Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

In overlooking any of these islands from an interior view of high altitude, you are impressed by the large number of fresh-water lakes and ponds that nestle in the valleys, in the uplands, and even in the depressions on the loftiest summits. One of the prettiest pools of water which can be imagined is formed by the red, bowl-shaped walls of an extinct crater that makes the top of Paistrakov Mountain: this is a very prominent landmark just across the bay from Oonalashka village, looking west.

A superb survey of Oonalashka Island can be made by the ascent of Mount Wood, which rears its sharp, syenitic peak two thousand eight hundred feet behind and right over the village and harbor of Illoolook. The path to the summit is not difficult, and the panorama spread out under your eyes well repays the effort. It gives you a better idea of what a singularly mountainous region the island is, of the comparative absence of level or bottom-land areas—everything seems to spring from the surrounding ocean mirror, to hills—from hills, in turn, to mountains that end in sharp and rugged peaks. Upon the rocky, frost-riven shingle of these summits nothing can grow except those tiny polar lichens which we find existing, clinging to the earth and rocks of the uttermost limits of the North as far as we have knowledge.

If the fog lifts its gray-blue curtain from the unruffled, clear surface of Captain’s Harbor, and rolls back and away from the red and brown head of the cold crater of Paistrakov on the left, and from the black, jagged outlines of the “Prince” on your right, you will then have at your feet a picture of surpassing scenic beauty, both of contour and color, before and under your delighted vision. The rougher waters of Bering Sea have power no farther inland than their foaming at the feet of Waterfall Head and the dark bases of the Prince, for they rapidly fade into a smooth, still peace as the queer, hook-like sand-spit of Oolachta Harbor is reached, and the anchorage of Illoolook village is attained; its houses and barraboras just peep out from the obscuring foothills of the mountain upon which we stand, and we can faintly discern a delicate fringe of sea-foam along the border of a long-curved beach in front. Two schooners and a steamer lie motionless upon the glassy bay, like so many microscopic water insects.

Turning right about and looking south, our eyes fall upon a radically different landscape—a bewildering, labyrinthian maze of Oonalashkan mountain peaks and ranges, rising in defiance to all law and order of position, with that lovely island-studded water of the head to Captain’s Harbor in the foreground. Ridge after ridge, summit after summit, fades out one behind the other into the oblivion of distance, where the suggestion of a continuance to this same wild interior is vividly made, in spite of wreaths of fog and lines of snowy sheen, relieved so brightly by that greenish-blue of the mosses and sphagnum in which they are set. A few pretty snow-buntings flutter over the rocks to the leeward of our position; their white, restless forms are the only evidence or indication of animal life in our rugged vista of an Oonalashkan interior. Yet, could we see better, we might notice a lurking red fox, and flush a bevy or two of summer-dressed ptarmigan, feeding as they do on the crowberries, the sphagnum, willow-buds and insect-life.

While gazing into the endless succession of valleys, and scanning the varied peaks, a puff of moist wind suddenly strikes our cheeks—we turn to its direction and behold it bearing in and up from Bering Sea—a thick and darkening bank of fog which rapidly envelopes and conceals everything that it meets. It ends our sightseeing, and peremptorily orders a return to the village below from which we came.

When we look at the Aleutes we are impressed at once with their remarkable non-resemblance to the Sitkans. They constantly remind us of Japanese faces and forms in another costume. The average Aleut is not a large man; he is below our medium standard—being about five feet six inches in stature, though, of course, there are a few exceptions to this rule, when examples will be found six feet tall, and many that are mere dwarfs. The women are in turn proportionately smaller. The hair is coarse, straight, and black; the beard scanty; cheek-bones are broad, high, and very prominent; the nose very insignificant and almost flattened out at the bridge—the nostrils thick and fleshy; the eyes very wide-set—very small, too, with a jet-black pupil and iris; the eyebrows very faintly marked; the lips are thick; the mouth large; the lower jaw is very square and prognathous; the ears are small, set close to the head, and almost always pierced for brass or silver rings. The complexion is a light yellowish-brown; in youth it is often fair, almost white, with a faint blush in the cheeks; in middle age and to senility the skin always becomes very strongly wrinkled and seamed, with a leathery harshness. They all have full even sets of teeth, but never take the least care of them whatever. They have small, well-shaped hands and feet, but the finger-nails are exceedingly thin and brittle, bitten off, and never trimmed neatly. They walk in a clumsy, shambling manner, with none of that lithe, springy stepping so characteristic of the Rocky Mountain Indians. When we meet them as we saunter through the settlement, men, women, and children alike drop their eyes to the ground, and pass by in stupid humility, or indifference, as the case may be.

As we see these people at Oonalashka, so they are seen in every respect elsewhere, as they exist between Attoo and Bristol Bay and the Shoomagin Islands. They spend most of their time, men and women, in their skin-canoes, hunting the sea-lion and sea-otter—in codfishing and travelling to and from their favorite salmon-runs and berrying-grounds. Therefore, they have not enabled a symmetrical figure to develop—their legs are always sprung at the knees, some badly bowed, and all are unsteady in walking. While there is nothing about the countenances of the women or girls which will warrant the term of handsome, yet they are not so ugly as the squaws of the Sitkan archipelago. Many of them have very kindly expressions, and a gleam of true womanly instinct far above their surroundings.

No people are more amiable or docile than are these natives of the Aleutian Islands to-day. They are quiet and respectful in their intercourse with the traders, and are all duly baptized members of the Greek Catholic Church. A chapel is never absent from their villages. They hunt sea-otters and trap foxes for their means of trading for those simple luxuries and necessaries of their life which they cannot find in their own country. There are no other fur-bearing animals here, and no other industries whatever in which they can engage.

As they live here to-day, they are married and sustain very faithfully the relation of husband and wife. Each family, as a rule, has its own hut or barrabora. They have long, long ago ceased to dress in skins; but they still retain and wear the primitive water-proof coat or “kamlayka” and boots or tarbosars, which are made from seal and sea-lion intestines. In the poverty-smitten stations of Akoon and Avatanak the early bird-skin “parkas” will probably be most commonly worn; (but it is because these natives are so miserably poor in furs that they do so). They get from the trader’s store at every village a full assortment of our own shop-made clothes, and, on Sunday in especial, many shiny broadcloth suits will be displayed by the luckier hunters. The women are all attired in cotton dresses and gowns, made up pretty closely in imitation of the prevailing fashions among our own people. They wear the boots and shoes which are regularly brought up from San Francisco. But whenever they go out fox-trapping, or enter their bidarkas, they wear the “tarbosar” or water-proof boot of primitive use—the uppers to it are made from the intestines or the gullets of marine mammalia, and it is soled with the tough flipper palms of a sea-lion.

They have the same weakness for our conventional high stovepipe hats which we display; but the prevalence of those boisterous gales and winds peculiar to these latitudes prevents that use of the cherished “beaver” that they otherwise would make of it. Instead, they universally wear low-crowned, leather-peaked caps, to which they love to add a gay red-ribbon band, suggested most likely by the recollection which they have of that gorgeous regalia of the Russian army and naval officers, who were wont to appear in full dress very often when among them in olden time.