Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

The Togiaks are the Quakers of Alaska; they are the simplest and the most unpretending of all her people; they seem to live entirely to themselves, wholly indifferent as to what other folks have and they have not. They seldom ever view a white man, and then it is only when they go down to the river’s mouth and visit a trader in his sloop or schooner. He never goes up to see them, for the best of reasons to him—they never have anything fit for barter save a few inferior mink and ground-squirrel skins to trade. They have no chiefs; each family is a law unto itself, and it comes and goes with a sort of free and easy abandon that must resemble the life and habit of primeval time. What little these people want and cannot get from each other, they do not go farther in search of, but do without, unless it be small supplies of tobacco which they procure through other Innuits, second or third hand.

Entire families of them, during the summer, leave their winter huts and go out into the valley at such points as their fancy may indicate, where they pass two and three months with absolutely no shelter whatever erected during that entire lapse of time. When it rains hard they simply turn their skin boats bottom side up, stick their heads under, and consider themselves fully settled for protection from tempestuous wind and sleet-storms, or any other climatic unpleasantness. How insensible to extremes of weather do these bodies of the Innuits become—their whole external form is as insensible to heat or cold as their stolid features are! Were they living under Italian skies, they could not affect a greater disregard for the varying moods of that mild climate than they do for the chilly, boisterous weather of Alaska. The Togiakers never go far from the river upon which they build their rude winter villages, and never venture out from its mouth; hence they are not so happy in making the skin canoe or kayak, as their hardier brethren are: these boats on the Togiak are clumsy, broad of beam in proportion to length, and the hatch, or hole, so large that two persons can sit in it back to back. When a family concludes to go out for the summer camp, the man gets into his “kayak,” takes the children who are under four or five years in with him, then pulls and paddles his way up against the current, or floats down, as the case may be; the women—wife, mother, and daughters—are turned ashore and obliged to find their way up or down through long grass and over quaking bogs—to toil in this manner from camp to camp, and as they plod along they shout and sing at the top of their voices to apprise any bear or bears, which may be in their path, of such coming, and thus stampede them; otherwise they would be in continual danger of silently stepping upon bruin as he lurked or slept in dense grassy jungles. When a bear first takes notice of the approach of a human being it invariably slinks away, rarely ever displaying, by the faintest sound, its departure; but that same animal, if surprised suddenly at close quarters, will turn and fight desperately, even unto death.

The bold, far-projected headland of Cape Newenham forms the southern pier of that remarkable funnel-like sea-opening to the Kuskokvim River—a river upon which the human ichthyophagi of the north do most congregate: three thousand savages are living here in a string of scattered hamlets that closely adjoin each other, and are nearly all located on the right-hand bank of the river as we ascend it. They are more like muskrat villages than human habitations—water, water all around and everywhere: situated on little patches, or narrow dikes, at the rim of the high tides, on the edge of the river proper, which is here, and for a long distance up, bordered by a strikingly desolate and forlorn country. A glance at our map will show to the reader that great funnel-fashioned mouth of the Kuskokvim, through which its strong and turbid, clay-white current is discharged into Bering Sea. The tides, in this enormous estuary, run with a rise and fall that simply beggars description—reaching an amazing vertical flow and ebb of fifty feet at the entrance! Such extraordinary change in tide-level is carried up, but much modified as it progresses, until lost at Mumtrekhlagamute; the entire physical aspect of that region, in which this sweeping daily change in a level of the water prevails, is most repellant and discouraging.

THE KUSKOKVIM RIVER AND TUNTUH MOUNTAINS

Viewed from Toolookah, 30 miles below Kolmakovsky, a famous Moose and Reindeer Hunting Grounds for the Innuits of that Region

From the high-tide bank-rims of the Kuskokvim, as we go up, across to the hills and to their rear in the east, extends a dreary expanse of swale and watered moors forty to sixty miles in width, flat and low as the surface of the sea itself. At high tide it appears to be nearly all submerged. It shimmers then like an inland ocean studded with myriads of small mossy islets. Again, when the tide in turn runs out, great far-expanded flats of mud and ooze supplant the waters everywhere, giving in this abrupt manner a striking shift of scenic effect. The eastern river bank is a queer, natural dike, formed by a rank and vigorous growth of coarse sedges, bulrushes, and little sapling fringes of alders, willows, with birch and poplars interspersed. Upon this natural dike these native villages range in close continuity, each occupying all the dry land in its own immediate limits, and occupying it so thoroughly that a traveller cannot, without great difficulty, find bare land enough outside of their sites upon which to pitch his tent. Mud, mud everywhere—a whitish-clay silt, through which, at low tide, it is almost a physical impossibility to walk from a stranded bidarka up to the villages. Indeed, if you are unfortunate enough to reach a settlement here when coming down or going up the river as the tide is out, you are a wise man if you simply fold your arms, sit quietly in your cramped position until the rising, roaring flood returns and carries you forward and over to your destination.

On the Lower Kuskokvim the river width of itself is so great that the people living on its eastern banks never can see an opposite shore to the westward, for it is even more submerged there and swampy, if anything, than where they reside; hence we find them located here on the east bank, to a practical exclusion of all settlement over on those occidental swales and bogs. The current of this singular stream flows quite rapidly. It discharges a great volume of water, which is colored a peculiar whitish tone by the contribution of a roiled tributary that heads in the Nooshagak divide. At its source and down to this muddy junction it is clear. It is a rapid stream in the narrows, and dull and sluggish in flow through wide openings.

The density of aboriginal population so remarkably manifested as we observe it on the Lower Kuskokvim does not, however, give all the testimony, inasmuch as during every summer two thousand or more natives from the Yukon delta come over here to fish with the Kuskokvims, making a sum-total of six or seven thousand fish-eaters, who catch, consume, and waste an astonishing quantity of salmon, which would, if properly handled, be sufficient to handsomely feed the entire number of native inhabitants of Alaska, four times over, every year!

Snow lies deeply upon all this region, driven and packed in vast drifts and fields by the wrath of furious wintry gales, and the hunting of land animals is thus made impossible. Then a native of the Kuskokvim Valley turns his attention to trapping white-fish[152] just as soon as the ice becomes firmly established, usually early in November. The traps are made of willow and alder wicker-work, and nearly all in the same pattern as those employed for salmon, but of somewhat smaller dimensions, so as to be easier to handle, since they are not required to catch the huge “chowichie.” Every morning at dawn on the river the men of its many villages can be seen making their way out to these fish-traps, when it is not bitterly inclement, and even then, sometimes. They carry curiously shaped ice-picks, made or fashioned from walrus-teeth or deer-antlers, because every night’s freezing covers the trap anew with a solid cap of ice, which must be broken up and removed ere a savage can get at it, haul it out, and empty its “pot.” Think of the physical hardihood required of a man who goes out from his hut to visit such a trap when the wind, away below zero, is blowing over an icy plain of the broad river at the rate of sixty miles an hour, whirling snowy spiculæ, like hot shot, into the faintest exposure which he dares to make of his face or eyes! He does not often go when a “poorga” prevails in this boisterous manner. Sometimes he feels as though he must, since a storm may have raged in wild, bitter fury for a week without sign of abatement. His children or his wife may be sick and half-starved; then, only then, does he venture out to dare and endure the greatest hardship of savage life in Alaska.