Alaska, Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

Captain Coghlan made a survey of Peril Straits before leaving Alaska, and marked off the channel with buoys. He found so many rocks and reefs that had been unsuspected, that the mariners said that they would never dare to venture through Peril Straits again, after learning how rock-crowded and dangerous it was.

Down Chatham Strait,[Strait,] green and snow-covered mountains rise on either side, and on the shores of Admiralty Island marble bluffs show like patches of snow on the long shore line of eternal green. The old Indian village of Kootznahoo, the “Bear Fort” of the natives, lies in a cove on the Admiralty shore, and, from first to last, the Kootznahoo tribe have proved an unruly set. They made hostile demonstrations to Vancouver’s men when they explored the strait, and in 1869 the authorities had to deal severely with them, destroying a village and carrying the chief away as hostage, or prisoner, on the U. S. S. Saginaw. In October, 1882, the shelling of this Kootznahoo village by Captain Merriman, U. S. N., made a great stir, and editors six thousand miles away heaped vituperation and invective upon the head of that officer, without waiting to know of anything but the bare fact of the shelling. The docility of the Indians since then, and the expressed approval of the Tyee’s action by the chiefs of the tribe, prove how efficacious his course was at the battle of Kootznahoo. In Alaska, where the history of that bombardment is still fresh, and the survivors are walking about in paint and nose rings, the whole thing wears a different aspect, and fragments that one remembers of those blazing editorials appear now as most laughable. Every scribe brought in a ringing sentence about the “eternal ice and snows of an arctic winter;” but they don’t have arctic winters in this part of Alaska, as a study of the Japan Current and the isothermal lines will show, and while the battle raged the thermometer stood higher than it did in New York. Other errors were bound to creep in where the fires of enthusiasm were kindled with so little information, and to the officers and people of Sitka the newspapers were a source of unending entertainment when the bombardment of Kootznahoo began to reach their columns.

As related on the spot, that Kootznahoo story of the torpedo and the whale is Homeric in its simplicity. Some Indians went out in a canoe with the white men employed by the Northwest Trading Company at Killisnoo. While paddling towards a whale, one of the bombs attached to a harpoon exploded and killed an Indian. If it had been a common Indian, nothing would ever have been heard of the incident, but when the natives saw their great medicine man laid low, they raised an uproar. Going back to first causes, they demanded two hundred blankets from the trading company as compensation for their loss. The company naturally ignored this tax levied by the coroner’s jury, and straightway there were signs of war.

The Indians’ demand for blood or ransom was made stronger by their capturing one of the white men and holding him as hostage, but when they found that he was one-eyed they tried to send him back for exchange. They claimed that he was cultus (worthless), and demanded a whole and sound man for their dead shaman. They made ready to murder all the white men at the adjoining station, intending, however, to spare the agent’s wife and children, as they afterwards confessed. As the signs of the coming trouble were more apparent, the little steamer Favorite was sent to Sitka with the agent’s family, and an appeal made for help to the Adams. Captain Merriman returned in the Favorite, accompanied by the revenue cutter Corwin.

A great wa-wa was held with the ringleaders and marauders, and to their bold demand for the two hundred blankets, Captain Merriman responded with a counter-demand, that the Indians should bring him four hundred blankets, and forever after keep the peace, or he would shell their village. Mistaking his word for that of a common Indian agent, the red men went their riotous way, and at dusk of a November afternoon the Corwin anchored outside the reef and sent the shot hurtling through the village. The Indians gathered up their blankets and their stores of winter provisions, and took to the woods, but the bombardment was not so severe, but that a few rascally Kootznahoos stayed in the village and plundered the abandoned houses. The tribute of blankets was paid, the Kootznahoos humbled themselves before the big Tyee, or their “good father,” and a more docile, penitent, and industrious community does not exist than those same obstreperous Indians.

The liquor that the Hudson Bay Company and the Russian traders furnished to the Indians was very weak and very expensive, and the Kootznahoos rest some of their claims to distinction on the fact that the native drink, or hoochinoo, was first distilled by their people. A deserter from a whaling-ship taught them the secret, and from molasses or sugar, with flour, potatoes, and yeast, they distil the vilest and most powerful spirit. An old oil can and a musket barrel, or a section of the long, hollow pipe of the common seaweed (nereiocistum) furnish the apparatus, and the hoochinoo, quickly distilled, can be used at once. After any quantity of it has been made, its presence is soon declared, and the Indians are frenzied by it. Hoochinoo is the great enemy of peace and order, and the customs officers can much easier detect a white man smuggling whiskey than catch the Indians in the distilling act. It is apparent enough when they have imbibed the rank and fiery spirit, but it is impossible to watch all the illicit stills that they set up in their houses, or hide in lonely coves and places in the woods. The man-of-war is always on the lookout for indications of hoochinoo, and at the first signs a raid is made on a village, the houses and the woods searched, and the stills and supplies destroyed. With the cunning of a savage race they have wonderful ways of hiding it in underground and up-tree warehouses, and many exciting stories are told by the naval officers of the great hoochinoo raids they have taken part in.

Lumme or rum, these children of nature sometimes call the forbidden fluid, as, like their Chinese cousins, the Thlinkets are unable to pronounce the letter r, and give the l-sound as its equivalent in every case. There are many points of resemblance between the Kootznahoos and the Orientals; and in writing of the origin of these Thlinket tribes of the archipelago, Captain Beardslee, in his official report, says:—

“All of the tribes mentioned except the Kootznahoos seem to have sprung from a common origin; they speak the same language and have similar customs and superstitions, and from these the Kootznahoos differ so slightly that a stranger cannot detect the difference. Their legend is that originally all lived in the Chilkat country; that there came great floods of ice and water, and the country grew too poor to support them, and that many emigrated south; that the Auks are outcasts from the Hoonah tribes, and the Kakes from the Sitkas, and both tribes deserve to be still so considered; that the Kootznahoos came from over the sea, and the Haidas, who live on Vancouver’s Island, from the south. I have imbibed an impression, which, however, I could not obtain much evidence to support, that all of the tribes except the Haidas are Oriental,—in every respect they resemble the Ainos of Japan far more than they do our North American Indians,—and that the Kootznahoos are of Chinese origin; while the Haidas, who are superior to all of the others in intelligence and skill in various handicrafts, are the descendants of the boat-loads whom Cortez drove out of Mexico, and who vanished to the north.”

All this part of Admiralty Island is a coal field, and veins and outcroppings of lignite have been found on every side of it, and along the inlets and creeks leading to the interior. A good coal mine would be worth more than a gold mine, in Alaska, and though seams have been discovered with regularity since 1832, none of the explorers seem to have found just the thing yet. In 1868 Lieutenant-Commander Mitchell explored Kootznahoo Inlet, leading into the heart of Admiralty Island, and at the head of the perilous channel opened a coal seam. In the following year, Mr. Seward’s party went up to the Mitchell mine, and they were enthusiastic over its promises. The coal burned beautifully in the open air, but when the real tests were put to it, and it was tried in the boiler-room of the ship, it was found to contain so much crude resin that it was destruction to boiler iron. Geologically, the country is too young to have even any very good lignite beds, but the archipelago is now swarming with coal prospectors and coal experts, and there is such a general craze for coal that it may yet be forthcoming. At present the Nanaimo coal is depended upon entirely for steaming purposes, and the mail-steamer has to carry its own supply for the whole round trip, and take as freight the coal needed for the government ships at Sitka.

After Captain Hooper’s mine of true coal at Cape Lisburn, on the Arctic coast, the most promising indications are at Cook’s Inlet and around the Kenai peninsula. Although irrelevant in this connection, it perhaps naturally follows in this lignite vein to mention a coal mine accidentally discovered by an English yachtsman, Sir Thomas Hesketh, while cruising about Kenai. He treed an eagle on a hunting trip, and, other means failing to dislodge it, the sportsman set fire to the tree. The roots ran down into a coal seam, that, taking fire, was burning two years later, when the last ship touched there. Another escapade of the yachting party was to set a dead monkey adrift in a box, and when it washed ashore near Kodiak, the Indians, who had had a tradition that the evil spirit would come to earth in the shape of a little black man, fled that part of the island in terror and never went back.