Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

Trader’s Steamer towing Bateaux laden with Goods up the Yukon.

[The Kvichpak just below Mercier’s Station.]

The waters of the Kvichpak are discharged into Bering Sea through a labyrinth of blind, misleading channels, sloughs, and swamps, which extend for more than one hundred miles up until they unite near Chatinak with the main channel of that great river. This enormous deltoid mouth of the Yukon is a most mournful and depressing prospect. The country itself is scarcely above the level of tides, and covered with a monotonous cloak of scrubby willows and rank sedges. It is water, water—here, there, and everywhere—a vast inland sea filled with thousands upon thousands of swale islets scarcely peeping above its surface. Broader and narrower spaces between low delta lands are where the whirl of its current is strongly marked by a rippling rush and the drift-logs that it carries upon its muddy bosom. These are the channels, the paths through the maze that leads from the sea up to the river proper; and where they unite, at a point above Andrievsky and Chatinak, the Yukon has a breadth of twenty miles; and again, at many places, away on and up this impressive stream as far as seven or eight hundred miles beyond, this same great width will be observed, but the depth is very much decreased.

Myriads of breeding geese, ducks, and wading water-fowl resort to this desolation of the deltoid mouth of the Yukon, where, in countless pools and the thick covers of tall grass and sedge, they are provided with a most lavish abundance of food and afforded the happiest shelter from enemies; but the stolid Innuit does not affect the place. The howling wintry gales and frightful curse of mosquitoes in the summer are too much even for him. His people live in only six or seven small wretched hamlets below Andrievsky and Chatinak—less than five hundred souls in all, including the entire population found right on the coast of the delta, between Pastolik in the north and Cape Romiantzov on the south. Above Anvik on the main river the Innuit does not like to go. He has no love for those Indians who claim that region all to themselves and resent his appearance on the scene. Whenever he does, however, he is always in company with the traders, and he never gets out of their sight and protection, even when making that overland portage from St. Michael’s by the Oonalakleet trail.

As we emerge from those dreary, low and watery wastes of the delta at Chatinak, the bluffs there, though desolate enough themselves, with their rusty barren slopes, yet they give us cheerful assurance of the fact that all Alaska is not under water, and that the borders of its big river are at last defined on both sides. High rolling hills come down boldly on the left bank as we ascend; but the right shore is still low and but little removed from the flatness of a swale. The channel of the river now zigzags from side to side (in the usual way of running bodies of water which wash out and undermine), building up bars and islets, and sweeping in its resistless flood an immense aggregate of soil and timber far into Bering Sea. The alluvial banks, wherever they are lifted above this surging current, which runs at an average rate of eight miles an hour, are continually caving down, undermined, and washed away. So sudden and precipitate are these landslides, sometimes, that they have almost destroyed whole trading expeditions of the Russians and natives, who barely had time to escape with their lives as the earthy avalanches rolled down upon the river’s edge and into its resistless current.

Above the delta large spruce and fir-trees, aspens, poplars, and plats of alders and willows grow abundantly on the banks; but they do not extend far back from the river on either side into any portions of the country, which is low and marshy, and which embraces so large a proportion of the entire landscape. Small larch-trees are also interspersed. The river is filled with a multitude of long, narrow islands, all timbered as the banks are, and which are connected one with the other by sand and gravel bars, that are always dry and fully exposed at low-water stages. Immense piles of bleached and splintered drift-logs are raised on the upper ends of these islands, having lodged there at intervals when high water was booming down.

Between Anvik and Paimoot are many lofty clay cliffs, entirely made up of clean, pure earth of different bright colors—red, yellow, straw-colored, and white, with many intermediate shades. The Yukon runs down from its remote sources at the Stickeen divide in British Columbia, down through a wild, semi-wooded country, a succession of lakes and lakelets, through a region almost devoid of human life. That extensive area, wherein we find such scant or utter absence of population, is, south of the Yukon, very densely timbered with spruce-trees on the mountains, and with poplars, birch, willow, along the courses of the stream and margins of the lakes. Its immediate recesses only are occasionally penetrated by roving parties of Indian hunters, who now and then leave the great river and the Tannanah for that purpose. It is a silent, gloomy wilderness. To the northward of the Yukon this variety in timber still continues; indeed, it reaches as far into the Arctic Circle and toward the ocean there as the seaward slopes of those low and rolling mountains extend, which rise in irregular ridges trending northeast and southwest. These hills are between one hundred and one hundred and fifty miles from the banks of the Kvichpak. Beyond this divide and water-shed of the northern tributaries of the Yukon a forest seldom appears in any case whatsoever, except where a low, straggling spur of hills stretches itself down to the shores of an icy sea; but it is stunted and scant in its hyperborean distribution thereon.

It is not necessary to enter into a description of the appearance and disposition of these Yukon Indians who live on this great river above Anvik, since they resemble those savages which we are so familiar with in the British American interior, Oregon, and Dakota.

The Russians, in regarding them, at once took notice of their marked difference from the more stolid Innuits, so that they were styled, jocularly, by Slavonian pioneers, “Frenchmen of the North,” and “Gens de Butte.” The Innuits called them “Ingaleeks,” and that is their general designation on the river to-day. They differ from our Plain Indians in this respect only: they are all dog-drivers. They rely upon the river and its tributaries largely for food, using birch-bark canoes—no skin-boats whatever. They have an overflowing abundance of natural food-supply of flesh, and fowl also, and when they suffer, as they often do, from starvation, it is due entirely to their own startling improvidence during seasons of plenty, which occur every year. A decided infusion of Innuit blood will be observed in the faces of the Indians who live at Anvik, and some distance up the river from that point of landed demarcation between Innuit and Ingaleek. In olden times the latter were wont to raid upon the settlements of the former, and carried off Innuit women into captivity whenever they could do so, treating the Eskimo just as the Romans raped the Sabines.