Alaska, Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

From Pyramid Harbor the ship went south to Icy Straits and up the other side of the long peninsula to Glacier Bay, so named by Captain Beardslee in 1880. At the mouth of it, in unknown and unsurveyed waters, began the search for a new trading station in a cove, since known as Bartlett Bay, in honor of the owner of the fishery, a merchant of Port Townsend.

Vancouver’s boats passed by Glacier Bay during his third cruise on this coast, and his men saw only frozen mountains and an expanse of ice as far as the eye could reach. It is only within a decade that anything has been known of the extent of the great bay at the foot of the Fairweather Alps, and no surveys have been made of its shores to correct the imperfect charts now in use. Revenue cutters, men-of-war, and traders’ ships had gone as far as the entrance, but were prevented from advancing by adverse winds and currents, floating ice, and shoaling waters. The old moraine left by the ice-sheet that once covered the whole bay forms a bar and barrier at its mouth, and the channel has to be sought cautiously.

Skirting the wooded shores and sailing through ice floes, every glass was brought into requisition for signs of life on land. Towards noon a white man and two Indians were sighted signalling from a canoe, and the steamer waited while they paddled towards it. They had been off on an unsuccessful[unsuccessful] hunt for the sea otter, and gladly consented to have their canoe hauled up on deck and to impart all their knowledge of Bartlett Cove. At three o’clock a resounding bang from the cannon announced to the Hooniah natives on shore, that the first ship that had ever entered that harbor was at hand. A canoe came rapidly paddling towards us, and a wild figure rose in the stern and shouted to the captain to “go close up to the new house and anchor in thirteen fathoms of water.” This was Dick Willoughby, the first American pioneer in Alaska, a local genius, and a far-away, polar variety of “Colonel Sellers,” most interesting to encounter in this last region of No-Man’s Land. Dick Willoughby came to this northwest coast in 1858, emigrating from Virginia by way of Missouri. Since that time he has ranged the Alaskan shores from the boundary line to Behring’s Straits, trading with the Indians, and prospecting for all the known minerals. Willoughby’s mines and possessions are scattered all up and down the coast, and there is not a new scheme or enterprise in the territory in which he has not a share. His mines, if once developed to the extent he claims possible, would make him greater than all the bonanza men, and in crude and well-stored gold, silver, iron, coal, copper, lead, and marble he is fabulously rich. In all the twenty-five years he has spent here, Dick Willoughby has gone down to San Francisco but once, and then was in haste to get back to his cool northern home.

A little Indian camp edged the beach below Willoughby’s log house and store, and the natives came out to look at us, with quite as much interest as we went on shore to see them. A small iceberg, drifted near shore, was the point of attack for the amateur photographers, and the Indian children marvelled with open eyes at the “long-legged gun” that was pointed at the young men, who posed on the perilous and picturesque points of the berg. Icebergs drifting down the bay, and small cakes of ice washing in shore with the rising tide, secured that luxury of the summer larder to the Indians, and in every tent and bark house on shore there was to be found a pail or basket of ice-water. In Willoughby’s store there were curios and baskets galore, and after his long and quiet life in the wilderness the poor man was nearly distracted, when seven ladies began talking to him at once, and mixed up the new style nickel pieces with the money they offered him.

The packing-house had just been built, and the ship unloaded more lumber, nets, salt, barrel-staves and hoops, and general merchandise and provisions for the new station. The small lighters and canoes in which the freight was taken ashore made unloading a slow process, although the whole native population assisted. The small boys joined in the carnival, and little Indians of not more than six years trooped over the rocky beach barefooted, and carried bundles of barrel-staves and shingles on their heads.

We roamed the beach, hunting for the round, cuplike barnacles that the whales rub off their tormented sides, and the children, quick to see what we were looking for, trooped up the beach ahead of us, and soon returned with dozens of them that they sold for a good price. Back in the little valley and natural clearing, the ground was covered with wild flowers and running strawberry vines, and the botanist was up to his shoulders in strange bushes, up to his ankles in mire, and in wild ecstacy at his finds. When we complimented Dick Willoughby upon the promising appearance of his little vegetable garden, and the great crop of strawberries coming on, he assured us that in a few weeks the ground would be red with fruit, and that he did not know but that he would be canning the wild strawberries by another year.

In one tent the best Indian hunter lay dying from the wounds received in an encounter with a bear, his face being stripped of flesh by the clawing of the fierce animal, and his body frightfully mangled. The Indians, to whom remnants of their superstition cling, viewed him sadly as one punished by the spirits. Their old shamans taught them that the spirit of a man resided in the black bear, and it was sacrilege to slay this animal, representing their great totem. The old men mutter prayers whenever they find the tracks of a bear, and cannot be induced to bring in the skin entire. It is rare to find an Alaska bear skin with the nose on, the Indians believing that they have appeased the spirit if they leave that sacred particle untouched. The black, the grizzly, and the rare St. Elias silver bear are found in this Hooniah country, and their skins at the trader’s store ranged in price from eight to twenty dollars.

The mountain goat—Aplocerus Montana by his full name—disports himself on all the crags around Glacier Bay, and leaps through the glacial regions of the Fairweather Alps. He has a long, silvery white hair, that is not particularly fine, but his sharp, little black horns are great trophies for the hunter, and are carved into spoon handles by the expert craftsmen of all the Thlinket tribes.

THLINKET BIRD-PIPE (SIDE AND BOTTOM).