This gateway to the Arctic Ocean is closed by ice-floes usually by the middle or end of October every year, and opened again in the following season by May 25th or June 1st, but the ice-fields do not allow much room for navigation north until the middle or end of June, sometimes not until the month of July has been well passed.
On that low, northern tundra slope of Cape Prince of Wales is the largest Innuit village in the Alaskan northland. Four hundred souls live there in a settlement which they style Kingigahmoot, and they bear unmistakable evidence of the vicious and degrading influence which evil whalers and rum-traders have exerted. We are struck by their saucy flippancy, their restless, meddlesome, and impertinent bearing. It is because these people have been for a great many years thoroughly familiarized with and degraded by all the tricks and petty treacheries of dishonest and disreputable white men. They do not draw a line in favor of any decency in our race to-day, and hence their disagreeable manner. Otherwise, beyond shaving the crowns of their heads, they do not differ from the Innuits whom we have met heretofore. They are seamen in the full sense of the word—hardy, reckless navigators who boldly launch themselves into stormy waters and cross from land to land in tempest and in fogs, depending solely upon the frail support of their walrus-skin baidars, or oomiaks. These are very neatly made, however, the covering of seal- and walrus-hides being stretched and sewed tightly over wooden frames that are lashed at the joints with sinew and whalebone-thongs. They hoist a square sail of deer-skins or cotton drilling, and run before the wind in heavy gales; or they employ paddles and oars, and urge their craft against head-winds and perverse currents. Their poverty is the only redemption which they have had from absolute destruction; for were they possessed of furs that would encourage the regular visits of traders, they would, with their disposition to debauchery, have been utterly exterminated long before this time. But they are poor, very poor, having nothing to tempt the cupidity of white traders—nothing but small stores of walrus-oil and teeth, and a few red and white foxes, perhaps. Therefore our people never stop long near them, just laying the vessel’s sails aback for a few minutes, or an hour, while the dusky paddling crews of the oomiaks surrounding the schooner exhibit their slim stocks of oil and ivory.
These northern Innuits are not known anywhere to have a village located far back from the sea save at three places, where, on the Selawik, the Killiamoot, and the Kooak Rivers, are settlements of a few people who are at least fifty and one or two hundred miles inland; but they are the exceptions only to their rule of living. Some thirty-five villages of these hyperborean Innuits of Alaska are scattered along the coast between St. Michael’s and Point Barrow; they possess an aggregate (estimated) inhabitation of three thousand men, women, and children. The Diomede and Prince of Wales natives are the most active middlemen or commission merchants among their people; they conduct all the trade between the Asiatic Chookchie savages and the American Innuits, chiefly with those of Kotzebue Sound. Before a wholesale destruction by our people, in 1849-57, of the whales that once were so abundant in these waters, the life of those natives was a comparatively easy struggle for existence, and they were far more numerous then than they are to-day; but a fleet of four and five hundred whaling-ships, manned by the hardiest men of all nations, literally swept that cetacean life from the North Pacific and Bering Sea, and drove it so far into the Arctic Ocean that its remnant, which is still there, is practically safe and beyond human reach.
As you leave the Straits of Bering behind, your little vessel cuts the cold, green waves of the Arctic Ocean rapidly, especially if under the pressure of a warm southwester which funnels up stiffly through the pass. You find nothing to catch your eye in all that long reach from Cape Prince of Wales to the entrance of Kotzebue Sound, which is an objective point of all the traders who come into the Arctic. Here is the last safe Alaskan harbor for a sea-going vessel as we go north. It is a big one; and it is a famous place for a geologist and Innuits alike. To the latter it is of especial significance, since the small rivers which empty there mark an extreme northern limit of salmon-running in America.
The shores which bound this large gulf rise as perpendicular bluffs, either directly from the water or from a shelving beach. In some places the land is remarkably low (as it always is when bordering the coast), and only so much raised above tide-level as to render the idea probable that it is of an alluvial formation, the result of accumulated mud and sand, brought down in former times by the melting and running of large glacial rivers, and then thrown up later by recent ice-floes of the Arctic Sea. The cliffs are, in part, abrupt and rocky; others are made up of falling masses of mud, sand, and ice. The rocky cliffs are dominant on the western and southern shores, while the diluvial bluffs and flats complete that remaining east and northeast circuit of the sound. Lowlands border a major portion of the Bay of Good Hope, and form the land of Cape Espenberg and contiguous country.
A most striking natural feature of this final rendezvous of the salmon-loving Innuits is the Peninsula of Choris, which divides the inner waters of the Bay of Escholtz from those of Good Hope. It is a narrow, variously indented tongue; its northern end is separated from the southern, and connected by a slender neck of very low land. This lower point assumes the shape of a round and somewhat conical eminence, surmounted by a flat, hut-like peak, the sides of which rise a few feet perpendicularly above a surrounding surface, as though raised artificially by masonry. The whole height is about six hundred feet above sea-level. Both sides of that quaint headland terminate in rocky cliffs which, toward the west, are one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet high, stratified, unbroken, and dipping to the west at an angle of thirty degrees. They are composed of micaceous slate, with no included minerals. This slate is of a greenish hue, with a very considerable predominance of mica. In it are garnets, veins of feldspar enclosing crystals of schorl, and fissures filled with quartz. At one point, nearly midway between the southern end of this peninsula and its low neck, is a singular bed of pure milk-white quartz, that marks its locality from a long distance by the masses of large white blocks which have fallen down by natural processes of cleavage and frost-chiselling, and these remain unaltered in their snowy color in spite of the corroding action of time and weather. Again, still nearer the neck, a narrow bed of limestone forms a distinct protrusion above some mica-schist, about thirty feet in length and five in depth. It reappears in such strength, however, at the southern end of the peninsula, that it forms most of the rock exposed, and produces four perpendicular and contiguous promontories, separated from each other by small, receding bays, that present curious walls striped a white and blue tint in beautifully blended stratification, most unique and attractive to the eye. The upper part of this limestone contains iron pyrites, and has cavities filled with chlorite. The lower strata are more abundantly mixed with micaceous schistus, containing compact actynolite, and flat prisms of a glassy shade of it, crystals of tourmaline, and those various concretions of iron pyrites. The quartz is, in some places, colored a real topaz tint. Such, in brief, is a faint description of those geological attractions which the Arctic rocks of Kotzebue Sound present to a student.
The country everywhere, that borders the Arctic Ocean and this sound, is low. The land rises by faint and gradual slopes; it is covered with clay soils and the characteristic vegetation of a tundra. The many low, projecting points of Kotzebue Sound are thickly strewn with large and smaller masses of vesicular and of compact lava, containing olivine. Some of these blocks extend into the sea; others are embedded in the sandy soil of the beach; but many are insulated and awash above the surf. They are honeycombed with empty cavities. The sands of this Arctic Ocean beach partake of the black and volcanic nature of those blocks. These large and numerous erratic blocks of basalt, collected chiefly on such jutting points, must have been conveyed there by ice-sheets from a very considerable distance, for no volcanic formation is to be seen in their vicinity.
A suggestive wreck lies half buried in the sand and drift of the north shore of Choris Peninsula—it is the scant and weathered remnants of a large whaling-bark, which was run ashore here and burned. Its own crew did so to prevent its capture by the Shenandoah—that cruiser which, during our civil war, swooped down upon our Asio-Alaskan whaling-fleet, as a fish-hawk drops upon a flock of startled gulls. Again, on the south side of Good Hope Bay, in this same remarkable sound of Kotzebue, is a bluff of solid blue clay, from the face of which the frost-king annually strikes large masses. The weathered débris of these fallen sections reveal many fine specimens of well-preserved remains of huge pachyderms—mammoths—and their finding has given a fit name of “Elephant Point” to the place.
Across that peninsula, which Choris Point and its comical little tender of Chamisso Islet project from, lies the long and narrow estuary of Hotham Inlet, where all Innuits, from Icy Cape to the far north and Bering Straits in the south, annually repair for salmon-fishing in August. Into the mouths of a half-dozen small streams which empty there, and that large one, of Kooak River, the humpbacked salmon runs, for a brief period, in great numbers: then the harvest of the Eskimo is at hand. Nowhere else above this point can a salmon ever be taken, and as it is the last chance of these natives, they improve it. Flocks of fat ducks and geese hover over and rest upon the smooth, shallow waters of this inlet, alternately feeding there and then alighting upon the tundra where crowberries and insects abound. Our whalers have taught these Innuits how to make and use gill-nets, with which they now catch their fish almost exclusively; and not unwisely have those natives made the change, for they have not got any slender willow brush and alder-saplings which their brethren use so effectually in making rude traps on the Yukon, Kuskokvim, and Nooshagak Rivers. They also stretch these gill-nets over certain narrow places, from shore to shore, of lagoons and lakes, where flocks of water-fowl are wont to fly (in early morning and late in the evening), and succeed in capturing a great many luckless birds by this simple method.