View at the head of Valdes Inlet, Prince William’s Sound: typical study of hundreds of such gelid rivers which discharge into the waters of this gloomy sound. A September sketch, made at low-tide
The shores of these canals are formed of high, stupendous mountains that rise abruptly from the water’s edge perpendicularly, and often overhanging. The dissolving snow upon their summits gives rise to thousands upon thousands of little cataracts, which fall with great impetuosity down their seamed sides and over sheer and rugged precipices. This fresh water, clear as crystal and cold as winter, thus descending into the green and blue salt sea, changes that tone to one of a strange whitish hue in its vicinity, as it also does in many fiörds of the Sitkan region. This peculiar flood always arrests attention and excites the liveliest curiosity in the mind of him who beholds it for the first time. Everywhere, save to the southward, mountains can be seen looming up in the background with snowy peaks and guttered ridges, and they attest the wild legends of their sullen grandeur which the first white men related who ever beheld them. These hardy sailors, when sent out in the ship Three Saints from Kadiak, in 1788, arrived in the Gulf of Choogatch, or this Sound of Prince William, during the month of May. They anchored in a little bay of Noochek Island, and there established a trading-station. This is the only post, Fort Constantine, or “Noochek,” that has ever been located by our people in all this section of a vast wilderness; to-day it is but little changed—a couple of trading-stores standing on the foundations of Ismailov’s[39] erection, in which the only three white men now known to reside in all that region of alpine wonder are living, surrounded by a small village of sixty natives.
The large size of those spruce-trees on the southern slopes of Kenai Peninsula, Montague, and Noochek Islands of Prince William’s Sound, so impressed the Russians that they established a shipyard at Resurrection Bay as early as 1794; by the close of that year they actually built and launched a double-decker, 73 feet long by 23 feet beam, of 180 tons burden—the first three-masted, full-rigged ship ever constructed on the west coast of the North American continent; she was named the Phœnix, and as she slid from her ways into the unruffled waters of this far-away place the exultation and delighted plaudits[40] of her builders echoed in strange discord with the wild surrounding. Baranov had no paint or even tar, so that this pioneer ship was covered with a coat of spruce-gum, ochre, and whale-oil. A few small vessels only were built after this, inasmuch as the company found it much more economical to purchase in European yards the sailing-craft and steamers which it was obliged to employ: but, to-day the traces of the Russian ship-carpenter’s axe can be still plainly recognized at many points of the western coast of the sound, and on Montague Island huge logs, as roughed out nearly a full century ago, are lying now, as they lay then, slightly decayed in many instances; the anticipation which felled them was never realized, and they have never been disturbed consequently.
In these early colonial Alaskan days, Fort St. Constantine, or Noochek Island, was a very important trading-centre; it was visited by all the tribes living on the Mount St. Elias sea-wall to the eastward as far as Yakootat, and also by the Copper Indians. Then the sea-otter was abundant, and in its ardent chase those Choogatch savages captured, incidentally, large numbers of black and brown bears, marten, and mink. Now, with the practical extermination of the sea-otter, we find a very poor lot of natives at this once flourishing post; but, for the means of a simple physical existence, they have no lack of an abundant supply of salmon, seal-blubber and flesh—meat of the marmot, porcupine, and bear, varied by the frequent killing of mountain sheep, which are found all over this alpine range; fine foxes are plentiful too.
These Indians live in houses partly underground, which we shall describe as we visit Kadiak, and in purely race-characteristics those people also closely resemble the Kadiak Eskimo. From the north of the Copper River, however, toward the Sitkan archipelago, the Koloshian or Thlinket is dominant in the form and features of those savages which we find in a few small and widely separated villages that exist on the narrow table-land between the high mountains and the unbroken swell of the ocean. These natives all, however, agree in describing their country as an excellent hunting-ground, well timbered, and traversed by numerous small streams which take their rise in the glaciers and eternal snows of the St. Elias Alps.
By some happy dispensation of the Creator every savage is so constituted that here in Alaska, at least, he believes in his own particular area of existence as the very best realm of the earth—he becomes homesick and refuses to be comforted if taken to California or Oregon, enters into a slow decline, and soon dies if not returned to the dreary spot of his birth—a sad illustration of fatal nostalgia.
An Alaskan Indian or Innuit has very little of what may be styled true slavish superstition; certainly he is credulous, but he rather encourages it for the sake of the romance. He gives slight attention to augurs or omens; he ventures out in search of food alike under all sorts of varying conditions of health and weather; he has a few charms or amulets, but does not surrender to them by any means. Shamans, or sorcerers, never have had the influence with him that they have exerted in the barbarism of our own ancestry, and which they possess among the savages of Central and South America and Africa to-day. It is no solution of this difference in disposition to call him stupid, for it is not true; he is far more alert, mentally, than the ghost-ridden Australian, or fetich-slave of Africa; and, again, the sun-worshipping and intensely superstitious Incas were far superior, intellectually, to him.
Most of the Innuits give hardly a thought to the subject, yet they are exceedingly vivacious and social among themselves; much more so than the Indians. They relate a great many supernatural stories, but it is only in amusement, and it seldom ever provokes serious attention.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] Selasphorus rufus—it is common in California, Oregon, and parts of Washington Territory, and Southern British Columbia—never found north of Victoria on the coast, except as above stated: it winters in Central America.