Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

An Innuit is not thrifty at all, but when brought into comparison with the Indian he is a bright and shining light in this respect. Among the Ingaleeks of the Yukon a spring famine regularly prevails every year during the months of April and May, or until the ice breaks up and the salmon run. One would naturally think that the bitter memories of gnawing hunger endured for weeks before an arrival of abundant food, would stimulate that savage to glad exertion when it did arrive so as to lay by of such abundance enough to insure him and his family against recurring starvation next year. Strange to say, it does not. The fish come; the famished natives gorge themselves, and thus engorged, loaf and idle that time away which should be employed in drying and preserving at least sufficient to keep them in stock when the fish have left the stream. Often we will actually see them lazily going to their slender store which they have newly prepared, and eat thereof, while salmon are still running in the river at their feet! Such improvidence and reckless disregard of the need of the morrow is hard indeed for us to realize. Many of the beasts of the field and forest with which the savage is well acquainted set him annually, but in vain, a better example.

White traders during the last twenty years have so thoroughly traversed the course of the Yukon, and, since our control of Alaska, little stern-wheel steamers annually make trips from the sea, accompanied with retinues of white men—these incidents have thoroughly familiarized the Indians here with ourselves. But the wilder Ingaleeks of the Tannanah, only six or seven hundred souls in number, however, are as yet comparatively unknown to us. With an exception of a white trader’s visit to their country in 1875,[158] and the recent descent of the Tannanah by a plucky young officer of the United States Army,[159] these Koltchanes have been unknown at home and wholly undisturbed by us. There are less than sixteen hundred Indians living over the entire Yukon region—a fact which speaks eloquently for an exceeding scantiness of the population of that vast landed expanse of this interior of the Alaskan mainland—a great arctic moor north of the Kvichpak, which is a mere surface of slightly thawed swale, swampy tundra, lakes and pools, sloughs and sluggish rivers, in the summer solstice, while the wildest storms of frigid winds, laden with snow and sleet, career in unchecked fury over them during winter. Such an extreme climate is the full secret of its marked paucity of human life. But that desolation of winter does not prevent an immense migration of animal life to this repellant section every summer from the south. Myriads of water-fowl, such as geese, ducks, and the smaller forms, breed and moult here then in all security, and free from molestation, while great herds of reindeer troop over the lichen-bearing ridges. The musk-ox, however, has never been known to range here or anywhere in Alaska within the memory of man. Its fossil remains have been disinterred from the banks of the Yukon, at several places (just as those of the mammoth have), but that, with a few bleached skulls, is the only record of this animal we can find which we would most naturally anticipate meeting with on such ground, apparently so well adapted for it.

There is some difference of opinion as to whether the Yukon or the Mississippi is the larger river, with respect to the volume of their currents. The variation in this regard can hardly be very great, either one way or the other. The Tannanah is the Missouri of the Kvichpak, and swells the flood of that river very perceptibly below its junction.

Michaeiovsky.

[Extreme northern settlement of white Americans.]

Michaeiovsky has been, and will continue to be, the chief rendezvous of a small white residency of the Alaskan North. It is an irregularly built omnium of old Russian dwellings, warehouses, and a few of our own structure. The stockade which once encircled it has long ago been dispensed with, though the antique bastions and old brass cannon still stand at one or two corners as they stood in early times, well placed to overawe and intimidate a bold and hostile savage people then surrounding them. The buildings are clustered together on a small peninsula of an island, about twenty-five or thirty feet above high-water mark; littered all around them are the small outbuildings and the summer tents of Innuit and Indian tourists who are loitering about for the double purpose of gratifying a little curiosity, and of trading. An abundance of drift-wood from the Yukon lies stranded on the beaches, and a large pile of picked, straight logs have been hauled from the water and stacked upon one side of a slope. The whole country, hill and plain, in every direction from this post is a flat and alternately rolling moorland, or tundra, the covering of which is composed principally of mosses and lichens, and a sphagnous combination which produces in the short growing season a yellowish-green carpet, with patches of pale lavender gray where the lichens are most abundant. At sparse and irregular intervals bunches of coarse sedge grasses rise, and the entire surface of moor is crossed at various angles with lines of dwarf birches and an occasional clump of alders and stunted willows. The most attractive feature in such an arctic landscape, when summer has draped it as we now behold it, is the nodding seed-plumes of the equisetum grasses—they are tufts of a pure, fleecy white that, ruffled in the breeze, light up the sombre russet swales with an almost electrical beauty. Everywhere here, in less than eighteen inches or two feet beneath this blossoming flora, will be found a solid foundation of perpetual frost and ice—it never thaws lower. The flowers of that tundra embrace a list of over forty beautiful species, chief among them being phloxes, a pale-blue iris, white and yellow poppies, several varieties of the red-flowered saxifrages, the broad-leaved archangelica, and many delicately fronded ferns.

Twittering, darting flocks of barn-swallows hover and glide over the old faded roofs and walls of Michaelovsky, and the bells of a red-painted church, just beyond, come jangling sweetly across the water, mingled with that homelike chattering of these swallows. But a pious mission here is a practical failure in so far as any effect upon the Innuit mind is concerned. During summer-time, in the Upper Yukon country, thunder-showers are very common; down here, on the coast, they are never experienced. The glory, however, of an auroral display is divided equally between them, when from September until March luminous waves and radii of pulsating rose, purple, green, and blue flames light up and dance about the heavens—gorgeous arches of yellow bands and pencil-points of crimson fire are hung and glitter in the zenith. These exhibitions beggar description; they are weirdly and surpassingly beautiful, far beyond all comparison with anything else of a spectacular nature on earth.

In the autumn and in the early days of December, a low declination of the sun tints up the clouds at sunrise and sunset into beautiful masses of colors that rapidly come and go in their origination and fading. Twilight is a lovely interval of the day in this latitude, and is even enjoyed by the hard-headed traders themselves. Winter is a weary drag here—about seven months—lasting from October until well into May; but, in spite of its intense cold, there are many long periods of its endurance characterized by clear, lovely weather, while the warmer summer is rendered disagreeable by a large number of cold misty days, rain, and gloomy palls of overhanging clouds which shut down upon everything like a leaden cover.

We are accustomed to associate an occurrence of a real mirage with dry, arid, desert countries, where the thirsty and sun-burned traveller is mocked by illusions of clear lakes and a green oasis just ahead. In truth, the mirage of an Alaskan tundra in midwinter is fully as remarkable, and quite as tantalizing. When the trader starts out with his dog-team, on an intensely still, cold day, the vibrations of the air are so energetic that those blades of grass which stick out from the snow, just ahead, seem to him like thickets of willow- and birch-trees, around which he must make a painful detour. Then, again, the ravines and valleys are transformed into vast lakes, with the loftiest and most precipitous shores. On the coast here, during cool, clear days in March, hills, which are thirty or seventy-five miles away from the windows of Michaelovsky, are lifted up and transported to the very beach of the island itself, contorted and fantastic changes constantly taking place in the picture, until suddenly a slight something, or a change perhaps in an observer’s position, causes the singular delusion to vanish.