Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

When he finally landed (it was St. Elias’ day), near a point that he named as he named the lofty central peak, Cape St. Elias, he found the temporary summer-houses of a band of natives; those people themselves had fled in terror from an unwonted invasion, but the Russians soon had reason to regret their subsequent better understanding.

After the storm which parted Bering, early in June, from the company of the second vessel of his expedition, he had hoped to fall in with her ever afterward, and while eagerly scanning the coast and horizon about him for some sign of his lost comrades, the hand of fate caused him to turn to the northward, when, had his helm been set south, he would have met the object of his search. For the other vessel, the St. Paul, had proceeded on its solitary course, and anxiously sought the commander, until it, too, had sighted this same coast, three days earlier than had its storm-separated consort. Tschericov came to anchor off some distance from “steep and rocky cliffs”[36] in “lat. 56°,” July 15. Weary and expectant, the captain sent his mate with the long-boat and a crew of ten or twelve of his best men away to the shore for the purpose of inquiry and for a fresh supply of water. The ship’s boat disappeared behind the point sheltering a small wooded inlet; it and its men were never seen again by their shipmates. Troubled in mind, but thinking that the surf, perhaps, had stove the boat in landing, the captain sent his boatswain in the dingy with five men and two carpenters, all well armed, to furnish the necessary assistance. The small boat disappeared also, and it, too, was never seen again. At the same time a great smoke was constantly ascending from the shore. Shortly afterward two huge canoes, filled with painted, yelling savages, paddled out from the recesses of the bay, and lying at some distance from the ship, all howled, in standing chorus, “Agai—agai!” then, flourishing their rude arms, they rapidly returned to the shore. Sorrowfully the disturbed and distressed Tschericov turned his ship’s course about and hurried home,[37] not knowing the fate of his men, unable to help them, and, to this day, no authentic inkling of what became of these Slavonian seamen has ever been produced. Unquestionably, they were tortured and destroyed.

The rains caught in the ship’s sails filled the casks of the Saint Paul, since Tschericov, deprived of his boats and thoroughly alarmed, made no further attempts to land; but he had not the faintest idea of the presence, at that moment, of his superior officer in the same waters, and only a few leagues to the northward, who also, like himself was eagerly looking for his storm-parted consort. What a most remarkable voyage, this voyage of the discovery of the Alaskan region—what a chapter of disappointment, of hardship, and of death!

That bluffy sea-wall which forms a face to the low coast plateau at the feet of the St Elias Alps is cut by no great river, nor indented by any noteworthy gulf or inlet, except at Yakootat Bay. Here a succession of precipitous glaciers sweep down from the lofty cradles of their birth to the waters of the sea, making an icy cliff of more than fifteen miles in breadth, where it breaks in constant reverberation and repetition. At the mouth of Copper River all silt carried down from old eroded glacial paths has been deposited for thousands and thousands of years, until a big deltoid chart of sea-water channels in muddy relief of bank and shoal has been formed, and through which the flood of an ice-chilled river takes its rapid course.

The gloomy, savage wildness of this region of supreme mountainous elevation, with its vast gelid sheets and precipitous cañons, its sombre forests and eternal snows, all as yet wholly unexplored, and only faintly appreciated as we can from the remote distance of shipboard observation—this region cannot remain much longer untrodden by the geologist and the naturalist, while the artist must accompany them if an adequate presentation is ever to be given of its weird, titanic realities.

The Mount St Elias shore-line is made up of small projecting points, awash. These alternate with low cliffy or else white sandy beaches, which border a flat, rolling woodland country that extends back from the sea ten to thirty miles, where it suddenly laps and rises upon the lofty flanks of the Elias Alps. Into the ocean many rocky shoals and long sandy bars stretch for miles, and streams of white muddy glacial or snow waters rush into the surf at frequent intervals—hundreds of them.

There are sand-beaches and silt-shoals which extend from Cape Suckling, up seventy-five miles to Hinchinbrook Island, that stands as a gate-post to the entrance of Prince William’s Sound: here is a long sand-ridge which is more than sixty miles in length and from three to seven miles broad, lying between the ocean and the mainland, which in turn is composed of low wooded uplands and of steep abrupt cliffs and hills that are quickly lost in the lofty snowy range of the Choogatch Alps. Through a section of this dreary sand-wall the impetuous flood of the Copper or Atna River forces its way, carrying its heavy load of glacial mud and silt far into the ocean. How the winds do blow here! How the trader dreads to tarry “off and on” this coast!

There are a few lonely places in this world, and the wastes of the great Alaskan interior are the loneliest of them all. Those of Siberia are traversed occasionally by wandering bands, but those of Alaska, never. The severe exigencies of climate there are such as to substantially eliminate savage life, and to rear an impregnable barrier to that of civilization.

When Alaska was first transferred, an estimate of many thousands of Indians inhabiting its vast interior was gravely made and as gravely accepted by us; but a thorough investigation made by our traders and officers of our Government during the last fifteen years has exposed that error. Hundreds only live where thousands were declared to exist. The Indians who live on the banks of the Copper River are, perhaps, the most poverty-stricken of all their kind in Alaska. Their shiftless spruce-bark rancheries and rude belongings are certainly the most primitive of their race, and render that weird Russian legend of the massacre of Seribniekov in 1848, which declared them so numerous and savage, absolutely grotesque. They are perfectly safe as they live in their wild habitat. The cupidity of savage or civilized man never has and never will molest them. But if half is true as to what they relate of huge glaciers which empty into their river, then those that have been described in Cross Sound have formidable rivals, which may yet prove to be superiors, perhaps, although it seems incredible.