Two hundred miles of uninhabited waste extends between the natives of Atkha and their nearest neighbors, the villagers of Nikolsky, who live in a small, sheltered bight of the southwest shore of Oomnak. This is one of the largest islands of the whole Aleutian group, very mountainous, with three commanding, overlooking peaks that are most imposing in their rugged elevation. Several large lakes nestle in their hilly arms, and feed salmon rivulets that rush in giddy rapids and cascades down to the ocean. Everything grows at Oomnak which we have noticed on its sister island of Oonalashka, except the willow; while cross and red foxes are much more abundant here than at any other place in the whole archipelago. A great many hot springs boil up on the north side, and only as recently as 1878 a decided volcanic shock was experienced, which resulted in the upheaval of a small mud-crater between the village and Toolieskoi Sopka, a huge fire-mountain of the middle interior. Subterranean noises and tremors of the earth are chronic phenomena here, but the natives pay no attention to them. They complain, however, of inability to find fish where they usually found them in abundance prior to these earthquakes. Redoubled attention, however, is paid to the salmon when they run, and thus the deficiency is made up.
An Aleutian Mummy.
[Unrolled from its cerements.]
Before the coming of the Russians, Oomnak was one of the most populous islands; then there were over twenty villages, some of them quite large. One was so big that “the inhabitants of it were able to eat the carcass of an enormous whale in a single day!” The most stubborn and independent spirit displayed by the Aleutes prior to their subjugation was exhibited by the inhabitants of this island. The four or five thousand hardy savages which the promishlyniks met here in 1757-59 have dwindled to a microscopic number of less than one hundred and thirty souls, who reside at Nikolsky to-day. They enjoy a somewhat better climate, for a good deal less snow falls here than at Oonalashka, and the small vegetable-garden does much better than elsewhere, except at Attoo. They raise domestic fowls, and have a very fair sea-otter catch every winter, when they scour the south coast, and reside for months at Samalga, hunting that animal. Furious gales which prevail during certain seasons drive kahlans out upon the south beach, there to rest from the pelting of storms: then they are speedily apprehended and clubbed by the watchful Oomnak hunter.
That curious group, the “Cheetiery Sopochnie,” or Islands of the Four Mountains, stands right across the straits, opposite Oomnak. From Kaygamilak, which lies nearest, eleven mummies were taken as they were found in a warm cave on the northeast side of this island. These bodies were placed there in 1724, or some twenty-five or thirty years before the Russians first appeared. The mummies[84] were in fine preservation, and were the remains of a noted chief and his family, who in that time ruled with an iron hand over a large number of his people. The Island of Kayamil is a mere volcanic series of fire-chimneys, the walls of which are not yet cool. The southeast shore in olden times was the site of several large settlements, where the people lived well upon an abundance of sea-lions, hair-seals, and water-fowl, which still repair to its borders. Now that it is desolate and uninhabitable, large flocks of tundra geese spend the summers here, as they shed their feathers and rear their young, not a fox to vex or destroy them having been left by those prehistoric Aleutian hunters.
But on Tahnak, which is the largest of the group, plenty of red foxes are reported. The loftiest summits are also on this one of the four islets, and on the south side once lived a race of the most warlike and ferocious of all Aleutes. They were destroyed to a man by Glottov, and their few descendants have long since been merged with those of Oomnak, where they now live. Several small, high, bluffy islands stand around Tahnak, and between it and its sister, Oonaska, which is nearly as large, equally rugged and precipitous. Amootoyon is a quite small islet, and completes the quartet of “Cheetiery Sopochnie.”
A most interesting volcanic phenomenon of recent record is afforded by the study of that small Bogaslov islet which now stands hot and smoking twenty miles north of Oomnak, and which, two years ago, raised a great commotion by firing up anew. In the autumn of 1796 the natives of Oomnak and Oonalashka were startled by a series of loud reports like parks of artillery, followed by tremblings of the earth upon which they stood. Then a dense dark cloud, full of gas and ashes, came down upon them from Bering Sea, swept by a northerly wind, and it hung over their astonished heads for a week or ten days, accompanied by earthquakes and subterranean thunder; then when an interval of clearing occurred by a change of winds, they saw distinctly to the northward a bright light burning over the sea. The boldest launched their bidarkas, and, after a close inspection, saw that a small island had been elevated about one hundred feet above the level of the surrounding waters; that it had been forced up from some fissure of the bottom to the sea, and was still rising, while liquid streams of lava and scoriæ made it impossible for them to land. This plutonic action did not cease here until 1825, when it left above the green waters of Bering Sea an isolated oval peak with a serrated crest, almost inaccessible, some two hundred and eighty feet high, and two or three miles in circumference. The Russians landed here then for the first time, and the rocks were so hot that they passed but a few moments ashore. It has, however, cooled off enough now to be occupied by large herds of sea-lions, and is resorted to by flocks of sea-fowl. In this fashion of the making of Bogaslov was our vast chain of the Aleutian archipelago cast up from that line of least resistance in the earth’s crust which is now marked by the position of these islands, as they alternately face the billows of the immense wastes of the Pacific, and those storm-tossed waves of the shoal sea of Bering.
FOOTNOTES:
[69] Bishop Veniaminov, who witnessed one of these eruptions in 1825, describes the occurrence: “On the 10th March, 1825, after a prolonged subterranean noise resembling a heavy cannonade, that was plainly heard on the islands of Oonalashka, Akoon, and the southern end of the Alaska Peninsula, a low ridge at the northwestern end of Oonimak opened in five places with violent emissions of flames and great masses of black ashes, covering the country for miles around; the ice and snow on the mountain tops melted and descended in a terrific torrent five to ten miles in width, on the eastern side of the island. The Shishaldin crater, which up to that time had also emitted flames, continued to smoke only.”