St. Michael’s is all by itself to-day; yet it, at one time, was not the only settlement on the island; for, close by the fort, there were two Mahlemoöt villages, Tahcik and Agahliak, whose inhabitants were first to cordially invite the Russians to locate here in 1835. But in 1842 the ravages of small-pox absolutely depopulated these native towns, and a few survivors fled in dismay from the place—they never came back, nor have their descendants returned. For some reason or other the Russians made the most persistent and energetic attempt to develop a successful vegetable garden in this region and to keep cattle. But, beyond a small exhibit of eatable cabbages, good radishes and turnips, and a few inferior potatoes, grown in the warm sand-dunes of Oonalakleet, nothing more, substantially, ever resulted from it.
Generally the snow falls, at Michaelovsky, as the beginning of its hyemal season, about October 1st, and by October 20th ice has formed, and has firmly locked up the Yukon by November 1st to 5th. These icy fetters break away by June 5th, and in a week or ten days the great river is entirely clear. The sea is usually covered by sludgy floes as early as the middle or end of every October, which remain opening and closing irregularly until next June. The months of July and August are the warmest, ranging from 48° to 54° Fahr. during daytime.[160]
From St. Michael’s to the westward a low basaltic chain of hills borders the coast, and, parallel to it some thirty miles inland, a few peaks attain an elevation of one thousand to fifteen hundred feet. Jutting out at a sharp angle from this volcanic range stands that low peninsula, tipped with the granitic headland named (by Cook more than a century ago) Cape Denbigh. This point forms the southern wall for that snug, tightly enclosed Bay of Norton, thus partitioned off from a sound of the same title. The Oonalakleet River empties into Norton’s Sound, at a point about midway between Michaelovsky and Denbigh. The debouchure of this stream is marked by the richest vegetation to be found anywhere in all of this entire region north of Bristol Bay. It is due to the warm sand-dune flats which are located here; and here is one of the liveliest Mahlemoöt villages of that north. That river is an exclusive gateway to the Yukon during the winter season, from and to Michaelovsky, and these Innuits are the chief commission merchants of Alaska. In a village, now called Kegohtowik, near by, Zagoskin received his first initiation into the wild life which he led up here as an explorer, since it was the first camp[161] he ever made among the Innuits after he had started out from Michaelovsky. This young Russian was kindly received by the wondering natives, who unharnessed his dogs and hung up his sleds on the cache scaffolds as a token of their hospitality. Into their kashga he was taken with every demonstration of regard and curiosity. He happened to have arrived just as these people were preparing for and celebrating a great festival of homage to an Eskimo sea-god who rules the icy waters of Bering and the Arctic Ocean. He quaintly records their proceeding in this language:
“I had an opportunity of observing the natives preparing for a great festival called by them ‘drowning little bladders in the sea.’ In the front part of the kashga, on a strip of moose or other skin, there were suspended about a hundred bladders taken from animals killed by arrows only. On these bladders are painted various fantastic figures. At one end of the trap hangs an owl with a man’s head and a gull carved from wood; at the other end are two partridges. By means of threads running to the crop-beam these images are made to move in imitation of life. Below the bladders is placed a stick six feet in height, bound about with straw. After dancing in front of the bladders a native takes from the stick a small wisp of straw, and lighting it, passes it under the bladders and birds so that the smoke rises around them. He then takes the stick and straw outside. This custom of ‘drowning little bladders in the sea’ is in honor of the sea-spirit called ‘Ug-iak;’ but I cannot discover,” says Lieutenant Zagoskin, “how the custom originated, or why they use bladders from animals killed by arrows in preference to those killed by other means. To all questions upon the subject the natives answered: ‘It is a custom which we took from our fathers and our grandfathers.’ It seems to be of great antiquity, as the natives can give no information as to its origin or the reasons for its adoption.[162] Before these bladders they dance all day in their holiday dress, which consists of light parka, warm boots, and short underdress for the men; and parkas, reindeer-trousers, colored in Innuit style, for women, and ornamented with glass beads and rings.”
And again, in this connection, the pleasures of a dog-sled journey overland to the Yukon are graphically narrated by the same traveller, who resumed his trip, after spending the night as above related, on snow-shoes and dog-sleds laden with his provisions and instruments. On the morning of December 9, 1842, he struck the Oonalakleet River and started up its frozen channel. He says:
“The weather was at first favorable, but it soon changed, and a driving snow-storm set in, blinding our eyes so that we could not distinguish the path. A blade of grass seventy feet distant had the appearance of a shrub, and sloping valleys looked like lakes with high banks, the illusion vanishing upon nearer approach. On December 9th, at midnight, a terrible snow-storm began, and in the short space of ten minutes covered men, dogs, and sledges, forming a perfect hill above them. We sat at the foot of a hill, with the wind from the opposite side, and our feet drawn under us to prevent them from freezing, and covered with our parkas. When we were covered by the snow, we made holes with sticks through to the open air. In a short time the warmth of the breath and perspiration melted the snow so that a man-like cave was formed about each individual. In these circumstances our travellers passed five hours, calling to one another at intervals to keep awake, it being certain death to sleep in that intense cold. If we had been on the other side of the hill, exposed to the full fury of the wind, we would have been buried in the snow and suffocated.”
Such are the experiences of all travelling traders on the Yukon, who encounter these wintry “poorgas” in the pursuit of their calling every year of their lives spent in that great Alaskan moorland. Familiarity with this subject never breeds contempt for it in the minds of those hardy men—that pain and privation to which these characteristic storms subject all human beings who are caught and chained on a tundra, or in the mountains, by their wild rushing and bitterly cold breath, is never forgotten.
On the shores of Norton’s Sound are many low clayey bluffs, which, as they are annually undermined by the surf and chiselled by frost, fall in heavy crumbled masses upon the beach. This exposes their long-concealed deposit of the tusks and bones of those pre-glacial elephants, the mammoth and the mastodon. Such fossil ivory has been used by all Innuits from time immemorial in making their sleds and in tipping their spears, lances, and arrows.
A party of Americans spent the summer of 1881 exploring the country at the head of that deep indentation in the north shore of Norton’s Sound called Golovin Bay. They were miners, and engaged in locating the sources from which the Innuits had been bringing large masses of lead-ore with a micaceous sparkle. The hope of a silver-mine had allured these hardy prospectors, who had not reckoned, however, on what they would have to face during the long winter, on the ice that was always left in the soil. Still, in the summer this bay of Golovin is an attractive anchorage—the most agreeable landscape presented anywhere on our Arctic coast. Several rivers empty into it, and on the slopes of the uplands of the northwest side is a growth of white pines that reach a height of fifteen or twenty feet. These small rounded conifers, scattered in clumps over the green and russet tundra, an absence of underbrush, and the dark-green lines of stunted willows and birches that fill the ravines on the sloping sides of gently rising hills, suggest the parking of an old-country place where the orchards are separated by hedges.
The beaches everywhere are profusely littered with drift-logs from the Yukon, twenty to forty feet in length, thickly strewn. They are pushed high above tides by the ice-floes in winter. What the result would be of failure to gain that abundant supply of fuel, now so easy of attainment, upon the natives of this entire region, is not difficult to determine. As they live to-day they are steadily, rapidly diminishing in number. The whalemen have substantially exterminated their chief sources of life—the whale and the walrus. Seals are not as abundant as on the Greenland coasts, and if, in addition to their extra labor of securing food-supply, they were obliged to do without wood, a practical depopulation of the Alaskan coast of Bering Straits and the Arctic Ocean would be effected soon.