Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

FOOTNOTES:

[147] The Indians, or Koltchanes, of the Alaskan interior burn their dead. If anyone dies in the winter, the relatives carry that corpse everywhere with them, use it at night in the place of a pillow, and only burn it at the commencement of warm weather.

[148] The Russian Imperial Government in 1841 ordered Governor Etholin, of Sitka, to select a skilled engineer to make this exploration, and accordingly, on July 10, 1842, Zagoskin was started for St. Michael’s. His expedition was the most extended of any white man ever made in Alaska prior to American search.

[149] Colymbus arcticus.

[150] The Archimandrite Jeromonakh Juvenal. The second of the priestly Russian service was Arch. Joassaf. He was drowned at sea in 1797. He was succeeded by Arch. Afanassy, who remained Bishop of Alaska until 1825, and he has been followed by many successors since.

[151] Visited then by Ivan Petroff, who made an extended trip for the United States Census.

[152] Coregonu ssp.

[153] The oil obtained from the beluga and the large seal (mahklok) is a very important article of trade between the lowland people and those of the mountains, the latter depending upon it entirely for lighting their semi-subterranean dwellings during the winter, and to supplement their scanty stores of food. It is manufactured by a very simple process. Huge drift-logs are fashioned into troughs much in the same manner as the Thlinket tribes make their wooden canoes. Into these troughs filled with water the blubber is thrown in lumps of from two to five pounds in weight. Then a large number of smooth cobble-stones are thrown into a fire until they are thoroughly heated, when they are picked up with sticks fashioned for the purpose and deposited in the water, which boils up at once. After a few minutes these stones must be removed and replaced by fresh ones, this laborious process being continued until all oil has been boiled out of the blubber and floats on the surface, when it is removed with flat pieces of bone or roughly fashioned ladles, and decanted into bladders or whole seal-skins, then cached on pole-frames until sold or used by the makers.

[154] Mount Tamahloopat: two thousand eight hundred feet.

[155] The Russians and natives always called the Yukon River by this name. Our change was first made by those Hudson Bay traders who came over to it from the Mackenzie, and was subsequently universally adopted.

[156] Rubus chamæmorus.

CHAPTER XIII.
LONELY NORTHERN WASTES.

The Mississippi of Alaska: the Yukon River, and its Thorough Exploration.—Its vast Deltoid Mouth.—Cannot be Entered by Sea-going Vessels.—Its Valley, and its Tributaries.—Dividing Line between the Eskimo and the Indian on its Banks.—The Trader’s Steamer; its Whistle in this Lone Waste of the Yukon.—Michaelovsky, the Trading Centre for this Extensive Circumpolar Area.—The Characteristic Beauties of an Arctic Landscape in Summer.—Thunder-storms on the Upper Yukon; never Experienced on the Coast and at its Mouth.—Gorgeous Arches of Auroral Light; Beautiful Spectacular Fires in the Heavens.—Unhappy Climate.—Saint Michael’s to the Northward.—Zagoskin, the Intrepid Young Russian Explorer, 1842.—Snow Blizzards.—Golovin Bay; our People Prospecting there for Lead and Silver.—Drift-wood from the Yukon Strews the Beaches of Bering Sea.—Ookivok, and its Cliff-cave Houses.—Hardy Walrus-hunters.—Grantley Harbor; a Reminder of a Costly American Enterprise and its Failure.—Cape Prince of Wales—facing Asia, thirty-six miles away.—Simeon Deschnev, the first White Man to see Alaska, 1648. His Bold Journey.—The Diomede Islands; Stepping-stones between Asia and America in Bering Straits.—Kotzebue Sound; the Rendezvous for Arctic Traders; the Last Northern Station Visited by Salmon.—Interesting Features of the Place.

Lo! to the wintry winds the pilot yields,

His bark careering o’er unfathomed fields,

Now far he sweeps, where scarce a summer smiles,

On Behring’s rocks, or Greenland’s naked isles.

—Campbell.

Is it not a little singular that the lonely and monotonous course of the Yukon River, reaching as it does to the very limits of the pathless interior of a vast, unexplored region on either side, should be that one section of all others in Alaska the best known to us? An almost uninterrupted annual march has been made up and down its dreary banks since 1865, by men[157] well qualified to describe its varying moods and endless shoals—every turn in its flood, every shelving bank of alluvium or rocky bluff that lines the margin of its turbid current, has been minutely examined, named and renamed to suit the occasion and character of a traveller.

The Yukon River is not reached by traders as any other stream of size is in Alaska, by sailing into its mouth. No ocean-going craft can get within sixty miles of its deltoid entrance. Were a sailor foolhardy enough to attempt such a thing, he would be hard aground, in soft silt or mud, a hundred miles from land in a direct line from the point of his destination. Therefore it is the habit of mariners to sail up as far north as Norton’s Sound, and then turn a little to the southward and anchor their schooners or steamers under a lee of Stuart’s and St. Michael’s Islands, where the old post of Michaelovsky is established on the latter.

The “Rédoute Saint Michael” was founded here in 1835 by Lieutenant Tebenkov, and has been ever since, and is to-day, the most important post in the Alaskan North. This post is a shipping point for the accumulated furs gathered by all traders from the Lower and Upper Yukon, and the Tannanah, the annual yield from such points being the largest and the most valuable catch of land-furs taken in Alaska. A vessel coming into St. Michael’s at any time during the summer will find, encamped around its warehouses many bands of Innuits and Indians who have come in there, over long distances of hundreds of miles, from the north, east, and south. They are there as traders and middlemen. The fur-trading on the Yukon is very irregular as to its annual time and place—the traders constantly moving from settlement to settlement, because this year they may get only a thousand skins where they got five thousand last season, and vice versa. It is impossible to locate the best single spots for trade; the catch in different sections will vary every winter according to the depth of snow, the severity of climate, the prevalence of forest fires, or starvation of whole villages, owing to unwonted absence of fish, and so on.

In midsummer the Yukon is reached by small, light-draft, stern-wheel steamers, which, watching their opportunity, run down from St. Michael’s and enter its mouth, towing behind them a string of five or six large wooden boats which are each laden with several tons of merchandise. The scream of their whistles and puffing of these little trading-steamers as they slowly drag such tows against a rapid current, is the only enlivenment which the immense lonely solitudes of the Yukon are subjected to by our people. That area of watery waste is so wide and long, and the boats are so small and few in number, that even this innovation must be watched for every year with a hawk’s eye, or it will pass unobserved.

Trader’s Steamer towing Bateaux laden with Goods up the Yukon.

[The Kvichpak just below Mercier’s Station.]

The waters of the Kvichpak are discharged into Bering Sea through a labyrinth of blind, misleading channels, sloughs, and swamps, which extend for more than one hundred miles up until they unite near Chatinak with the main channel of that great river. This enormous deltoid mouth of the Yukon is a most mournful and depressing prospect. The country itself is scarcely above the level of tides, and covered with a monotonous cloak of scrubby willows and rank sedges. It is water, water—here, there, and everywhere—a vast inland sea filled with thousands upon thousands of swale islets scarcely peeping above its surface. Broader and narrower spaces between low delta lands are where the whirl of its current is strongly marked by a rippling rush and the drift-logs that it carries upon its muddy bosom. These are the channels, the paths through the maze that leads from the sea up to the river proper; and where they unite, at a point above Andrievsky and Chatinak, the Yukon has a breadth of twenty miles; and again, at many places, away on and up this impressive stream as far as seven or eight hundred miles beyond, this same great width will be observed, but the depth is very much decreased.

Myriads of breeding geese, ducks, and wading water-fowl resort to this desolation of the deltoid mouth of the Yukon, where, in countless pools and the thick covers of tall grass and sedge, they are provided with a most lavish abundance of food and afforded the happiest shelter from enemies; but the stolid Innuit does not affect the place. The howling wintry gales and frightful curse of mosquitoes in the summer are too much even for him. His people live in only six or seven small wretched hamlets below Andrievsky and Chatinak—less than five hundred souls in all, including the entire population found right on the coast of the delta, between Pastolik in the north and Cape Romiantzov on the south. Above Anvik on the main river the Innuit does not like to go. He has no love for those Indians who claim that region all to themselves and resent his appearance on the scene. Whenever he does, however, he is always in company with the traders, and he never gets out of their sight and protection, even when making that overland portage from St. Michael’s by the Oonalakleet trail.

As we emerge from those dreary, low and watery wastes of the delta at Chatinak, the bluffs there, though desolate enough themselves, with their rusty barren slopes, yet they give us cheerful assurance of the fact that all Alaska is not under water, and that the borders of its big river are at last defined on both sides. High rolling hills come down boldly on the left bank as we ascend; but the right shore is still low and but little removed from the flatness of a swale. The channel of the river now zigzags from side to side (in the usual way of running bodies of water which wash out and undermine), building up bars and islets, and sweeping in its resistless flood an immense aggregate of soil and timber far into Bering Sea. The alluvial banks, wherever they are lifted above this surging current, which runs at an average rate of eight miles an hour, are continually caving down, undermined, and washed away. So sudden and precipitate are these landslides, sometimes, that they have almost destroyed whole trading expeditions of the Russians and natives, who barely had time to escape with their lives as the earthy avalanches rolled down upon the river’s edge and into its resistless current.

Above the delta large spruce and fir-trees, aspens, poplars, and plats of alders and willows grow abundantly on the banks; but they do not extend far back from the river on either side into any portions of the country, which is low and marshy, and which embraces so large a proportion of the entire landscape. Small larch-trees are also interspersed. The river is filled with a multitude of long, narrow islands, all timbered as the banks are, and which are connected one with the other by sand and gravel bars, that are always dry and fully exposed at low-water stages. Immense piles of bleached and splintered drift-logs are raised on the upper ends of these islands, having lodged there at intervals when high water was booming down.

Between Anvik and Paimoot are many lofty clay cliffs, entirely made up of clean, pure earth of different bright colors—red, yellow, straw-colored, and white, with many intermediate shades. The Yukon runs down from its remote sources at the Stickeen divide in British Columbia, down through a wild, semi-wooded country, a succession of lakes and lakelets, through a region almost devoid of human life. That extensive area, wherein we find such scant or utter absence of population, is, south of the Yukon, very densely timbered with spruce-trees on the mountains, and with poplars, birch, willow, along the courses of the stream and margins of the lakes. Its immediate recesses only are occasionally penetrated by roving parties of Indian hunters, who now and then leave the great river and the Tannanah for that purpose. It is a silent, gloomy wilderness. To the northward of the Yukon this variety in timber still continues; indeed, it reaches as far into the Arctic Circle and toward the ocean there as the seaward slopes of those low and rolling mountains extend, which rise in irregular ridges trending northeast and southwest. These hills are between one hundred and one hundred and fifty miles from the banks of the Kvichpak. Beyond this divide and water-shed of the northern tributaries of the Yukon a forest seldom appears in any case whatsoever, except where a low, straggling spur of hills stretches itself down to the shores of an icy sea; but it is stunted and scant in its hyperborean distribution thereon.

It is not necessary to enter into a description of the appearance and disposition of these Yukon Indians who live on this great river above Anvik, since they resemble those savages which we are so familiar with in the British American interior, Oregon, and Dakota.

The Russians, in regarding them, at once took notice of their marked difference from the more stolid Innuits, so that they were styled, jocularly, by Slavonian pioneers, “Frenchmen of the North,” and “Gens de Butte.” The Innuits called them “Ingaleeks,” and that is their general designation on the river to-day. They differ from our Plain Indians in this respect only: they are all dog-drivers. They rely upon the river and its tributaries largely for food, using birch-bark canoes—no skin-boats whatever. They have an overflowing abundance of natural food-supply of flesh, and fowl also, and when they suffer, as they often do, from starvation, it is due entirely to their own startling improvidence during seasons of plenty, which occur every year. A decided infusion of Innuit blood will be observed in the faces of the Indians who live at Anvik, and some distance up the river from that point of landed demarcation between Innuit and Ingaleek. In olden times the latter were wont to raid upon the settlements of the former, and carried off Innuit women into captivity whenever they could do so, treating the Eskimo just as the Romans raped the Sabines.

An Innuit is not thrifty at all, but when brought into comparison with the Indian he is a bright and shining light in this respect. Among the Ingaleeks of the Yukon a spring famine regularly prevails every year during the months of April and May, or until the ice breaks up and the salmon run. One would naturally think that the bitter memories of gnawing hunger endured for weeks before an arrival of abundant food, would stimulate that savage to glad exertion when it did arrive so as to lay by of such abundance enough to insure him and his family against recurring starvation next year. Strange to say, it does not. The fish come; the famished natives gorge themselves, and thus engorged, loaf and idle that time away which should be employed in drying and preserving at least sufficient to keep them in stock when the fish have left the stream. Often we will actually see them lazily going to their slender store which they have newly prepared, and eat thereof, while salmon are still running in the river at their feet! Such improvidence and reckless disregard of the need of the morrow is hard indeed for us to realize. Many of the beasts of the field and forest with which the savage is well acquainted set him annually, but in vain, a better example.

White traders during the last twenty years have so thoroughly traversed the course of the Yukon, and, since our control of Alaska, little stern-wheel steamers annually make trips from the sea, accompanied with retinues of white men—these incidents have thoroughly familiarized the Indians here with ourselves. But the wilder Ingaleeks of the Tannanah, only six or seven hundred souls in number, however, are as yet comparatively unknown to us. With an exception of a white trader’s visit to their country in 1875,[158] and the recent descent of the Tannanah by a plucky young officer of the United States Army,[159] these Koltchanes have been unknown at home and wholly undisturbed by us. There are less than sixteen hundred Indians living over the entire Yukon region—a fact which speaks eloquently for an exceeding scantiness of the population of that vast landed expanse of this interior of the Alaskan mainland—a great arctic moor north of the Kvichpak, which is a mere surface of slightly thawed swale, swampy tundra, lakes and pools, sloughs and sluggish rivers, in the summer solstice, while the wildest storms of frigid winds, laden with snow and sleet, career in unchecked fury over them during winter. Such an extreme climate is the full secret of its marked paucity of human life. But that desolation of winter does not prevent an immense migration of animal life to this repellant section every summer from the south. Myriads of water-fowl, such as geese, ducks, and the smaller forms, breed and moult here then in all security, and free from molestation, while great herds of reindeer troop over the lichen-bearing ridges. The musk-ox, however, has never been known to range here or anywhere in Alaska within the memory of man. Its fossil remains have been disinterred from the banks of the Yukon, at several places (just as those of the mammoth have), but that, with a few bleached skulls, is the only record of this animal we can find which we would most naturally anticipate meeting with on such ground, apparently so well adapted for it.

There is some difference of opinion as to whether the Yukon or the Mississippi is the larger river, with respect to the volume of their currents. The variation in this regard can hardly be very great, either one way or the other. The Tannanah is the Missouri of the Kvichpak, and swells the flood of that river very perceptibly below its junction.

Michaeiovsky.

[Extreme northern settlement of white Americans.]

Michaeiovsky has been, and will continue to be, the chief rendezvous of a small white residency of the Alaskan North. It is an irregularly built omnium of old Russian dwellings, warehouses, and a few of our own structure. The stockade which once encircled it has long ago been dispensed with, though the antique bastions and old brass cannon still stand at one or two corners as they stood in early times, well placed to overawe and intimidate a bold and hostile savage people then surrounding them. The buildings are clustered together on a small peninsula of an island, about twenty-five or thirty feet above high-water mark; littered all around them are the small outbuildings and the summer tents of Innuit and Indian tourists who are loitering about for the double purpose of gratifying a little curiosity, and of trading. An abundance of drift-wood from the Yukon lies stranded on the beaches, and a large pile of picked, straight logs have been hauled from the water and stacked upon one side of a slope. The whole country, hill and plain, in every direction from this post is a flat and alternately rolling moorland, or tundra, the covering of which is composed principally of mosses and lichens, and a sphagnous combination which produces in the short growing season a yellowish-green carpet, with patches of pale lavender gray where the lichens are most abundant. At sparse and irregular intervals bunches of coarse sedge grasses rise, and the entire surface of moor is crossed at various angles with lines of dwarf birches and an occasional clump of alders and stunted willows. The most attractive feature in such an arctic landscape, when summer has draped it as we now behold it, is the nodding seed-plumes of the equisetum grasses—they are tufts of a pure, fleecy white that, ruffled in the breeze, light up the sombre russet swales with an almost electrical beauty. Everywhere here, in less than eighteen inches or two feet beneath this blossoming flora, will be found a solid foundation of perpetual frost and ice—it never thaws lower. The flowers of that tundra embrace a list of over forty beautiful species, chief among them being phloxes, a pale-blue iris, white and yellow poppies, several varieties of the red-flowered saxifrages, the broad-leaved archangelica, and many delicately fronded ferns.

Twittering, darting flocks of barn-swallows hover and glide over the old faded roofs and walls of Michaelovsky, and the bells of a red-painted church, just beyond, come jangling sweetly across the water, mingled with that homelike chattering of these swallows. But a pious mission here is a practical failure in so far as any effect upon the Innuit mind is concerned. During summer-time, in the Upper Yukon country, thunder-showers are very common; down here, on the coast, they are never experienced. The glory, however, of an auroral display is divided equally between them, when from September until March luminous waves and radii of pulsating rose, purple, green, and blue flames light up and dance about the heavens—gorgeous arches of yellow bands and pencil-points of crimson fire are hung and glitter in the zenith. These exhibitions beggar description; they are weirdly and surpassingly beautiful, far beyond all comparison with anything else of a spectacular nature on earth.

In the autumn and in the early days of December, a low declination of the sun tints up the clouds at sunrise and sunset into beautiful masses of colors that rapidly come and go in their origination and fading. Twilight is a lovely interval of the day in this latitude, and is even enjoyed by the hard-headed traders themselves. Winter is a weary drag here—about seven months—lasting from October until well into May; but, in spite of its intense cold, there are many long periods of its endurance characterized by clear, lovely weather, while the warmer summer is rendered disagreeable by a large number of cold misty days, rain, and gloomy palls of overhanging clouds which shut down upon everything like a leaden cover.

We are accustomed to associate an occurrence of a real mirage with dry, arid, desert countries, where the thirsty and sun-burned traveller is mocked by illusions of clear lakes and a green oasis just ahead. In truth, the mirage of an Alaskan tundra in midwinter is fully as remarkable, and quite as tantalizing. When the trader starts out with his dog-team, on an intensely still, cold day, the vibrations of the air are so energetic that those blades of grass which stick out from the snow, just ahead, seem to him like thickets of willow- and birch-trees, around which he must make a painful detour. Then, again, the ravines and valleys are transformed into vast lakes, with the loftiest and most precipitous shores. On the coast here, during cool, clear days in March, hills, which are thirty or seventy-five miles away from the windows of Michaelovsky, are lifted up and transported to the very beach of the island itself, contorted and fantastic changes constantly taking place in the picture, until suddenly a slight something, or a change perhaps in an observer’s position, causes the singular delusion to vanish.

St. Michael’s is all by itself to-day; yet it, at one time, was not the only settlement on the island; for, close by the fort, there were two Mahlemoöt villages, Tahcik and Agahliak, whose inhabitants were first to cordially invite the Russians to locate here in 1835. But in 1842 the ravages of small-pox absolutely depopulated these native towns, and a few survivors fled in dismay from the place—they never came back, nor have their descendants returned. For some reason or other the Russians made the most persistent and energetic attempt to develop a successful vegetable garden in this region and to keep cattle. But, beyond a small exhibit of eatable cabbages, good radishes and turnips, and a few inferior potatoes, grown in the warm sand-dunes of Oonalakleet, nothing more, substantially, ever resulted from it.

Generally the snow falls, at Michaelovsky, as the beginning of its hyemal season, about October 1st, and by October 20th ice has formed, and has firmly locked up the Yukon by November 1st to 5th. These icy fetters break away by June 5th, and in a week or ten days the great river is entirely clear. The sea is usually covered by sludgy floes as early as the middle or end of every October, which remain opening and closing irregularly until next June. The months of July and August are the warmest, ranging from 48° to 54° Fahr. during daytime.[160]

From St. Michael’s to the westward a low basaltic chain of hills borders the coast, and, parallel to it some thirty miles inland, a few peaks attain an elevation of one thousand to fifteen hundred feet. Jutting out at a sharp angle from this volcanic range stands that low peninsula, tipped with the granitic headland named (by Cook more than a century ago) Cape Denbigh. This point forms the southern wall for that snug, tightly enclosed Bay of Norton, thus partitioned off from a sound of the same title. The Oonalakleet River empties into Norton’s Sound, at a point about midway between Michaelovsky and Denbigh. The debouchure of this stream is marked by the richest vegetation to be found anywhere in all of this entire region north of Bristol Bay. It is due to the warm sand-dune flats which are located here; and here is one of the liveliest Mahlemoöt villages of that north. That river is an exclusive gateway to the Yukon during the winter season, from and to Michaelovsky, and these Innuits are the chief commission merchants of Alaska. In a village, now called Kegohtowik, near by, Zagoskin received his first initiation into the wild life which he led up here as an explorer, since it was the first camp[161] he ever made among the Innuits after he had started out from Michaelovsky. This young Russian was kindly received by the wondering natives, who unharnessed his dogs and hung up his sleds on the cache scaffolds as a token of their hospitality. Into their kashga he was taken with every demonstration of regard and curiosity. He happened to have arrived just as these people were preparing for and celebrating a great festival of homage to an Eskimo sea-god who rules the icy waters of Bering and the Arctic Ocean. He quaintly records their proceeding in this language:

“I had an opportunity of observing the natives preparing for a great festival called by them ‘drowning little bladders in the sea.’ In the front part of the kashga, on a strip of moose or other skin, there were suspended about a hundred bladders taken from animals killed by arrows only. On these bladders are painted various fantastic figures. At one end of the trap hangs an owl with a man’s head and a gull carved from wood; at the other end are two partridges. By means of threads running to the crop-beam these images are made to move in imitation of life. Below the bladders is placed a stick six feet in height, bound about with straw. After dancing in front of the bladders a native takes from the stick a small wisp of straw, and lighting it, passes it under the bladders and birds so that the smoke rises around them. He then takes the stick and straw outside. This custom of ‘drowning little bladders in the sea’ is in honor of the sea-spirit called ‘Ug-iak;’ but I cannot discover,” says Lieutenant Zagoskin, “how the custom originated, or why they use bladders from animals killed by arrows in preference to those killed by other means. To all questions upon the subject the natives answered: ‘It is a custom which we took from our fathers and our grandfathers.’ It seems to be of great antiquity, as the natives can give no information as to its origin or the reasons for its adoption.[162] Before these bladders they dance all day in their holiday dress, which consists of light parka, warm boots, and short underdress for the men; and parkas, reindeer-trousers, colored in Innuit style, for women, and ornamented with glass beads and rings.”

And again, in this connection, the pleasures of a dog-sled journey overland to the Yukon are graphically narrated by the same traveller, who resumed his trip, after spending the night as above related, on snow-shoes and dog-sleds laden with his provisions and instruments. On the morning of December 9, 1842, he struck the Oonalakleet River and started up its frozen channel. He says:

“The weather was at first favorable, but it soon changed, and a driving snow-storm set in, blinding our eyes so that we could not distinguish the path. A blade of grass seventy feet distant had the appearance of a shrub, and sloping valleys looked like lakes with high banks, the illusion vanishing upon nearer approach. On December 9th, at midnight, a terrible snow-storm began, and in the short space of ten minutes covered men, dogs, and sledges, forming a perfect hill above them. We sat at the foot of a hill, with the wind from the opposite side, and our feet drawn under us to prevent them from freezing, and covered with our parkas. When we were covered by the snow, we made holes with sticks through to the open air. In a short time the warmth of the breath and perspiration melted the snow so that a man-like cave was formed about each individual. In these circumstances our travellers passed five hours, calling to one another at intervals to keep awake, it being certain death to sleep in that intense cold. If we had been on the other side of the hill, exposed to the full fury of the wind, we would have been buried in the snow and suffocated.”

Such are the experiences of all travelling traders on the Yukon, who encounter these wintry “poorgas” in the pursuit of their calling every year of their lives spent in that great Alaskan moorland. Familiarity with this subject never breeds contempt for it in the minds of those hardy men—that pain and privation to which these characteristic storms subject all human beings who are caught and chained on a tundra, or in the mountains, by their wild rushing and bitterly cold breath, is never forgotten.

On the shores of Norton’s Sound are many low clayey bluffs, which, as they are annually undermined by the surf and chiselled by frost, fall in heavy crumbled masses upon the beach. This exposes their long-concealed deposit of the tusks and bones of those pre-glacial elephants, the mammoth and the mastodon. Such fossil ivory has been used by all Innuits from time immemorial in making their sleds and in tipping their spears, lances, and arrows.

A party of Americans spent the summer of 1881 exploring the country at the head of that deep indentation in the north shore of Norton’s Sound called Golovin Bay. They were miners, and engaged in locating the sources from which the Innuits had been bringing large masses of lead-ore with a micaceous sparkle. The hope of a silver-mine had allured these hardy prospectors, who had not reckoned, however, on what they would have to face during the long winter, on the ice that was always left in the soil. Still, in the summer this bay of Golovin is an attractive anchorage—the most agreeable landscape presented anywhere on our Arctic coast. Several rivers empty into it, and on the slopes of the uplands of the northwest side is a growth of white pines that reach a height of fifteen or twenty feet. These small rounded conifers, scattered in clumps over the green and russet tundra, an absence of underbrush, and the dark-green lines of stunted willows and birches that fill the ravines on the sloping sides of gently rising hills, suggest the parking of an old-country place where the orchards are separated by hedges.

The beaches everywhere are profusely littered with drift-logs from the Yukon, twenty to forty feet in length, thickly strewn. They are pushed high above tides by the ice-floes in winter. What the result would be of failure to gain that abundant supply of fuel, now so easy of attainment, upon the natives of this entire region, is not difficult to determine. As they live to-day they are steadily, rapidly diminishing in number. The whalemen have substantially exterminated their chief sources of life—the whale and the walrus. Seals are not as abundant as on the Greenland coasts, and if, in addition to their extra labor of securing food-supply, they were obliged to do without wood, a practical depopulation of the Alaskan coast of Bering Straits and the Arctic Ocean would be effected soon.

As the trader shapes his course from St. Michael’s for Port Clarence and Kotzebue Sound, his little vessel skirts the low north shore of Norton’s Sound very closely. He may stop for an hour or two, if the weather permits, at Sledge Islet, standing “off and on” while the Innuits come out to the schooner in their skin “oomiaks” or bidarrahs. This barren rock was so named by Captain Cook, who, when he landed on it, found nothing but a native’s hand-sled. Its inhabitants were all sojourning on the mainland, berrying. It is only about a mile in its greatest length, less than half a mile wide, and raised almost perpendicularly from the sea to a height of five or six hundred feet. When the modicum of walrus-oil and ivory which these natives have to barter has been hoisted on board, the schooner shapes her course for another islet—the curious “Ookivok,” or King’s Island—which stands, a mere rock as it were, in the flood that sweeps through Bering Straits. It is rugged, and strewn with immense quantities of basaltic fragments, scoriæ, and rises so precipitately from the sea that no place for a beach-landing can be found.

Here on the south side, clinging like nests of barn-swallows, are the summer houses of the Ookivok walrus-hunters. They are from fifty to one hundred feet above the brawling surf that breaks incessantly beneath them, and secured to the perpendicular cliffs by lashings and guys of walrus-thongs. The wooden poles thus fastened to the rocks are covered with walrus-hides. On these unique brackets those hardy Innuits spend the warmer weather. Their winter residences are mere holes excavated in the interstices and fissures of the same bluff to which their flimsy summer dwellings are attached, the entrances to most of them being directly under the frail platforms upon which these Mahlemoöt families are perched with all of their rude household belongings. The nakedness of the island is so great as to forbid life to even a spear of grass or moss—nothing but close, leathery lichens, that grow so tightly to its weathered rocks that they appear to be part and parcel of the splintered basaltic cubes or olivine bluffs themselves. A more uninviting spot for human habitation could not be found in all the savage solitudes of the north. But the Innuit is here, not for the pleasure of location; he is here for that command which this station gives him over all walrus-herds floating up and down on the ice-floes of Bering Sea at the sport of varying moods of wind and current.

Ookivok.

From the rugged crests of King’s Island the natives can apprehend drifting sea-horses as they sleep heavily on broad ice-cakes, and make ample preparation for their capture. The violence of the wind is so great that the small, flat summit of this islet cannot be utilized as a place of residence—the winds that howl over and around its rock-strewn head would hurl the Innuits, bag and baggage, into those angry waves which thunder incessantly below. Long experience at plunging through surf with their handsomely made kayaks, and returning to land on these perilous shores of King’s Island, has made the Ookivok people the boldest and the best watermen in the north. Their little skin canoes are of the finest construction, and their surplus time is largely passed in carving walrus-ivory into all fashions of rude design for barter in the summer, when the ice shall disappear and the sails of whaling-ships and fur-trading schooners challenge their attention in the offing.

What a winter these people must witness! What a succession of furious storms and snow-laden gales! When their summer comes it brings but little sunlight to their rocky retreat; for, standing, as it does, in the full sweep of that warmer flood which flows up from the Japanese coast into the Arctic, cold, chilly fogs and obstinate clouds envelope them most of the time. But sympathy is utterly wasted; were they to be transported to California, and surrounded with all the needs of a creature existence, they would soon entreat, beg, implore us to return them to the inhospitable rock from which they were taken. The whalers have, at various intervals during the last twenty years, carried Innuits down to spend the winter with them at the Sandwich Islands, under an idea that these people would be delighted with the soft, warm climate there, and such fruits and flowers, and be grateful for the trip. But in no instance did an individual of this hyperborean race fail to sigh for his home in Bering Sea, or the Arctic Ocean, soon after landing at Hawaii. Those Innuits who were without kith or kin became just as homesick and forlorn as any natives did who had relatives behind awaiting their return.

A few hours’ sailing, with a free wind, to the north from King’s Island, brings you into full view of a bold headland at the entrance to Port Clarence. Cape York is a noted landmark in this well-travelled highway to the Arctic Ocean—well travelled by the whaling fleets of the whole world until recently; now, an elimination of cetacean life from these waters has caused their substantial abandonment by those vessels, and no others come, save a trading-schooner ever and anon at wide intervals. A roomy harbor, sheltered from the south by a long pier of alluvium, is Port Clarence. Leading beyond it is an immense inner basin, walled in all about by steep slate precipices: this is Grantley Harbor. High hopes and great expectations were centred here in 1865-66, by the location of that short cable-end which, underrunning Bering Straits, was to unite an overland telegraph wire from St. Petersburg with that one we were to build, in the same fashion, from Portland, Ore., thus to span the Old and New Worlds by this short submarine link. Naturally, then, it made this point of its beginning a most interesting locality. In obedience to an order of a few wealthy, energetic capitalists, who did not then believe in the practicability of the Atlantic cable, many stately ships, freighted with men and goods, left San Francisco in the summer of 1865, and, again, in the succeeding season of 1866, for divers points in Alaska and Siberia. These men were to build the line overland. They were landed at St. Michael’s and at Port Clarence, and at several harbors on the Asiatic coast. They had fairly got to work, when, late in 1866, the success of the submarine cable between Newfoundland and Ireland was assured. That success compelled an abandonment of the Collins Overland Telegraph, and these men were consequently recalled, and sailed back to California in those handsome vessels of the telegraph fleet. How the Innuits of Port Clarence marvelled when these smart, richly dressed men disembarked, and put up houses in which to store their treasures of food and telegraph materials, as well as to actually live in—to stay there with them, in their own rude country, where no such thing had ever been even dreamed of before. After the ships had squared their yards and filled away, without calling the Americans on board, then the Mahlemoöt heart was filled with unknown and strange emotions of joy and curiosity—both of these passions were fully satisfied ere the white men left Grantley Harbor.

With Cape York just astern, you pass under the lee of those sheer and lofty walls of that shoulder to our continent, Cape Prince of Wales. Its bold front stands in full but silent recognition of an Asiatic coast westward, just thirty-six miles away, over the shallow flood of Bering Straits. What changes in a great northland and seas would have been wrought had a tithe of such volcanic energy which raised up the Aleutian archipelago been only exerted here in throwing a basaltic dike across from continent to continent! Had the upheaval and power that elevated the large island of Oonimak alone been focused here, we should have no division of the Old World and the New. That ocean-river which flows steadily into the icy wastes of a known and unknown polar basin above Alaska and Siberia would not now give that life which it so freely grants both animals and vegetables in the wide reach of the North Pacific. A dam of adamantine rock or basalt across the Straits of Bering would cause a startling revision of all the natural order of life in Bering Sea and our Arctic Ocean.

CAPE PRINCE OF WALES

That extreme narrowing of the American shore of Bering Straits: the Asiatic coast is only thirty-six miles to the Westward from this Point, which was located and named by Captain Cook, August 7, 1778

Cape Prince of Wales, which forms the extreme narrowing of Bering Straits, is a high, rugged promontory, with walls on the south side that are abrupt precipices of a full thousand feet, while the uplands rise, culminating in a snowy crown that is twenty-five hundred feet above the level of the sea. Deep gulches seam these vertical walls, and are the paths of numerous tiny rivulets that trickle and run in cascades down from the spongy moorlands above. When, however, you stand in to the straits, homeward bound from the Arctic Ocean, this cape on that side presents a wholly different outline. It slopes up gradually from the beaches, and presents the appearance of a tundra gently rising to a small ridge-like summit. This lowland on the north side is projected under the sea for a distance of over eight miles in a northerly direction, making an exceedingly dangerous shoal, and justly dreaded by the mariner.

The Siberian side and opposite headland is the bold and lofty East Cape, and is connected with the mainland by a low neck of rolling tundra, which is characteristic of Cape Prince of Wales also. Both of these outposts of two mighty continents present, at a small distance, the resemblance of islands.

On June 20th, two hundred and thirty-eight years ago (1648), Simeon Deschnev, a Cossack chief trader, sailed from the mouth of the Siberian river Kolyma, standing to the eastward, where he intended to cruise until the country of those Chookchie natives, who had ivory for trade, should be reached. His party sailed in three small “kotches,” which were rude wooden shallops, decked over, about thirty feet long and twelve in beam, drawing but little water. They pushed on and on in that region to the eastward, from which direction the nomadic natives of the Kolyma had always returned laden with walrus-ivory. Fields of ice retarded them; no populous trading-villages rewarded their scrutiny of the rugged coast as they advanced. The known waters behind them closed up with floes, so returning was impossible; while the unknown waters ahead were open and invited exploration. In this manner, hugging the coast, Deschnev and his companions sailed through the straits, landing once there in September. He called it an “isthmus,” and described the appearance of the Diomede Islands, which he plainly saw from the shore. Although no mention is made by any one of this party of having seen the American continent, yet it must have been observed by them, for the bold headland of Cape Prince of Wales can be easily descried on any clear day from the Asiatic side. Deschnev’s voyage had been quite forgotten until Müller, in hunting over old records in 1764, found the narrative then, and at once published it in the “Morskoi Sbornik.”

A long interregnum elapsed between the hardy voyage of Simeon Deschnev and the next or second passage of the straits by the keel of a white man’s vessel. Not until August, 1728, did Bering sail through here. He went only a short distance above, into the Arctic Ocean, and returned without giving any sign thereafter of the importance of the pass or its nature, believing, most likely, that what land he saw on the eastern side was a mere island and not a great American continent. But that intrepid navigator, Captain Cook, who comes third in this early initiation of our race, made no mistake: he fully realized that the division of two hemispheres was here effected, and so declared the fact, and then gave to these straits, in a most chivalric manner, the name of Bering, August, 1778.

The Diomedes.

“Fairway Rock.” “Ignalook” (America). “Noornabook” (Asia).

[Viewed from the Arctic Ocean; looking S.S.W. 7 m.]

Midway, stepping-stones as it were, across those straits are the Diomedes, two barren, rocky islets and a sheer rock. The largest and the most western is about three miles long and one in width; it is seven or eight hundred feet in abrupt elevation from the water, and the line of division between the Siberian possessions and our own just takes it in. The sister island is somewhat smaller, less than half as large, but it is as bold and sheer in its rocky elevation, leaving a channel-width of two miles only in between. The first is named Ratmanov, or Noornabook; the second, Kroozenstern, or Ignalook; while that high isolated hay-cock mass, about seven miles south of Kroozenstern, is called Fairway Rock. Bering Straits has an average depth of only twenty-six fathoms, with a hard, regular bottom of sand, gravel, and silt.

This gateway to the Arctic Ocean is closed by ice-floes usually by the middle or end of October every year, and opened again in the following season by May 25th or June 1st, but the ice-fields do not allow much room for navigation north until the middle or end of June, sometimes not until the month of July has been well passed.

On that low, northern tundra slope of Cape Prince of Wales is the largest Innuit village in the Alaskan northland. Four hundred souls live there in a settlement which they style Kingigahmoot, and they bear unmistakable evidence of the vicious and degrading influence which evil whalers and rum-traders have exerted. We are struck by their saucy flippancy, their restless, meddlesome, and impertinent bearing. It is because these people have been for a great many years thoroughly familiarized with and degraded by all the tricks and petty treacheries of dishonest and disreputable white men. They do not draw a line in favor of any decency in our race to-day, and hence their disagreeable manner. Otherwise, beyond shaving the crowns of their heads, they do not differ from the Innuits whom we have met heretofore. They are seamen in the full sense of the word—hardy, reckless navigators who boldly launch themselves into stormy waters and cross from land to land in tempest and in fogs, depending solely upon the frail support of their walrus-skin baidars, or oomiaks. These are very neatly made, however, the covering of seal- and walrus-hides being stretched and sewed tightly over wooden frames that are lashed at the joints with sinew and whalebone-thongs. They hoist a square sail of deer-skins or cotton drilling, and run before the wind in heavy gales; or they employ paddles and oars, and urge their craft against head-winds and perverse currents. Their poverty is the only redemption which they have had from absolute destruction; for were they possessed of furs that would encourage the regular visits of traders, they would, with their disposition to debauchery, have been utterly exterminated long before this time. But they are poor, very poor, having nothing to tempt the cupidity of white traders—nothing but small stores of walrus-oil and teeth, and a few red and white foxes, perhaps. Therefore our people never stop long near them, just laying the vessel’s sails aback for a few minutes, or an hour, while the dusky paddling crews of the oomiaks surrounding the schooner exhibit their slim stocks of oil and ivory.

These northern Innuits are not known anywhere to have a village located far back from the sea save at three places, where, on the Selawik, the Killiamoot, and the Kooak Rivers, are settlements of a few people who are at least fifty and one or two hundred miles inland; but they are the exceptions only to their rule of living. Some thirty-five villages of these hyperborean Innuits of Alaska are scattered along the coast between St. Michael’s and Point Barrow; they possess an aggregate (estimated) inhabitation of three thousand men, women, and children. The Diomede and Prince of Wales natives are the most active middlemen or commission merchants among their people; they conduct all the trade between the Asiatic Chookchie savages and the American Innuits, chiefly with those of Kotzebue Sound. Before a wholesale destruction by our people, in 1849-57, of the whales that once were so abundant in these waters, the life of those natives was a comparatively easy struggle for existence, and they were far more numerous then than they are to-day; but a fleet of four and five hundred whaling-ships, manned by the hardiest men of all nations, literally swept that cetacean life from the North Pacific and Bering Sea, and drove it so far into the Arctic Ocean that its remnant, which is still there, is practically safe and beyond human reach.

As you leave the Straits of Bering behind, your little vessel cuts the cold, green waves of the Arctic Ocean rapidly, especially if under the pressure of a warm southwester which funnels up stiffly through the pass. You find nothing to catch your eye in all that long reach from Cape Prince of Wales to the entrance of Kotzebue Sound, which is an objective point of all the traders who come into the Arctic. Here is the last safe Alaskan harbor for a sea-going vessel as we go north. It is a big one; and it is a famous place for a geologist and Innuits alike. To the latter it is of especial significance, since the small rivers which empty there mark an extreme northern limit of salmon-running in America.

The shores which bound this large gulf rise as perpendicular bluffs, either directly from the water or from a shelving beach. In some places the land is remarkably low (as it always is when bordering the coast), and only so much raised above tide-level as to render the idea probable that it is of an alluvial formation, the result of accumulated mud and sand, brought down in former times by the melting and running of large glacial rivers, and then thrown up later by recent ice-floes of the Arctic Sea. The cliffs are, in part, abrupt and rocky; others are made up of falling masses of mud, sand, and ice. The rocky cliffs are dominant on the western and southern shores, while the diluvial bluffs and flats complete that remaining east and northeast circuit of the sound. Lowlands border a major portion of the Bay of Good Hope, and form the land of Cape Espenberg and contiguous country.

A most striking natural feature of this final rendezvous of the salmon-loving Innuits is the Peninsula of Choris, which divides the inner waters of the Bay of Escholtz from those of Good Hope. It is a narrow, variously indented tongue; its northern end is separated from the southern, and connected by a slender neck of very low land. This lower point assumes the shape of a round and somewhat conical eminence, surmounted by a flat, hut-like peak, the sides of which rise a few feet perpendicularly above a surrounding surface, as though raised artificially by masonry. The whole height is about six hundred feet above sea-level. Both sides of that quaint headland terminate in rocky cliffs which, toward the west, are one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet high, stratified, unbroken, and dipping to the west at an angle of thirty degrees. They are composed of micaceous slate, with no included minerals. This slate is of a greenish hue, with a very considerable predominance of mica. In it are garnets, veins of feldspar enclosing crystals of schorl, and fissures filled with quartz. At one point, nearly midway between the southern end of this peninsula and its low neck, is a singular bed of pure milk-white quartz, that marks its locality from a long distance by the masses of large white blocks which have fallen down by natural processes of cleavage and frost-chiselling, and these remain unaltered in their snowy color in spite of the corroding action of time and weather. Again, still nearer the neck, a narrow bed of limestone forms a distinct protrusion above some mica-schist, about thirty feet in length and five in depth. It reappears in such strength, however, at the southern end of the peninsula, that it forms most of the rock exposed, and produces four perpendicular and contiguous promontories, separated from each other by small, receding bays, that present curious walls striped a white and blue tint in beautifully blended stratification, most unique and attractive to the eye. The upper part of this limestone contains iron pyrites, and has cavities filled with chlorite. The lower strata are more abundantly mixed with micaceous schistus, containing compact actynolite, and flat prisms of a glassy shade of it, crystals of tourmaline, and those various concretions of iron pyrites. The quartz is, in some places, colored a real topaz tint. Such, in brief, is a faint description of those geological attractions which the Arctic rocks of Kotzebue Sound present to a student.

The country everywhere, that borders the Arctic Ocean and this sound, is low. The land rises by faint and gradual slopes; it is covered with clay soils and the characteristic vegetation of a tundra. The many low, projecting points of Kotzebue Sound are thickly strewn with large and smaller masses of vesicular and of compact lava, containing olivine. Some of these blocks extend into the sea; others are embedded in the sandy soil of the beach; but many are insulated and awash above the surf. They are honeycombed with empty cavities. The sands of this Arctic Ocean beach partake of the black and volcanic nature of those blocks. These large and numerous erratic blocks of basalt, collected chiefly on such jutting points, must have been conveyed there by ice-sheets from a very considerable distance, for no volcanic formation is to be seen in their vicinity.

A suggestive wreck lies half buried in the sand and drift of the north shore of Choris Peninsula—it is the scant and weathered remnants of a large whaling-bark, which was run ashore here and burned. Its own crew did so to prevent its capture by the Shenandoah—that cruiser which, during our civil war, swooped down upon our Asio-Alaskan whaling-fleet, as a fish-hawk drops upon a flock of startled gulls. Again, on the south side of Good Hope Bay, in this same remarkable sound of Kotzebue, is a bluff of solid blue clay, from the face of which the frost-king annually strikes large masses. The weathered débris of these fallen sections reveal many fine specimens of well-preserved remains of huge pachyderms—mammoths—and their finding has given a fit name of “Elephant Point” to the place.

Across that peninsula, which Choris Point and its comical little tender of Chamisso Islet project from, lies the long and narrow estuary of Hotham Inlet, where all Innuits, from Icy Cape to the far north and Bering Straits in the south, annually repair for salmon-fishing in August. Into the mouths of a half-dozen small streams which empty there, and that large one, of Kooak River, the humpbacked salmon runs, for a brief period, in great numbers: then the harvest of the Eskimo is at hand. Nowhere else above this point can a salmon ever be taken, and as it is the last chance of these natives, they improve it. Flocks of fat ducks and geese hover over and rest upon the smooth, shallow waters of this inlet, alternately feeding there and then alighting upon the tundra where crowberries and insects abound. Our whalers have taught these Innuits how to make and use gill-nets, with which they now catch their fish almost exclusively; and not unwisely have those natives made the change, for they have not got any slender willow brush and alder-saplings which their brethren use so effectually in making rude traps on the Yukon, Kuskokvim, and Nooshagak Rivers. They also stretch these gill-nets over certain narrow places, from shore to shore, of lagoons and lakes, where flocks of water-fowl are wont to fly (in early morning and late in the evening), and succeed in capturing a great many luckless birds by this simple method.