Secretary Seward trod a thorny pathway, and he and his newly-acquired Territory were the theme of every wit and joker in the public prints. Congress was in an ugly frame of mind, and even the party leaders in the House of Representatives felt dubious about getting an appropriation to pay for Alaska. The wildest reports of the country and its resources were current, and while one sage represented it as a garden of wild roses, and a place for linen dusters, the next one said the only products were icebergs and furs, and the future settlers would cultivate their fields with snow-ploughs.
The irrepressible Nasby wrote: “The dreary relic of diplomacy to the south of the North Pole is a land reservation for the Blair family,” and he advised President Johnson to “swing around the circle,” and visit “this land of valuable snow and merchantable ice.”
In a less humorous vein a Democratic editor said: “Congress is not willing to take $10,000,000 from the Treasury to pay for the Secretary of State’s questionable distinction of buying a vast uninhabitable desert with which to cover the thousand mortifications and defeats which have punished his pilotage of Andrew Johnson through his shipwrecked policy of reconstruction. The treaty has a clause binding us to exercise jurisdiction over the Territory and give government to forty thousand inhabitants now crawling over it in snow-shoes. Without a cent of revenue to be derived from it, we will have to keep regiments of soldiers and six men-of-war up there, and institute a Territorial government. No energy of the American people will be sufficient to make mining speculation profitable in 60° north latitude. Ninety-nine one-hundredths of the territory is absolutely worthless.”
In this spirit the thing went on through all of that stormy winter. The impeachment trial was held, and President Johnson acquitted May 17, 1867. On the following day General N. P. Banks introduced a bill appropriating $7,200,000 to pay for Alaska, and as it hung uncertain for weeks, it was determined to get the appropriation through in a deficiency bill, if the Banks bill failed. At a night session on the 30th of June, with the House in committee of the whole, and General Garfield in the chair, General Banks made a most eloquent speech, painting Alaska in glowing colors and luxuriant phrase, and winning the suffrages of the disaffected ones on his own side by the audacity of his genius. Judge Loughbridge, of Iowa, opposed the bill, and three Democrats (Boyer of Pennsylvania, Pruyn of New York, and Johnson of California), made ringing speeches in its favor. The next day C. C. Washburn made a severe speech against it, and Maynard, of Tennessee, spoke for it. Then the grand “old commoner,” Thaddeus Stevens, made an oration in its favor, ending up with a fish story of the skipper who ran his ship aground on the herring in Behring Sea, and ran it so high and so dry on the wriggling fish, that it broke in two. On the 14th of July the bill passed by ninety-eight yeas, forty-nine nays. Fifty-three members not voting, endangered its success, but the House showed its temper by a clause insisting that hereafter it should take part in the consideration of treaties, as well as the Senate. Two weeks later the Czar was chinking his bags of American gold, when dust again rose from the State Department. The cost of the cable messages sent by the two governments, in regard to the negotiations and the transfer, amounted to nearly $30,000. When their share of the bill was presented to the Russian government, they refused to pay it, claiming that the treaty provided that the United States should pay $7,200,000 and all the expenses of transfer. There were polite messages between the diplomats, but at last the cable company reduced the bill, and our State Department paid for all of it.
In the end many statements and prophecies concerning the Territory have been disproved, but we received a country of 580,107 square miles, equal in area to one sixth of the whole United States, and for this great empire we paid at the rate of one and nineteen-twentieths of a cent per acre. The Alexander archipelago itself, comprising 1,100 islands, and an area of 14,142 geographical square miles, will soon prove itself worth the purchase-money alone, when it is explored, developed, and settled. Of the strip of main land, thirty miles wide and three hundred miles long, off which the islands are anchored, Sir George Simpson, Governor-in-Chief of the Hudson Bay Company, once said that all the British possessions in the interior, adjacent to it, were useless, if this coast strip were not leased to them. For years Great Britain made overtures to buy this strip, and hordes of its mining adventurers made threats to drive the Russians away; yet, by the hooks and crooks of diplomacy, it came into the possession of the United States, while the southern border of this strip is distant six hundred and forty miles from our once northern boundary, the forty-ninth parallel. By leasing those tiny Seal Islands, in Behring Sea, to the Alaska Commercial Company, the government has derived a revenue of over $300,000 per annum, and the Territory has, in this way, paid a fair percentage of interest on the purchase-money, since it has been virtually at no expense to protect it, or keep up a form of government. In view of the later mineral discoveries, it is said that Douglass Island alone is worth all that the United States gave for the Territory, and events are slowly proving the foresight and wisdom of Mr. Seward in acquiring it.
The Russians knew almost nothing of the topography or resources of the country when they passed it over to us, as the directors of the fur company, having absolute control, had made everything subservient to their interests and trade. A clause in their lease provided that the government should have the right to all mineral lands discovered, so that they took good care to discourage explorers and prospectors. Baranoff is even said to have given thirty lashes to a man who brought in a specimen of gold-bearing quartz, and warned him of worse punishment if he found any more ore. All the records and papers of the fur company were turned over to the United States, and the archives at St. Petersburg were searched for any documents or reports pertaining to Russian America. Two shelves in the State Department Library at Washington are filled with these manuscript records of early Alaskan events. They are written in clear Russian text, as even as print, and forty of the volumes are archive reports of the directors and agents of the fur company. Fifty of them are office records and journals, and one bulky volume contains the ships’ logs that were of sufficient value and interest to warrant their preservation. None of them have been translated, except as students and specialists have made notes from them for their own use. Mr. Ivan Petroff gave these archives a thorough inspection in gathering the materials for his valuable Census Report of 1880.
CHAPTER XV.
SITKA.—HISTORY SUCCEEDING THE TRANSFER.
A great event in the history of Sitka after the transfer was the visit of Ex-Secretary Seward and his party, and their stay was the occasion of the last gala season that the place has known. Mr. Seward and his son had gone out to San Francisco by the newly-completed lines of the Union and Central Pacific Railroad, intending to continue their travels into Mexico. He casually mentioned before Mr. W. C. Ralston, the banker, that he hoped some time to go to his territory of Alaska. Within a few hours after that Mr. Ralston wrote him that there were two steamers at his service, if he would accept one for a trip to Alaska. The fur company offered their steamer, the Fideliter, and Mr. Ben Holladay put the steamer Active at the disposal of Mr. Seward and his party. Mr. Holladay’s offer was accepted, and his best and favorite commander, Captain C. C. Dall, was given charge of the Active, and everything provided for a long yachting trip. The others invited by Mr. Seward to partake of this magnificent hospitality were his son Frederick W. Seward and his wife, Judge Hastings, of San Francisco, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, of St. Louis, Hon. W. S. Dodge, revenue collector and mayor of Sitka, Hon. John H. Kinkead, postmaster and post trader at Sitka, and Captain Franklin of the British Navy, a nephew of the lamented Sir John Franklin. They left San Francisco on the 13th of July, 1869, and, touching at Victoria, reached Sitka July 30. The Ex-Secretary was received with a military salute on landing, and went to the house of Mayor Dodge. He kept the Russian Sabbath by attending service in the Greek church on our Saturday, and the American Sabbath, by listening to the post chaplain in the Lutheran church on the following day. Like many visitors since then, Mr. Seward said, at the end of his second day, that he had met every inhabitant, and knew all about them and their affairs. On another day General Davis gave a state reception at the castle, and Mr. Seward being dissuaded from his original plan of going up to Mount St. Elias, lest, after the voyage across a rough sea, he should find the monarch of the continent hidden in clouds, made up a party for the Chilkat country instead. General Davis and his family, two staff officers, and a few citizens, were invited to join them, and they went in by Peril Straits to Kootznahoo, and then up to the mouth of the Chilkat River. The incidents of their visit to Kloh-Kutz in his village have been related in a preceding chapter. Adding Professor Davidson and his assistants to their party, the Active returned to Kootznahoo, and visited the coal mine near Chief Andres village, and spent another day on a fishing frolic in Clam Bay. On his return to Sitka Mr. Seward was the guest of General Davis at the castle, and on the evening before his departure he addressed the assembled citizens in the Lutheran church. He took leave with regret, and sailed away with a military salute on a clear and radiant day. They touched at the Takou glacier and Fort Wrangell, went up the Stikine River to the mining camps on the bars near the boundary line, and last visited Fort Tongass. The adjoining village of Tongass Indians, with its many fine totem poles and curious houses, was very interesting to them, and the old chief Ebbitts paid great honors to the Tyee of all the Tyees. Mr. Seward carried away a large collection of Alaska curios and souvenirs, and his lavish purchases quite shook the curio markets of those days. By the etiquette of the country the fur robes laid for him to sit on in the chief’s lodges were his forever after, and the exchange of gifts consequent upon such hospitalities made his visits memorable to the chiefs by the potlatches left them. Mr. Seward carried home a dance cloak covered with Chinese coins, that the Russians had probably gotten during the days of their large trade with China, and sold to the Indians for furs. When the Chinese embassy visited Mr. Seward at Auburn, they gave him the names of the coins, and some of them dated back to the twelfth and fifth centuries, and to the first years of the Christian era. A quantity of Alaska cedar was taken east, and, in combination with California laurel, was used in the panellings and furnishings of the Seward mansion at Auburn.
A year later Lady Franklin went to Sitka on the troop-ship Newbern, and for three weeks was entertained at the castle, and occupied the same corner guest-chamber already made historic by Mr. Seward. At that time, 1870, she was nearly eighty years of age, but she was a most active and wonderful woman. She was accompanied by her niece, Miss Cracroft, who was her private secretary, and her object in visiting Alaska was to trace rumors that she had heard of the finding of relics of her husband. It was a fruitless search, and the widow of Sir John Franklin only lived for five years after this second trip to the Pacific coast in quest of tidings of the lost explorer.
With the exception of these incidents, Sitka grew duller and more lifeless by a slow-descending scale, with every year that succeeded the transfer of the territory to the United States. The officers of the garrison chafed under the isolation from even the remote frontiers of Washington Territory and Oregon, and the soldiers kept tumult rising in the Indian village. After ten years’ occupation the military sailed away one day in 1877, and as no civil government was established to succeed their rule, the inhabitants were in despair. In a short time the Indians began to presume upon their immunity from punishment, and distilling their hoochinoo openly and without hindrance, soon had pandemonium raging in the rancherie and overflowing into the town. They burned the deserted quarters and buildings on the parade ground, killed and mutilated cattle, and the Russian priest was powerless to prevent the defilement of his church by crowds of lazy, indolent Indians, who lay on the church steps and gambled on any and every day. Trouble was precipitated by the Indians murdering a white man in November, 1878. The murderers were arrested by some friendly Indians and put in the guard-house, and immediately the whole village was in arms. The white citizens, who had been appealing for the protection of their own government before this, were virtually in a state of siege and at the mercy of the enraged Siwashes. The murderers were sent to Oregon for trial, but still their people raged. The three hundred white people were outnumbered two and three times by the Indians, and all winter they were in momentary dread of a final uprising and a massacre. The Russians arranged to gather at the priest’s house at any sign of disturbance, and the collector of customs prepared to send his family below.