Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

As we retrace our steps to Oonalashka village we become fully impressed with the size of this island. It bears so many mountain spurs, with a singularly rugged, cut-up coast, in which the deep indentations or gulf-fiörds nearly sever the island in twain as they run in to almost meet from the north and south sides. Beautiful mats of wild poppies are nodding their yellow heads as the gusts sweep over them on the hillsides, and a rank, rich growth of tall grasses by the creek-margins and the sea-shore in sheltered places shimmers and sways like so many fields of uncut green grain do at home. Vegetation everywhere, except on the summits of the highest peaks and ridges and the mural faces of the bluffs! Even there some tiny lichens grow, however, and give rich tones of golden ochre and purplish-bronzed reflections from the cold, moist rocks, whereto they cling.

We pause in that little cemetery, just outside of the village of Illoolook. It is on a small knoll, under higher hills that rear themselves over it. Its disorder and neglect is a fair reminder of what we see in most of our own rural graveyards. The practice of all these natives is to inter by digging a shallow grave. The body is prepared in its best clothes, and coffined in a plain wooden box. A small mound and a larger or smaller wooden Greek cross is the only monument. Tiny oil-portraits of their patron saints, painted on tin or sheet-iron, especially made for these purposes, and furnished by the Church, are tacked to the crosses, with now and then a rude Russian inscription carved or painted thereon in addition. During certain periods of the summer, when the weather is pleasant, little squads of relatives will come out here from the village and pass a whole day in tea-drinking and renovating the crosses, sitting on the mounds as they chat, work, and boil their samovar. The Illoolook church-bells ring—they arouse us to resume the walk thus interrupted in this small city of Aleutian dead. As we enter the town, we see the occupants of turfy barraboras and frame cottages hastening from every quarter and trooping to the door of a yellow-walled and red-roofed house of worship. Perched on that three-barred cross which crowns the cupola of this chapel are half a dozen big black ravens, all croaking most lugubriously, as the clanging chimes peal out below them. That is their favorite roosting-place. The natives take no notice of those ill-omened birds, which as feathered scavengers, hop around the barraboras in perfect security, since no one ever disturbs them, unless it be some graceless trader who is anxious to test the killing power of a new shotgun. They breed in high chinks of the bluffs, and find abundant food cast upon the beaches by the sea. A few domestic fowls, some with broods of newly-hatched chicks, are running about or scratching around the place. The priest’s shaggy little bull and cow stand in front of a small stable or “scoatnik,” lazily chewing their cud. There is no other live-stock in the hamlet, except a few dogs and cats; not a great many of the latter, however.

West of this Island of Oonalashka is a narrow-lined stretch of more than eight hundred miles of rapidly-succeeding islets and islands, until the extreme limit of the Alaskan border is reached at Attoo. In all this dreary wilderness of land and water only three small human settlements are to be found to-day, with a population of less than five hundred natives and six or seven white men. Attoo, Atkha, and Oomnak are the only villages, the last closely adjoins Oonalashka, on a large island of the same name.

THE VILLAGE AND HARBOR OF ATTOO

This Settlement is the extreme Western Town of North America: it is three thousand miles West of San Francisco

Attoo is the extreme western town which is or can be located on the North American continent. It is the first land made and discovered by the Russians, as they became acquainted with the Aleutian chain. Michael Novodiskov, a sailor who had survived Bering and the wreck of the St. Peter in 1741, took command of a small shallop in 1745, and sailed from Lower Kamchatka. He reached Attoo, and also landed on its sister island of Aggatoo, in the same season. The Aleutes were then numerous, bold, and richly supplied with sea-otter skins. Now, nothing but the ruined sites of once populous villages remain behind to attest the truth of that early Russian narrative; and the descendants, who number but a little more than one hundred souls, are living in a small hamlet that nestles in the shelter of that beautiful harbor on the north side of Attoo Island, at the rear of which abrupt hills and high mountains suddenly rise. A sand-beach before the village is fringed by a most luxurious growth of rank grass, that wild wheat of the north, the tasselled seed-plumes of which are waving as high as the waists, and even the heads of the natives themselves.

Sea-otters have been virtually exterminated or driven from the coast here, so that the residents of Attoo are, in worldly goods, poor indeed; and a small trader’s store is stationed here, more for the sake of charity than of commercial gain. But they have an abundance of sea-lion meat, of eggs and water-fowl; a profusion of fish—cod, halibut, algæ mackerel, and a few salmon. They have a liberal supply of drift-wood landed by currents upon the shores of this and the contiguous rugged islets. Several times during the last ten years have traders endeavored to coax these inhabitants to abandon Attoo and go with them to better situations for sea-otter hunting. But, although pinched by poverty, yet so strongly attached are they to this lonely island of their birth, that they have obstinately declined. Though they are poor, yet the contrast between their cheerful, healthy faces and those debauched countenances which we observed at the wealthy villages of Protassov and Belcovsky is a delightful one, and preaches an eloquent sermon in its own reflection. Naturally the people of Attoo do not enjoy much sugar, tea, cloth, and other little articles which they have learned to covet from the trader’s store; so we find them living nearer the primitive style of Aleutian ancestry than elsewhere in the archipelago, being dressed largely in tanned seal and bird-skins, of the fashion made and worn by their forefathers who welcomed Novodiskov long, long ago.

The necessity of doing something in order to gain from the trader a few of the simplest articles, such as the natural resources of Attoo utterly failed to supply, has driven the natives to the care and conservation of blue foxes, which they introduced here many years past, and of which they secure, in traps, two or three hundred every season. The common red fox[80] of the whole Aleutian chain became extinct here in prior time; so, taking advantage of this fact, those blue foxes, so abundant and so valuable on the Seal Islands, were imported, and have ranged without deterioration, since ice-floes never bridge the straits that isolate this island from the nearest adjacent land, and upon which the common breed might cross over to ruin the quality of the fur of that transported Vulpes lagopus. They have also domesticated the wild goose, and rear flocks of them around their barraboras, being the only people in Alaska who have ever done so.

It hardly seems credible, at first thought, but the village of Attoo makes San Francisco practically the half-way town as we go from Calais, Me., to it, our westernmost settlement! It is really but slightly short of being just midway, since Attoo stands almost three thousand miles west of the Golden Gate.[81] A strict geographical centre of the American Union is that point at sea forty miles off the Columbia River mouth, on the coast of Oregon.