Alaska, Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

These Kasa-an Indians are a branch of the Haidas, the finest of the Indian tribes of the coast. They are most intelligent and industrious people, and are skilled in many ways that render them superior to the other tribes of the island. Their permanent village is some miles below the fishery, and their square whitewashed houses, and the tomb and mortuary column of Skowl, their great chief, makes quite a pretty scene in a shady green inlet near Baronovich’s old copper mine. A few of their houses at the fishery are of logs or rough-hewn planks, but the most of them are bark huts, with a rustic arbor hung full of drying salmon outside. These bits of bright-red salmon, against the slabs of rough hemlock bark, make a gay trimming for each house, and when a bronzed old hag, in a dun-colored gown, with yellow ’kerchief on her head, stirs up the fire of snapping fir boughs, and directs a column of smoke toward the drying fish, it is a bit of aborigine life to set an artist wild. Their bark houses are scattered irregularly along the beach above high-water mark, and a fleet of slender, black canoes, with high, carved bows, are drawn up on the sand and pebbles. The canoe is the only means of locomotion in this region of unexplored and impenetrable woods, and the Indian is even more at home in it than on shore. No horseman cares for his steed more faithfully than the Siwash tends and mends his graceful cedar canoe, hewn from a single log, and given its flare and graceful curves by being steamed with water and hot stones, and then braced to its intended width. The Haida canoe has the same high, double-beaked prow of the Chinook canoes of Puget Sound, but where the stern of the latter drops in a straight line to the keel, the Haida canoe has a deep convex curve. By universal fashion all of these canoes are painted black externally, with the thwarts and bows lined with red, and sometimes the interior brightened with that color. The black paint used to be made from a mixture of seal oil and bituminous coal, and the red paint was the natural clay found in places throughout all Indian countries. Latterly the natives have taken to depending on the traders’ stores for paint, but civilization has never grasped them so firmly as to cause them to put seats or cross-pieces in their canoes. They squat or sit flat in the bottom of their dugouts for hours without changing position. It gives white men cramps and stiff joints to look at them, and sailors are no luckier than landsmen in their attempts to paddle and keep their balance in one of these canoes for the first time. The Indians use a broad, short paddle, which they plunge straight down into the water like a knife, and they literally shovel the water astern with it. The woman, who has a good many rights up here that her sisters of the western plains know not, sits back of her liege, and with a waving motion, never taking the paddle out of the water once, steers and helps on the craft. Often she paddles steadily, while the man bales out the water with a wooden scoop. When the canoes are drawn up on the beach they are carefully filled with grass and branches, and covered with mats or blankets to keep them sound and firm. A row of these high-beaked canoes thus draped has a very singular effect, and on a gloomy day they are like so many catafalques or funeral gondolas. Baronovich’s old schooner, the Pioneer of Cazan, lies stranded on the beach in the midst of the native boats, moss and lichens tenderly covering its timbers, and vagrant grasses springing up in the seams of the old wreck. The dark, cramped little cabin is just the place for ghosts of corsairs and the goblins of sailors’ yarns, and although it has lain there many seasons, no Indian has yet pre-empted it as a home for his family and dogs.

THREE CARVED SPOONS AND SHAMAN’S RATTLE.

The thrifty Siwash, which is the generic and common name for these people, and a corruption of the old French voyagers’ sauvage, keeps his valuables stored in heavy cedar chests, or gaudy red trunks studded with brass nails; the latter costly prizes with which the Russian traders used to tempt them. At the first sound of the steamer’s paddle-wheels,—and they can be heard for miles in these fiords,—the Indians rummaged their houses and chests and sorted out their valuable things, and when the first ardent curio-seeker rushed through the packing-houses and out towards the bark huts, their wares were all displayed. The Haidas are famous as the best carvers, silversmiths, and workers on the coast; and there are some of their best artists in this little band on Kasa-an Bay. An old blind man, with a battered hat on his head and a dirty white blanket wrapped around him, sat before one bark hut, with a large wooden bowl filled with carved spoons made from the horns of the mountain goat. These spoons, once in common use among all these people, are now disappearing, as the rage for the tin and pewter utensils in the traders’ stores increases, although many of them have the handles polished and the bowls worn by the daily usage of generations. The horn is naturally black, and constant handling and soaking in seal oil gives them a jetty lustre that adds much to the really fine carvings on the handles. Silver bracelets pounded out of coin, and ornamented with traceries and chasings by the hand of “Kasa-an John,” the famous jeweller of the tribe, were the prizes eagerly sought and contended for by the ladies. The bangle mania rages among the Haida maids and matrons as fiercely as on civilized shores, and dusky wrists were outstretched on which from three to nine bracelets lay in shining lines like jointed mail. Anciently they pounded a single heavy bracelet from a silver dollar piece, and ornamented the broad two-inch band with heraldic carvings of the crow, the bear, the raven, the whale, and other emblematic beasts of their strangely mixed mythology. Latterly they have become corrupted by civilized fashions, and they have taken to narrow bands, hammered from half dollars and carved with scrolls, conventional eagles copied from coins, and geometrical designs. They have no fancy for gold ornaments, and they are very rarely seen; but the fancy for silver is universal, and their methodical way of converting every coin into a bracelet and stowing it away in their chests gives hope of there being one place where the surplus silver and the trade dollars may be legitimately made away with.

In one house an enlightened and non-skeptical Indian was driving sharp bargains in the sale of medicine-men’s rattles and charms, and kindred relics of a departed faith. His scoffing and irreverent air would have made his ancestors’ dust shake, but he pocketed the chickamin, or money, without even a superstitious shudder. The amateur curio-buyers found themselves worsted and outgeneralled on every side in this rich market of Kasa-an by a Juneau trader, who gathered up the things by wholesale, and, carrying them on board, disposed of them at a stupendous advance. “No more spoon,” said the old blind chief as he jingled the thirteen dollars that he had received from this trader for his twenty beautifully carved spoons, and the tourists who had to pay two dollars a piece for these ancestral ladles echoed his refrain and began to see how profits might mount up in trading in the Indian country. Dance blankets from the Chilkat country, woven in curious designs in black, white, and yellow wool, spun from the fleece of the mountain goat, were paraded by the anxious owners, and the strangers elbowed one another, stepped on the dogs, and rubbed the oil from the dripping salmon overhead in the smoky huts, in order to see and buy all of these things.

Old Skowl bid defiance to the missionaries while he lived, and kept his people strictly to the faith and the ways of their fathers. If they fell sick, the shaman or medicine-man came with his rattles and charms, and with great hocus-pocus and “Presto change” drove away or propitiated the evil spirits that were tormenting the sufferer. If the patient did not immediately respond to the treatment, the doctor would accuse some one of bewitching his victim, and demand that he should be tortured or put to death in order to relieve the afflicted one. It thus became a serious matter for every one when the doctor was sent for, as not even the chiefs were safe from being denounced by these wizards. No slave could become a shaman, but the profession was open to any one else, regardless of rank or riches, and the medicine man was a self-made grandee, unless some great deformity marked him for that calling from birth. As preparation for his life-work he went off by himself, and fasted in the woods for many days. Returning, he danced in frenzy about the village, seizing and biting the flesh of live dogs, and eating the heads and tongues of frogs. This latter practice accounts for the image of the frog appearing on all the medicine men’s rattles; and in the totemic carvings the frog is the symbol of the shaman, or speaks of some incident connected with him. Each shaman elected to himself a familiar spirit, either the whale, the bear, the eagle, or some one of the mythological beasts, and gifted with its qualities, and under the guidance of this totemic spirit, he performed his cures and miracles. This token was carved on his rattles, his masks, drums, spoons, canoes, and all his belongings. It was woven on his blankets, and after death it was carved on bits of fossil ivory, whale and walrus teeth, and sewed to his grave-clothes. The shaman’s body was never burned, but was laid in state in the large grave boxes that are seen on the outskirts of every village. Columns capped with totemic animals and flags mark these little houses of the dead, and many of them have elaborately carved and painted walls. The shaman’s hair was never cut nor touched by profane hands, and each hair was considered a sacred charm by the people. Captain Merriman, while in command of the U. S. S. Adams, repeatedly interfered with two shamans, who were denouncing and putting to torture the helpless women and children in a village where the black measles was raging. He found the victims of this witchcraft persecution with their ankles fastened to their wrists in dark, underground holes, or tied to the rocks at low tide that they might be slowly drowned by the returning waters. All threats failing, the two shamans were carried on the Adams, and the ship’s barber sheared and shaved their heads. The matted hair was carried down to the boiler room and burned, for if it had been thrown overboard it would have been caught and preserved, and the shamans could have retained at least a vestige of authority. The Indians raised a great outcry at the prospect of harm or indignity being offered their medicine-men, but when the two shaved heads appeared at the gangway, the Indians set up shouts of derision, and there were none so poor as to do them honor after that. A few such salutary examples did much to break up these practices, and though their notions of our medicine are rather crude, they have implicit faith in the white, or “Boston doctors.”

If these fish-eating, canoe-paddling Indians of the northwest coast are superior to the hunters and horsemen of the western plains, the Haidas are the most remarkable of the coast tribes, and offer a fascinating study to anyone interested in native races and fellow man. From Cape Fox to Mount St. Elias the Indians of the Alaska coast are known by the generic name of Thlinkets, but in the subdivision of the Thlinkets into tribes, or kwans, the Haidas are not included. The Thlinkets consider the Haidas as aliens, but, except in the language, they have many things in common, and it takes the ethnologist’s eye to detect the differences. The greater part of the Haida tribe proper inhabit the Queen Charlotte Islands in the northern part of British Columbia, and the few bands living in villages in the southern part of Alaska are said to be malcontents and secessionists, who paddled away and found homes for themselves across Dixon Entrance. I have heard it stated, without much authority to sustain it, however, that old Skowl was a deserter of this kind, and, not approving of some of the political methods of the other chiefs in his native village, withdrew with his followers and founded a colony in Kasa-an Bay. This aboriginal “mugwump,” as he would be rated in the slang of the day, was conservative in other things, and his people have the same old customs and traditions as the Haidas of the original villages on the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Where the Haidas really did come from is an unending puzzle, and in Alaska the origin and migration of races are subjects continually claiming one’s attention. There is enough to be seen by superficial glances to suggest an Oriental origin, and those who believe in the emigration of the Indians from Asia by way of Behring Straits, or the natural causeway of the Aleutian Islands, in prehistoric times, find an array of strange suggestions and resemblances among the Haidas to encourage their theories. That the name of this tribe corresponds to the name of the great mountain range of Japan may be a mere coincidence, but a few scholars who have visited them say that there are many Japanese words and idioms in their language, and that the resemblance of the Haidas to the Ainos of northern Japan is striking enough to suggest some kinship. Opposed to this, however, is the testimony of Marchand, the French voyager, who visited the Haidas in 1791, and recognizing Aztec words and terminations in their speech, and resemblances to Aztec work in their monuments and picture-writings, first started the theory that they were from the south, and descendants of those who, driven out of Mexico by Cortez, vanished in boats to the north. To continue the puzzle, the Haidas have some Apache words in their vocabulary, and have the same grotesque dance-masks, and many of the same dances and ceremonies that Cushing describes in his sketches of life among the Zunis in New Mexico. Hon. James G. Swan, of Port Townsend, who has given thirty years to a study of the Indians of the northwest coast, has lately given much attention to the Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, and has made large collections of their implements and art works for the Smithsonian Institute. He found the Haida tradition and representation of the great spirit,—the Thunder Bird,—to be the same as that of the Aztecs, and when he showed sketches of Aztec carvings to the Haidas they seemed to recognize and understand them at once. Copper images and relics found in their possession were identical with some silver images found in ruins in Guatemala by a British archæologist. Judge Swan has collected many strange legends and allegories during his canoe journeys to the isolated Haida villages, and his guide and attendant, Johnny Kit-Elswa, who conducts him to the great October feasts and dances, is a clever young Haida silversmith and a remarkable genius. Judge Swan has written a memoir on Haida tattoo masks, paintings, and heraldic columns, which was published as No. 267 of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, January, 1874. In The West Shore magazine of August, 1884, he published a long article with illustrations upon the same subjects, and his library and cabinet, his journals and sketch-books, contain many wonderful things relating to the history and life of these strange people.

CHAPTER V.
FORT WRANGELL AND THE STIKINE.

Those who believe that all Alaska is a place of perpetual rain, fog, snow, and ice would be quickly disabused could they spend some of the ideal summer days in that most lovely harbor of Fort Wrangell. Each time the sky was clearer and the air milder than before, and on the day of my third visit the fresh beams of the morning sun gave an infinite charm to the landscape, as we turned from Clarence Straits into the narrower pass between the islands, and sailed across waters that reflected in shimmering, pale blue and pearly lights the wonderful panorama of mountains. Though perfectly clear, the light was softened and subdued, and even on such a glorious sunny morning there was no glare nor harshness in the atmosphere. This pale, soft light gave a dreamy, poetic quality to the scenery, and the first ranges of mountains above the water shaded from the deep green and russet of the nearer pine forests to azure and purple, where their further summits were outlined against the sky or the snow-covered peaks that were mirrored so faithfully in the long stretches of the channel. The sea water lost its deep green tints at that point, and was discolored and tinged to a muddy tea green by the fresh current of the Stikine River, which there reaches the ocean.