the sea-level, and also whole native settlements were swept away in mountain floods caused by the sudden melting of those big banks of ice and snow on such volcanic summits and their foothills, upon which the hot breccia from a vomiting crater fell.[69]

This great island in olden times was the one most densely populated by the Aleutes. The excesses and terrible outrages of Russian promishlyniks, followed by the wholesale work of death wrought by small-pox, have utterly eliminated every human settlement from the length and breadth of Oonimak, upon which no one has resided since 1847. Ruins on the north shore show the abandoned sites of numerous large hamlets; one was over four thousand two hundred feet in its frontage on the beach. The fear and superstition which those tragedies of early Russian intercourse produced in the simple minds of the natives, who belonged by birth to this great island, became at length so potent as to cause the entire and permanent abandonment of their desolated villages, which were once so populous and well satisfied.

The craters, and outflow therefrom, on Oonimak have been, from time immemorial, resorted to by the natives as their store-houses for sulphur, and that shining obsidian with which they tipped their bone-spear and arrow-heads; of it, also, they made their primitive knives, and traded the surplus stock to those Aleutes living elsewhere. They used the sulphur with dried moss in making fires, which they started with the fire-stick and by rocky concussions.[70]

Before entering the straits of Oonimak, we had a fine view of the entire sweep of the Krenitzin group, that presents a succession of the wildest and most irregular peaks and bluffs, everywhere seeming to jut up and fall into the sea, without a gentle slope for a human landing, as they face the Pacific billows dashing so incessantly upon their basaltic bases; the extreme eastern islet of the group is Oogamok, and it forms the opposite land from Cape Heethook on Oonimak, directly across the straits. A swarm of sea-parrots fly out from its rocky bluffs on the south shore, stirred into unwonted activity and curiosity by the near approach of our vessel, while a dozing herd of sea-lions suspiciously stretch their long necks into the air, smell us, then simultaneously and precipitately plump themselves into the foaming breakers just below their basking-place above the surf-wash.

It is very difficult to adequately define or express those varying impressions which are inspired by a panorama of these Aleutian Islands, such as unfolds itself to your eye when rapidly sailing along under their lee on a clear day. The scene is one of rare beauty. The water is blue and dancing until it strikes in heavy waves upon the rocky curbing of the islands, dashing up clouds of spray in white, fleecy masses against the dark-brown and reddish cliff-walls rising over all. The slopes and the summits of everything on land, save the very highest peaks, are clothed in an indescribably rich green and golden carpet of circumpolar sphagnum; exquisitely-colored lichens[71] adorn the stony sea-bluffs and precipices inland. Every minute of the ship’s progress in a free, fair wind shifts the fascinating scene—a new peak, another bold headland, a narrow pass, unfolds now between two islets that just before apparently were solid and as united as one island could be; a steamy jet of hot-spring vapor rises from a deeper, richer mass of green and gold than that surrounding it, and a dark-brownish column of smoke that issues from a lofty, cloud-encircled summit in the distance is the burning crater of Akootan.

Everything is so open here, is so plain to see, that when you try to find some points of resemblance to that picture which has challenged your admiration in the Sitkan archipelago, you find nothing—absolutely nothing—in common effect. It is, nevertheless, just as attractive, just as grand; but how different! All is laid perfectly bare to inspection here—no dense forests and tangled thickets to conceal the surface of the diversified uplands and mountain slopes, or to hide the innermost recesses of the deep ravines and narrow valleys. While there is a vast variation in the islands, yet there is, to the mind of him who views them for the first time, the most helpless inability on his part to distinguish or even recognize them apart when he happens to revisit them. They are seldom ever clearly defined, being more or less obscured in fog and heavy rifts of cloud. The top of a headland peeps aloft, sharply outlined, while all below is lost in the mists and banks of fog that roll up there from the sea. Then, in remarkable contrast, only a few miles beyond, the rocks at sea-level and foothills of the next island will be entirely plain to your sight; while everything above is concealed, in turn, by a curtain of the same moist and vanishing misty fog. Fog, fog, fog everywhere, rising and descending with the force of wind-currents that bear it—now veiling, now revealing the startling and impressive beauties of this vast sea-girt chain of the Aleutian archipelago. These majestic blue swells of the great Pacific join with those cold green waves of that lesser, shallower ocean of the North in holding with firm embrace the most impressive range of fire-eaten mountains known to the geographer. This cordon of smoking, grumbling, quaking hills and peaks, when once surveyed, leaves an enduring image, grand and superb, on the retina of that eye which has been so fortunate as to behold it.

As the little schooner bears up to the westward for our port of Oonalashka, after we have well passed the Straits of Oonimak, we sail into the shorter, choppy waters of Bering Sea—into its characteristic light gray-green hue of soundings. The precipitous walls of Akoon Island, rising like so much Titanic sandstone masonry everywhere abruptly from the surf, carry a broad green plateau, that rolls and extends high above the surrounding tide-level. Here, under their lee, on the north shore, we encounter one of those large schools of humpback whales[72] which are so common and so frequently met with in the Aleutian straits and passages. These animals rise and sink alongside of the vessel, in utter disregard of its presence; and even volleys and bullets of our breech-loading rifles rapidly fired into their broad, glistening, gray-black backs and sides do not seem to arouse or alarm them in the least. Down they lazily go, to soon rise again with a sonorous whistle as they “blow.” A cloud of whale-birds hover over and settle on the watery area occupied by the feeding whales, ever and anon rising, to alight again as the cetacean fleet leaves its feathered convoy tossing behind on the wavelets of the sea.

Our skipper, who has been a whaler in his youth, tells us, with a quaint air of contempt for what we so much admire, that these fish-like monsters are of no consequence in the eyes of a wise whaling captain, for though they are large enough, it is true, yet they are the wrong breed of whales—they are lean, fighting humpbacks, which, if struck with a harpoon, will run like an express engine for fifty miles or more, carrying a boat and crew of our species, either down in its rapid rush, or else diving in the shoals, over which it feeds, it rolls the death-dealing iron out or breaks it off on the bottom.

A stiff head-wind causes the course of the vessel to frequently lie close in to the shore where the massive bluffs of Akoon and Akootan rise in grim defiance, and from the shelves and interstices of which flocks of sea-parrots and little auks fly out in circling flights of curiosity and inspection around the schooner. As we watch the lazy motions of the whales, we recall the fact that on the summits of these bluffs and headlands now before us, the natives of Oonimak, as well as those to the country born, were in the habit of standing through long vigils of daily and nightly watch, as they went whale-fishing long ago after their own primitive fashion.

Nothing fit to eat is, or was, so highly prized by the Aleutes or Kaniags, as the blubber and gristle of a whale. To secure this luxury these savages were in the habit of subjecting themselves to infinite hardship and repeated bitter disappointment. The chase of the “ahgashitnak”[73] and the little “akhoaks”[74] was the important business of their lives in times of peace. The native hunter used, as his sole weapon of destruction, a spear-handle of wood about six feet in length; to the head of this he lashed a neatly-polished socket of walrus ivory, in which he inserted a tip of serrated slate that resembled a gigantic arrow-point, twelve or fourteen inches long and four or five broad at the barbs, and upon the point of which he carved his own mark

In the months of June and July the whales begin to make their first inshore visits to the Aleutian bays, where they follow up schools of herring and shoals of Amphipoda, or sea-fleas, upon which they love to feed. These bays of Akootan and Akoon were and are always resorted to more freely by those cetaceans than are any others in Alaska, and here the hunt is continued as late as August. When a calm, clear day occurs the natives ascend the bluffs and locate a school of whales; then the best men launch their skin-canoes, or bidarkas, and start for the fields. “Two-holed” bidarkas only are used. The hunter himself sits forward with nothing but his whale-spear in his grasp; his companion, in the after hatch, swiftly urges the light boat over the water in obedience to his order. Carefully looking the whales over, the hunter finally recognizes that yearling, or the calf, which he wishes to strike; for it is not his desire to attack an old bull or angry cow-whale. He calculates to a nice range where the “akhoak” will rise again from its last point of disappearance, and directs the course of the bidarka accordingly. If he is fortunate he will be within ten or twenty feet of the rising calf or yearling, and as it rounds its glistening back slowly and lazily out from its cover of the wavelets the Aleut throws his spear with all his physical power, so as to bury the head of it just under the stubby dorsal fin of that marine monster; the wooden shaft is at once detached, but the contortions of the stricken whale only assist to drive and urge the barbed slate-point deeper and deeper into its vitals. Meanwhile the canoe is paddled away as alertly as possible, before the plunging flukes of the tortured animal can destroy it or drown its human occupants.

ALEUTES WHALING

Natives of Akoon and Akootan killing Hump-back Whales

As soon as the whale is thus wounded it makes for the open sea, where “it goes to sleep” for three days, as the natives believe; then death intervenes, and the gases of decomposition cause its carcass to float, and, if the waves and currents are favorable, it will be so drifted as to lodge on a beach at some locality not so very remote from the place where it was struck by the hunter. The business of watching for these expected carcasses then became the great object of everyone’s life in that hunters’ village; dusky sentinels and pickets were ranged over long intervals of coast-line, stationed on the brows of the most prominent headlands, where they commanded an extensive range of watery vision. But the caprices of wind and tides are such in these highways and byways of the Aleutian Islands, that on an average not more than one whale in twenty, struck in this manner by native hunters, was ever secured; nevertheless, that one alone (when cast ashore) amply repaid the labor and the exposure incurred chiefly by watching day after day, in storm and fog, from the bluffs of Akoon and Akootan. The lucky hunter who successfully claimed, by his spear-head mark, the credit of slaying such a stranded calf or yearling, was then an object of the highest respect among his fellow-men, and it was remembered well of him even long after death.[75] Also, the greatest expression of respect for the size and ability of a native village and its people was the statement that it was so populous as to be able to eat all the meat and blubber of a large whale’s carcass in a single day!

As we “put about” under the frowning walls at Cape North, of Akootan, our captain says that the next tack will carry us into Oonalashka Harbor. Meanwhile, as we stand out into the waters of Bering Sea, we have a superb vista of the rugged, seared, and smoking summit of Akootan itself, which rears its hot head high above the rough, rocky island that bears its name. The beaches are few and far between, and there is but little land upon this island to invite a pedestrian, since masses of dark basalt, vesicular and olivine, are scattered in wild profusion everywhere. Over the northeast side steamy clouds arise from the path of a hot spring, which gushes out of the mountain, so hot that meat and fish are cooked in its scalding flood by the natives. On the very crest, as it were, of this whale-backed volcano, are two small, deep lakes that once were the vent-holes of subterranean fires. In olden times seven settlements, with a population of more than six hundred Aleutes, lived on the coast of this island, which, with Akoon, was then the whale-hunter’s paradise. To-day we find it utterly desolate, inhabited by a poverty-stricken hamlet of sixty-five natives, who are located on the southwest shore. The able-bodied men of this place spend the greater part of their time, however, far away from home on the sea-otter grounds of Saanak, being carried, like their brethren of Akoon and Avatanak, to and from that spot by a trader’s vessel.

Closely joined to them is the village of Akoon, in which fifty-five or sixty of their countrymen live on the northwest shore, who hunt and deport themselves as do those of Akootan. The Akoonites, however, enjoy the satisfaction of being nearer than their neighbors to that small, rugged islet of Oogamak, which stands in the path, as it were, of the great Pass of Oonimak; here on the low rocks a comparatively large number of sea-lions repair, and the little hair-seal also. For some reason or other, more of these last-named seals are found here than elsewhere in the entire large extent of this gigantic island chain. Akoon used to boast of many mighty whalers among its prehistoric population of five or six hundred natives, who, in fading away, have left the ruins only of eight settlements to attest their previous proud existence.

While we have noticed the poverty of the Akootans, yet, as we contemplate the wretched little village on Avatanak, close by and facing the straits, we must call this the most abject human settlement, perhaps, that we shall or can find throughout the archipelago—only nineteen souls living here in the most abandoned squalor and apathy, principally upon the sea-castings of the beach and mussels. Yet this island in olden days was the happy home for a busy little fishing community which then had three settlements on the banks of a beautiful stream that empties its clear waters into the sea on its north side. The most revolting chapter in all the long story of Russian outrage and oppression of Aleutian natives is devoted to a recital of the savage brutality of Solovaiyah and Notoorbin, who lived here during the winter of 1763.

Steam-vessels usually make the jagged headlands and peaks of Tigalda Island as their first land-fall en route from San Francisco to Oonalashka and Bering Sea. They then shape their course into Akootan Straits very easily and safely. The currents and winds, which always cause a variation of the ship’s course, never carry the vessel much to the right of Tigalda, or to the left of Avatanak, so that an experienced Alaskan mariner has but little difficulty—even though dense fog prevails, which only gives him fitful gleams of the rude landscape—in recognizing some one of the characteristic peaks or bluffs of these Krenitzin islands; then, with a known point of departure, he can literally feel his way into Oonalashka Harbor. He almost always has to do so, for seldom indeed does he enjoy as fair a sweep of these coasts of Avatanak and Tigalda as that viewed by the author, who scanned this rocky group in a calm, clear September afternoon of 1876.

To-day, Tigalda is an utterly abandoned island, given over during the summer to the undisturbed possession of foxes and those flocks of “tundra” geese which settle on the uplands to breed and preen in safety. When moulting here, they have the shelter of several lakes, upon which they swim in mocking security, even if crafty, lurking Reynard attempts to capture them. Near the largest lake on this island a settlement once throve. The inhabitants had control of a mine of red and golden-yellow chalk, which formed the base of a pigment highly prized by all Aleutes, far and near, for painting their ancient grass, and wooden hats, and other work of the same materials. On the north side of this island is a singular cluster of needle rocks which rise, as twenty-eight points, abruptly from the sea. On them, in positive security, the big burgomaster gull breeds, and the eagle-like pinions of this bird bear thousands of heavy bodies in stately flight over and around these nesting-places. The shrill, hawk-like screams of those “chikies” can be heard far out at sea, over the noise of the surf.

Oogalgan rock, which stands up boldly, and defies that fury of an ocean in the mouth of Oonalga Straits, is another striking headland which the mariner should be well acquainted with, for in times of arrival, when fog prevails, it is often the first land-fall made after leaving California or Oregon, when bound in for Oonalashka. It is a bleak, tempest-swept islet, presenting to the Pacific a black, reddish front of abrupt precipitous cliffs, without a sign of vegetation in the crevices; but, from the inside passages of Akootan and Oonalga, it exhibits two or three saddle-backed slopes covered with green mosses and lichens. Flocks of those comical shovel-billed sea-parrots breed upon it, and skurry in their rapid, noiseless manner all around.

At last our little schooner “comes about,” to make that “reach” which is to take us into the peace and quiet of a beautiful harbor, and, with every sail drawing hard, she fills away, and we glide swiftly ahead. That richly banded waterfall bluff on our right, and the striking outline of Kahlecta Point, over the “Bishop” rock under it, on our left, are eagerly scanned as we dash through the heavy roll of Akootan Straits and its violent tide-rips, the surf breaking on the “Bishop” and the point beyond it most grandly. A short hour, and the rough water is passed. We have entered Captain’s Harbor, and are “fanning” along over a glassy surface up to our anchorage off from, but close by, the village of Oonalashka.[76]

What San Francisco is to California, so is Oonalashka to all Alaska west of Kadiak. It is the point of all arrivals and all departures for and from this vast area. It is most fitly chosen, and beautifully located. From earliest time, an Aleutian legend never failed in its rendition to the dusky people then living in their yourts and kazarmies to vividly impress upon the native mind a full sense of those pleasures of life and hope at Illoolook; not, however, as expressed so sadly by our own bard, whose inimitable poem declares that the wolf howled long and dismally from this lovely shore of Illoolook.

Cold on his midnight watch the breezes blow

From wastes that slumber in eternal snow,

And waft across the wave’s tumultuous roar

The wolf’s long howl from Ounalaska’s shore.

If Campbell had only substituted “Akoon” for “Oonalashka” in this much-admired verse descriptive of savage desolation, he would not have marred a famous passage by the slightest error—but, at Oonalashka, never, never was a wolf ever known to be. In 1830, however, two of these animals got over from Oonimak as far west as Akoon—on drifting ice-floes, most likely. They were speedily noticed by the natives, who killed them at once, so Veniaminov says, for they were cordially hated by the Aleutes, since these beasts “kill foxes and spoil the traps.”

ILLOOLOOK, OR OONALASHKA

View of the Village looking West from the Cemetery

The panorama of land and water here in summer is an exceedingly attractive one—in its effect fully as charming as is the lovely spread of Sitka Sound; but its character is widely opposed. If we chance to view Oonalashka in clear sunshine during a day in the summer months, we will recall this picture to our mind’s eye often with positive pleasure. Here, strung along for half a mile just back of a curved and pebbly beach, is an irregular row of frame, single-story cottages, a large Greek church, and a fine parsonage, three or four big wooden warehouses with a wharf running well into the harbor, two or more trading-stores, one of them quite imposing in its size, and fifty or sixty barraboras—these constitute the abiding-places of the four hundred residents of Illoolook. They are placed upon a narrow spit of alluvium that divides the sea from the waters of a small creek which runs just back of the village right under these hills that abruptly rise there, to rise again, farther inland, to higher peaks in turn. A rich, dark, vivid green covers and clothes the mountain slopes, the valleys, and the hills, even to the loftiest summits, where only a light patch of glistening snow is now and then seen relieved thereon by the grayish-brown rocky shingle. These hills and mountains, rising on every hand above us from the land-locked shores of Captain’s Harbor, bear no timber whatsoever, but the mantle of circumpolar sphagnum, interspersed with grasses and a large flora, makes ample amends for that deficiency and hide their nakedness completely—in their narrow defiles and over the bottom-land patches grass grows with tropical luxuriance, waist-high, with small clumps of stunted willow-bushes clinging to the banks of little water-courses and rivulets. This is the only growing timber found anywhere on the Aleutian chain. It never becomes stouter than the thickness of a man’s wrist, and the tallest bushes in scattered thickets are never over six or seven feet high, rapidly dwindling in growth as they ascend the hillsides.

Especially gratifying is the landscape, thus adorned, to the senses of any ship-worn traveller, who literally feasts his eyes upon it. But if he should go ashore and step upon what appeared to him, from the vessel’s deck, to be a firm greensward, he will find instead a quaking, tremulous bog, or he will slide over a moss-grown shingle, painted and concealed by cryptogamic life, where he fondly anticipated a free and ready path. The thick, dense carpet of crowberry[77] plants that is spread everywhere over the hillsides, into which the pedestrian sinks ankle-deep at every step, makes a stroll very laborious when undertaken at any distance from the sea-beach.

If a wide survey is accomplished here of Oonalashka Island, the studies made will give a perfect understanding of every other island to the westward in this great archipelago, which is enveloped during the major portion of each year in fogs, and swept over by frequent gales. Such a combination of the elements, with mists and hidden sea-currents, make it a region dreaded by mariners; yet there is enough sunshine now and then to make the life of our landsmen very comfortable, even though they cannot engage in any other profitable calling than that of sea-otter trading with the natives.

Summers are mild, foggy, and humid. The average temperature is about 50° Fahrenheit. Winters are also mild, foggy, and humid, with a slightly colder average of 30°. The thermometer nowhere in the Aleutian chain ever went much below zero at sea-level. There is no record even of a consecutive three or four weeks in winter lower than 3° or 5° above zero. The mercury seldom ever falls as low as 10°. There is no nice distinction of the four seasons here. We can notice only two. Winter begins in October and ends by May 1st to 5th, when summer suddenly asserts herself for the rest of the year not thus appropriated.

Flurries of snow sometimes fall in August and often in September. It never stays long on the ground or even on the hilltops then, and generally melts as fast as it comes, away into December; but on the highest peaks it is seen all the year round. From January to May 1st or 5th, as a rule, snow covers everything in a spotless shroud from two to five feet deep. The high, blustering wintry gales make this snow intensely disagreeable to us, driving into and through air-tight crevices, and literally making the inmates of the village huts prisoners for weeks at a time. The dogs and sleds so common and characteristic elsewhere in the vast expanse of Alaska are never seen here. They would be a mere nuisance to these people, since the rugged inequalities of the Aleutian country simply prohibit their use.

This is, however, the chosen land for lingering fogs. The foggy cloudiness of the Aleutian Islands is most remarkable. There are not a dozen fogless days in the whole year at Oonalashka, though the sun may be seen half the time. Fifty sunshiny days in the year is a handsome average. Thunder is never heard, or seldom ever, while lightning is never seen, although the dark swelling clouds seem to constantly suggest it; also the northern lights—these auroral displays are almost unknown, and when seen are very, very faint.

But the wind—ah, the winds that riot over this range of rocky islands! They are always stirring. A perfect calm has never been recorded at Oonalashka. They are strong and come from all points of the compass; they are freshest and most violent in October and November, December, and March. Gales follow each other in quick succession during these months every year, lasting usually about three days each.

All sides of Oonalashka Island are deeply indented by bays and fiörds; but the points on the southern coast are avoided and not well known. They are not safe to approach on account of reefs and rocks, awash and sunken, which extend out to sea a long distance, and upon them the heavy billows of the Pacific Ocean break incessantly, as well as against the cliff-beaches of this forbidding shore. But around the northern and eastern margins of the island more good harbors are located than can be found on all of the other islands of the Aleutian archipelago put together. They call the bay which we entered, as we sailed in from Akootan Pass, “Captain’s Harbor.” It is the same place where the natives first gazed upon a white man and his ship after the frightful massacres of 1762 and 1763. Here in 1769 Layvashava, with a crew of those Siberian promishlyniks, anchored during the whole of one autumn and engaged the astonished inhabitants in active trade; but it was a guarded and tedious barter, since the Aleutes had a lively recollection of the terrible past, so recent and so bloody.

The island of Oonalashka chanced to be the scene of that only real desperate and fatal blow ever struck by the simple natives of the Aleutian chain at their Cossack oppressors. By 1761 the Russians had advanced to the eastward as far as Oonimak, and up to this time the relations between the natives and the white invaders had been altogether of an outwardly friendly character, the former submitting, as a rule, patiently to the demands of the newcomers, but the Cossack Tartars, encouraged by their easy conquests, rapidly proceeded from bad to worse, committing outrages of every kind, so that in 1762 they had reduced the Aleutes to the verge of absolute slavery, and continued to act in this manner until the patience and the timidity of the simple race were exhausted. The arrival of a brutal, domineering, lustful party of over one hundred and fifty of these Cossack Russians at Chernovsky, on the northwest coast of this island, in the summer of 1762, under the nominal command of a Siberian trader named Drooshinnin, proved to be “the last straw laid upon the camel’s back.” At a given signal the despoiled and ravished natives arose in every one of the then populous Oonalashkan settlements (twenty-four villages), flocked together, and unitedly fell upon their oppressors. They slaughtered every man except four, who happened, luckily for them, to have been absent from their vessels in Chernovsky Harbor, hunting grouse in the mountains. They were secreted in the recesses of a hot cave (that is still pointed out in the flanks of Makooshin Mountain), by the kindness of a charitable native, until they were able to escape and join the expedition of Solovaiyah, which appeared at the offing of Oomnak early in the following year. Fired by a recital of the Drooshinnin slaughter, this fierce Cossack turned his half-savage comrades, and worse yet, himself, loose upon the unhappy people of Oonalashka, and literally exterminated every male, old and young, that he could find, visiting each settlement in swift rotation of death and desolation. The men and boys fled to the fastnesses of the interior, followed by many of the women, and when the inclemencies of winter began to threaten their starvation, they humbly sued for peace, and became the abject and submissive vassals of the promishlyniks ever after.

A smoking volcano that rears its ragged crown high above all the surrounding hills and peaks is Makooshin; it juts, alone and unsupported, as a bold promontory, five thousand four hundred and seventy-five feet above, and into the green waters of Bering Sea. It is the chief point of scenic interest on Oonalashka Island, and the objective one in particular, if the day be clear, as the visitor sails up and into the harbor of Illoolook. While it is not near so majestic in elevation, or perfect of outline, as the Shishaldin Mountain, yet it is wild and striking. It can be easily ascended in July and August, when the winds do not blow their hardest, and when there is the least snow. No one remembers, nor is there any legend of any disturbance more serious than the shaking of the earth and loud noises which Makooshin is charged with. In 1818 it made the whole island tremble violently during a period of several days, emitting, however, nothing but dense columns of smoke, and fine ashes were sifted lightly everywhere with the winds. A resounding cannonade that then burst from its bowels sorely alarmed the people, however, who fled from their little hamlets clustered at its base.

THE VOLCANO OF MAKOOSHIN: 5,475 FEET

Viewed from Bering Sea: bearing S.E. by S. 26 miles distant. Sept. 26, 1876

Immediately under the steep slopes and large proportions of this quiescent volcano is a small settlement of sixty natives, housed in those typical Aleutian barraboras, with a small chapel, of course. Here, in 1880, lived the oldest inhabitant of the Oonalashka parish, an Aleut who had an undisputed age of eighty-three years. These simple souls have that same faith in the good behavior of Makooshin which distinguished the citizens of Herculaneum and Pompeii with reference to the dangers of Vesuvius. But the most amusing indignation is expressed by them in speaking of the bad behavior of an Oomnak crater, just across the straits from them, which in 1878 broke out into earthquakes, smoke, fire, and mud-showers, that so frightened the fish all about in these waters as to literally cause a famine at Makooshin. The finny tribes seem to be driven off by a trembling of the rocky bottom to the sea.

It was at Makooshin that the first Russians landed under Stepan Glottov in 1757. These traders in their reports declared that the natives here then “were very numerous and warlike,” and that they had a great deal of that peculiar trouble with them which we so thoroughly understand now in the light of their infamous record. Certain it is that a more innocent-looking, indolent group of Aleutes cannot be found in all this region to-day than are these descendants of the “blood-thirsty savages,” which Glottov saw in council here. They trap cross-foxes on the flanks of the great mountain which overshadows their settlement, and do but little else. They are not at all impressed by the volcano, and cannot understand why we should walk over a long portage of eight miles from Oonalashka Harbor just to ascend it: because, they say truly, that the chances are ten to one against our seeing anything when we shall get up there, inasmuch as fog will surely shut down over everything. In spite, however, of their argument we ascended, and they were right. We could not see a rod beyond our footing in any direction, and had it not been for their guidance, as the fog continued, we would have had a very difficult matter in regaining the lowlands at all that day.[78]

When Makooshin is seen from Bering Sea, in the early autumn, the snow rests upon its peculiar form so as to make a most striking suggestion of its being extended as a huge corpse, with a sheet thrown over the upper part only of the body. The natives have many folk-lore stories and legends which belong to the mountain; but these yarns are like the ballads of our sailor boys, they run on forever, ending in the same manner as they began. A hot spring sends a little rivulet of warm water across our path as we come down, and we notice that most of the boggy places are tinged with iron oxides.

In overlooking any of these islands from an interior view of high altitude, you are impressed by the large number of fresh-water lakes and ponds that nestle in the valleys, in the uplands, and even in the depressions on the loftiest summits. One of the prettiest pools of water which can be imagined is formed by the red, bowl-shaped walls of an extinct crater that makes the top of Paistrakov Mountain: this is a very prominent landmark just across the bay from Oonalashka village, looking west.

A superb survey of Oonalashka Island can be made by the ascent of Mount Wood, which rears its sharp, syenitic peak two thousand eight hundred feet behind and right over the village and harbor of Illoolook. The path to the summit is not difficult, and the panorama spread out under your eyes well repays the effort. It gives you a better idea of what a singularly mountainous region the island is, of the comparative absence of level or bottom-land areas—everything seems to spring from the surrounding ocean mirror, to hills—from hills, in turn, to mountains that end in sharp and rugged peaks. Upon the rocky, frost-riven shingle of these summits nothing can grow except those tiny polar lichens which we find existing, clinging to the earth and rocks of the uttermost limits of the North as far as we have knowledge.

If the fog lifts its gray-blue curtain from the unruffled, clear surface of Captain’s Harbor, and rolls back and away from the red and brown head of the cold crater of Paistrakov on the left, and from the black, jagged outlines of the “Prince” on your right, you will then have at your feet a picture of surpassing scenic beauty, both of contour and color, before and under your delighted vision. The rougher waters of Bering Sea have power no farther inland than their foaming at the feet of Waterfall Head and the dark bases of the Prince, for they rapidly fade into a smooth, still peace as the queer, hook-like sand-spit of Oolachta Harbor is reached, and the anchorage of Illoolook village is attained; its houses and barraboras just peep out from the obscuring foothills of the mountain upon which we stand, and we can faintly discern a delicate fringe of sea-foam along the border of a long-curved beach in front. Two schooners and a steamer lie motionless upon the glassy bay, like so many microscopic water insects.

Turning right about and looking south, our eyes fall upon a radically different landscape—a bewildering, labyrinthian maze of Oonalashkan mountain peaks and ranges, rising in defiance to all law and order of position, with that lovely island-studded water of the head to Captain’s Harbor in the foreground. Ridge after ridge, summit after summit, fades out one behind the other into the oblivion of distance, where the suggestion of a continuance to this same wild interior is vividly made, in spite of wreaths of fog and lines of snowy sheen, relieved so brightly by that greenish-blue of the mosses and sphagnum in which they are set. A few pretty snow-buntings flutter over the rocks to the leeward of our position; their white, restless forms are the only evidence or indication of animal life in our rugged vista of an Oonalashkan interior. Yet, could we see better, we might notice a lurking red fox, and flush a bevy or two of summer-dressed ptarmigan, feeding as they do on the crowberries, the sphagnum, willow-buds and insect-life.

While gazing into the endless succession of valleys, and scanning the varied peaks, a puff of moist wind suddenly strikes our cheeks—we turn to its direction and behold it bearing in and up from Bering Sea—a thick and darkening bank of fog which rapidly envelopes and conceals everything that it meets. It ends our sightseeing, and peremptorily orders a return to the village below from which we came.

When we look at the Aleutes we are impressed at once with their remarkable non-resemblance to the Sitkans. They constantly remind us of Japanese faces and forms in another costume. The average Aleut is not a large man; he is below our medium standard—being about five feet six inches in stature, though, of course, there are a few exceptions to this rule, when examples will be found six feet tall, and many that are mere dwarfs. The women are in turn proportionately smaller. The hair is coarse, straight, and black; the beard scanty; cheek-bones are broad, high, and very prominent; the nose very insignificant and almost flattened out at the bridge—the nostrils thick and fleshy; the eyes very wide-set—very small, too, with a jet-black pupil and iris; the eyebrows very faintly marked; the lips are thick; the mouth large; the lower jaw is very square and prognathous; the ears are small, set close to the head, and almost always pierced for brass or silver rings. The complexion is a light yellowish-brown; in youth it is often fair, almost white, with a faint blush in the cheeks; in middle age and to senility the skin always becomes very strongly wrinkled and seamed, with a leathery harshness. They all have full even sets of teeth, but never take the least care of them whatever. They have small, well-shaped hands and feet, but the finger-nails are exceedingly thin and brittle, bitten off, and never trimmed neatly. They walk in a clumsy, shambling manner, with none of that lithe, springy stepping so characteristic of the Rocky Mountain Indians. When we meet them as we saunter through the settlement, men, women, and children alike drop their eyes to the ground, and pass by in stupid humility, or indifference, as the case may be.

As we see these people at Oonalashka, so they are seen in every respect elsewhere, as they exist between Attoo and Bristol Bay and the Shoomagin Islands. They spend most of their time, men and women, in their skin-canoes, hunting the sea-lion and sea-otter—in codfishing and travelling to and from their favorite salmon-runs and berrying-grounds. Therefore, they have not enabled a symmetrical figure to develop—their legs are always sprung at the knees, some badly bowed, and all are unsteady in walking. While there is nothing about the countenances of the women or girls which will warrant the term of handsome, yet they are not so ugly as the squaws of the Sitkan archipelago. Many of them have very kindly expressions, and a gleam of true womanly instinct far above their surroundings.

No people are more amiable or docile than are these natives of the Aleutian Islands to-day. They are quiet and respectful in their intercourse with the traders, and are all duly baptized members of the Greek Catholic Church. A chapel is never absent from their villages. They hunt sea-otters and trap foxes for their means of trading for those simple luxuries and necessaries of their life which they cannot find in their own country. There are no other fur-bearing animals here, and no other industries whatever in which they can engage.

As they live here to-day, they are married and sustain very faithfully the relation of husband and wife. Each family, as a rule, has its own hut or barrabora. They have long, long ago ceased to dress in skins; but they still retain and wear the primitive water-proof coat or “kamlayka” and boots or tarbosars, which are made from seal and sea-lion intestines. In the poverty-smitten stations of Akoon and Avatanak the early bird-skin “parkas” will probably be most commonly worn; (but it is because these natives are so miserably poor in furs that they do so). They get from the trader’s store at every village a full assortment of our own shop-made clothes, and, on Sunday in especial, many shiny broadcloth suits will be displayed by the luckier hunters. The women are all attired in cotton dresses and gowns, made up pretty closely in imitation of the prevailing fashions among our own people. They wear the boots and shoes which are regularly brought up from San Francisco. But whenever they go out fox-trapping, or enter their bidarkas, they wear the “tarbosar” or water-proof boot of primitive use—the uppers to it are made from the intestines or the gullets of marine mammalia, and it is soled with the tough flipper palms of a sea-lion.

They have the same weakness for our conventional high stovepipe hats which we display; but the prevalence of those boisterous gales and winds peculiar to these latitudes prevents that use of the cherished “beaver” that they otherwise would make of it. Instead, they universally wear low-crowned, leather-peaked caps, to which they love to add a gay red-ribbon band, suggested most likely by the recollection which they have of that gorgeous regalia of the Russian army and naval officers, who were wont to appear in full dress very often when among them in olden time.

The Aleutian men dress very plainly, young and old alike, little or no attention being given by them to details of color or ornamentation, as is the common usage and practice of most semi-civilized races; but they do lavish a great deal of care and skill in the decoration of their antique “kamlaykas,” “tarbosars,” and their bidarkas: the seams of these garments and the boats are frequently embellished with gay tufts of gaily colored sea-bird feathers and lines of goose-quill embroidery.

True feminine desire for all the bright ribbons and cheap jewelry that a trader spreads before her consumes the heart of the Aleutian woman, especially if she be young and admired by her people. The women are, therefore, only limited by their means, when it comes to bedecking themselves with all of these trinkets and gewgaws of the kind which the artful trader exhibits for that purpose. They braid their hair up in two queues usually and let them hang down behind upon their backs. They never wear bonnets, or hats, for that matter; but as they go to church or from hut to hut they tie cotton handkerchiefs over their heads. When hasty little errands out of doors, or sudden gossiping trips are undertaken, a shawl is thrown over the woman’s head and held there, with the gathered ends together, under her chin by one hand. The shawls are of bright colors, and supply the place of woollen garments, though ready-made cloaks and dolmans are not uncommon at those points where the sea-otter-hunting harvest is the best: her skirts, overskirts, waists, and stockings are all of cotton.

As these people have really but one idea and no variation of occupation, they all live alike, in the same general manner. The difference between the families is only that of relative cleanliness and thrift. The most important and serious business of their shore-life is that embodied in the construction and repair of their huts, or barrabkies. If it is well built it makes a warm, dry shelter, and answers every requirement of a comfortable domicile. An excavation is made in the earth on the spot selected in the village site, ten or twelve feet square, and three or four feet deep. A wooden frame and lining is then put into this sub-cellar, and the excavated earth is then thrown back against and over it, with an outer wall of carefully-cut sod and boggy peat, being laid up two and three feet thick, sloping down to which is a well-thatched roof of grass and sedge, that abounds everywhere on the sandy margins of the sea-shore. Some of these huts are made very much larger than this pattern just defined, having regularly spread wings, like a Maltese cross, on the floor. The entrance to the barrabkie is usually through a low doorway that is made to a small annex or storm hallway, also built of sod and peat. This shields another little door, which opens into the living-room that the architect steps down into as he enters. A single window is put at the opposite end of the room from the door, in which a small glazed sash is usually employed. The floor is either covered with boards which the native has purchased from the trader, or else it is the hard-trodden earth itself, upon which the women strew grass and spread mats of the same texture.

A diminutive cast-iron stove is now very generally used by the Aleutes. It commonly stands right in the centre of the room, and upon it the cooking can be done, instead of being driven to the hallway fireplace, or “povarnik,” of the olden time, when the smoke then stifled them from the burning of that fat of seals, fish and birds, which was used very largely for fuel Therefore, they were obliged to stew and broil on a special fireplace constructed outside of the living-room. A great many old-style “peechka” stoves of the Russians are still in use, but no new ones are being made any more, since the introduction of our little iron stoves. This living-room of the hut is usually curtained or partitioned into two sections, one of which is the bedchamber, or “spalniah.” They have a great variety of beds and bedsteads, or bunks rather. They are proud of a well-stuffed couch of feathers, and take more real, solid comfort in sleeping thereon than in anything else that transpires of an enjoyable nature in their lives. The dealers sell a series of the most gaudily printed spreads for these beds, and sometimes you will be much surprised to see a white counterpane and fluted pillow-shams spread over an Aleutian couch. Those beds are always raised well up from the floor, and sometimes a curtain is specially hung around them—a borrowed Russian idea, unquestionably. A rude table, two or three empty cracker-boxes from the trader’s store for chairs, and a rough bench or two, is about all the furniture ever seen in a barrabkie. The table-ware and household utensils do not require a large cupboard for their reception. Cups and saucers of white crockery, highly decorated in flaring blue and red floral designs, plates to match, a few pewter teaspoons, will usually be found in sufficient quantity for the daily use of the family; and these are loaned out to a neighbor also, on occasions of festivity, when an entire circle of chosen friends join under the roof of some one barrabora in tea-drinking and “praznik” feasting.

The traders say that recently a great desire has come upon the natives to possess granite ware cooking utensils and drinking cups, or those porcelain or silicon-plated iron vessels which we designate by that name; they do not require washing, and can be easily wiped out and never rust. Tin-ware is at a great discount among them—it rusts. The odor of coal-oil will be noticed among many others in the barraboras of the Aleutians and Kadiaks in these days, for the general use of this fluid has been established. The glass lamps and the smell suggestive of that illuminant can be plainly detected by any stranger who goes into a village up there now, in spite of the fishy and other indigenous strong aromas, which are in themselves equally odious and penetrating. However, an old Aleutian fogy will occasionally insist upon using a primitive stone lamp, with a wicking of moss or strips of cotton cloth.

A marked fondness for pictures, old engravings, chromos, in fact anything that goes in the line of caricature or illustration, is manifested by the Aleutes. They paste all sorts of scraps from newspapers, magazines, and theatrical posters, which the traders give them, upon the walls of the barrabora. The Russians early took notice of this trait, and the priests of the Greek Church made good use of it by distributing richly-colored and gilded portraits of holy men and women, the Imperial family, and mythological church groups.

As the Aleut, his wife and children, and a relative or two, perhaps, are living in the barrabora, he enjoys a warm and comfortable shelter as long as he keeps it in good repair. He does not place what he has of surplus supply in a cellar—such fish, fowl, or meat as he may have in excess of immediate consumption is hung up outside of his door on a wooden frame, or “laabaas.” Here it is beyond the reach of dogs, and is quite secure, inasmuch as he lives in no danger or dread of theft from the hands of his neighbors.

He is a fish-eater, like a vast majority of the rest of native Alaskans. He has cod, halibut, salmon, trout, and herrings in overflowing abundance, and all swim close to his door. He hooks and nets his piscine food-supply all the year round as it rotates with the seasons. He varies this steady diet with all the tea, sugar, and hard bread, or flour, that he can purchase from the trader’s store; some other little articles in the grocery line, such as canned California fruits, are especially agreeable to his palate. These natives call on the trader for biscuits, or sea-crackers, not because they like this hard bread best, but on account of the scarcity of fuel wherewith to properly bake up flour.

While fish is the staff of Aleutian daily life, yet nature has vouchsafed many simple luxuries to those people: these are sea-urchins, or echinoderms, and the eggs and flesh of the several species of water-fowl peculiar to and abundant in such latitudes. Then, in August and September, the valleys, hillsides, and margins of the sea are resorted to by the natives for the huckleberries, the “moroshkies,” the crowberries, and giant umbelliferous stalks of the Archangelica, found ripe and ripening there. The Aleutian huckleberries are much better than those of the Sitkan district, and are really the only good indigenous fruit, according to the evidence of our palates.

OONALASHKAN NATIVES COD-FISHING

An Aleutian Fisherman and Bidarka hooking “Treesca” in Oolachta Harbor, Oonalashka Island

Another peculiarity of an Aleutian village, which strikes a stranger’s eye, is the irregular but frequent coming and going of a number of old women, and younger ones, to and from the mountains; they always return with a burden of what appears to be coarse grass upon their backs, in such huge bundles that the bearers are quite hidden from view. These females, while not literally hewers of wood, are really working as hard. They are gathering the only natural resource which is afforded them for fuel. When long and tedious journeys along the coast fail to reward a search for drift-logs, which are found here and there in scant number at the best, then the women repair to those spots on the mountain sides where the slender strawberry-like runners of the crowberry[79] have grown and intergrown into thick masses. These they pull from the earth, as we would gather dried grasses. A large bundle is made for each woman in the party, and then, assisting each other to load up, they stagger down the hillside trails, under these heavy burdens, back to their respective barraboras. This “sheeksa” is then air-dried, or weathered several weeks, so as to get it ready and fit for use in those odd Russian ovens or “peechka” stoves. It is twisted into short wisps, two or three of which at one time are ignited, and thrust as they blaze, into the oven; then the door of the peechka is closed tightly and promptly. This makes a hot fire for a few moments; every particle of the heat is absorbed by the thick, brick walls of the oven, so that, as it radiates slowly, the small apartment within the earthen walls of the barrabora is kept at a tropical temperature, for several hours at a time, without a renewal of this fire. To-day, however, at Oonalashka, and at three or four other central sea-otter villages, the natives are buying cord-wood and coal from the traders. The wood is brought from Kadiak, while the coal comes up as ballast from San Francisco in the traders’ vessels.

Housed and fed in this manner, the entire Aleutian population have been, and are living; as their children grow up and inherit the parental homes, or branch out, after marrying, to erect barraboras of their own, they repeat the same methods of their ancestry. In a normal condition the Aleut is a quiet, peaceful parent, affectionate but yet not demonstrative; he is kind to his wife and imposes no real burden upon her which he does not fully share himself. The children grow up without harsh discipline; still they are not the recipients of marked attention. The family life, when the head or the hunter is at home, is one of very simple routine; he is in bed most of the time, striving to balance that account of the very many sleepless nights he has passed in his bidarka scouring sea-otter reefs during his recent three months’ trip, to Saanak or the Chernaboors. The others rise at broad daylight, light their blubber-fire in the outside kitchen, and prepare a slight breakfast of crackers, tea, and boiled fresh fish. This meal is carried into the living-room, where the “peechka” has been started up, so as to thoroughly warm that apartment. If this native is the possessor of a little iron stove, of our own make, then all heating and cooking is done on the one fire made in it and the smoke of that burning fat and oil with which so much of their fuel of drift-wood and sheeksa is mixed, goes up the pipe and leaves no annoying trace behind. Between the members of the household there is never much conversation—the topics are few, indeed, beyond the ordinary routine of irregular meals, and the desultory rising and retiring of a family. This monotony of their lives is very much enlivened by exercises of the church, to which they are constantly going and coming from. But when they meet in a neighboring barrabkie, or receive friends in their own, then tongues are loosened, and conversation flows freely, especially over cups of tea between the old men and women; the latter are incessant talkers under such genial encouragement.

Although the Aleut does not give you, at first, the least idea that he has ever had any severe training of a heroic order, yet it is a fact that most of the young men, ere they become recognized hunters, had to “win their spurs,” as it were. The old men always impress upon the native youth that great importance of strictly observing the customs of their forefathers in conducting the chase, and that neglect in this respect will surely bring upon them disaster and punishment; therefore the young men are encouraged to go to sea in gales of wind, and make difficult landings with their bidarkas at surf-washed places. Before the advent of Russian priests, every village had one or two old men at least, who considered it their especial business to educate the children; thereupon, in the morning or the evening when all were at home, these aged teachers would seat themselves in the centre of one of the largest village yourts or “oolagamuh:” the young folks surrounded them, and listened attentively to what they said—sometimes failing memory would cause the old preceptors to repeat over and over again the same advice or legend in the course of a lecture. The respect of the children, however, never allowed or occasioned an interruption of such a senile oration.

But to-day their education, in so far as the strict sense of the term goes, is received from the priests and deacons of the Greek Church. They seem to have abandoned all the shamanism, the mummery and savagery of their primitive lives eagerly and willingly for those practices and precepts of the Christian faith; in this strange accord the Kadiakers also joined. No recourse to violent measures was ever resorted to by the Russian missionaries, who were always met more than half-way by these singular heathen. An Aleut is the better Christian when fairly compared with the Kaniag—the latter is not half as sincere or faithful.

Stepan Glottov, in 1759, wintered, first of all white men, at Oomnak Island, and he lived there then in perfect peace and quiet with the natives; so amicable were his relations with these people, that he persuaded their chief to be baptized, and to allow a little son to go with Glottov to Kamchatka, where the youth lived several years, then returned, well versed in the Russian language, and assumed the title of supreme chief of the Aleutians; this is the earliest record made of the conversion of these people. In 1796 the first priest or missionary came among them; and never, from that time to the present moment, has a representative of that church ever been treated otherwise than well by these islanders.

The Aleutian brain has streaks of genuine philosophy and a keen sense of humor. A priest once reproached an aged sire for allowing a worthless son to worry and vex the household. “Why, Ivan,” said he, “do you, who are so good, and Natalie, your wife, also most excellent, permit this rude child to so deport himself?” “Ah, father,” replied the old man with great emotion, “not out of every sweet root grows a sweet plant!”

This inherent religious disposition of the Aleut is the reason why we find a Greek church or a chapel in every little hamlet where his people live. The exclusion of all other sects, however, is natural, since the character of the ornate service and frequent “prazniks,” or festivals of that chosen denomination, suits him best. The Greek Catholic Bishop of the Alaskan diocese now resides in Oonalashka. He used to make Sitka his headquarters, but the depopulation of the whites there after the transfer of the country made that spot too lonely for him, and he soon removed to San Francisco. A few years ago a final transfer was made to Illoolook. As far as possible the natives support their own respective chapels, erect the church structures, keep them in repair, and make an annual contribution sufficient to support a reader, or “deacon,” so that the order of daily services shall be constantly in operation. When a community is too poor, however, to do this, then the bishop has money supplied to him by the Russian Home Church Fund, which he uses to maintain the proper conduct of those chapels situated at impecunious settlements. Of course these outlying and far-distant hamlets of the Aleutian archipelago are unable to secure and pay, each one, for the services of a regularly ordained resident priest. Therefore a parish priest, either from Oonalashka, Belcovsky, Sitka, or even San Francisco, is in the habit of making a tour of the entire Alaskan circuit once in every year or two, so as to administer the higher offices of the church, such as baptism, marriage, etc.

Most amusing is that intense outward piety of these grimy people—they greet you with a blessing and a prayer for your good health in the same breath, and they part from you murmuring a benediction. They never sit down to their rude meals without asking the blessing of God; never enter a neighbor’s house without crossing themselves at the threshold; and in most of the barraboras a little image-picture of a patron saint will be found in one corner, high up on a shelf, to which the face of every member of the family is always turned when they rise and retire—the head bowed and the cross sign made before this “eikon,” in humility and silence. These people also carry the precepts and phraseology of the church upon their lips, constantly repeating them during holy weeks and pious festivals.

The fact that among all the savage races found on the northwest coast by Christian pioneers and teachers, the Aleutians are the only practical converts to Christianity, goes far, in my opinion, to set them apart as very differently constituted in mind and disposition from our Indians and our Eskimo of Alaska. To the latter, however, they seem to be intimately allied, though they do not mingle in the slightest degree. They adopted the Christian faith with very little opposition, readily exchanging their barbarous customs and wild superstitions for the rites of the Greek Catholic Church and its more refined myths and legends.

At the time of their first discovery, they were living as savages in every sense of the word, bold and hardy, throughout the Aleutian chain, but now they respond, on these islands, to all outward signs of Christianity, as sincerely as our own church-going people. The question as to the derivation of those natives is still a mooted one among ethnologists, for in all points of personal bearing, intelligence, character, as well as physical structure, they seem to form a perfect link of gradation between the Japanese and Eskimo, notwithstanding their traditions and their language are entirely distinct and peculiar to themselves; not one word or numeral of their nomenclature resembles the dialect of either. They claim, however, to have come first to the Aleutian Islands from a “big land in the westward,” and that when they came there first they found the land uninhabited, and that they did not meet with any people, until their ancestors had pushed on to the eastward as far as the peninsula and Kadiak. Confirmatory of this legend, or rather highly suggestive of it, is the fact that repeated instances have occurred within our day where Japanese junks have been, in the stress of hurricanes and typhoons, dismantled, and have drifted clear over and on to the reefs and coasts of the Aleutian Islands. Only a short time ago, in the summer of 1871, such a craft was so stranded, helpless and at the mercy of the sea, upon the rocky coast of Adak Island, in this chain; the few surviving sailors, Japanese, five in number, were rescued by a party of Aleutian sea-otter hunters, who took care of them until the vessel of a trader carried them back, by way of Oonalashka, to San Francisco, and thence they returned to their native land.

A number of the males in every Aleutian village will be found who can read and write with the Russian alphabet. This education they get in the line of church exercises, inasmuch as they are all conducted in the Russian language, though the responses for the congregation usually are made by Aleutian accents. An Aleut grammar and phonetic alphabet, adapted to the expression of the Russian language, is used in all of these hamlets. It was prepared by that remarkable man, Veniaminov, in 1831: a large number of the books were printed, and they have been in use ever since. The young men and boys are taught as they grow up, by the church deacon usually, to read, first in the Aleut dialect, then in the Russian. The traders take advantage of this understanding among these people, and facilitate their bartering very materially. They give every hunter a pass, or grocer’s book, in which he keeps a regular account, charging what he may need, in advance of payment, so enabling his family to get what it requires during his long absence on the hunting-grounds. In short, that book is a regular letter of credit at the store, and the traders have found it the best way of influencing the natives in their favor, and also of aiding the superior hunters.

This method of credit has developed, and made manifest the truth of a strong statement in which Veniaminov declared his belief that these people were really honest at heart, totally unlike all other savages in Alaska, or elsewhere on the American continent, for that matter. Many of the hunters, when they are about to depart for a long four or five months’ sea-otter chase, and consequent absence for such length of time from home, go to the trader and tell him to restrict their wives from overdrawing a certain pecuniary limit, which they fix of their own idea as to what they can afford. This action, however, is the purpose of true honesty only, for those same hunters, when they get back, after first religiously settling every indebtedness in full, make at once a heavy draft upon any surplus that they may have, going so far in the line of extravagance and singular improvidence, in some instances, as to purchase, on the spur of the moment, music-boxes worth two hundred dollars each, or whole bolts of silk and costly packages of handkerchiefs, neckties, and white linen, and many other things of a like nature, wholly unwarranted by the means of the hunter, or of any real service to him or his family.

The church “prazniks,” or festivals, are very quiet affairs, but when the Aleut determines to celebrate his birthday or “eman nimik,” he goes about it in full resolution to have a stirring and vociferous time. Therefore he brews a potential beer by putting a quantity of sugar, flour, rice, and dried apples (if he can get the latter) into a ten or twenty-gallon barrel, which is filled with water. He sends invitations out to his friends so dated as to bring them to the barrabkie when a right degree of fermentation in the kvass-barrel shall have arrived; sometimes the odor of that barrel itself is sufficient to gather them in all on time. Some one of the natives who is famous for natural and cultivated skill in playing the accordion or concertina, is given the post of honor and the best of the beer; he or she, as the case may be, soon starts the most hilarious dancing, because Aleutes are exceedingly fond of this amusement, especially so when stimulated by beer. If the apartment is large enough, the figures of an old Russian quadrille are gone through with, accompanied by indescribable grimaces and grotesque side-shuffles of the dancers, the old women and young men being the most demonstrative. Usually, however, a single waltzing couple has the floor at one time, whirling around with the liveliest hop-waltz steps, and as it settles down out of breath, a fresh pair springs up from the waiting and watching circle. The guests rapidly pass from their normal sedateness into the varying stages that rotate between slight and intense drunkenness.

These kvass orgies, on such occasions, are the only exhibitions of disorder that the people of the Aleutian Islands and Kadiak ever afford. At Belcovsky, and at every point where the sea-otter industry is most remunerative to the native hunter, there you will find the greatest misery, due wholly to those beery birthday celebrations as sketched above.

Some traders often give entertainments to the natives, in which they wisely offer plenty of strong tea, with white sugar-lumps, and nothing else; these parties are quite reputable and highly enjoyed by all concerned. The floor of the warehouse, or the living-rooms of the trader himself, are cleared, and this allows ample space for a full-figured cotillon or quadrille, or a dozen or two of dancing couples. The ball-room of the chief trading-firm at Oonalashka is a very animated and extensive prospect when an evening-party of this sort is in fine motion. The familiar strains of “Pinafore,” the “Lancers,” “John Brown,” and “Marching through Georgia,” rise in piercing strength from the vigorous men and women who are squeezing the accordions, and every now and then a few of the young Aleutes break out into a short singing refrain, using English words to suit the music, as they caper in the high-tide of this festivity. It is the young men, however, only, who thus vocalize; the women, when sober, old and young, are always silent, with downcast eyes, and are very abject in demeanor.

The great feminine solace in a well-to-do native hut is recourse to a concertina or accordion, as the case may be. These instruments are especially adapted to the people. Their plaintive, slow measure, when fingered in response to native tunes and old Slavonian ballads, always rise upon the air in every Aleutian hamlet, from early morning until far into night. An appreciation of good music is keen: many of the women can easily pick up strains from our own operas, and repeat them correctly after listening a short while to the trader or his wife play and sing. They are most pleased with sad, wailing tunes, such as “Lorena,” the “Old Cabin Home,” and the like.

Thus we note those salient characteristics of Aleutians, who are the most interesting and praiseworthy inhabitants of Alaska. There are not a great many of them, however, when contrasted numerically with the Indians and the Eskimo of this region; but they come closer, far nearer to us in good fellowship and human sympathy. We turn, therefore, from them again to resume our contemplation of the country in which they live. The sun is burning through a gray-blue bank of sea-swept fog, ever and anon shining down brilliantly upon the beautiful, vividly green mountains, and glancing from the clear waters of Oonalashka’s harbor. It tempts us to walk, to stroll, when the trader tells us that we can easily cross over to Beaver Bay, where Captain Cook anchored and refitted in 1778. So we go, and a patient, good-humored native trots ahead to keep us on the road and bring us back safely, lest the fog descend and shut all in darkness which is now so light and bright. A narrow foot-trail that is deeply worn by the pigeon-toed Aleutes into moss and sphagnum, or fairly choked by rank-growing grasses and annuals in low warm spots, winds around and over the divide between Oonalashka village and Borka. As we reach the rippling, rocky strand of Beaver Bay, a cascade arrests our attention on account of its exceeding beauty. Tumbling down from the brow of a lofty bluff of brown and reddish rocks, a rivulet falls in a line of snowy spray, which reflects prismatic colors from the rocks and sunlight as it drops into the cold embrace of the sea. While we, resting on the grassy margin of the beach, enjoy this charming picture, our native turns his face to the bay, and he points out to us the pebbly shore where Captain Cook “hove down” his vessel, more than a century ago, and then scraped those barnacles and sea-weed growths from that ship’s bottom. Here the English discoverer first came in contact with the natives of Oonalashka, and there are people over on Spirkin or “Borka” Island, just across the bay from us, who will recite the legend of this early visit of that Englishman with great earnestness, circumspection, and detail, so faithfully has the story been transmitted from father to son. Their own name of Samahgaanooda was changed voluntarily to English Bay, or “Anglieeski Bookhta,” by which designation they themselves call the harbor to-day.

A broad expanse of this bay lies directly between us on the north side and the village of Borka, which is perched on a narrow beach-level shelf of an island that rises bold and abruptly, high from the sea. This hamlet is the most remarkable native settlement in all Alaska with respect to a strange and unwonted cleanliness which is exhibited in this community of one hundred and forty Aleutes, who are living here to-day in twenty-eight frame houses, barraboras, and a chapel. What makes it still more remarkable is the fact that these people are in close communication with their kindred of Oonalashka, who are distant only a few hours’ journey by canoe and portage, and who are not especially cleanly to the slightest noteworthy degree. Those people of Borka are living in the cleanest and neatest of domiciles. They are living so without an exceptional instance, every hut being as tidy and as orderly as its neighbor. They have large windows in the small frame houses and barraboras, scrub and sand the floors, and keep their simple furniture, their beds, and window-panes polished and bright. Glass tumblers, earthen pots, and wooden firkins filled with transplanted wild-flowers stand on the tables and deep window-sills to bloom fresh and sweet all the year round. A modest, unassuming old Russian Creole trader, who has lived there all his life, and who was living recently, is credited with this influence for the better with the natives. Certainly he is the only one who has ever succeeded in working such a revolution in the slovenly, untidy household habits of these amiable but shiftless people.

As we retrace our steps to Oonalashka village we become fully impressed with the size of this island. It bears so many mountain spurs, with a singularly rugged, cut-up coast, in which the deep indentations or gulf-fiörds nearly sever the island in twain as they run in to almost meet from the north and south sides. Beautiful mats of wild poppies are nodding their yellow heads as the gusts sweep over them on the hillsides, and a rank, rich growth of tall grasses by the creek-margins and the sea-shore in sheltered places shimmers and sways like so many fields of uncut green grain do at home. Vegetation everywhere, except on the summits of the highest peaks and ridges and the mural faces of the bluffs! Even there some tiny lichens grow, however, and give rich tones of golden ochre and purplish-bronzed reflections from the cold, moist rocks, whereto they cling.

We pause in that little cemetery, just outside of the village of Illoolook. It is on a small knoll, under higher hills that rear themselves over it. Its disorder and neglect is a fair reminder of what we see in most of our own rural graveyards. The practice of all these natives is to inter by digging a shallow grave. The body is prepared in its best clothes, and coffined in a plain wooden box. A small mound and a larger or smaller wooden Greek cross is the only monument. Tiny oil-portraits of their patron saints, painted on tin or sheet-iron, especially made for these purposes, and furnished by the Church, are tacked to the crosses, with now and then a rude Russian inscription carved or painted thereon in addition. During certain periods of the summer, when the weather is pleasant, little squads of relatives will come out here from the village and pass a whole day in tea-drinking and renovating the crosses, sitting on the mounds as they chat, work, and boil their samovar. The Illoolook church-bells ring—they arouse us to resume the walk thus interrupted in this small city of Aleutian dead. As we enter the town, we see the occupants of turfy barraboras and frame cottages hastening from every quarter and trooping to the door of a yellow-walled and red-roofed house of worship. Perched on that three-barred cross which crowns the cupola of this chapel are half a dozen big black ravens, all croaking most lugubriously, as the clanging chimes peal out below them. That is their favorite roosting-place. The natives take no notice of those ill-omened birds, which as feathered scavengers, hop around the barraboras in perfect security, since no one ever disturbs them, unless it be some graceless trader who is anxious to test the killing power of a new shotgun. They breed in high chinks of the bluffs, and find abundant food cast upon the beaches by the sea. A few domestic fowls, some with broods of newly-hatched chicks, are running about or scratching around the place. The priest’s shaggy little bull and cow stand in front of a small stable or “scoatnik,” lazily chewing their cud. There is no other live-stock in the hamlet, except a few dogs and cats; not a great many of the latter, however.

West of this Island of Oonalashka is a narrow-lined stretch of more than eight hundred miles of rapidly-succeeding islets and islands, until the extreme limit of the Alaskan border is reached at Attoo. In all this dreary wilderness of land and water only three small human settlements are to be found to-day, with a population of less than five hundred natives and six or seven white men. Attoo, Atkha, and Oomnak are the only villages, the last closely adjoins Oonalashka, on a large island of the same name.

THE VILLAGE AND HARBOR OF ATTOO

This Settlement is the extreme Western Town of North America: it is three thousand miles West of San Francisco

Attoo is the extreme western town which is or can be located on the North American continent. It is the first land made and discovered by the Russians, as they became acquainted with the Aleutian chain. Michael Novodiskov, a sailor who had survived Bering and the wreck of the St. Peter in 1741, took command of a small shallop in 1745, and sailed from Lower Kamchatka. He reached Attoo, and also landed on its sister island of Aggatoo, in the same season. The Aleutes were then numerous, bold, and richly supplied with sea-otter skins. Now, nothing but the ruined sites of once populous villages remain behind to attest the truth of that early Russian narrative; and the descendants, who number but a little more than one hundred souls, are living in a small hamlet that nestles in the shelter of that beautiful harbor on the north side of Attoo Island, at the rear of which abrupt hills and high mountains suddenly rise. A sand-beach before the village is fringed by a most luxurious growth of rank grass, that wild wheat of the north, the tasselled seed-plumes of which are waving as high as the waists, and even the heads of the natives themselves.

Sea-otters have been virtually exterminated or driven from the coast here, so that the residents of Attoo are, in worldly goods, poor indeed; and a small trader’s store is stationed here, more for the sake of charity than of commercial gain. But they have an abundance of sea-lion meat, of eggs and water-fowl; a profusion of fish—cod, halibut, algæ mackerel, and a few salmon. They have a liberal supply of drift-wood landed by currents upon the shores of this and the contiguous rugged islets. Several times during the last ten years have traders endeavored to coax these inhabitants to abandon Attoo and go with them to better situations for sea-otter hunting. But, although pinched by poverty, yet so strongly attached are they to this lonely island of their birth, that they have obstinately declined. Though they are poor, yet the contrast between their cheerful, healthy faces and those debauched countenances which we observed at the wealthy villages of Protassov and Belcovsky is a delightful one, and preaches an eloquent sermon in its own reflection. Naturally the people of Attoo do not enjoy much sugar, tea, cloth, and other little articles which they have learned to covet from the trader’s store; so we find them living nearer the primitive style of Aleutian ancestry than elsewhere in the archipelago, being dressed largely in tanned seal and bird-skins, of the fashion made and worn by their forefathers who welcomed Novodiskov long, long ago.

The necessity of doing something in order to gain from the trader a few of the simplest articles, such as the natural resources of Attoo utterly failed to supply, has driven the natives to the care and conservation of blue foxes, which they introduced here many years past, and of which they secure, in traps, two or three hundred every season. The common red fox[80] of the whole Aleutian chain became extinct here in prior time; so, taking advantage of this fact, those blue foxes, so abundant and so valuable on the Seal Islands, were imported, and have ranged without deterioration, since ice-floes never bridge the straits that isolate this island from the nearest adjacent land, and upon which the common breed might cross over to ruin the quality of the fur of that transported Vulpes lagopus. They have also domesticated the wild goose, and rear flocks of them around their barraboras, being the only people in Alaska who have ever done so.

It hardly seems credible, at first thought, but the village of Attoo makes San Francisco practically the half-way town as we go from Calais, Me., to it, our westernmost settlement! It is really but slightly short of being just midway, since Attoo stands almost three thousand miles west of the Golden Gate.[81] A strict geographical centre of the American Union is that point at sea forty miles off the Columbia River mouth, on the coast of Oregon.

The nearest neighbors of the Attoo villagers are not of their own kith and kin—they are the Atkhan and Kamchadale Creoles and natives of the Russian Seal Islands, some two hundred miles west; but on our side they are separated by more than four hundred and thirty miles of stormy water from the first inhabited island, which is Atkha, where a much larger and a much more fortunately situated settlement exists on its east coast, at Nazan Bay. Here is a community of over two hundred and thirty souls, being all the people gathered together who previously lived in small scattered hamlets on the many large and small islands between Atkha and Attoo. They secure a comparatively good number of sea-otters, and are relatively well-to-do, being able to excite and sustain much activity in the trader’s store.

General agreement among those who have visited the Atkhans, as traders and agents of the Government, is that these natives are the finest body of sea-otter hunters in all respects known to the business. They make long journeys from their homes, carried to the outlying islands of Semeisopochnoi, Amchitka, Tanaga, Kanaga, Adahk and Nitalikh, Siguam and Amookhta, some of them far distant, on which they establish camps and search the reefs and rocks awash, as they learn by experience where the chosen haunts of the shy sea-otter are. Here they remain engaged in the chase over extended periods of months at a time, when, in accord with a preconcerted date arranged with the traders, those schooners which carried them out from Atkha, return, pick them up, and take them back. Then the trader’s store is made a grand rendezvous for the village; the hunters tally their skins, settle their debts, make their donations to the church, and then promptly invest their surplus in every imaginable purchase which the goods displayed will warrant.

The women of Atkha employ long intervals, in which their husbands and sons are absent, by making the most beautifully woven grass baskets and mats. The finest samples of this weaving ever produced by a savage or semi-civilized people are those which come from Atkha. The girls and women gather grasses at the proper season, and prepare them with exceeding care for their primitive methods of weaving; and they spare no amount of labor and pains in the execution of their designs, which are now almost entirely those suggested by the traders, such as fancy sewing-baskets, cigar-holders, table-mats, and special forms that are eagerly accepted in trade, for they find a ready sale in San Francisco.

A peculiar and valuable food-fish is found in the Atkhan waters which has been attracting a great deal of attention as a substitute for the mackerel of our east coast, inasmuch as there is no such fish found oil the Alaskan coasts. Among the sea-weed that floats in immense rafts everywhere throughout the Aleutian passes, the “yellow-fish,” or “Atkha mackerel,”[82] is very abundant; it is also plentiful off the Shoomagin Islands. It is a good substitute for the real mackerel,[83] resembling it in taste after salting, as well as in size and movements.

During early days of Russian order and control, the people of Atkha lived altogether on the north side of the island, and it was then the grand central depot of the old Russian American Company. A chief factor was in charge, who had exclusive jurisdiction over all that country embraced in the Kurile archipelago, and the Commander group of Kamchatka, and the Aleutian chain as far east as Oomnak. It was a very important place then, and this territory of its jurisdiction was styled the “Atkhan Division.” But within the last ten or twelve years, fish and drift-wood became very scarce on the Bering Sea coast, so the inhabitants made a sweeping removal of everything from the ancient site on Korovinsky Bay to that of Nazan, where the little hamlet now stands, overtopped by lofty peaks and hills on every side, except where it looks out over the straits to the bold headlands of Seguam. So thorough were they in this “nova-sailnah,” that they even disinterred the remains of their first priest and re-buried them in front of their new chapel—a delightful exhibition of fond memory and respect where we might, perhaps, have least thought to have found them manifested.

The curious Island of Amlia shuts out the heavy swell of the Pacific Ocean from Nazan Harbor, and gives that little bay great peace and protection. This island is thirty miles in length, and nowhere has it a breadth of over four miles; most of its entire extent is only some two miles from ocean to ocean. It consists of a string of sharp, conical peaks, which once were active volcanoes, but now cold and silent as the tomb. So abruptly do they rise from the oceans which they divide, that there is but one small spot on the south side where a vessel can lie at anchor and effect a landing.

Atkha is a large island, and it has very slight resemblance to that of Oonalashka in shape; its indented fiörds are, however, less deep and not near so commodious and accessible. The snowy, smoking crater of Korovinsky Sopka stands like a grim sentinel overlooking the north end of the island, a sheer five thousand feet above the sea-beach at its feet. A few miles to the south another rises to almost as great an elevation, from the flanks of which a number of hot springs pour out a steady boiling flood; then, at the northeast extremity, and handsomely visible from the village, is a silent, snowy crater which they call Sarichev. Korovinsky is the only disturber of the peace that rightfully belongs to Atkha. It is constantly emitting smoke and ashes, while earthquakes and subterranean noises are felt and heard all over the island at frequent though irregular periods during the entire year. In the ravines and cañons of this volcano and its satellites are the only glaciers which the geologist has ever been able to find on any of these peaked, lofty islands west of Oonalashka, though a hundred eternal snow-clad summits and a thousand snow-filled gorges are easily discerned. The natives here also describe a series of mud-volcanoes, or “mud-pots,” that exist on the island, in which this stuff is constantly boiling up with all the colors of the rainbow, about as they seethe and puff in the Geyser Basin of the Yellowstone Park.

There are a dozen or so small, mountainous, uninhabited islands between Atkha and the larger island of Adakh in the west. Very little is known of them, since they endanger life if a landing is made. The most imposing one is Sitkhin, a round, mountainous, lofty mass which culminates in a snow-covered peak over five thousand feet in height. The crater is dead, however, and no sign of ancient volcanic energy is now displayed, beyond the emission of hot springs from fissures in its rocky flanks. Adakh itself is quite a large island, rough and hilly to an excessive degree. A grand cone, which rises up directly in the centre high above all the rest, is called the “white crater.” It is also a dead volcano like Sitkhin; but steamy vapors from outpouring hot waters rise in many valleys and from the uplands. A succession of volcanic peaks reared from the sea, a few of them still smoking and muttering, constitute the islands of Tanaga and Kanaga in the vicinity of Adakh. No place is feasible for a boat to land on either of these wild islets, except on the west shore of Tanaga in Slava Rossia Bay.

A single immense peak, rising all by itself, solitary and alone, from the girdle of surf that encircles it—a band of foaming breakers eighteen miles in circumference, is the islet of Goreloi. It is a formidable rival of the majestic volcano of Shishaldin, on Oonimak. Though nearly as high, yet it is not so symmetrical a cone. Wreaths and solid banks of fog are pressed against its volcanic sides, and hang around its glittering white head, so that the full impression of its grandeur cannot strike us as we gaze at its defiant presence, where, unsupported, it alone beats back the swell of a vast ocean.

That cluster of islands which stand between Goreloi and Attoo is an aggregate of cold volcanic peaks—Amchitka and Kyska being the largest—the Seven Peaks, or Semiseisopochnoi, smoking a little, all the rest entirely quiet. They offer no hospitality to a traveller, and the natives have done wisely in abandoning these savage island-solitudes to reside at Nazan Bay, where the country has a most genial aspect, and many stretches of warm sand-dune tracts are found, upon which vegetation springs into luxuriant life. Here, also, quite a herd of Kamchatkan cattle were cared for when the Russian régime was in vogue. This stock-raising effort was not a practical success, however, and the last of the bovine race disappeared very shortly after the country changed ownership. Goats were also introduced here, as well as elsewhere throughout the fur-trading posts of the old company in Alaska; but the morbid propensity of those pugnacious little animals to feed upon the grasses which grow over roofs of the barraboras, and thus break in and otherwise damage such earthen tenements, made them so unpopular that their propagation was energetically and successfully discouraged by the suffering Aleutes.

Two hundred miles of uninhabited waste extends between the natives of Atkha and their nearest neighbors, the villagers of Nikolsky, who live in a small, sheltered bight of the southwest shore of Oomnak. This is one of the largest islands of the whole Aleutian group, very mountainous, with three commanding, overlooking peaks that are most imposing in their rugged elevation. Several large lakes nestle in their hilly arms, and feed salmon rivulets that rush in giddy rapids and cascades down to the ocean. Everything grows at Oomnak which we have noticed on its sister island of Oonalashka, except the willow; while cross and red foxes are much more abundant here than at any other place in the whole archipelago. A great many hot springs boil up on the north side, and only as recently as 1878 a decided volcanic shock was experienced, which resulted in the upheaval of a small mud-crater between the village and Toolieskoi Sopka, a huge fire-mountain of the middle interior. Subterranean noises and tremors of the earth are chronic phenomena here, but the natives pay no attention to them. They complain, however, of inability to find fish where they usually found them in abundance prior to these earthquakes. Redoubled attention, however, is paid to the salmon when they run, and thus the deficiency is made up.

An Aleutian Mummy.

[Unrolled from its cerements.]

Before the coming of the Russians, Oomnak was one of the most populous islands; then there were over twenty villages, some of them quite large. One was so big that “the inhabitants of it were able to eat the carcass of an enormous whale in a single day!” The most stubborn and independent spirit displayed by the Aleutes prior to their subjugation was exhibited by the inhabitants of this island. The four or five thousand hardy savages which the promishlyniks met here in 1757-59 have dwindled to a microscopic number of less than one hundred and thirty souls, who reside at Nikolsky to-day. They enjoy a somewhat better climate, for a good deal less snow falls here than at Oonalashka, and the small vegetable-garden does much better than elsewhere, except at Attoo. They raise domestic fowls, and have a very fair sea-otter catch every winter, when they scour the south coast, and reside for months at Samalga, hunting that animal. Furious gales which prevail during certain seasons drive kahlans out upon the south beach, there to rest from the pelting of storms: then they are speedily apprehended and clubbed by the watchful Oomnak hunter.

That curious group, the “Cheetiery Sopochnie,” or Islands of the Four Mountains, stands right across the straits, opposite Oomnak. From Kaygamilak, which lies nearest, eleven mummies were taken as they were found in a warm cave on the northeast side of this island. These bodies were placed there in 1724, or some twenty-five or thirty years before the Russians first appeared. The mummies[84] were in fine preservation, and were the remains of a noted chief and his family, who in that time ruled with an iron hand over a large number of his people. The Island of Kayamil is a mere volcanic series of fire-chimneys, the walls of which are not yet cool. The southeast shore in olden times was the site of several large settlements, where the people lived well upon an abundance of sea-lions, hair-seals, and water-fowl, which still repair to its borders. Now that it is desolate and uninhabitable, large flocks of tundra geese spend the summers here, as they shed their feathers and rear their young, not a fox to vex or destroy them having been left by those prehistoric Aleutian hunters.

But on Tahnak, which is the largest of the group, plenty of red foxes are reported. The loftiest summits are also on this one of the four islets, and on the south side once lived a race of the most warlike and ferocious of all Aleutes. They were destroyed to a man by Glottov, and their few descendants have long since been merged with those of Oomnak, where they now live. Several small, high, bluffy islands stand around Tahnak, and between it and its sister, Oonaska, which is nearly as large, equally rugged and precipitous. Amootoyon is a quite small islet, and completes the quartet of “Cheetiery Sopochnie.”

A most interesting volcanic phenomenon of recent record is afforded by the study of that small Bogaslov islet which now stands hot and smoking twenty miles north of Oomnak, and which, two years ago, raised a great commotion by firing up anew. In the autumn of 1796 the natives of Oomnak and Oonalashka were startled by a series of loud reports like parks of artillery, followed by tremblings of the earth upon which they stood. Then a dense dark cloud, full of gas and ashes, came down upon them from Bering Sea, swept by a northerly wind, and it hung over their astonished heads for a week or ten days, accompanied by earthquakes and subterranean thunder; then when an interval of clearing occurred by a change of winds, they saw distinctly to the northward a bright light burning over the sea. The boldest launched their bidarkas, and, after a close inspection, saw that a small island had been elevated about one hundred feet above the level of the surrounding waters; that it had been forced up from some fissure of the bottom to the sea, and was still rising, while liquid streams of lava and scoriæ made it impossible for them to land. This plutonic action did not cease here until 1825, when it left above the green waters of Bering Sea an isolated oval peak with a serrated crest, almost inaccessible, some two hundred and eighty feet high, and two or three miles in circumference. The Russians landed here then for the first time, and the rocks were so hot that they passed but a few moments ashore. It has, however, cooled off enough now to be occupied by large herds of sea-lions, and is resorted to by flocks of sea-fowl. In this fashion of the making of Bogaslov was our vast chain of the Aleutian archipelago cast up from that line of least resistance in the earth’s crust which is now marked by the position of these islands, as they alternately face the billows of the immense wastes of the Pacific, and those storm-tossed waves of the shoal sea of Bering.