Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

The aspect of the country surrounding this settlement is much more suggestive of farming and cattle-raising than is that presented anywhere else in the Alaskan Territory. The land is rolling and hilly, the higher eminences being covered with thick spruce forests; but as you advance into the interior, great swamps of tangled heather, fir, jungle, and sphagnum are prevalent. The soil everywhere, not covered with grass and forest, is mossy, with a little grass and many bushes. The trees are large, fifty to sixty feet high, and eighteen inches to twenty-four in diameter, mostly spruce—no cedar or hemlock. That district adjoining the East Foreland Head is, perhaps, the best with reference to dry, fertile soil, for, in its vicinity, there are broad plains where wild timothy and red-top grasses grow to the height of your waist and shoulders. An extended experience of the Russians taught them to locate their agricultural operations here; that the coast-line belt of the Kenai Peninsula, between the Forelands and Kooshiemak Bay, a belt of low and semi-prairie uplands some eighty miles in length, and varying in depth from ten to twenty, was the most eligible base of agricultural effort afforded anywhere in Alaska, the quality of the crops always being best near the coast, the soil being drier, and the danger of little nipping summer-frosts wholly abated.

The several small settlements which we find upon this pastoral strip to-day have a curious history, as to the origin of their inhabitants. About the period of 1836-38, the expenses of the Russian American Company in maintaining their trading stations in Alaska were increasing to an alarming degree, while the receipts remained stationary, or fell off. An enquiry into its cause revealed it. The fact was, that hundreds of superannuated employés were drawing their salaries and subsistence, rendering no adequate return for the same. These persons had grown old, and had lost their health in serving the company; were, nearly all of them, infirm survivors of Shellikov and Baranov’s parties, whose daring and energy had established the company. It would be inhuman to discharge these aged and crippled Russians, and throw them upon their own resources in such a region. After much deliberation the company was authorized by the Crown to make the following terms of settlement and relief, and thus locate them as permanent pensioners and settlers in the country. Therefore all of the old employés who had married or lived with native or half-breed women, and who were unable to successfully engage in the trading avocations of the company, by reason of age and other infirmities, were, upon their written or witnessed request, after being stricken from the pay-rolls, provided for in this manner.

The company was obliged to select and donate a piece of ground, build a comfortable dwelling, furnish agricultural tools, seeds, cattle and fowls, and supply the pensioner receiving all this with provisions enough to support him and his wife for one year. These “old colonial citizens” (as they were called), thus established, were then exempted from all taxation, military duty, or molestation whatsoever, and a list of their names was annually forwarded in the reports of the company. The children of those settlers were at liberty to enter or not, as they pleased, the service of the company at stated salaries. The company, furthermore, was commanded to purchase all the surplus produce of these pensioners, furs, and dried fish, etc. This order of the Crown, thus fixing the status of those old servants, also included the half-breeds who were equally infirm by reason of such service. Such whites, or Russians, were officially designated “colonial citizens,” the half-breeds were styled “colonial settlers.”

The descendants of these pensioned servants of the Russian Company are the men and women you observe to-day in those little hamlets scattered along the east coast of Cook’s Inlet, or the Kenai Peninsula. They are bright, clean, and, though very, very poor, still appear wholly independent. They are engaged in small trading with the Kenaitze savages and in their limited agricultural efforts, whereby they have potatoes, turnips, and other hardy vegetables. The cattle, of which they have a few in each settlement, are of the small, shaggy Siberian breed, not much larger than Shetland ponies, and capable of living in the rigors of a winter which would destroy or permanently injure our breeds of neat cattle. These people make butter by laboriously shaking the milk in bottles.

They are obliged to shelter their cattle during winters from the driving fury of heavy snow-storms, and when the herd ranges in the grass-season, the boys and old men always have to guard it from the deadly attention of the big brown bears which infest the entire region. They have a regular “round-up” in each hamlet every night.

THE VOLCANO OF ILYAMNA: 12,060 FEET

The most prominent Fire Mountain of that Chain forming the North Shore of Cook’s Inlet

Everywhere on the west coast of Cook’s Inlet the mountains rise steeply and rugged from the sea, a wild and uninviting contrast with the park-like terraces of the Kenai coast just opposite. Here are the same lofty ridges and smoking peaks which startled and oppressed the brave heart of Captain Cook, as they muttered and trembled in volcanic throes when he sailed by. The two cones which rise dominant are the summits of Mount Ilyamna and the “Rédoute,” from which columns of brownish smoke ascend by day and ruddy fire-glowings by night. So precipitous is this mainland shore of Cook’s Inlet that at only two small points of the most limited area is there any low land to be found, and these spots have been promptly utilized by the Kenaitze Indians as sites for their villages of Toyonok and Kustatan. The dense, sombre coniferous forest which we have become so familiar with, clothes the flanks of those grim mountain walls with the thickest of all coverings to a height of one thousand feet above the beaches below. Here and there we glance into the recesses of a cañon or a gorge where the naked, mossy surface of immense rocky declivities arrests and fixes the eye, while the glittering caps of ice and snow far away above fit down snugly upon long, rough, treeless intervals, covered with heather, lichens, and varied arctic sphagnum.

The upper waters of Cook’s Inlet are said to be quite remarkable for their barrenness of fish—salmon only being plenty in the running season, ascending all the numerous rivers and rivulets; the reason most likely is due to the turbid upheaval of the bottoms everywhere by that violent tidal bore which prevails, recurring twice every twenty-four hours. The Indians here employ a curious trestle or staging of poles, which they use in spearing salmon, and netting them from its support.