Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

NOOSHAGAK, OR ALEXANDROVSK

Old Russian Central Trading Post for the Innuits of the Bristol Bay Region—founded by Kolmakov, in 1834

“Nooshagak” is not a very euphonious name, yet it is employed in Alaska to express the whole of an immense area that backs the borders of Bristol Bay; but, when strictly applied, it is the designation of a small trading-post at the head of a large, brackish estuary of the sea, into which the Nooshagak River pours its heavy flood. A cruise of three hundred and eighty miles to the northeast from Oonalashka in a trim little trading-schooner, which alone can make the landing, takes you to this old and well-known Russian outpost; but the mariner who pilots that vessel must be well acquainted with those perilous shoals and tide-rips of Bristol Bay, or you will never disembark at the foot of that staircase which leads up to the doors of Alexandrovsk. The river here is a broad arm of the sea, full of shifting sand-bars and mud-flats which try the temper of the most patient and skilful navigator. It runs over these shallows at certain turns of the tide, like the ebb and flow in the Bay of Fundy, with a big, booming tidal wave, or “bore.” The current of this river may be discerned for a long distance out into Bristol Bay, easily traced at the season of high water by its turbidity.

Above the settlement of Nooshagak that river rapidly narrows into a width of half a mile between banks for a long distance up its winding course. It is very deep, with a succession of ripples, or bars, that prevent navigation. When the northern bend is reached, then it changes to a brawling, swift, and shoal current, with higher rocky banks up to its source in the big lake which bears its guttural name. It is clear and pure here, and is not muddy until it reaches the shelving, alluvial banks of its lower course, which precipitate, by their caving and washing out, large quantities of soil and timber into the stream. Its shores are, and all the country back is, thickly wooded by spruce forests, and parked with grassy slopes which reach out here and there, planted sparsely with thickets and clumps of graceful birch- and poplar-trees. These nod and wave their tremulous foliage as the summer gusts sweep now and then over them. Countless pools, ponds, and lakes nestle in the moors and in the forest hollows, upon which flocks of geese, ducks, and all other kinds of hardy water-fowl breed and moult their plumage during the short, hot summer. The traders say that this river is the only one in Alaska, of the least magnitude, which has banks on both sides of firm soil throughout its entire course.

This site of Nooshagak village was an initial point of Russian influence and trade among the great Innuit people of Alaska, who live extended in their numerous settlements from the head of Bristol Bay clear to the Arctic Ocean. Kolmakov established the post in 1834, and named it Alexandrovsk. A simple cylindrical wooden shaft, twenty feet high, surmounted with a globe, stands erected to his memory on a small hillock overlooking the post below. The village itself is located on the abrupt slopes of a steep, grassy hillside which rises from the river’s edge. The trading-stores and the residence of the priest, the church, log-huts of the natives and their barraboras are planted on a succession of three earthen terraces, one rising immediately behind the other. All communication from flat to flat is by slippery staircases, which are fraught with great danger to a thoughtless pedestrian, especially when fogs moisten the steps and darkness obscures his vision.

The red-roofed, yellow-painted walls of the old Russian buildings, the smarter, sprucer dwellings of our traders, with lazy, curling wreaths of bluish smoke, are brought into very picturesque relief by the verdant slopes of Nooshagak’s hillside, caught up and reflected deeply by the swiftly flowing current of the river below. The natives have festooned their long drying-frames with the crimson-tinted flesh of salmon; bleached drift-logs are scattered in profusion upon a bare sandy high-water bench that stretches like a buff-tinted ribbon just beneath them, and above, the dark, turbid whirl of flood and eddy so characteristic of a booming, rising river. A gleam of light falls upon a broad expanse of the estuary beyond that point under which the schooner lies at anchor, and brings out the thickly wooded banks of an opposite shore, causing us to note the fact that, for some reason or other, no timber seems ever to have spread down so far toward the sea on this side of the stream, or where the settlement stands, since nothing but scattered copses of alder- and willow-bushes grow on its suburbs or anywhere else as far as an eye can range up the valley.

We notice a decided difference in bearing and expression among the natives here—nothing like what we have studied at Oonalashka, Kadiak, or Sitka. They are Innuits, or representatives of the most populous savage family indigenous to Alaska, and are as nomadic as Bedouins. They are the least changed or altered by contact with our race. They are Eskimo, strictly speaking, and the natives of Kadiak are almost strictly related to them. In portraying the physique, physiognomy, and disposition of these people, we find in an average Innuit a man who stands about five feet six or seven inches in his heelless boots; his skin is fair, slightly Mongolian in its complexion and facial expression; a broad face, prominent cheek-bones, a large mouth with full lips, small black eyes, but prominently set in their sockets—not under a lowering brow, as in the case of true Indian faces. The nose is very insignificant and much depressed, having between the eyes scarcely any bridge at all. He has an abundance of coarse black hair; never any of a reddish hue, as frequently noted among the Aleutes when first discovered and described by the Russians. Up to the age of thirty years an Innuit usually keeps his hair cut pretty close to his scalp; some of them shave the occiput, so that it shines like a billiard-ball. After this period in life he lets it grow as it will, wearing it in ragged, unkempt locks. He sometimes will sport a well-developed mustache and chin-whisker, of which he is as proud as though a Caucasian. He has shapely hands and feet; his limbs are well made, formed, and muscled. An Innuit woman is proportionately smaller than the man, and, when young, sometimes she is not unpleasant to look at. The skin of her cheeks then will be faintly suffused with blushes of natural color, her lips pouting and red, with small, tapering hands and high-instepped feet. She rarely pierces her lips or disfigures her nose; she lavishes upon her child or children a wealth of affectionate attention—endows them with all her ornaments. She allows her hair to grow to its full length, gathers it up behind into thick braids, or else it is bound up in ropes lashed by copper wire or sinews. She seldom tattooes her skin in any place; a faint drawing of transverse blue lines upon the chin and cheeks is usually made by her best friend when she is married.

An Innuit Woman.