Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

A STICKEEN SQUAW

Boiling Berries and Oil, Toasting Herrings, etc.

Water-dippers, pot-spoons and ladles are made from horns of the mountain sheep. They are steamed, bent, and pared down thin, carved and shaped so as to be exceedingly symmetrical, and well finished. The stew and berry-spoons in ordinary use are made from the stiff, short black horns of the mountain goat, the handles often carved to represent a human form, animal, or bird. Knives of all sorts are now in use. Much ingenuity is often exhibited by the adaptation of old blades to new handles—in converting the large, flat blacksmithing files into keen weapons, and making fish-cleaning knives out of pieces of iron; thin, square or oblong sheets of this metal are so fitted into oblong wooden handles as to resemble the small hash-knives used in our kitchens.

But the Sitkan housekeeper glories in her boxes—great chests and little ones—in which she stores everything of value belonging to the family, except the dogs and the canoes. The big boxes, corded up with bark ropes, are her blanket and fur treasuries; the smaller ones contain her oolachan “butter” and dried fish and meat. The larger chests are from two and a half to four feet square; the lesser are between a foot to two feet. The sides of such a box are made of a single piece of thinly shaven cedar board, which by steaming is bent three times at a right angle, and pegged tightly and very neatly up to the fourth corner. The bottom is a separate solid plank, keyed in with little pegs very solidly, and water-tight; the cover is cut out of a thick slab, and fits over and sets down heavily on the upper edge of the chest. Those boxes are all decorated in designs of the peculiar type so common among these savages, painted in black and white. The next desideratum of the squaw is a full supply of cedar-bark mats, which she plaits from strips of this material, and which are always spread out on the ground or rude plank floor when the Indian prepares to roll up in his blanket for slumber. Such mats are the pride of all Thlinket squaws, and vary much in texture and in pattern.

But the daily routine of the dusky housekeeper is a very different one indeed from that characteristic of woman’s labor in caring for our homes. No sweeping or dusting in the Indian rancherie; no bed-chambers to change the linen in and tidy up; no kitchen or servants to look after; nothing whatever of the kind. Yet the Indian matron is always busy. She has to hew the firewood and drag it in; she has to carry water and attend to all of the rude cooking and filling of the trenchers; she looks after the mats and the sewing of the children’s fur and other garments—not much to be sure in the way of dressmaking—she has to make all of the tedious berry-trips, picking and drying of the fruit, as well as attending to the preservation, in the same manner, of the fish and game which the man brings in. She has an infinite amount of drudgery to do in the line of gathering certain herbs, bark, and shell-fish. Many small roots indigenous to the country, containing more or less starch, are eagerly sought after, dried, and stored away by the women. The inner sap-layer of the spruce and also that of the hemlock—the cambium layer—is collected by cutting the trees down and then barking the trunks for that object. It is shaved off in ribbons and eaten in great quantities, both fresh and dried, and is considered very wholesome. It is sweet, mucilaginous, but distinctly resinous in flavor. The rank-growing seeds, shoots, and leaf-stalks of the Epilobium heracleum, and many others, are plucked and carried by the squaws in huge bundles to the family fire, and there eaten by all hands, the stalks being dipped, mouthful after mouthful, in oil.

She has, however, no washing whatever of clothes to do for anybody, except what little she may see fit to do for herself; she never treats the dishes even to that ordeal. With all this, however, it seems rather strange that the clothes of the Indians, consisting of dresses, shirts and blankets for the men; and for women, petticoats, chemises, dresses (sometimes), and blankets also—that these articles usually appear neat and tolerably clean—the children excepted, as they are always dirty beyond all adequate description. Every individual attends to his or her own washing—if the husband wants a clean shirt, he washes it himself.

Before the introduction of the potato through early white fur-traders, the only plant cultivated by the Alaskan savages was a potent weed which they grew as a substitute for tobacco—the importation of the latter, however, has taken its place entirely to-day, because the Virginian weed is far more pleasant. But the old stone mortars and pestles that are still to be found knocking around the most venerable town-sites, bear evidence to the industry of making native tobacco here ages ago. This plant was prepared for use by drying over a fire on a little frame stretcher, then bruised to a powder in the stone mortars, then moistened and pressed into cakes. It was not smoked in a pipe, but, mixed with a little clamshell lime (burnt for the purpose), it was chewed or held in the cheek, just as the Peruvian Indians use coca.[25] Everybody knows how fond Indians are of tobacco—there is no exception to the rule in Alaska, and no excuse for attempting to recite in these pages the well-worn story anew.

No domesticated animals, except dogs, are to be found with the Alaskan Indians—no cats or fowls. The original breed of curs has been very much disguised by imported strains; the present natives are gray and black, shaggy, wolfish beasts, about the size of a large spitz dog. These cowardly, treacherous animals alone make a white man’s stay in an Indian village a burden to his existence.

The work bestowed by several of the Sitkan clans upon their so-called potato gardens is hardly to be designated as the “cultivation” of that tuber. It forms to-day, this vegetable does, a very important part of the food-supply, and where a white man takes hold of such a garden the result, in a small way, is very satisfactory; but the Siwash finds that the greater part of the low, flat, rich soil in this country is so thickly wooded that the task of clearing the ground is altogether too much for him to even consider, much less undertake. But when he can find a place where an old settlement once existed, though long abandoned—there the sites of decayed rancheries are sure to be of rich, warm soil—such are the spots which the Siwash calls his garden, and where his potatoes are rudely planted, little or no attention being paid to the hoeing and drilling which we deem essential, therefore the variety in use has been run down so that the size and yield is very small, and the quality watery and poor.