A peculiar dread which all the natives of this region have, of visiting those areas where volcanic energy manifests itself, is taken advantage of by those dumb beasts upon which the savage wages relentless warfare; the immediate vicinity of craters, of steaming hot springs and solfataras, will always be a rendezvous for game, especially bears, which seem to fully understand that in staying there they will never be disturbed. But the Kenaitze are ardent hunters, nevertheless, and spend most of their time and energy in the chase of land animals—making long journeys into the interior, and gloomy recesses of mountainous cañons and defiles, to follow and find the fur-bearing quarry peculiar to their country.
They have regular tracks of main travel, where, like stage stations on our frontier post-roads, at intervals they have erected shelter-huts, in which they often live with their families for months of the year at a time; they make birch-bark canoes for their river and lake transit, but in navigating Cook’s Inlet, they buy skin bidarkas of the Kadiak model and use them altogether. They are fairly independent of salt water, and seldom pass many hours upon it, except in travelling and trading one with another, and the Creoles; they are, however, very expert at fresh-water fishing through holes in the ice for trout in the thousand and one lakes, large and small, which are so common in their country.[44]
As these natives live in their permanent settlements, we find them distinguished by a peculiar architecture. Their houses are fashioned out of logs, and set above ground resting upon its surface; the logs are hollowed out on one side so as to fit one upon the other in true spoon-fashion, and make a really air and water-tight wall; an enclosure of these walls will hardly ever be larger than 20 feet square, and most of them never go over 12 or 15 feet; they have regularly laid cross-rafters, with a low, or half-pitch, over which spruce-bark shells are so spread as to shed rain and drifting snow; these shingle slabs are kept in place by a number of heavy poles, lashed transversely across; a fireplace is always in the centre with a very small smoke-hole opened in the roof just above it; the door is a square aperture cut through the logs at the least exposed front, about large enough to easily admit the ingress and egress of a crouching Indian. It is stopped in stormy weather by a bear-skin, hung so as to fall directly over it from the inside. When the door is thus closed the naturally dark interior becomes almost wholly so; but the howling of a tempest, laden with rain, sleet or snow, as the case may be, renders this gloomy indoor perfectly radiant to the senses of its sheltered inmates, and they loll in robes and blankets and doze away the time on the rude wooden platform which surrounds the walls and keeps their bodies from the cold damp earth. Upon this staging they spread grass mats and skins, and, in fact, it is a catchall for everything.
The Bedroom Annex of a Kenaitze Rancherie.
An odd feature seen in some of the most pretentious houses of those inlet savages, is the presence of a little kennel-like bedroom annex, which many of the most wealthy or important have built up against the main walls. These boxlike additions are tightly framed and joined to the houses, the only entrance being from the inside of the main structure by a small hole cut directly through the logs of the wall; they are sleeping chambers, and are furnished with a rough plank floor, and sometimes a window made of a piece of translucent bladder-gut. They are also reserved and special apartments during the occasion of those visits of ceremony which Indians often pay, one to each other. But the main idea is to have these tight little dormitories so snug and warm that they will insure the comfortable rest of the owner therein without much burdensome bed-clothing—in many cases the Kenaitze can sleep here in the coldest weather without any covering at all, and do. Such a bed is a great and priceless luxury to them.
No furniture annoys the Kenai housekeeper, unless the small square blocks of wood used occasionally as stools or seats can be so styled; the grease and fire-boxes which we have seen in Sitkan households are also duplicated here, but though made of wood they are not so neatly put together. The traders recently have introduced a very novel feature to the interior of nearly every Kenaitze house; it is the common, cheap, box-imitation, in miniature, of a Saratoga trunk with lock and key. Those oddly contrasted articles will be found everywhere among these people, who keep in them all their valuables, such as charms, and toys for the children, flashy handkerchiefs, small tools fashioned out of bits of iron and steel, bags of thread and stripped sinews, needles, ammunition, and their percussion-caps, which are to them as pearls without price—nothing so precious. Outside of this trunk-craze, and their odd sleeping-rooms, these Indians do not live together or act differently from the usual habit and manner of savages proper, so familiar to us by reason of repeated descriptions published of our own meat-eaters who live near by. They crave nothing from the white trader save powder, lead, good rifles, percussion-caps, tobacco, calico, and the sham trunks alluded to.
The sun shines out over Cook’s Inlet much more than it does in the Sitkan region and the Aleutian Islands. The proportion of fair, bright weather is larger than that experienced anywhere else in all Alaska or its coast. The winter months here are not excessively cold; snow falls in December—sometimes as late as 3d of January before the first flakes of the season arrive. By the first to middle of May it has usually melted away on the lowlands, and the grass springs up anew, green and luxuriant. Summer, and even winter storms, are drawn along the lofty ranges of the Kenai Peninsula when all is serene and pleasant at the same time on the moors and lowlands of the inlet shores. Often, too, the people of that coast can look up to a continued falling of heavy rain and snow on the mountain summits of the steep ridges across the inlet, while they bask in unclouded sunshine, and have no interruption of its comfort.
We ourselves have as yet made but slight use of the natural resources and advantages of Cook’s Inlet. A party of San Francisco merchants have established at the mouth of the Kassilov River a salmon cannery, which has been worked to the full limit of demand; and a smaller, similar factory is located at the head of this inlet, in the Kaknoo estuary.
The finest salmon known to man, savage or civilized, both in flavor and size combined, is that giant fish which runs in especial good form and number into Cook’s Inlet, and which the Russians called the “chowichah;”[45] they are most abundant during the summer neap-tides, but they are not as numerous as are the several other varieties of smaller and far less palatable salmonidæ, which also run up here with them. The average length of these superb chowichah fish is four feet, and a weight of fifty pounds is a low medium. They appear regularly on the 20th and 22d of every May, running in pairs, refusing the hook, though hugging the shore lines. Our people catch them in floating gill-nets, and in weirs of brush and saplings of wicker-work woven with spruce-roots and bark, which are erected on the mud-flats at the river mouth, during low tide.