Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

An extensive spread of the largest fresh-water lake in Alaska just over the divide from Cook’s Inlet, early led the Russians to explore it, and to find a portage via its waters to the sea of Bering. But, though this barrier can be passed by an active man in a single day, yet it has divided, and continues to absolutely separate, two distinct races of savages—the Innuits from the Indians; for the Kenaitze are Indians, as we understand them, based upon our types of the great plains and foothills of the Rocky Mountains; and, living here as they do on the shores of Cook’s Inlet, they live, perhaps, in the most romantic and picturesque region of Alaska. Burning volcanoes, smoking and grumbling, a large inland sea rolling for miles and miles therein, and lay at their feet; wide watery moors, tundra, timber and lakes, and rivers rising in the snow-white peaks everywhere visible, all combine to make the most striking lights and shades of natural scenery that human thought can realize in fancy.

A Kenaitze Chief: Cook’s Inlet.

These natives of Cook’s Inlet are strongly defined from those of Kadiak as a separate people, both in language (which no white man has ever been able to repeat), in appearance, and in disposition. They are true Athabascans, or exactly like the meat-eating Indians of our great North American interior. An average man here is an Indian of medium height, say five feet seven or nine inches, well built and symmetrical, lithe and sinewy. The cold glint of his small, jet-black eyes is not relieved by any expression of good humor in his taciturn features and physical bearing. His nose will present, as a rule, the full aquiline or Julius Cæsar outline. Their skin is darker than that of the Innuit, though now and then a comely young person will show perceptible blood-mantlings to the cheeks. The mouth is large—lips rather full; beardless faces are the rule. Their women are much better-looking than either the Siwash squaws of the Sitkan region, or the females of the Aleutian and Innuit races. Their hair is worn in clubbed bunches and braids, hanging upon their backs, thickly larded over with grease, and often powdered with feathers and geese-down.

In the immediate vicinity of the shores of Cook’s Inlet the primitive habits of these savages have been very much changed by their daily intercourse with the Creoles; but at the head of the gulf, especially in the Sooshetno and Keknoo valleys, they are still dressed in their deer-skin shirts and trousers, men and women alike. They work those garments with a great variety of beads, porcupine quills stained in bright colors, and grass plaitings.

These Kenaitze are the only real hunters in all Alaska. They place little or no dependence on fish like the other tribes, unless we except the walrus-eating Eskimo, who hunt, however, in water-craft entirely. And were they not natural Nimrods, the abundance of game which abounds in their district would stimulate such ambition alone in itself. The brown bear[41] of Alaska is found almost everywhere; but it seems to prefer an open, swampy country to that dense timber most favored by its ursine relative, the black bear. It attains its greatest size, and exhibits the most ferocity, on the Kenai Peninsula. It should be called the grizzly, because it is frequently shot here fully as large, if not larger,[42] than those examples recorded in Oregon and California.

This wide-ranging brute is found away up beyond the Arctic Circle, though never coming down to the coast of the icy ocean except at Kotzebue Sound. It is a most expert fisherman, and a terror to the reindeer and cariboo of those hyperborean solitudes. It frequents, during the salmon season, all the Alaskan rivers and their tributaries which empty into Bering Sea and the North Pacific, as far as the fish can ascend. When the run for the year is over, then the animal retires into the thick recesses of semi-timbered uplands and tundra, where berries and small game, deer especially, are most abundant.

Everywhere throughout this large extent of Alaska the footpaths, or roads, of that omnipresent ursine traveller arrest your attention. The banks of all streams are lined by the well-trodden trails of these heavy brutes, and offer far better facilities for progress than those afforded by the paths of men. Not only are the swampy plains intersected by such well-worn routes of travel, but the mountains themselves and ridges, to the very summits thereof, are thus laid out; and the judgment of a bear in traversing a rough, mountainous divide is always of the best—his track over is sure to be the most practicable route. On the steep, volcanic uplands of the mountainous coast of the west shore in Cook’s Inlet, groups of twenty, and even thirty, of these huge bears can be seen together feeding upon the berries and roots which are found there in season. Their skins are not valuable, however, being “patched” and harsh-haired. Then they are very fierce, so that they are not commonly hunted anywhere except by the Kenaitze, who, like all other aboriginal hunters, respect them profoundly, and invariably address a few eulogistic words of praise to a bear before killing or attempting to kill it.[43]

Bear “Roads” over the Moors of Oonimak Islands.