SITKA SOUND
Viewed from the Castle, looking South. June 9, 1874

LIBRARY OF CONTEMPORARY EXPLORATION
AND ADVENTURE

OUR
ARCTIC PROVINCE

ALASKA AND THE SEAL ISLANDS

BY

HENRY W. ELLIOTT

ILLUSTRATED BY MANY DRAWINGS FROM NATURE
AND MAPS

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1906

Copyright, 1886, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
TROW’S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY.
NEW YORK.

INTRODUCTION.

If the writer could materialize in the reader’s mind that large aggregate of printed matter now stacked on book-shelves and filed in newspaper columns, which has been published to the world during the last eighty years upon Alaska, the effect would certainly be startling.

Scores of weighty volumes, hundreds of pamphlets and magazine articles, and a thousand newspaper letters, have been devoted to the subject of Alaskan life, scenery, and value. In contemplation of this, viewed from the author’s standpoint of extended personal experience, he announces his determination to divest himself of all individuality in the following chapters, to portray in word, and by brush and pencil, the life and country of Alaska as it is, so clearly and so truthfully, that the reader may draw his or her own inference, just as though he or she stood upon the ground itself.

How differently a number of us are impressed in the viewing of any one subject, by which observation we utterly fail to agree as to its character and worth! This variance is handsomely illustrated by the diverse opinion of Alaskan travellers.

Smithsonian Institution,
February 26, 1886.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.

CHAPTER I.
DISCOVERY, OCCUPATION, AND TRANSFER.

The Legend of Bering’s Voyage.—The Discovery of Russian America, or Alaska, in July, 1741.—The Return Voyage and Shipwreck of the Discoverer.—The Escape of the Survivors.—They Tell of the Furs and Ivory of Alaska.—The Rush of Russian Traders.—Their Hardy Exploration of the Aleutian Chain, Kadiak, and the Mainland, 1760-80, inclusive.—Fierce Competition of the Promyshlineks finally Leads to the Organization and Domination of the Russian American Company over all Alaska, 1799.—Its Remarkable Success under Baranov’s Administration, 1800-18, inclusive.—Its Rapid Decadence after Baranov’s Removal.—Causes in 1862-64 which Led to the Refusal of the Russian Government to Renew the Charter of the Russian American Company.—Steps which Led to the Negotiations of Seward and Final Acquisition of Alaska by the U. S. Government, 1867.

The stolid, calm intrepidity of the Russian is not even yet well understood or recognized by Americans. No better presentation of this character of those Slavic discoverers of Alaska can be made than is the one descriptive of Veit Bering’s voyage of Russian-American fame, in which shipwreck and death robbed him of the glory of his expedition. No legend of the sea, however fanciful or horrid, surpasses the simple truth of the terror and privation which went hand-in-hand with Bering and his crew.

Flushed with the outspoken favor of his sovereign, Bering and his lieutenant, Tschericov, sailed east from Petropaulovsky, Kamchatka, June 4, 1741; the expedition consisted of two small sail-vessels, the St. Peter and the St. Paul. They set their course S. S. E., as low as the 50th degree of north latitude, then they decided to steer directly east for the reported American continent. A few days later a violent storm arose, it separated the rude ships, and the two commanders never met in life again.

While groping in fog and tempest on the high seas, Bering drifted one Sunday (July 18th) upon or about the Alaskan mainland coast; he disembarked at the foot of some low, desolate bluffs that face the sea near the spot now known to us as Kayak Island, and in plain view of those towering peaks of the St. Elias Alps. He passed full six weeks in this neighborhood, while the crew were busy getting fresh food-supplies, water, etc., when, on the 3d of September, a storm of unwonted vigor burst upon them, lasted seven days, and drove them out to sea and before it, down as far as 48° 8´ north latitude, and into the lonely wastes of the vast Pacific. Scurvy began to appear on board the St. Peter; hardly a day passed without recording the death of some one of the ship’s company, and soon men enough in health or strength sufficient to work the vessel could not be mustered. A return to Kamchatka was resolved upon.

Bering became surly and morose, and seldom appeared on deck, and so the second in command, “Stoorman” Vachtel, directed the dreary cruise. After regaining the land, and burying a sailor named Shoomagin on one of a group of Alaskan islets that bear his name to-day, and making several additional capes and landfalls, they saw two islands which, by a most unfortunate blunder, they took to be of the Kurile chain, and adjacent to Kamchatka. Thus they erred sadly in their reckoning, and sailed out upon a false point of departure.

In vain they craned their necks for the land, and strained their feeble eyes; the shore of Kamchatka refused to rise, and it finally dawned upon them that they were lost—that there was no hope of making a port in that goal so late in the year. The wonderful discipline of the Russian sailors was strikingly exhibited at this stage of the luckless voyage: in spite of their debilitated and emaciated condition, they still obeyed orders, though suffering frightfully in the cold and wet; the ravages of scurvy had made such progress that the steersman was conducted to the helm by two other invalids who happened to have the use of their legs, and who supported him under the arms! When he could no longer steer from suffering, then he was succeeded by another no better able to execute the labor than himself. Thus did the unhappy crew waste away into death and impotency. They were obliged to carry few sails, for they were helpless to reef or hoist them, and such as they had were nearly worn out; and even in this case they were unable to renew them by replacing from the stores, since there were no seamen strong enough on the ship to bend new ones to the yards and booms.

Soon rain was followed by snow, the nights grew longer and darker, and they now lived in dreadful anticipation of shipwreck; the fresh water diminished, and the labor of working the vessel became too severe for the few who were able to be about. From the 1st to the 4th of November the ship had lain as a log on the ocean, helpless and drifting, at the sport of the wind and the waves. Then again, in desperation, they managed to control her, and set her course anew to the westward, without knowing absolutely anything as to where they were. In a few hours after, the joy of the distressed crew can be better imagined than described, for, looming up on the gray, gloomy horizon, they saw the snow-covered tops of high hills, still distant however, ahead. As they drew nearer, night came upon them, and they judged best, therefore, to keep out at sea “off and on” until daybreak, so as to avoid the risk of wrecking themselves in the deep darkness. When the gray light of early morning dawned, they found that the rigging on the starboard side of the vessel was giving way, and that their craft could not be much longer managed; that the fresh water was very low, and that sickness was increasing frightfully. The raw humidity of the climate was now succeeded by dry, intense cold; life was well-nigh insupportable on shipboard then, so, after a brief consultation, they determined to make for the land, save their lives, and, if possible, safely beach the St. Peter.

The small sails were alone set; the wind was north; thirty-six fathoms of water over a sand bottom; two hours after they decreased it to twelve; they now contrived to get over an anchor and run it out at three-quarters of a cable’s length; at six in the evening this hawser parted; tremendous waves bore the helpless boat on in toward the land through the darkness and the storm, where soon she struck twice upon a rocky reef. Yet, in a moment after, they had five fathoms of water; a second anchor was thrown out, and again the tackle parted; and while, in the energy of wild despair, prostrated by sheets of salty spray that swept over them in bursts of fury, they were preparing a third bower, a huge combing wave lifted that ark of misery—that band of superlative human suffering—safely and sheer over the reef, where in an instant the tempest-tossed ship rested in calm water; the last anchor was dropped, and thus this luckless voyage of Alaskan discovery came to an end.

Bering died here, on one of the Commander Islands,[1] where he had been wrecked as above related; the survivors, forty-five souls in number, lived through the winter on the flesh of sea-lions, the sea-cow,[2] or manatee, and thus saved their scanty stock of flour; they managed to build a little shallop out of the remains of the St. Peter, in which they left Bering Island—departed from this scene of a most extraordinary shipwreck and deliverance—on August 16, 1742, and soon reached Petropaulovsky in safety the 27th following. In addition to an authentic knowledge of the location of a great land to the eastward, the survivors carried from their camp at Bering Island a large number of valuable sea-otter, blue-fox, and other peltries, which stimulated, as no other inducement could have done, the prompt fitting out and venture of many new expeditions for the freshly discovered land and islands of Alaska.

THE RHYTINA, OR SEA-COW (Extinct)

The flesh of this animal constituted the chief food supply of Bering’s shipwrecked crew, 1741-’42

So, in 1745, Michael Novodiskov first, of all white men, pushed over in a rude open wooden shallop from Kamchatka, and landed on Attoo, that extreme western islet of the great Aleutain chain which forms upon the map a remarkable southern wall to the green waters of Bering Sea. No object of geographical search was in this hardy fur-hunter’s mind as he perilled his life in that adventure—far from it; he was after the precious pelage of the sea-otter, and like unto him were all of the long list of Russian explorers of Alaskan coasts and waters. These rough, indomitable men ventured out from their headquarters at Kamchatka and the Okotsk Sea in rapid succession as years rolled on, until by the end of 1768-69 a large area of Russian America was well determined and rudely charted by them.[3]

The history of this early exploration of Russian America is the stereotyped story of wrongs inflicted upon simple natives by ruthless, fearless adventurers—year in and year out—the eager, persistent examination of the then unknown shores and interior of Alaska by tireless Cossacks and Muscovites, who were busy in robbing the aborigines and quarrelling among themselves. The success of the earliest fur-hunters had been so great, and heralded so loudly in the Russian possessions, that soon every Siberian merchant who had a few thousand rubles at his order managed to associate himself with some others, so that they might together fit out a slovenly craft or two and engage in the same remunerative business. The records show that, prior to the autocratic control of the old Russian American Company over all Alaska in 1799, more than sixty distinct Russian trading companies were organized and plying their vocation in these waters and landings of Alaska.

They all carried on their operations in essentially the same manner: the owner or owners of the shallop, or sloop, or schooner, as it might be, engaged a crew on shares; the cargo of furs brought back by this vessel was invariably divided into two equal subdivisions—one of these always claimed by the owners who had furnished the means, and the other half divided in such a manner as the navigator, the trader, and the crew could agree upon between themselves. Then, after this division had been made, each participant was to give one-tenth part of his portion, as received above, to the Government at St. Petersburg, which, stimulated by such generous swelling of its treasury, never failed to keep an affectionate eye upon its subjects over here, and encouraged them to the utmost limit of exertion.

This Imperial impetus undoubtedly was the spur which caused most of that cruel domination of the Russians over a simple people whom they found at first in possession of their new fur-bearing land; the thrifty traders managed to do their business with an exceedingly small stock of goods, and, where no opposition was offered, these unscrupulous commercial travellers ordered the natives out to hunt and turn over all their booty, not even condescending to pay them, except a few beads or strips of tobacco, “in return for their good behavior and submission to the crown!” Naturally enough, the treacherous Koloshes of Sitka, the dogged Kadiakers, the vivacious Eskimo or Innuits, and even the docile Aleutes, would every now and then arise and slaughter in their rage and despair a whole trading post or ship’s crew of Russians; but these outbreaks were not of preconcerted plan or strength, and never seriously interrupted the iron rule of Slavonian oppression.

The rapidly increasing number of competitors in the fur trade, however, soon began to create a scarcity of the raw material, and then the jealousies and rivalries of the trading companies began in turn to vent themselves in armed struggles against each other for possession and gain. This order of affairs quickly threw the whole region into a reign of anarchy which threatened to destroy the very existence of the Russians themselves. Facing this deplorable condition, one of the leading promoters of the fur-trading industry in Alaska saw that, unless a bold man was placed at the head of the conduct of his business, it would soon be ruined. This man he picked out at Kargopol, Siberia, and on August 18, 1790, he concluded a contract with Alexander Baranov, who sailed that day from the Okotsk, and who finally established that enduring basis of trade and Russian domination in Alaska which held till our purchase in 1867 of all its vested rights and title.

The wild savage life which the Russians led in these early days of their possession of this new land—their bitter personal antagonisms and their brutal orgies—actually beggar description, and seem well-nigh incredible to the trader or traveller who sojourns in Alaska to-day. It is commonly regarded as a rude order of existence up there among ourselves now; and when we come to think back, and contrast the stormy past with the calm present, it is difficult to comprehend it; yet it is not so strange if it be remembered that they were practically beyond all reach of authority, and lived for many consecutive years in absolute non-restraint.

It is easy to trace the several steps and understand the motives which led to our purchase of Alaska. There was no subtle statecraft involved, and no significance implied. The Russian Government simply grew weary of looking after the American territory, which was an element of annually increasing cost to the Imperial treasury, and was a source of anxiety and weakness in all European difficulties. It became apparent to the minds of the governing council at St. Petersburg that Russians could not, or at least, would not settle in Russian America to build up a state or province, or do anything else there which would redound to the national honor and strength. This view they were well grounded in, after the ripe experience of a century’s control and ownership.

One period in that history of Russian rule afforded to the authorities much rosy anticipation. This interval was that season in the affairs of the Russian American Company which was known as Baranov’s administration, in which time the revenues to the crown were rich, and annually increasing. But Baranov was a practical business man, while every one of his successors, although distinguished men in the naval and army circles of the home government, was not. Comment is unnecessary. The change became marked; the revenues rapidly declined, and the conduct of the operations of the company soon became a matter of loss and not of gain to the stockholders and to the Imperial treasury. The history, however, of the rise and fall of this great Russian trading association is a most interesting one; much more so even than that of its ancient though still surviving, but decrepit rival, the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Those murderous factional quarrels of the competing Russian traders throughout Alaska in 1790-98 finally compelled the Emperor Paul to grant, in 1799, much against his will, a charter to a consolidation of the leading companies engaged in American fur-hunting, which was named the Russian American Company. It also embraced the Eastern Siberian and Kamchatkan colonies. That charter gave to this company the exclusive right to all the territory in Alaska, Kamchatka, and the Siberian Okotsk, and Kurile districts, and the privileges conferred by this charter were very great and of the most autocratic nature; but at the same time the company was shrewdly burdened with deftly framed obligations, being compelled to maintain, at its own expense, the new government of the country, a church establishment, a military force, and, at various points in the territory, ample magazines of provisions and stores to be used by the Imperial Government for its naval vessels or land troops whenever ordered. At a time when all such stores had to be transported on land trails over the desolate wastes of Siberia from Russia to the Okotsk, this clause in the franchise was most burdensome, and really fatal to the financial success of the company.

The finesse of the Russian authorities is strikingly manifested in that charter, which ostensibly granted to the Russian American Company all these rights of exclusive jurisdiction to a vast domain without selfishly exacting a single tax for the home treasury; but in fact it did pay an immense sum annually into the royal coffers in this way. The entire fur trade in those days was with China, and all the furs of Alaska were bartered by the Russians with the Mongols for teas, which were sold in Russia and Europe. The records of the Imperial treasury show that the duties paid into it by this company upon these teas often exceeded two millions of silver rubles annually.[4]

The company was also obliged, by the terms of their charter, to make experiments in the establishment of agricultural settlements wherever the soil and climate of Alaska would permit. The natives of Alaska were freed from all taxes in skins or money, but were obliged to furnish to the company’s order certain quotas of sea-otter hunters every season, all men between the ages of eighteen and fifty being liable to this draft, though not more than one-half of any number thus subject could be enlisted and called out at any one time.

The management of this great organization was vested in an administrative council, composed of its stockholders in St. Petersburg, with a head general office at Irkutsk, Siberia—a chief manager, who was to reside in Alaska, and was styled “The Governor,” and whose selection was ordered from the officers of the Imperial navy not lower in rank than post-captain. That high official and Alaskan autocrat had an assistant, also a naval officer, and each received pay from the Russian Company, in addition to their regular governmental salaries, which were continued to them by the Crown.

In cases of mutiny or revolt the powers of the governor were absolute. He had also the fullest jurisdiction at all times over offenders and criminals, with the nominal exception of capital crimes. Such culprits were supposed to have a preliminary trial, then were to be forwarded to the nearest court of justice in Siberia. Something usually “happened” to save them the tedious journey, however. The Russian servants of the company—its numerous retinue of post-traders, factors, and traders, and laborers of every class around the posts—were engaged for a certain term of years, duly indentured. When the time expired the company was bound to furnish them free transportation back to their homes, unless the unfortunate individuals were indebted to it; then they could be retained by the employer until the debt was paid. It is needless to state in this connection that an incredibly small number of Russians were ever homeward bound from Alaska during these long years of Muscovitic control and operation. This provision of debtor vs. creditor was one which enabled the creditor company to retain in its service any and all men among the humbler classes whose services were desirable, because the scanty remuneration, the wretched pittance in lieu of wages, allowed them, made it a matter of utter impossibility to keep out of debt to the company’s store. Even among the higher officials it is surprising to scan the long list of those who, after serving one period of seven years after another, never seemed to succeed in clearing themselves from the iron grasp of indebtedness to the great corporation which employed them.

As long as the Russian Company maintained a military or naval force in the Alaskan territory, at its own expense, these forces were entirely at the disposal of its governor, who passed most of his time in elegant leisure at Sitka, where the finest which the markets and the vineyards of the world afforded were regularly drawn upon to supply his table. No set of men ever lived in more epicurean comfort and abundance than did those courtly chief magistrates of Alaska who succeeded the plain Baranov in 1818, and who established and maintained the vice-regal comfort of their physical existence uninterruptedly until it was surrendered, with the cession of their calling, in 1867.

The charter of the Russian American Company was first granted for a period of twenty years, dating at the outset from January 1, 1799. It also had the right to hoist its own colors, to employ naval officers to command its vessels, and to subscribe itself, in its proclamation or petition, “Under the highest protection of his Imperial Majesty, the Russian American Company.” It began at once to attract much attention in Russia, especially among moneyed men in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Nobles and high officials of the Government eagerly sought shares of its stock, and even the Emperor and members of his family invested in them, the latter making their advances in this direction under the pretext of donating their portions to schools and to charitable institutions. It was the first enterprise of the kind which had ever originated in the Russian Empire, and, favored in this manner by the Crown, it rose rapidly into public confidence. A future of the most glowing prosperity and stability was prophesied for it by its supporters—a prosperity and power as great as ever that of the British East India Company—while many indulged dreams of Japanese annexation and portions of China, together with the whole American coast, including California.

But that clause in the charter of the company, which ordered that the chief manager of its affairs in Alaska should be selected from the officers of the Imperial navy, had a most unfortunate effect upon the successful conduct of the business, as it was prosecuted throughout Russian America. After Baranov’s suspension and departure, in the autumn of 1818, not a single practical merchant or business man succeeded him. The rigid personal scrutiny and keen trading instinct which were so characteristic of him, were followed immediately by the very reverse; hence the dividends began to diminish every year, while the official writing, on the other hand, became suddenly more voluminous, graphic, and declared a steady increase of prosperity. Each succeeding chief manager, or governor, vied with the reports of his predecessors in making a record of great display in the line of continued explorations, erection of buildings, construction of ships of all sizes, and the establishment of divers new industries and manufactories, agriculture, etc.

The second term of the Russian American Company’s charter expired in 1841, and the directors and shareholders labored most industriously for another renewal; the Crown took much time in consideration, but in 1844 the new grant was confirmed, and rather increased the rights and privileges of the company, if anything; still matters did not mend financially, the affairs of the large corporation were continued in the same reckless management by one governor after the other—with the same extravagant vice-regal display and costly living—with useless and abortive experiments in agriculture, in mining and in ship-building, so that by the approach of the lapsing of the third term of twenty years’ control, in 1864, the company was deeply in debt, and though desirous of continuing the business, it now endeavored to transfer the cost of maintaining its authority in Alaska to the home Government; to this the Imperial Cabinet was both unwilling and unable to accede, for Russia had just emerged from a disastrous and expensive war, and was in no state of mind to incur a single extra ruble of indebtedness which she could avoid. In the meantime, pending these domestic difficulties between the Crown and the company, the charter expired; the Government refused to renew it, and sought, by sending out commissioners to Sitka, for a solution of the vexed problem.

Now, if the reader will mark it, right at this time and at this juncture, arose the opportunity which was quickly used by Seward, as Secretary of State, to the ultimate and speedy acquisition of Russian America by the American Union. Those difficulties which the situation revealed in respect to the affairs of the Russian Company conflicting with the desire of the Imperial Government, made much stir in all interested financial circles. A small number of San Francisco capitalists had been for many years passive stockholders in what was termed by courtesy the American Russian Ice Company—it being nothing more than a name really, inasmuch as very little ever was or has been done in the way of shipping ice to California from Alaska. Nevertheless these gentlemen quickly conceived the idea of taking the charter of the Russian Company themselves, and offered a sum far in excess of what had accrued to the Imperial treasury at any time during the last forty years’ tenure of the old contract. The negotiations were briskly proceeding, and were in a fair way to a successful ending, when it informally became known to Secretary Seward, who at once had his interest excited in the subject, and speedily arrived at the conclusion that if it was worth paying $5,000,000 by a handful of American merchants for a twenty years’ lease of Alaska, it was well worthy the cost of buying it out and out in behalf of the United States; inasmuch as leasing it, as the Russians intended to, was a virtual surrender of it absolutely for the period named. In this spirit the politic Seward approached the Russian Government, and the final consummation of Alaska’s purchase was easily effected,[5] May, 1867, and formally transferred to our flag on the 18th of October following.

If the Russian Government had not been in an exceedingly friendly state of mind with regard to the American Union, this somewhat abrupt determination on its part to make such a virtual gift of its vast Alaskan domain would never have been thought of in St. Petersburg for a moment. Still, it should be well understood from the Muscovitic view, that in presenting Russian America to us, no loss to the glory or the power of the Czar’s Crown resulted; no surrender of smiling hamlets, towns or cities, no mines or mining, no fish or fishing, no mills, factories or commerce—nothing but her good will and title to a few thousand poor and simple natives, and a large wilderness of mountain, tundra-moor and island-archipelago wholly untouched, unreclaimed by the hand of civilized man. Russia then, as now, suffered and still suffers, from an embarrassment of just such natural wealth as that which we so hopefully claim as our own Alaska.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Bering’s Island—he was wrecked on the east coast, at a point under steep bluffs now known as “Kommandor.” Scarcely a vestige of this shipwreck now remains there.

[2] That curious creature is extinct. It formerly inhabited the sea-shores of these two small islands. The German naturalist Steller, who was the surgeon of Bering’s ship, has given us the only account we have of this animal’s appearance and habits; it was the largest of all the Sirenians; attained a length sometimes of thirty feet. When first discovered it was extremely abundant, and formed the main source of food-supply for the shipwrecked crew of Bering’s vessel. Twenty-seven years afterward it became extinct, due to the merciless hunting and slaughter of it by the Russians, who, on their way over to Alaska from Kamchatka, always made it an object to stop at Bering or Copper Island and fill up large casks with the flesh of this sea-cow. Its large size, inactive habits, and clumsy progress in the water, together with its utter fearlessness of man, made its extinction rapid and feasible.

I make the restoration from a careful study of the details of Steller’s description.

[3] The order of this search and voyaging has been faithfully recorded by Ivan Petroff in his admirable compendium of the subject. (See Tenth Census U. S. A., Vol. VIII.) While this narrative may be interesting to a historian, yet I deem it best not to inflict it upon the general reader. Also in “Bancroft’s History of Alaska,” recently published at San Francisco, it is graphically and laboriously described.

[4] The Russian currency is always expressed in kopecks and in rubles. Gold coinage there is seldom ever seen, and was never used in Alaska. The following table explains itself:

1 copper kopeck = 1 silver kopeck.
2 copper kopecks = 1 grösh.
3 copper kopecks = 1 alteen.
5 copper kopecks = 1 peetak.
5 silver kopecks = 1 peetak.
10 silver kopecks = 1 greevnah.
15 silver kopecks = 1 peteealtin.
20 silver kopecks = 1 dvoogreevenik.
25 silver kopecks = 1 chetvertak.
50 silver kopecks = 1 polteenah.
100 silver kopecks = 1 ruble.

The silver ruble is nearly equal to seventy-five cents in our coin. The paper ruble fluctuates in Russia from forty to fifty cents, specie value; in Alaska it was rated at twenty cents, silver. Much of the “paper” currency in Alaska during Russian rule was stamped on little squares of walrus hide.

A still smaller coin, called the “polooshka” worth ¼ kopeck, has been used in Russia. It takes its name from a hare-skin, “ooshka,” or “little ears,” which, before the use of money by the Slavs, was one of the lowest articles of exchange, pol signifying half, and polooshka, half a hare’s skin. From another small coin, the “deinga” (equal to ½ kopeck in value), is derived the Russian word for money, deingah or deingie.

[5] $7,200,000 gold was paid by the United States into the Imperial treasury of Russia for the Territory of Alaska; it is said that most of this was used in St. Petersburg to satisfy old debts and obligations incurred by Alaskan enterprises, attorneys’ fees, etc. So, in short, Russia really gave her American possessions to the American people, reaping no direct emolument or profit whatsoever from the transfer.

CHAPTER II.
FEATURES OF THE SITKAN REGION.

The Vast Area of Alaska.—Difficulty of Comparison, and Access to her Shores save in the Small Area of the Sitkan Region.—Many Americans as Officers of the Government, Merchants, Traders, Miners, etc., who have Visited Alaska daring the last Eighteen Years.—Full Understanding of Alaskan Life and Resources now on Record.—Beautiful and Extraordinary Features of the Sitkan Archipelago.—The Decaying Town of Wrangel.—The Wonderful Glaciers of this Region.—The Tides, Currents and Winds.—The Forests and Vegetation Omnipresent in this Land-locked Archipelago.—Indigenous Berries.—Gloomy Grandeur of the Cañons.—The Sitkan Climate.—Neither Cold nor Warm.—Excessive Humidity.—Stickeen Gold Excitement of 1862 and 1875.—The Decay of Cassiar.—The Picturesque Bay of Sitka.—The Romance and Terror of Baranov’s Establishment there in 1800-1805.—The Russian Life and Industries at Sitka.—The Contrast between Russian Sitka and American Sitka a Striking One.

“For hot, cold, moist and dry, four champions fierce

Strive here for mastery.”—MILTON.

The general contour of Alaska is correctly rendered on any and all charts published to-day; but it is usually drawn to a very much reduced scale and tucked away into a corner of a large conventional map of the United States and Territories, so that it fails, in this manner, to give an adequate idea of its real proportion—and does not commonly impress the eye and mind, as it ought to, at first sight. But a moment’s thoughtful observation shows the vast landed extent between that extreme western point of Attoo Island in the occident, and the boundary near Fort Simpson in the orient, to be over 2,000 miles; while from this Alaskan initial post at Simpson to Point Barrow, in the arctic, it covers the limit of 1,200 geographical miles.[6] The superficial magnitude of this region is at once well appreciated when the largest States or Territories are each held up in contrast.

The bewildering indentation and endless length of the coast, the thousands of islands and islets, the numerous volcanoes and towering peaks, and the maze of large and small rivers, make a comparison of Alaska, in any other respect than that of mere superficial area, wholly futile when brought into contrast with the rest of the North American continent. Barred out as she is from close communion with her new relationship and sisterhood in the American Union by her remote situation, and still more so by the unhappiness of her climate, she is not going to be inspected from the platforms of flying express trains; and, save the little sheltered jaunt by steamer from Puget Sound to Sitka and immediate vicinity, no ocean-tourists are at all likely to pry into the lonely nooks and harbors of her extended coasts, surf-beaten and tempest-swept as they are every month in the year.

But, in the discharge of official duty, in the search for precious metals, coal and copper, in the desire to locate profitable fishing ventures, and in the interests of natural science, hundreds of energetic, quick-witted Americans have been giving Alaska a very keen examination during the last eighteen years. The sum of their knowledge throws full understanding over the subject of Alaskan life and resources, as viewed and appreciated from the American basis; there is no difficulty in now making a fair picture of any section, no matter how remote, or of conducting the reader into the very presence of Alaska’s unique inhabitants, anywhere they may be sought, and just as they live between Point Barrow and Cape Fox, or Attoo and the Kinik mouth.

In going to Alaska to-day, the traveller is invariably taken into the Sitkan district, and no farther; naturally he goes there and nowhere beyond, for the best of all reasons: he can find no means of transportation at all proper as regards his safety and comfort which will convey him outside of the Alexander archipelago. To this southeastern region of Alaska, however, one may journey every month in the year from the waters of the Columbia River and Puget Sound, in positive pleasure, on a seaworthy steamer fitted with every marine adjunct conducive to the passenger’s comfortable existence in transit; it is a land-locked sea-trip of over eighteen hundred miles, made often to and from Sitka without tremor enough on the part of the vessel even to spill a brimming glass of water upon the cabin table. If fortunate enough to make this trip of eight or nine hundred miles up, and then down again, when the fog is not omnipotent and rain not incessant, the tourist will record a vision of earthly scenery grander than the most vivid imagination can devise, and the recollection of its glories will never fade from his delighted mind.

If, however, you desire to visit that great country to the westward and the northwest, no approach can be made via Sitka—no communication between that region and this portion of Alaska ever takes place, except accidentally; the traveller starts from San Francisco either in a codfishing schooner, a fur-trader’s sloop, or steamer, and sails out into the vast Pacific on a bee-line for Kadiak or Oonalashka; and, from these two chief ports of arrival and departure, he laboriously works his way, if bent upon seeing the country, constantly interrupted and continually beset with all manner of hindrances to the progress of his journey by land and sea. These physical obstructions in the path of travel to all points of interest in Alaska, save those embraced in the Sitkan district, will bar out and deprive thousands from ever beholding the striking natural characteristics of a wonderful volcanic region in Cook’s Inlet and the Aleutian chain of islands. When that time shall arrive in the dim future which will order and sustain the sailing of steamers in regular rotation of transit throughout the waters of this most interesting section, then, indeed, will a source of infinite satisfaction be afforded to those who love to contemplate the weird and the sublime in nature; meanwhile, visits to that region in small sailing-craft are highly risky and unpleasant—boisterous winds are chronic and howling gales are frequent.

The beautiful and extraordinary features of preliminary travel up the British Columbia coast will have prepared the mind for a full enjoyment and comprehension of your first sight of Alaska. If you are alert, you will be on deck and on good terms with the officer in charge when the line is crossed on Dixon Sound, and the low wooded crowns of Zayas and Dundas Islands, now close at hand, are speedily left in the wake as the last landmarks of foreign soil. To the left, as the steamer enters the beautiful water of Clarence Straits, the abrupt, irregular, densely wooded shores of Prince of Wales Island rise as lofty walls of timber and of rock, mossy and sphagnous, shutting out completely a hasty glimpse of the great Pacific rollers afforded in the Sound; while on the right hand you turn to a delighted contemplation of those snowy crests of the towering coast range which, though thirty and fifty miles distant, seem to fairly be in reach, just over and back of the rugged tree-clad elevations of mountainous islands that rise abruptly from the sea-canal in every direction. Not a gentle slope to the water can be seen on either side of the vessel as you glide rapidly ahead; the passage is often so narrow that the wavelets from the steamer’s wheel break and echo back loudly on your ear from the various strips of ringing rocky shingle at the base of bluffy intersections.

Lodges in a Vast Wilderness.

If, by happy decree of fate, fog-banks do not shut suddenly down upon your pleased vision, a rapid succession of islands and myriads of islets, all springing out boldly from the cold blue-green and whitish-gray waters which encircle their bases, will soon tend to confuse and utterly destroy all sense of locality; the steamer’s path seems to be in a circle, to lead right back to where she started from, into another equally mysterious labyrinthine opening: then the curious idiosyncrasy possesses you by which you seem to see in the scenery just ahead an exact resemblance to the bluffs, the summits and the cascades which you have just left behind. Your emphatic expression aloud of this belief will, most likely, arouse some fellow-passenger who is an old voyageur, and he will take a guiding oar: he will tell you that the numerous broad smooth tracks, cut through the densely wooded mountain slopes from the snow lines above abruptly down to the very sea below, are the paths of avalanches; that if you will only crane your neck enough so as to look right aloft to a certain precipice now almost hanging 3,000 feet high and over the deck of the steamer, there you will see a few small white specks feebly outlined against the grayish-red background of the rocks—these are mountain goats; he tells you that those stolid human beings who are squatting in a large dug-out canoe are “Siwashes,” halibut-fishing—and as these savages stupidly stare at the big “Boston” vessel swiftly passing, with uplifted paddles or keeping slight headway, you return their gaze with interest, and the next turn of the ship’s rudder most likely throws into full view a “rancherie,” in which these Indians permanently reside; your kindly guide then eloquently describes the village and descants with much vehemence upon the frailties and shortcomings of “Siwashes” in general—at least all old-stagers in this country agree in despising the aboriginal man. On the steamer forges through the still, unruffled waters of intricate passages, now almost scraping her yard-arms on the face of a precipitous headland—then rapidly shooting out into the heart of a lovely bay, broad and deep enough to float in room and safety a naval flotilla of the first class, until a long, unusually low, timbered point seems to run out ahead directly in the track, when your guide, giving a quick look of recognition, declares that Wrangel[7] town lies just around it, and you speedily make your inspection of an Alaskan hamlet.

Owing to the dense forest-covering of the country, sections of those clays and sands which rest in most of the hollows are seldom seen, only here and there where the banks of a brook are cut out, or where an avalanche has stripped a clear track through the jungle, do you get a chance to see the soil in southeastern Alaska. There are frequent low points to the islands, composed, where beaten upon by the sea, of fine rocky shingle, which form a flat of greater or less width under the bluffs or steep mountain or hill slopes, about three to six feet above present high-water mark; they become, in most cases, covered with a certain amount of good soil, upon which a rank growth of grass and shrubbery exists, and upon which the Indians love to build their houses, camp out, etc. These small flats, so welcome and so rare in this pelagic wilderness, have evidently been produced by the waves acting at different times in opposing directions.

GRAND GLACIER: ICY BAY

View looking across a profile of its sea-wall face, two and a half miles: ice cliffs from one hundred and fifty to three hundred feet high above the water; depth of sea from sixty to eighty fathoms where it is sounded under the steamer’s keel. An October picture, when all its surface cavities and pinnacles are concealed by snow and smoothed by frozen sleet

In all of those channels penetrating the mainland and intervening between the numerous islands from the head of Glacier Bay and Lynn Canal down to the north end of Vancouver’s Island, marks, or glacial scratchings, indicative of the sliding of a great ice-sheet, are to be found, generally in strict conformity with the trend of the passages, wherever the rocks were well suited for their preservation; and it is probable that the ice of the coast range, at one time, reached out as far west as the outer islands which fringe the entire Alaskan and British Columbian coast. Many of the boulders on the beaches are plainly glaciated; and, as they are often bunched in piles upon the places where found, they seem to have not been disturbed since they were dropped there. The shores are everywhere abrupt and the water deep. The entire front of this lofty coast-range chain, that forms the eastern Alaskan boundary from the summit of Mt. St. Elias to the mouth of Portland Canal, is glacier-bearing to-day, and you can scarcely push your way to the head of any cañon, great or small, without finding an eternal ice-sheet anchored there: careful estimation places the astonishing aggregate of over 5,000 living glaciers, of greater or less degree, that are silently but forever travelling down to the sea, in this region.

Those congealed rivers which take their origin in the flanks of Mt. Fairweather[8] and Mt. Crillon[9] are simply unrivalled in frigid grandeur by anything that is lauded in Switzerland or the Himalayas, though the vast bulk of the Greenland ice-sheets is, of course, not even feebly approximated by them; the waters of the channels which lead up from the ocean to the feet of these large glaciers of Cross Sound and Lynn Canal, are full of bobbing icebergs that have been detached from the main sheet, in every possible shape and size—a detachment which is taking place at intervals of every few moments, giving rise, in so doing, to a noise like parks of artillery; but, of course, these bergs are very, very small compared with those of Greenland, and only a few ever escape from the intricate labyrinth of fiörds which are so characteristic of this Sitkan district. An ice-sheet comes down the cañon, and as it slides into the water of the canal or bay, wherever it may be, the pressure exerted by the buoyancy of the partially submerged mass causes it to crack off in the wildest lines of cleavage, and rise to the surface in hundreds and thousands of glittering fragments; or again, it may slide out over the water on a rocky bed, and, as it advances, break off and fall down in thundering salvos, that ring and echo in the gloomy cañons with awe-inspiring repetition. At the head and around the sides of a large indentation of Cross Sound there are no less than five immense, complete glaciers, which take their origin between Fairweather and Crillon Mountains, each one reaching and discharging into tide-water: here is a vast, a colossal glacier in full exhibition, and so easy of access that the most delicate woman could travel to, and view it, since an ocean-steamer can push to its very sea-walls, without a moment’s serious interruption, where from her decks may be scanned the singular spectacle of an icy river from three to eight miles wide, fifty miles long, and varying in depth from fifty to five hundred feet. Between the west side of this frozen bay and the water, all the ground, high and low, is covered by a mantle of ice from one thousand to three thousand feet thick!

Here is an absolute realism of what once took place over the entire northern continent—a vivid picture of the actual process of degradation which the earth and its life were subjected to during that long glacial epoch which bound up in its iron embrace of death just about half of the globe.[10] This startling exhibition of a mighty glacier with its cold, multitudinous surroundings in Cross Sound, is alone well worth the time and cost of the voyage to behold it, and it alone. There is not room in this narrative for further dwelling upon that fascinating topic, for a full description of such a gelid outpouring would in itself constitute a volume.

Throughout this archipelago of the Sitkan district, the strongest tidal currents prevail: they flow at places like mill-races, and again they scarcely interfere with the ship or canoe. The flood-tides usually run northward along the outer coasts, and eastward in Dixon’s Entrance; the weather, which is generally boisterous on the ocean side of the islands, and on which the swell of the Pacific never ceases to break with great fury, is very much subdued inside, and the best indication of these tidal currents is afforded by the streaming fronds of kelp that grow abundantly in all of these multitudinous fiörds, and which are anchored securely in all depths, from a few feet to that of seventy fathoms: when the tide is running through some of those narrow passages, especially at ebb, it forms, with the whip-like stems of sea-weed, a true rapid with much white water, boiling and seething in its wild rushing; these alternations between high and low water here are exceedingly variable—the spring-tides at some places are as great as eighteen feet of rise, and a few miles beyond, where the coast-expansion is great, it will not be more than three or four feet.

Those baffling tides and the currents they create, together with gusty squalls of rain or sleet, and irregular winds, render the navigation of this inside passage wholly impracticable for sailing-vessels—they gladly seek the open ocean where they can haul and fill away to advantage even if it does blow “great guns;” the high mural walls of the Alexander fiörds on both sides, usually, of the channels, cause the wind to either blow up them, or down: it literally funnels through with terrific velocity when the “southeasters” prevail, and nothing, not even the steamer, braves the fury of such a storm.

The great growth of trees everywhere here, and the practical impenetrability of these forests on foot, owing to brush and bushes, all green and growing in tangled jungle, is caused by the comparative immunity of this country from the scourge of forest fires: this is due to a phenomenal dampness of the climate—it rains, rains, and drizzles here two-thirds of the time. The heaviest rains are local, usually occurring on the western or ocean slopes of the islands where the sea-winds, surcharged with moisture, first meet a barrier to their flow and are thrown up into the cooler regions of the atmosphere. It will be often noticed, from the steamer, that while heavy rain is falling on the lofty hills and mountains of Prince of Wales Island, it is clear and bright directly over the Strait of Clarence to the eastward, and not far distant. June and July are the most agreeable seasons of the year in which to visit the Sitkan district, as a rule.

Many thoughtful observers have questioned the truth of the exuberant growth of forestry peculiar to this region, as being due to that incessant rainfall mentioned above; no doubt, it is not wholly so; but yet, if the ravages of fire ran through the islets of the archipelago, as it does in the interior slightly to the eastward, the same order of vegetation here would be soon noted as we note it there to-day; everywhere that you ascend the inlets of the mainland, the shores become steep and rocky, with no beach, or very little; the trees become scrubby in appearance, and are mingled with much dead wood (brulé). Scarcely any soil clothes the slopes, and extensive patches of bare rock crop out frequently everywhere.

Although the forest is omnipresent up to snow-line in this great land-locked Sitkan district, yet it differs much in rankness of growth and consequent value; it nowhere clothes the ridges or the summits, which are 1,500 to 2,000 feet above tide-level; these peaks and rocky elevations are usually bare, and show a characteristically green-gray tint due to the sphagnous mosses and dwarfed brier and bushes peculiar to this altitude, making an agreeable and sharp contrast to that sombre and monotonous line of the conifers below. The variety is limited, being substantially confined to three evergreens, the spruce (Abies sitkensis and menziesii), the hemlock (Abies mertensiana), and the cedar (Thuja gigantea). The last is the most valuable, is found usually growing near the shores, and never in great quantities at any one place; wherever a sheltered flat place is found, there these trees seem to grow in the greatest luxuriance. In the narrower passages, where no seas can enter, the forest seems almost to root in the beach, and its branches hang pendent to the tides, and dip therein at high water. Where a narrow beach, capped with warm sands and soil, occurs in sheltered nooks, vividly green grass spreads down until it reaches the yellow sea-weed “tangle” that grows everywhere in such places reached by high tide, for, owing to the dampness of the climate, a few days exposure at neap-tides fails to injure this fucoid growth. Ferns, oh! how beautiful they are!—also grow most luxuriantly and even abundantly upon the fallen, rotting tree-trunks, and even into the living arboreal boughs, and green mosses form great club-like masses on the branches.

Large trunks of this timber, overthrown and dead, become here at once perfect gardens of young trees, moss, and bushes, even though lying high above the ground and supported on piles of yet earlier windfall. Similar features characterize the littoral forests of the entire land-locked region of the northwest coast, from Puget Sound to the mouth of Lynn Canal.

In addition to these overwhelmingly dominant conifers already specified, a few cottonwoods and swamp-maples and alders are scattered in the jungle which borders the many little streams and the large rivers like the Stickeen, Tahko, and Chilkat. Crab-apples (Pyrus rivularis) form small groves on Prince of Wales Island, where the beach is low and capped with good soil. Then on the exposed, almost bare rocks of the western hilltops of the islands of the archipelago, a scrub pine (Pinus contorta) is found; it also grows in small clumps here and there just below the snow-line on the mountains generally. Berries abound; the most important being the sal-lal (Gaultheria shallow)—they are eaten fresh in great quantities, and are also dried for use in winter—and another small raspberry (Rubus sp.), a currant (Ribes sp.), and a large juicy whortleberry. Of course these berries do not have the flavor or body which we prize at home in our small fruits of similar character—but up here they, in the absence of anything better or as good, are eaten with avidity and relish, even by the white travellers who happen to be around when the fruit is ripe; wild strawberries appear in sheltered nooks; a wild gooseberry too is found, but it, like the crab-apple of Prince of Wales Island, is not a favorite—it is drastic.

KOOTZNAHOO INLET

Characteristic view of scenery in the Sitkan Archipelago. The high lands and peaks of Admiralty Island in the distance; Indians fishing for halibut over rocky shoals in the foreground. An October sketch, looking East from Chatham Straits

We find in many places throughout this district highland moors, which constitute the level plateau-summits of ridges and mountain foothills; these areas are always sparsely timbered, covered by a thick carpet of sphagnous heather, and literally brilliant in June and July with the spangled radiance of an extensive variety of flowering annuals and biennials. In these moorland mantles, which are usually soaked full of moisture so as to be fairly spongy under foot, cranberries flourish, of excellent flavor, and quite abundant, though, compared with our choice Jersey and Cape Cod samples, they are very small.

Certainly the scenery of this Venetian wilderness of Lower Alaska is wonderful and unrivalled—the sounds, the gulfs, bays, fiörds, and river-estuaries are magnificent sheets of water, and the snow-capped peaks, which spring abruptly from their mirrored depths, give the scene an ever-changing aspect. At places the ship seems to really be at sea, then she enters a canal whose lofty walls of syenite, slate, and granite shut out the light of day, and against which her rigging scrapes, and the passenger’s hand may almost touch—a hundred thousand sparkling streams fall in feathery cascades, adown their mural heights, and impetuous streams beat themselves into white foam as they leap either into the eternal depths of the Pacific or its deep arms.

Probably no one point in the Sitkan archipelago is invested by nature with a grander, gloomier aspect than is that region known as the eastern shore of Prince Frederick’s Sound, where the mountains of the mainland drop down abruptly to the seaside; here a spur of the coast range, opposite Mitgon Islet, presents an unusually dreadful appearance, for it rises to a vast height with an inclination toward and over the water: the serrated, jagged summits are loaded with an immense quantity of ice and snow, which, together with the overhanging masses of rock, seems to cause its sea-laved base to fairly totter under that stupendous weight overhead; the passage beneath it, in the canoe of a traveller, is simply awful in its dread suggestion, and few can refrain from involuntary shuddering as they sail by and gaze upward.

A word about the Sitkan climate: you are not going to be very cold here even in the most severe of winters, nor will you complain of heat in the most favorable of summers; it maybe best epitomized by saying in brief that the weather is such that you seldom ever find a clean cake of ice frozen in the small fresh-water ponds six inches thick; and you never will experience a summer warm enough to ripen a head of oats. The first impression usually made upon the visitor is that it is raining, raining all the time, not a pouring rain or shower, then clearing up quickly, but a steady “driz-driz-drizzle”; it rained upon the author in this manner seventeen consecutive days in October, 1866, accompanied by winds from all points of the compass. Therefore, by contrast, the relatively clear and dry months of June and July in the archipelago are really delightful—clear and pleasant in the sun, and cool enough for fires indoors—then you have about eighteen hours of sunshine and six hours of twilight.

It is very seldom that the zero-point is ever recorded at tide-level during winter here, though in January, 1874, it fell to —7° Fah.; the thermometer at no time in the winter preceding registered lower than 11° above. A late blustering spring and an early, vigorous winter often join hands over a very backward summer—about once or twice every five years; these are the backward seasons; then the first frost in the villages and tidal bottoms occurs about the 28th to 31st of October, soon followed by the rain turning to snow, being as much as three feet deep on the level at times. Severe thunderstorms, with lightning, often take place during these violent snowfalls in the winter—strange to say they are not heard or seen in the summer! Snow and rain and sleet continue till the end of April—sometimes as late as the 10th of May, before giving way to the enjoyable season of June and July. Then again the mild winters are marked by no frost to speak of—perhaps the coldest period will have been in November, little or no snow, six or seven inches at the most, and much clear and bracing weather.

The average rainfall in the Sitkan district is between eighty-four and eighty-six inches annually—it is a very steady average, and makes no heavier showing than that presented by the record kept on the coast of Oregon and Vancouver’s Island. A pleasant season in the archipelago will give the observer about one hundred fair days; the rest of the year will be given over to rain, snow, and foggy-shrouds, which wet like rain itself.[11] A most careful search during the last hundred years has failed to disclose in all the extent of this Sitkan region an arable or bottom-land piece large enough to represent a hundred-acre farm, save in the valley of the Tahkoo River, where for forty or fifty miles a low, level plateau extends, varying in width from a few rods to half a mile, between the steep mountain walls that compass it about. Red-top and wild timothy grasses grow here in the most luxuriant style, as they do for that matter everywhere else in the archipelago on little patches of open land along the streams and sea-beaches; the humidity of the climate makes the cost of curing hay, however, very great, and prevents the profitable ranging of cattle.

We have strayed from the landing which we made at Wrangel, and, returning to the contemplation of that town, candor compels an exclamation of disappointment—it is not inviting, for we see nothing but a straggling group of hastily erected shanties and frame store-houses, which face a rickety wharf and a dirty trackway just above the beach-level; a dense forest and tangled jungle spring up like a forbidding wall at the very rear of the houses, which are supplemented by a number of Indian rancheries that skirt the beach just beyond, and hug the point; this place, however, though now in sad decline, was a place of much life and importance during 1875-79, when the Cassiar gold-excitement in British Columbia, via the Stickeen River, drew many hundreds of venturesome miners up here, and through Wrangel en route. This forlorn spot was still earlier a centre of even greater stir and activity, for, in 1831, the Russians, fearing that they would be forced into war with the Hudson’s Bay people, made a quick movement, came down here from Sitka, and built a bastioned log fortress right where the present Siwash rancheries stand. Lieutenant Zarenbo, who engineered the construction, called his work “Rédoute Saint Dionys,” and had scarcely got under cover when he was attacked by several large bateaux, manned by employés of the great English company; he fired upon them, beat them off, and held his own so well that the grateful Baron Von Wrangel, who then was governor-in-chief, bestowed the name of the plucky officer upon the large, rugged island which overshadows the scene of the conflict, and which it bears upon every chart to-day.[12]

Again, in 1862, the solitude of Wrangel was broken by the sudden eruption of over two thousand British Columbia and Californian miners, who rushed up the Stickeen River on a gold “excitement.” Quite a fleet of sail and steam-vessels hung about the place for a brief season, when the flurry died out, and the restless gold-hunters fled in search of other diggings, taking all their belongings with them.

The steamer does not tarry long at Wrangel; a few packages fall upon the shaky wharf, the captain never leaves the bridge, and in obedience to his tinkling bell, the screw scarce has paused ere it starts anew, and the vessel soon heads right about and west, out to the open swell of the great Pacific; but it takes six or seven hours of swift travel over the glassy surface of Clarence Strait to pass the rough heads of Kuprianov Island on the right, flanked by the sombre, densely wooded elevations of Prince of Wales on the left. The lower, yet sharper spurs of the straggling Kou forests force our course here directly to the south. It is said that more than fifteen hundred islands, big and little, stud this archipelago from Cape Disappointment to Cross Sound. You will not attempt to count them, but readily prefer to believe it is so. From the great bulk of Vancouver’s Land to the tiny islet just peeping above water, they are all covered to the snow-line from the sea-level with an olive-green coniferous forest—islands right ahead, islands on every side, islands all behind. You stand on deck and wonder where the egress from the unruffled inland lake is to be as you enter it; no possible chance to go ahead much faster, is your constant thought, which keeps following every sharp turn of the vessel as she rapidly swings right about here, there, and everywhere, in following the devious path of this weird course to her destination.

Unless the fog shuts down very thick, the darkness of night does not impede the steamer’s steady progress, for the pilot sees the mountain tops loom up darker against the blue-black sky, and with unerring certainty he guides the helm. When the ship is running through tide-rapids in the night, the boiling phosphorescence of the foaming waters, as they rush noisily under our keel, gives a fresh zest to the novelty of the cruise, and the pilot’s cries of command ring out in hoarse echoes over the surging tumult below; meanwhile, the passengers anxiously and nervously watch the unquiet turns of the trembling vessel—then suddenly the helm is put up, and the steamer fairly bounds out of still water and the leeward of Coronation Island, into the rhythmic roll of the vast billows of the Pacific, which toss her in strange contrast to the even keel that has characterized our long, land-locked sea-voyage up to this moment. The wrinkled, rugged nose of Cape Ommaney looms right ahead in the north, and soon we are well abreast of the mountainous front to the west coast of Baranov Island, running swiftly into Sitka Sound.[13]

Cape Ommaney is a very remarkable promontory; it is a steep, bluffy cliff, with a round, high rocky islet, lying close by and under it. The eastern shore of that cape takes a very sharp northerly direction, and thus makes this southern extremity of Baranov Island an exceedingly narrow point of land. An unlucky sailor, Isaac Wooden, fell overboard from Vancouver’s ship the Discovery, when abreast of it and homeward bound, Sunday, August 24, 1794, and—was drowned, after having safely passed through all the perils of that most remarkable voyage, extended as it was over a period of four consecutive years’ absence from home. The rock bears the odd name “Wooden” in consequence.

The location of New Archangel, or Sitka village, is now conceded to be the one of the greatest natural beauty and scenic effect that can be found in all Alaska. The story of its occupation by the Russians is a recitation of violent deeds and unflinching courage on the part of the iron-willed Baranov and his obedient servants: he led the way down here from Kadiak first, of all white men, in 1799, after hearing the preliminary report of exploration made two years previously by his lieutenant, Captain James Shields, an English adventurer and shipbuilder, who entered the service of the Russian Company in the Okotsk. Baranov, though small in stature, was possessed of unusual physical endurance and muscular strength. He was absolutely fearless; he never allowed any obstacle, no matter how serious, which the elements or savage men were perpetually raising, to check his advances. He loved to travel and explore, and possessed rare executive or governing power over his rude and boisterous followers. He soon realized that the establishment of the headquarters of the company at St. Paul, Kadiak Island, was disadvantageous, and quickly resolved to settle himself permanently in the Bay of Sitka, or Norfolk Sound, where he could communicate with the vessels of other nations and purchase supplies of them. Late in the autumn of 1799 he sailed to this port in the brig Catherine, accompanied by a large fleet of Aleutian and Kadiak sea-otter hunters with their bidarkas, or skin-canoes. So abundant were sea-otters then, now so rare, that, with the assistance of these native hunters, he secured over fifteen hundred prime otter-skins in less than a month; then satisfied with the trading resources of the locality, Baranov began the construction of a stockaded post, the site selected for which was on the main island, about six miles to the northward of the Sitkan town-site of to-day. During the winter of 1799-1800 he and his whole force were busily engaged in the erection of substantial log houses and the surrounding stockade at this location. In the spring, two American fur-trading vessels made their appearance here, and the owners began to carry on a brisk traffic with the native Sitkans, right under the eyes of Baranov. Knowing that this must be stopped, the energetic Russian hastened back to Kadiak and set the machinery in motion to that end. But his absence in the meantime from Sitka was improved upon by the Koloshians, who, acting in preconcerted plan, utterly destroyed the post. These savages on a certain day, when most of the garrison was far outside of the stockade, hunting and fishing, rushed in, several thousand of them, upon a few armed men, surrounded the block-house, assailed it from all sides at once, and soon forced an entrance. They massacred the defenders to a man, including the commander, Medvaidniekov, and carried off more than three thousand sea-otter pelts from the warehouses.

During this wild and bloody fight an English ship was lying at anchor far down the harbor, some ten miles from the scene; three Russians and five Aleutes only, out of the hunting parties absent at the time of the attack, managed to secrete themselves in the woods, and hide until they could gain the decks and protection of this vessel, and thus acquaint her captain, Barber, of the outrage; he contrived to entice two of the leading Sitkan chiefs on board of his ship, plied them with drink, and soon had them securely ironed, and then, having quite a battery of guns, he was able to make his own terms for their release; this was done after the surrender of eighteen women (captured outside of the stockade) and 2,000 sea-otter skins was made to Barber, who at once sailed for Kadiak. Here the British seaman demanded from Baranov the salvage of 50,000 rubles for rescuing his men and women and property; with this demand the Russian could not or would not comply; but, after many days in amicable argument, Captain Barber received and accepted 10,000 rubles in full settlement.

While the lurid light of the burning wreck of this first Sitkan post was flashing over the sound, and the Koloshes were howling and dancing around it in their fiendish exultation, nearly two hundred Aleutian hunters were surprised and slaughtered at various points in the vicinity, and a party of over one hundred of these simple natives perished almost to a man, on the same day, from eating poisonous mussels which they detached from the rocks in the strait that separates Baranov Island from Chichagov; that canal still bears the name commemorative of this dreadful accident—it is called “Pogeebshie”[14] or “Destruction” Strait.

The enraged Russian manager was unable, by reason of a complicated flood of troubles with his subordinates elsewhere, to revisit Sitka until the spring of 1804; he then came down from Kadiak in a squadron consisting of three small sloops, in all considerably less than 100 tons burden; these craft he had built and fitted out in Prince William Sound and Yakootat Bay during the preceding winter. He had with him forty Russians and three hundred Aleutian sea-otter hunters. With this small force the indomitable man resolved to attack and subjugate a body of not less than five or six thousand fierce, untamed savages, who were flushed with their cruel successes, and eager to shed more blood. He was unexpectedly strengthened by the sudden appearance in the bay of the Neva, 400 tons, which had sailed from London to Kadiak, and arrived just after Baranov’s departure, but Captain Lissiansky, learning of the object of his trip, determined to assist in rebuilding the Sitkan post and to punish the Indians, so he sailed at once for the place.

Baranov found the Sitkans all entrenched behind a huge stockade that was thrown up on the same lofty rocky site of the governor’s castle in the town to-day. They reviled him and defied him, taunted him with his misfortunes, and easily succeeded in exciting him to a ferocious attack, in which, despite his demoniacal bravery, he was beaten off at first with the loss of eleven white sailors and hunters, he himself badly wounded, together with Lieutenants Arbuzov and Povalishin. The darkness of a violent rain and sleet storm, with night close at hand, caused a cessation, for the time, of further hostilities, but in the morning the ship and the little sloops approached the beach and opened upon the startled savages a hot bombardment—the splintering of their log bastions and the terrible, unwonted noise accompanying, was too much for their self-control, and though, during the whole day they refused to fly, yet when night again came round they abandoned their fortification, and retreated silently and quickly in canoes to Chatham Strait.

The Castle of Baranov: 1809-1827.

[Wholly remodelled and rebuilt by his successors.]

The Russians then took possession of the present town-site of Sitka. The rocky eminence which the savages had so bravely held was cleared of their rude barricades, and the foundations were laid then to the castle that still stands so conspicuous. Around this nucleus the Russian settlement soon sprang up in a few months, a high stockade was then erected between the village and the Indian rancheries, which still stands in part to-day; it was bastioned and fortified with an armament of three-pounder brass guns. From this time on the supremacy of the Russians was never questioned by the Indians of the Sitkan archipelago. The reckless daring of Baranov, evinced by his personal bearing at the head of a handful of men in repeated attacks upon the castle-rock encampment was exaggerated by the savages in repetition among themselves, until his name to them became synonymous with a charmed life and supreme authority. Baranov himself called this spot the final headquarters of the Russian American Company, and henceforth it became so, and it was officially known as New Archangel; but the tribal name of the savages who lived just outside the stockade fence was “Seet-kah,” and soon the present designation was used by all visitors and Russians alike, brevity and euphony making it “Sitka.”

It is not probable that the beautiful vistas of this sound influenced Baranov in the slightest when he selected it for his base of operations; but there must have been mornings and evenings when this hardy man looked at them with some responsive pleasure, for certainly the human being who could remain insensible to their scenic glories must be one without a drop of warm blood in his veins. Those high-peaked summits of the Baranov Mountains, which overshadow the town on the east, destroy, in a great measure, the effects of sunrise; but the transcendent glow of sundown colors is the glow that floods the crown and base of Mt. Edgecumb on the western horizon of the bay, and repeats its radiance in tipping with golden gild the host of tiny islets which stud the flashing waters, to burn in lingering brightness on the peaks of Verstova and her sister hills, when all else is in darkness or its shades around about.

The most characteristic and expressive single view of Sitka is that one afforded from Japan Island, which is close by and right opposite the town: the place was in its greatest architectural grandeur prior to the departure of the Russians, in 1866. The lofty peak which rises abruptly back of the village is Verstova, to the bald summit of which a champagne picnic by the Russians was religiously made every summer. Although the mountain is slightly under three thousand feet in altitude and seemingly right at hand, yet the journey to its crest is one that taxes the best physical energies of strong men. The forest is so dense, so damp, the underbrush so thick and so tangled, that the walk requires a supreme bodily effort, if the trip be made up there and back in the same day.

This view from “Yahponskie” gives an exceedingly good idea of the ultra-mountainous character of Baranov Island, much better than any power of verbal description can. It also illustrates the futility of land travel in the Sitkan archipelago, and affords ample reason for the utter absence of all roads, even footpaths, in that entire region; it also preserves the somewhat imposing front which the extensive warehouses and official quarters of the Russian American Company presented in 1866, before their transfer to us, and the ravages of fire and that decay which has since well-nigh destroyed them; it recalls the shipyards and the brass and iron foundries and machine-shops that have not even a vestige of their existence on that ground to-day, and it outlines a larger Indian village than the one we find there now.

For the objects of self-protection and comfort the Russians built large apartment-houses or flats, and lived in them at Sitka. Several of these dwellings were 150 feet in length by 50 to 80 feet in depth, three stories high, with huge roof-attics. They were constructed of big spruce logs, smoothly trimmed down to 12’ × 12’ timbers. These were snugly dovetailed at the corners, and the expansive roof covered with sheet-iron. The exteriors were painted a faint lemon-yellow, while the iron roof everywhere glistened with red-ochre. The windows were uniformly small, but fitted very neatly in tasteful casemates, and usually with double sashes. Within, the floors were laid of whipsawed planks, tongued and grooved by hand and highly polished. The inner walls were “ceiled” up on all sides and overhead by light boards, and usually papered showily. The heavy, unique Russian furniture was moved in upon rugs of fur and tapestry, and then these people bade defiance to the elements, no matter how unruly, and led therein the most enjoyable of physical lives. The united testimony of all travellers, who were many, and who shared the hospitality of the Russians at Sitka, is one invariable tribute to the excellence and the comfort of their indoor living at New Archangel.

A GLIMPSE OF SITKA

View in Sitka Sound, looking up towards the town: Mt. Verstova, in the middle distance, and the rugged granitic peaks of Indian River on the horizon. Sitkan Indians running down to Borka Islet for halibut. June, 1874

The shipyard of Sitka was as complete as any similar establishment in the Russian Empire. It was actively employed in boat and sail-vessel building, being provided with all sorts of workshops and materials. Experiments were also instituted and prosecuted, to some extent, in making bricks, so much prized in the construction of the big conventional Russian “stoves,” the turning of wooden-ware, the manufacture of woollen stuffs from the crude material brought up from California; but the great cost of importing skilled labor from far-distant Russia, and the relative expense of maintaining it here, caused the financial failure of all these undertakings. Much money was also wasted in attempting to make iron out of the different grades of ore found in many sections of the country. The only real advantage that the company ever reaped from the workshops at Sitka was that which accrued to it from the manufacture of agricultural implements, which it sold to the indolent rancheros of California and Mexico. Thousands of the primitive ploughshares and rude hoes and rakes used in those countries then were made here; also axes, hatchets, and knives were turned out by industrious Muscovites for Alaskan post-trading. The foundry was engaged most of the time in making the large iron and brazen bells which every church and mission from Bering’s Straits to Mexico called for. Most of these bells are still in use or existence, and give ample evidence of skilful workmanship, and of this early development of a unique industry on our northern coast.

Naturally enough the contrast of what the Russian Sitka was, with what the American Sitka is to-day, is a striking one: then a force of six or eight hundred white men, with wives and families, busily engaged as above sketched, directed by a retinue of fifty or sixty subalterns of the governor, lived right under the windows of his castle and within the stockade; then the Greek-Catholic Bishop of all Alaska also resided there, with a staff of fifteen ordained priests and scores of deacons all around him, maintained regardless of expense, at this time, by the Imperial Government in that ecclesiastical pomp so peculiar to this Oriental Church—then a fleet of twelve to fifteen sailing-vessels, from ships in size to mere sloops, with two ocean-going steamers, made the waters of the bay their regular rendezvous, their hardy crews assisting to give life and stir to the town, shore, and streets—all this ordered by the concentration of the entire trade and commerce of Alaska at New Archangel.

Now, how different! As you step ashore you scarcely pause to notice the handful of whites who have assembled on the wharf, but at once the impression of general decay is made upon your mind; the houses, mostly the original Russian buildings, are settling here, there, and everywhere, rotting on their foundations, and scarcely more than half of them even occupied, while the combined population of some three hundred souls in number peers at you from every corner. The great majority of these people are the half-breeds, or “Creoles,” or the descendants of Indians and Russians; some of them are tall and well-formed, and a few of them good-looking, but they are nearly all short-statured, abject, and apathetic. Yet in one respect Sitka has vastly improved under American supremacy—she has become clean; for although the Russian officers kept the immediate surroundings of their residences in good order, still they never looked after the conduct of the rest of the town. There were, in their time, no defined streets or sidewalks, and mud and filth were knee-deep and most noisome. Our military authorities, however, who first took charge immediately after the transfer, and who are proverbial for cleanliness and neatness in garrison life, made the sanitary reformation of Sitka an instant and imperative duty; the slimy walks were soon planked, the muddy streets were gravelled and curbed, the main street especially widened, the oldest houses were repainted, and where dilapidated, repaired, and things put into shape most thoroughly; they also graded and sauntered over the first wagon-road ever opened in Alaska, which they constructed, from the steamers’ landing under the castle, back bordering the bay to Indian River, over a mile in length.

But the pomp and circumstance of the old castle—still the most striking artificial feature now in all Alaska—will never wake to the echoes of that proud and lavish hospitality which once reigned within its walls, and when the flashing light in its lofty cupola carried joy out over the dark waters of the sound to the hearts of inbound mariners, who came safely into anchor by its gleaming—the elegant breakfasts and farewell dinners given to favored guests, where the glass, the plate, viands, wines and appointments were fit for regal entertainment itself—all these have vanished, and naught but the uneven, slowly settling floors, warped doors, and general mouldiness of the present hour greets the inquiring eye. So heavy are its timbers, and so faithfully were they keyed together, that in spite of neglect, the ravages of decay and frequent vandalism, yet, in all likelihood, an age will elapse ere the structure is removed by these destroying agencies now so actively at work upon it. Moved by the desire to preserve the salient features of this historical structure, the author made, during one clear June day, a pre-Raphaelitic drawing of it,[15] as his vessel swung at anchor under its shadows; in it the reader will observe that the rocky eminence which it crowns is covered to the very foundations and to the promenade cribbing that surrounds them, with a thick growth of alders, stunted spruces, and other indigenous vegetation. That walk around the castle, which was artificially reared thereon, gives a most commanding view of everything, over all objects in the town and Indian village, and sweeps the landscape and the sound. Another picture from the promenade walk under the flagstaff is also given, in order that a faint effect may be conveyed to the reader of the exceeding beauty of the island-studded Bay of Sitka. Descending and standing immediately under the castle on the beach, to the right you have a perfect Alpine scene as you look east along the pebbly shore to the living green flanks of Mount Verstova, which carry your gaze up quickly over rolling purplish curtains of fog to the snowy crest of it, and other lofty crests ad infinitum, over far beyond. The little trading stores on the left in this view hide the track so well known in Sitka as the “Governor’s Walk,” for this is the only direction out to the saw-mill in the middle distance, in which the earth lies smooth and dry enough in all this archipelago for a clean mile-jaunt. These still blue and green waters are alive with food-fishes, while the dense coverts on the mountains harbor grouse and venison in lavish supply; the oyster and the lobster you have not, but the clam and the crab are here in overwhelming abundance and excellence. “Ah!” you exclaim, “if it were not for this eternal rain, this everlasting damp precipitation, how delightful this place would be to live in!”

FOOTNOTES:

[6] The superficial area of Alaska is 512,000 square miles; or, in round numbers, just one sixth of the entire extent of the United States and Territories. Population in 1880: Whites, 430; Creole, 1,756; Eskimo, 17,617; Aleut, 2,145; Athabascan, 3,927; Thlinket, 6,763—total, 33,426.

[7] When the Cassiar mines in British Columbia were prosperous, Wrangel was a very busy little transfer-station—the busiest spot in Alaska; then between four and five thousand miners passed through every spring and fall as they went up to and came down from the diggings on the Stickeen tributaries above; they left a goodly share, if not most, of their earnings among the store and saloon keepers of Wrangel. The fort is now deserted—the town nearly so; the whole place is rapidly reverting to the Siwashes. Government buildings erected here by the U. S. military authorities, which cost the public treasury $150,000, were sold in 1877, when the troops were withdrawn, for a few hundreds. The main street is choked with decaying logs and stumps. A recent visitor declares, upon looking at the condition of this place in the summer of 1883: “Fort Wrangel is a fit introduction to Alaska. It is most weird and wild of aspect. It is the key-note to the sublime and lonely scenery of the north. It is situated at the foot of conical hills, at the head of a gloomy harbor, filled with gloomy islands. Frowning cliffs, beetling crags, stretch away on all sides surrounding it. Lofty promontories guard it, backed by range after range of sharp, volcanic peaks, which in turn are lost against lines of snowy mountains. It is the home of storms. You see that in the broken pines on the cliff-sides, in the fine wave-swept rocks, in the lowering mountains. There is not a bright touch in it—not in its straggling lines of native huts, each with a demon-like totem beside it, nor in the fort, for that is dilapidated and fast sinking into decay.”

[8] 14,708 feet.

[9] 13,400 feet.

[10] I am aware that geologists do not all subscribe to this view, which was the doctrine of Agassiz.

[11] The chief signal officer of the U. S. Army has had a number of meteorological observers stationed at half a dozen different posts in Alaska, and has had this service fully organized up there during the last ten years; the inquirer can easily gain access to a large amount of published data touching this subject.

The mean temperature of the year will run throughout the months in the Sitkan region about as follows—an average, for the time, of 44° 7’ Fah.

[12] Zarenbo Island—it blocks the northern end of Clarence Strait, and affords many varied vistas of rare scenic beauty.

[13] Sitka port is on the west coast of Baranov Island; north latitude 57° 02’ 52”; west longitude 135° 17’ 45”.

[14] Not “Peril,” as it is translated by American geographers and printed on all of our Alaskan maps.

[15] This building, as it stands upon its foundations, is 140 feet in length by 70 feet in width—two stories with lofts, capped with the light-house cupola; these foundations rest upon the summit of the rock, 60 feet above tide-water.

CHAPTER III.
ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKANS.

The White Man and the Indian Trading.—The Shrewdness and Avarice of the Savage.—Small Value of the entire Land Fur Trade of Alaska.—The Futile Effort of the Greek Catholic Church to Influence the Sitkan Indians.—The Reason why Missionary Work in Alaska has been and is Impotent.—The Difference between the Fish-eating Indian of Alaska and the Meat-eating Savage of the Plains.—Simply One of Physique.—The Haidahs the Best Indians of Alaska.—Deep Chests and Bandy Legs from Canoe-travel.—Living in Fixed Settlements because Obliged To.—Large “Rancheries” or Houses Built by the Haidahs.—Communistic Families.—Great Gamblers.—Indian “House-Raising Bees.”—Grotesque Totem Posts.—Indian Doctors “Kill or Cure.”—Dismal Interior of an Indian “Rancherie.”—The Toilet and Dress of Alaskan Siwashes.—The Unwritten Law of the Indian Village.—What Constitutes a Chief.—The Tribal Boundaries and their Scrupulous Regard.—Fish the Main Support of Sitkan Indians.—The Running of the Salmon.—Indians Eat Everything.—Their Salads and Sauces.—Their Wooden Dishes and Cups, and Spoons of Horn.—The Family Chests.—The Indian Woman a Household Drudge.—She has no Washing to Do, However.—Sitkan Indians not Great Hunters.—They are Unrivalled Canoe-builders.—Small-pox and Measles have Reduced the Indians of the Sitkan Archipelago to a Scanty Number.—Abandoned Settlements of these Savages Common.—The Debauchery of Rum among these People.—The White Man to Blame for This.

“Think you that yon church steeple

Will e’er work a change in these wild people?”

Our people living now in the Sitkan district are engaged either in general trading with the Indians, in prospecting for “mineral,” or actively mining; and, also, in a small fashion, in canning salmon and rendering dog-fish and herring oil. Perhaps we can give a fair idea of the traders by introducing the reader to one of them and his establishment just as we find him at Sitka. In a small frame one-story house, not usually touched by paint, the trader shelters a general assortment of notions and groceries, but principally tobacco, molasses, blankets of all sizes and colors, cotton prints and cheap rings, beads, looking-glasses, etc.; he stands behind a rude counter, with these wares displayed to best advantage on the rough shelves at his back; a wood-burning stove diffuses a genial glow, but no chairs or benches are convenient. A “Siwash”[16] and his squaw deliberately and gravely enter. The Indian slowly looks up and down the room, and then proceeds to price every object within his vision, no matter whether he has the least idea of purchasing or not; this is the prelude and invariable habit of a Sitkan Indian, and it arouses an immense amount of suppressed profanity on the part of the outwardly courteous trader. But our savage has come in this time bent upon buying, and selling also; his female partner has a bundle carefully done up under her blanket, and which she wholly concealed when she squatted down on her haunches the moment after entering the door; she also has a number of small silver coins in her mouth, for, funny as it may seem, this worthy pair have carefully agreed upon what they shall spend in the store before coming in; so the woman has taken out from the leathern purse which hangs on her breast and under her chemise, the exact amount, and, returning the pouch to the privacy of her bosom, she places the available coin in her mouth for safe keeping ad interim.

Finally the Indian, in the course of half an hour, or perhaps a whole half-day in preliminary skirmishing, boldly reaches down for his bundle in the squaw’s charge; then having, by so doing, given the trader to fully understand that he has something to sell, as well as desiring to buy, he reaches out for the groceries, the cloth, the tobacco, or whatever he may have fully decided to purchase; a long argument at once ensues as to the bottom cash price, and in every case of doubt the squaw decides; all the articles are done up in brown paper and neatly tied with attractive parti-colored twine. Then the dusky woman arises, with an indescribably vacant stare, bends over the counter and lets the jingling silver drop upon it, pausing just a moment until the tired but triumphant trader counts and sweeps it, still moist, into his till.

Now the Siwash, having bought, proceeds to sell, and he does it in his own peculiar way. He unrolls his package of furs; he eloquently discourses as he strokes each pelt out on the counter, in turn praising its size and its quality; the trader in the meanwhile sharply keeps one eye on the savage and one eye on the furs, and, after the story of their capture and quality has been told over the third or fourth time, he asks, “How much?” The crafty hunter promptly demands more than they would retail at in London; the trader answers with great emphasis and a most disgusted head-shake, “no;” he then offers just half or one-third the sum named, whereupon the Indians, affecting great contempt, both shout out “klaik!” which sounds like Poe’s “Raven”—roll up their furs and hustle out in a huff, still repeating, in sonorous unison, “klaik, klaik”—(no, no). Then they go to the rival trader’s establishment, and to all of them in turn, even if there are half a dozen, not leaving one of them unvisited; they finally finish the rounds in the course of a week or two, and then quietly march back to that trader who offered the most, and laying their peltries down in perfect silence on his counter, hold out a grimy hand for the exact sum he had previously proffered.

In this shrewd and aggravating manner does the simple untutored savage of the northwest coast deal with white traders—are they swindled, do you think? From the beginning to the end of any transaction you may have with an Alaskan Indian you will be met with the keenest understanding on his part of the full value in dollars and cents of whatsoever he may do for you or sell. When, however, the Hudson Bay or the Russian Company held an exclusive franchise in this district, then the Indian had no alternative but the single post-trader’s terms; and then the white man’s profits were enormous. But now, with the keen rivalry of competing stores, the trader barely makes a living anywhere in Alaska to-day, while the Indian gets the best of every bargain—vastly better compared with his former experience.

The Sitkan Chimes.

The fur trade, however, in the whole Sitkan district is now of small commercial importance; thirty or forty thousand dollars annually will more than express its gross value. This great shrinkage is due to the practical extermination of the sea-otter in these waters, while the brown and black bears, the mink and marten, the beaver and the land-otter skins secured in this archipelago and its mainland coast are not highly valued by furriers, inasmuch as the climate here is never cold enough to give them that depth and gloss of fur desired and so characteristic of those animals which are taken, away back in the interior, where the temperature ranges from 20° to 40° below zero for months at a time. In early days, the Sitkan savages acted as middlemen, receiving these choice peltries from the back-country Indians, who were never permitted by the coast tribes to come down to the sea—and then trading the stock anew in their own right over to the Russian and English posts, they reaped a large advance. Now, however, the independent white trader penetrates to the interior himself, and the Alaskan Siwashes mourn the loss of those rich commissions which once accrued to their emolument and consequence. The irruption, also, of the restless, tireless, wandering miners throughout Alaska and British Columbia, who, prospecting in every ravine and cañon, never let an opportunity pass to trade and trap for good furs, has also contributed to this total stagnation of the business in the Sitkan region.

The finest structure in Sitka to-day is the Greek church, which alone did not pass from the custody of its original owners at the time of the transfer. This building has been kept in repair, so that its trim and unique architecture never fails to arrest the visitor’s attention and challenge inspection, especially of the interior. We find the service of the church rich and profuse in silverware, candelabra, ornately framed pictures—oil-paintings of the saints—and rich vestments; two priests officiate, a reader chants rapid automatism, and a choir of small boys respond in shrill but pleasing orisons; instrumental music is banished from the services of the Greek Church, and so are pews, chairs, and hassocks; the Creole congregation, men, women, and children, stand and kneel and cross themselves, erect and bowed, for hours and hours at a time during certain festivals, never moving a step from their positions. The men stand on the right side of the vestibule, facing the altar, while the women all stand by themselves, on the left, the children at option as they enter. No one looks to the one side or the other, but every face is riveted upon the priest, who says little, and is busily engaged in symbolic worship.

The Indians do not enter here, nor did they ever; for them the Russians erected a small chapel, which still stands on the site of its first location; it is built against the inner side of the stockade, and, like the old Lutheran church lower down in the town, it is fast going to ruin; the door is secured by one of those remarkable Muscovitic padlocks—it is eight or ten inches long, five or six wide, and three deep; these singular locks must be seen to be appreciated in all of their clumsy strength. This little faded place of savage worship was the scene in 1855 of the second and last stand ever made by the Sitkan Indians in revolt against the Russians. Those savages, brooding over some petty indignities received from the whites, became suddenly inflamed with passion, and a swarm of armed warriors from the adjacent rancheries rushed, one dusky evening, upon the fortified palisade surrounding the village, and began to cut and tear it down. The Russians opened their brass batteries of grape and round-shot upon the infuriated, yelling natives from the several block-houses which commanded the stockade, but the Siwashes returned the fire fearlessly with their smoothbore muskets, and succeeded in getting possession of this chapel, behind the stout logs of which they were sheltered and able to do deadly execution with their rifles in picking off the Russian officers and men, as they hurried to and from the bastions and through the streets of the town. When, however, one of the company’s vessels hauled off the beach opposite the Indian village, and trained her guns upon it and its people, the savages humbly sued for mercy, and have remained in abasement ever since.

Old Indian Chapel at Sitka.

[Greek Catholic Church, June 9, 1874.]

Contemplating this Indian church at Sitka, which has stood here for nearly three quarters of a century, and then glancing over it and into the savage settlement that nestles in its shadow, it is impossible to refrain from expressing a few thoughts which arise to my mind over the subject of the Indian in regard to his conversion to the faith and practices of our higher civilization. Nearly a whole century has been expended, here, of unflagging endeavor to better and to change the inherent nature of these Indians—its full result is before our eyes. Go down with me through the smoky, reeking, filthy rancheries and note carefully the attitude and occupation of these savages, and contrast your observation with that so vividly recorded of them by Cook, Vancouver, Portlock, and Dixon, and many other early travellers, and tell me in what manner have they advanced one step higher than when first seen by white men full a hundred years ago. You cannot escape the conclusion with this tangible evidence in your grasp, that in attempting to civilize the Alaskan Indian the result is much more like extermination, or lingering, deeper degradation to him than that which you so earnestly desire. The cause of this failure of the missionary and the priest is easy to analyze: it is due to the demoralizing precept and example of those depraved whites who always appear on the field of the Indian mission, sooner or later; if they could be shut out, and the savage wholly uninfluenced by their vicious lives, then the story of Alaskan Indian salvage might be very different. Still, the thought will always come unbidden and promptly—these savages were created for the wild surrounding of their existence; expressly for it, and they live happily in it: change this order of their life, and at once they disappear, as do the indigenous herbs and game before the cultivation of the soil and the domestication of animals.

The Indians of Alaska, however, will never call upon the Government for food and reservations—there is a great abundance on the earth and in the waters thereof for them; living as they do all down at tide-water, at the sole source of their subsistence, they are within the quick reach of a gunboat; the overpowering significance of that they fully understand and fear. There is a huge wilderness here for them which the white man is not at all likely to occupy, even in part, for generations of his kind to come, yet unborn.

Sitka is the seat of that Alaskan civil government[17] which Congress, after much deliberation, ordered in 1884; but the governor lives here in much humbler circumstances than did his Slavonian predecessors. As it would require a small fortune to rehabilitate the “castle,” the present chief-magistrate resides in one of those neatly built houses which the military authorities erected shortly after they took charge in 1867-68; it is not at all commanding, but has a pleasant vista from its windows over the parade ground, and the steamers’ landing.

While the most impressive feature of the Sitkan archipelago is unquestionably that of the awe-inspiring solemnity and grand beauty of its strange wilderness, yet the most interesting single idea is the Indian and the life he leads therein; with the single exception of the substitution of a woollen blanket and a cotton shirt for his primitive skin garments, he is living here to-day just as he has lived away back to the time when his legends fail to recite, and centuries before the bold voyages of Cook and Vancouver, and the savage sea-otter fleet of Baranov, first discovered him and then made his existence known to the civilized world. True, some of the young fellows who have labored upon vessels and in the fish-canneries wear an every-day workingman’s shirt and trousers, and speak a few words of English, understanding much more, yet the primeval simplicity of all Indian life in this district is substantially preserved.

These savages are fish-eaters, and as such they have a common bond of abrupt contrast in physique with their meat-eating brethren of the Rocky Mountains and the great plains; but the traits of natural disposition are the same, the heart and impulse of the Haidah or the Tongass, are the heart and the impulse of the Sioux or the Cheyenne—the former moves nowhere except squatted in his shapely canoe, the other always bestrides a pony or mustang. This wide divergence in every-day action gives alone to these savages their strongly marked bodily separation; the fish-eater is stooping as he stands, and though he has a deep chest and sinewy arms, yet his lower limbs are bowed, sprung at the knees, and imperfectly muscled; while the meat-eater is erect and symmetrical, in fine physical outline from the crown of his head to his heels.

The various divisions or bands of the Indian population of the Sitkan archipelago and mainland[18] differ but little in their manner of life and customs, and speak closely related dialects of the same language. The Haidahs are the best dispositioned and behaved. They have been from the earliest times constantly in the habit of making long and incessant canoe voyages; and, taking into account the ease with which all parts of this region can be reached on water, it is rather surprising that any marked difference in language should be found at all; still, when we recall the knowledge which we have of their fierce inter-tribal wars, it is not so strange; this warfare, however, was of the same barbarous character as that recognized in all other American savages—it was the surprise and massacre of helpless parties, never sparing old women, children or decrepit men. These internecine family wars have undoubtedly been the sole cause of the present subdivisions of the savages as we note them to-day.

In drawing the picture, faithfully, of any one Alaskan Indian, I may say candidly that in so doing I give a truthfully defined image of them all throughout the archipelago. Physically the several tribes of this region differ to some extent, but not near so much as our colored people do among themselves; the margin of distinction up here between the ten or eleven clans, which ethnologists enumerate, is so slight that only a practised eye can declare them. The Haidahs possess the fairest skins, the best temper, and the best physique; while the ugly Sitkans and Khootznahoos are the darkest and the worst. But the coarse mouth, the width and prominence of the cheek bones, and the relatively large size of the head for the body, are the salient main departures from our ideal symmetry.

The body is also long and large, compared with the legs, brought about by centuries of constant occupation in canoes and the consequent infrequent land travel; their hair is black and coarse, unkempt, and never allowed, by the males, to fall below their shoulders except in the case of their “shamans,” or doctors. A scattered, straggling mustache and beard is sometimes allowed to grow upon the upper lip and chin, generally in the case of the old men only, who finally grow weary of plucking it out by the roots, which in youth they always did in sheer vanity.

Once in a while a face is turned upon you from a canoe, or in a rancherie, which arrests your attention, and commands comment as good-looking; these instances are, however, rare—very, very rare. I think the Haidahs give more evidence in average physiognomy of possessing greater intelligence than that presented in the countenances of their brethren; while I deem the Sitkas and Khootznahoos to be the most insensible—if they are as bright they conceal the fact with astonishing success. Again, the ferocity and exceptionally savage expression of their faces, which Captain Cook and Vancouver saw and so graphically recorded, has faded out completely; but in all other respects they agree to-day perfectly with those descriptions of these early voyagers. In those days firearms had not destroyed their faith in elaborate armaments of spear and bow and body armor-shields of wood and leather, so that they then appeared in much more elaborate costumes and varied pigments than they do now.

Each tribe has one or more large “rancheries,” or villages, in which it lives, and which are always located at the level of the sea, just above tide and surf, at river-mouths, or on sheltered bays of the islands, or the mainland; these rancheries, or houses, are built of solid, heavy timbers in the permanent villages, or thrown loosely together of lighter material in their temporary or camping stations. The general type of construction is the same throughout the archipelago, the most substantial houses being those of the Haidahs, who give more care to the accurate fitting together and ornamentation of their edifices than is shown elsewhere. They certainly show a greater constructive facility and mechanical dexterity, not only in the better style of house-building but in the greater number of, greater size of, and excessively elaborate carved totem posts. These peculiar adjuncts to Alaskan Indian architecture are small and shabby everywhere else when compared with the Prince of Wales exhibition.

All permanent villages are generally situated with regard to one great idea—easy access to halibut-fishing banks and such coast fisheries, which occupy the greater proportion of the natives’ time in going to and coming from them when not actually engaged in fishing upon these chosen grounds; therefore it happens that, occasionally, a village will be located on a rocky coast, bleak and exposed, though carefully placed at the same time so as to permit of the safe landing of canoes in rough water. These houses always face seaward, and stand upon some flat of soil, elevated a few feet above the high-tide mark, where below there is usually a sandy or gravelly beach upon which the fleet of canoes is drawn out, or launched from, as the owners come and go at all hours of the day and night. The houses are arranged side by side, either in close contact, or else a space of greater or less width between. A promenade or track is always left between the fronts of the houses and the edge of the bank, from ten to thirty feet in width; it constitutes a street, and in which the carved posts and temporary fish-drying frames, etc., are usually planted. Also those canoes that are not in daily use, or will not be used for some time, are invariably hauled up on this street, and carefully covered by rush-mats or spruce-boughs, so as to protect them from the weather, by which they might be warped or cracked.

The rancheries are themselves never painted by their rude architects and builders; they, however, soon assume a uniform, inconspicuous, gray color, and become yellowish-green in spots, or overgrown with moss and weeds owing to the dampness of the climate. If it were not for the cloud of bluish smoke that hovers over these villages in calm weather, they would never be noticed from any considerable distance.

A Haidah Rancherie.

In localities where the encroachment of mountain and water make the village area very scant, two rows of houses are occasionally formed, but in no instance whatever is any evidence given in these Koloshian settlements of special arrangement of dwellings, or of any set position for the house of the chief man of the village: he may live either in the centre or at the extreme end of the row. Each house usually shelters several families, in one sense of the term; these are related to each other and under the tacitly acknowledged control of some elder, to whom the building is reputed to belong, and who is a person of greater or less importance in the tribe or village according to the amount of his property or cunning of his intellect.

Before some of these Siwash mansions a rude porch or platform is erected, upon which, in fair weather, a miscellaneous group of natives will squat in assembly, conversing, if squaws, or gambling, if men. The houses themselves are usually square upon their foundations, and vary much in size, some of them being a hundred feet square, while most of them are between fifty and sixty feet, the smaller rancheries being less than twenty. The gable end, and the entrance right under its plumb, always faces the street and beach-view; the roof slopes down at a low pitch or angle on each side, with a projecting shelter erected right over the hole left in the roof-centre, intended for the escape of smoke—no chimneys were ever built. This shelter, or shutter, is movable, and is shifted by the Indian just as the wind and rain may drive; the floor is oblong or nearly square, and, in the older and better constructed examples, is partly sunk in the earth, i.e., the ground has been excavated to a depth of six or eight feet in a square area, directly in the centre, with one or two large earthen steps or terraces left running around the sides of the cellar. A small square of bare dirt is left in the exact centre, again, of this hole, while the rest of the floor is covered with split planks of cedar; the earthen steps which environ the lower floor are in turn faced and covered with cedar-slabs, and these serve not only for sleeping and lounging places, but also for the stowage, in part, of all sorts of boxes and packages of property and food belonging to the family; the balance of these treasures usually hangs suspended, in all manner of ingenious contrivances, from the heavy beams and roof-poles overhead. The rancheries which are built to-day by Alaskan Indians nearly all stand on the surface of the ground without any excavation—a decided degeneracy.

The pattern of the Koloshian house is maintained with little variation throughout the archipelago, and has been handed down from remote antiquity. When, after extended confabulation, a number of Indians agree to build a house, several months are passed first in the forest by them, where they are engaged in felling the trees and dressing the timbers necessary; when these logs and planks are finally hewn into shape (everything in this line is done with axes and the little adze-like hatchets so often described), they are tumbled into the water and towed around to the contemplated site of the new edifice. The great size of the beams and planks used in a big Indian rancherie make it imperative that a large number of hands co-operate in the work. The erection, therefore, of such a structure in all its stages, the cutting and hewing in the woods, the launching and towing of the timbers to the foundations, and their subsequent elevation and fitting, forms the occasion of a regular gathering, or “bee,” that generally calls in whole detachments from neighboring villages, which is always the precursor to a grand “potlatch,” or giving away of the portable property of the savage for whom the labor is undertaken.

Section Showing Arrangement of Interior of a Rancherie.

Some of the larger houses have required the repeated assembling of a whole tribe, and the lapse of two or three years of time ere completion in all details, because the Siwash for whom the work has been done has regularly exhausted his available resources on each occasion, and has needed this interval, longer or shorter as it may have been, in which to accumulate a fresh stock of suitable property, especially blankets, with which to reward a renewed and continued effort. Dancing and gambling relieve the monotony of the labor, which, however, seldom ever is suffered to occupy more than two or three hours of each day, and is conducted in a perfect babel of guttural talk and noise, and the exultant shouting of the entire combination of men, women, and children, as the great beams are placed in position.[19]

In the construction of these dwellings the savage uses no iron or wooden spikes, he “mortices” and “tenons” rudely but solidly everything that requires binding firmly; in the lighter and temporary summer rancheries much use is made of cedar-root and bark-rope lashings to the same end. Within the last fifteen or twenty years the common use of small windows has been employed, the glazed sashes being purchased from the whites either at Victoria or else brought up to order by the traders; these are inserted in the most irregular manner, usually on the sides under the eaves.

The oddly-carved totem posts, which appear in every village, sometimes like a forest of dead trees at distant sight, are, broadly speaking, divisible into two classes: that is to say, the clan or family pillars, and those erected as memorials of the dead. There has been too much written in regard to these grotesque features seeking to endow them with idolatry, superstitions, and other fancies of the savage mind. Nothing of the kind, in my opinion, belongs to the subject; the image posts of the totem order are generally from 30 to 50 feet in height, with a diameter of 3 to 5 feet at the base, tapering slightly upward. They are often hollowed at the back, after the fashion of a trough, so that they can be the easier handled and put into position. Those grotesque figures which cover these posts from top to bottom, closely grouped together, have little or no serious significance whatever: they always display the totem of the owner, and a very marked similarity runs through the carvings of this character in each village, though they have a wide range of variation when one settlement is contrasted with another. I am unable to give any definite explanation, that is worthy of attention, of the real meaning of all those strange designs—perhaps, in truth, there is none; they are simply ornamental doorways.

The smaller memorial posts are also generally standing in the village, upon the narrow border of land running between the houses and the beach, but in no determinate relation to the buildings. When a man falls before prostrating illness, his relatives call in the medicine man, or “shaman,” and also invite the friends of the family to the house of sickness, usually providing them with tobacco; soon the rancherie is full of curious friends, of smoke, and of the abominable noise of the shaman. If the patient dies, the body is not burned now, as it used to be prior to the advent of the whites, but is bent double into a sitting posture, and enclosed in a square cedar box, which has been made for this purpose by the joint labor of the assembled Indians, or else they have subscribed and purchased it from some one of their number. This coffin is exactly the same in shape and size as the box commonly used by every Siwash family here for the reception of spare food, oil, etc., so that there never is any delay or difficulty in getting one.

If the dead Koloshian is a man of only ordinary calibre, his body is put, while still warm, into the wooden crib, and this is at once carried out and stored away in a little tomb-house, which is generally a small covered shed right behind the rancherie, or in the immediate vicinity. This vault is also made by the united labor of the men of the village, and paid for in the same manner as that indicated for the purchase of the coffin-box. In it may be placed but a single body, then again it will contain several—all relatives, however. But should the deceased savage have been one of great importance, then the whole rancherie itself is given up to the reception of the body, which is boxed and placed therein, sitting thus, in state, perhaps for a year or more, no one removing any of the things, the members of the family all vacating the premises, and seeking quarters elsewhere in the village. Now it becomes necessary, sooner or later, to erect a carved post to the memory of this man. Again the Indians collect for the purpose, and are repaid by a distribution of property made by the deceased man’s brother, or that relative to whom the estate has come down, in order of descent. This inheriting relative takes possession the moment the body of the dead has been enclosed in its cedar casket, and not before.[20]

The doorway to the Alaskan house is usually a circular hole through which the Indian must stoop to half his stature when he enters. It is generally from four to six feet from the ground, and is gained by a rude flight of stairs or a notched log leading up to it on the outside, and in the same manner down to the floor on the inside. As you enter, the whole interior seems dark—everything, at first, indistinct, and the only light being directly above and below the smoke-hole in the roof, for a blanket is dropped as a portière over the doorway the moment you pass within. In the centre of this gloomy interior, directly beneath a hole in the roof, is the fireplace, upon which logs are smouldering or fitfully blazing; kettles of stewing fish, and oil and berries simmering under the care of some squatty, grimy squaws who surround it. If this house be a large one you will find within fifty or sixty Koloshes of both sexes, all ages, and in all conceivable attitudes, as they stand, sit, or lounge or sleep around the four sides of the deep terraced room, some cleaning firearms, others repairing fishing-tackle, or carving in wood or slate; while others are idly staring into the fire, or, wrapped in their blankets, are sleeping with reiterated snoring. Against the walls, pendent from the black, sooty beams overhead, hang an infinite variety of personal effects peculiar to this life, such as fish-spears and hooks, canoe paddles, bundles of furs, cedar-bark lines and ropes, immense wooden skewers of dried salmon and halibut, while the boxes which contain the real wealth of such people—blankets,[21] tobacco, and cloths of cotton, and handkerchiefs of silk, are stowed away in the corners.

But odors that the civilized nose never before scented now rise thick and fast as you contemplate this interior, and the essential oils of rancid oolachan grease, decaying fish, and others, in rotation swift, of many shades of startling disgust, cause you to speedily turn and gladly seek, with no delay, the outer stairway, even though a tempest of rain and wind is beating down (with that fury which seems to be most pronounced in violence here as compared with the rest of the world, when it does storm in earnest). Here again it is not pleasant for us to tarry even in fair weather, inasmuch as the Koloshian has no idea of sewerage or of its need, the refuse—slops, bones, shells, fish-débris, and a medley of similar and worse nuisances are lazily thrown out of this doorway on either side and straight ahead, as they are from the entrance to every other rancherie in the village. A merciful growth of rank grass and mighty weeds charitably covers and assimilates much, but yet the atmosphere hangs heavy around our heads—we move away.

On ordinary occasions a head-covering is usually dispensed with, unless it be some old hat of our style. The squaws, however, fashion and often wear grass hats, made as they weave their fine basketware; they have the form of an obtuse cone, generally ornamented by conventional designs painted in black, blue, or red. The feet are almost invariably bare—too wet for moccasins. Painting the face is a very common practice; vermilion is the favorite pigment, and is usually rubbed in without the least regard to pattern or effect; blue and black colors also are used in the same manner, but I have never seen their limbs or bodies so treated, which is the common method of meat-eating savages, who always paint themselves with great care as to exact and symmetrical design. Here the faces of Alaskan Siwashes are thus daubed for the dance or for mourning; especially hideous are the mixtures of spruce-gum grease, and charcoal which you observe smeared over the countenances of the Sitkans, who do so chiefly to prevent unpleasant effects of the sun when it happens to shine out upon them as they are fishing or paddling extended journeys in their canoes, and who also give you an ugly reminder of their being in mourning by the same application.

Bracelets are beaten-out pieces of copper or brass wire and silver coins, highly polished, and worn chiefly by the women, who often carry several upon each arm. When worn upon the ankles they are forged in round sections, while for the wrist they are made quite flat. Tattooing once was universal, but is now going out of style; and, until quite lately, the females all wore labrets in the lower lips—this disgusting distortion is also being abated. Only among the very old women can this monstrosity now be found in its original form. Most of the middle-aged squaws still have a small aperture in the lower lip, through which a little silver, beaten tube, of the size of a quill, is thrust, and projects from the face, just above the chin, about a quarter of an inch. The younger women have not even this remnant of a most atrocious old custom. The ears are often pierced, and tiny shell ornaments, backed with thin sheet-silver or copper, are inserted; and also the septum of the nose is perforated, of both sexes very generally, for the insertion of a silver ring, or a pendant of haliotis shell.

Each village has its lex non scripta, and is a law unto itself everywhere within the confines of the Alexander archipelago; or, in different words, it conducts its affairs wholly without reference to any other village or savages—it is the largest unit in the Indian system of government. Living as they do in these settlements, where they know each other just as well and as familiarly as we know the individual members of our own private home circles, no matter whether the village contain a thousand souls or but half a dozen—there are no strangers in it. Every little daily incident of each other’s simple life, every move that they make, what they capture in the forest or hook out from the sea, is regularly recounted in the rancheries over night. All engaged in precisely the same calling of fishing and hunting, naturally there is no room among them for the eager rivalries and passionate enterprises which our living stimulates and sustains. Therefore the routine of government is almost nothing in its detail—no laws appear to be necessary, and they are not acknowledged; but any action tending to the injury of another, in person or property, lays the offender open to reprisals by the sufferer—usually atoned for—and the village feud, thus aroused, is soon satisfied by a payment in blankets, or other valuable property, to a full settlement. Injuries, thefts and murder, however, which, inflicted by the people of one village upon another, either close at hand or remote, have not always been adjusted in this amicable manner; hence, from time immemorial, the disputants have been at war with each other in this region, and the result of these wars has been to divide them into the existing clans as we find them now. Their internecine warfare was carried on in true savage style. If the cause was one which concerned the whole village, then the chief of that settlement could implicitly count upon the services of every male Indian able to bear arms; and although these savages are fearless and brave, yet they know no open, fair fight—taught to get his living by stratagem when fishing or hunting, so the Kolosh advances in capturing his human enemies, just as all other Indians have done and do.

Each village has a well-recognized head man, or chief, who, though possessing much influence, still never has had, and does not now enjoy, that absolute rule which is attributed to such Indians. He is really a presiding elder over the several families in the hamlet, and, without their consent, his decisions are futile or carry no weight. He has no power to compel other members of the tribe to work, hunt, or fish for him, and if he builds a house, or a canoe, he has to hire them to labor by making the customary “potlatch,” just as any other man of the tribe would do—only he must give a little more. The social rules which exist among these savages show many strange features, for though every rancherie has its freely-acknowledged chief, yet they are divided into as many or more families than there are houses, each one of which has its own regulations, and a subordinate authority of its own governing it, and it alone.[22]

The Sitkan Indians trouble themselves very little about the interior country; but the coast line, and especially the margins of rivers and streams, are duly divided up among the different families. These tracts are regarded as strictly private property, just as we would regard them if fenced in as farms and cattle ranches—and they are passed from one generation to the other in the line of savage inheritance; they may be sold, or even rented by one family desiring to fish, to gather berries, to cut timber, or to hunt on the domain of another. So settled and so strict are these ideas of proprietary and vested rights in the soil, that, on some parts of the coast, corner-stones and stakes may be seen to-day set up there to define the limits of such properties between savages, by savages; and furthermore, woe to the disreputable trespassing Siwash who steps over these boundaries and appropriates anything of value, such, for instance, as a stranded whale, shark, seal, or otter—berries, wreckage, or shell-fish.

The woods and the waters are teeming with animal life; the lofty semi-naked peaks harbor mountain goats in large flocks; the beautiful grouse of Sabine hides in the forest thickets; the land otter and the mule-eared deer haunt the countless ravines, valleys, and rivulet bottoms; salmon in fabulous numbers run up those streams, and big, brown and glossy black bears come down to fatten upon these spawning fish. But the Sitkan savage is indolent, and, though all this dietary abundance and variety is before him, he lives quite exclusively upon halibut and salmon, the former mostly fresh and the latter air-dried and smoked in the soot of his rancherie. Halibut he finds all the year round; salmon briefly run only at widely separated periods.

The halibut fishery is the one systematic regular occupation of the natives. These fish may be taken in all waters of the archipelago at almost any season, though on certain banks, well known to the Indians, they are more numerous at times. When the halibut are most active and abundant, the Koloshians take them in large quantities, fishing with a hook and line from their canoes, which are anchored over the favored spots by stones attached to cedar-bark ropes or cables. They still employ their own primitive, clumsy-looking hook in decided preference to using our own make. When the canoe is loaded to the gunwale by an alert fisherman, these halibut are brought in to some convenient adjacent point on the shore, where they are handed over to the women, who are there to take care of them, usually living in a temporary rancherie. They squat around the pile, rapidly clean the fish, removing the larger bones, head, fins, and tail, and cut it into broad, thin flakes. These are then hung on the poles of a wooden frame trellis, where, without salt, and by the wind and sun alone, sometimes aided by a slow fire underneath the suspended fish-meat, the flakes are sufficiently cured and dried; then they are packed away in those characteristic cedar boxes for future use.

A group of old and young squaws, half-nude, flecked with shining scales and splashed with blood, as they always are when at work upon a fine run of halibut or salmon—such a group is to be vividly remembered ever afterward, if you see it even but once. The little pappooses, entirely naked, with big heads and bellies, slender necks and legs, are running hither and thither in infantile glee and sport, always with a mouthful of raw ova or a handful of stewed fish from the kettle near by, while the babies, propped up in their stiff-backed lashings, croon and sleep away the time.

There are no rivers of any size flowing on the islands of the Sitkan archipelago; but there are rapid rivulets and broad brooks in great numbers. Many of these are large enough to be known as “salmon rivers.” The first run of those attractive fish usually takes place up some of the longest island-streams and the mainland rivers about July 10th to 20th. A month later a larger species begins to arrive from the depths of the ocean outside, and this run sometimes lasts, in a desultory manner, until January. These salmon, when they first appear, are fat and in superb condition and color; but as they leave the salt water and take up their persistent, tireless ascent of fresh-water channels they become hook-jawed, lean, and pale-fleshed. They ascend very small streams in especially great numbers when these rivulets are swollen by the heavy rains of October, and, being easily caught and very large, they constitute the chief harvest of the Alaskan Indian—his meat and bread, in fact. They are either speared in the shallow estuaries or trapped in brush and split-stick weirs, which are planted in the streams. Everyone of the little salmon brooks has its owner in the Indian law. They are the private property of the several families or subdivisions of the clans. Those people always come out of their permanent village houses during the fishing period, and camp upon the banks of their respective water claims.

It is quite unnecessary to itemize all the species of food-fishes in the Alexander archipelago, for anything and everything that is at all abundant in the vicinity of an Indian rancherie is sure to be eaten; trout, herring, flounders, rock-cod, and the rosy, glittering sebastines constitute minor details of the savage dietary. Codfish are taken in these waters, but not in great numbers, nor are they especially sought for. The spawn of the herring[23] is collected on spruce boughs, which the Indians carefully place at low-water on the spawning grounds; then, when taken up, it is smoke-dried and stored away.

But the “loudest” feast of these savages consists of a box, just opened, of semi-rotten salmon-roe. Many of the Siwashes have a custom of collecting the ova, putting it into wooden boxes, and then burying it below high-water mark on the earthen flats above. When decomposition has taken place to a great extent, and the mass has a most penetrating and far-reaching “funk,” then it is ready to be eaten and made merry over. The box is usually uncovered without removing it from its buried position; the eager savages all squat around it, and eat the contents with every indication on their hard faces of keen gastronomic delight—faugh!

Indians Raking Oolochans and Herring.—Stickeen River.

The same ill-favored and heartily-hated “dog-fish”[24] of our Cape Cod fishermen is also very abundant in these far-away waters. Recently, the demand created for its oil by the tanneries of Oregon and California has made its capture by the Indians an important source of revenue to them; the oil rendered from its liver is readily sold by them to the white traders, who also have established a fishery for the purpose on Prince of Wales Island. These traders also are making good use of herring-oil, which is to be secured here in unfailing, abundant supply, to any quantity required.

The most grateful condiment to the Sitkan palate is rancid fish-oil, or oolachan “butter”—a semi-solid grease, with a fetid smell and taste; into this they always dip or rub their flakes of dried fish, their berries, in fact everything that they eat. A little wooden trencher or tub, grotesquely carved, always is to be seen (and smelled), placed alongside of the monotonous kettle of stewed fish, or pile of dried fish, which constitutes the regular spread for a full meal. And again, a very curious, soap-like use of this oil is made by the younger and more comely savages. An Indian never washes in water up in this wet and watery wilderness. I never have seen an attempt made to wash the face or hands with water, but they do rub oil vigorously over, and scrub it off bright and dry with a towel, or mop, of cedar-bark shreds or dry sedge-grass. The constant presence of this strong-flavored oil renders it a physical impossibility for a white man, not long-accustomed to its odor, to enter a rancherie and eat with the inmates, unless the pangs of starvation make him ravenous.

Whether from taste itself, or sheer indolence, the culinary art of these people is confined to the incessant simmering and boiling of everything which is not eaten raw, or ripe; copper, sheet-iron, and brass kettles being now universally used, are the only decided innovation made by contact with ourselves in their aboriginal cooking outfit, though the introduction of tin and cheap earthenware dishes is growing more general every day. Most of the Indian household utensils are made of wood; they are fashioned in several forms or types, which appear to have been faithfully copied from early time. The berry and the food-trays are cut out of solid pieces of wood, the length being about one and one-third times as great as the width, while the depth is relatively small. In some of the large rancheries these trays, or troughs, are six to ten feet long; the outer ends of those receptacles are generally carved richly in all sorts of fancy relief; and, sometimes, the sides are grotesquely painted. A common form, and smaller in size, and a great favorite with the family, is boat-shaped, the hollow of the dish being oval; the ends are provided with odd prow-shaped projections that serve as handles—one of these ends being usually carved into the head and fore-feet of some animal or bird, the other to represent its hind-feet and tail. These dishes are seldom more than eight or ten inches in length, and curve upward from the middle each way, like the “sheer,” or the gunwale, of a clipper ship.

A STICKEEN SQUAW

Boiling Berries and Oil, Toasting Herrings, etc.

Water-dippers, pot-spoons and ladles are made from horns of the mountain sheep. They are steamed, bent, and pared down thin, carved and shaped so as to be exceedingly symmetrical, and well finished. The stew and berry-spoons in ordinary use are made from the stiff, short black horns of the mountain goat, the handles often carved to represent a human form, animal, or bird. Knives of all sorts are now in use. Much ingenuity is often exhibited by the adaptation of old blades to new handles—in converting the large, flat blacksmithing files into keen weapons, and making fish-cleaning knives out of pieces of iron; thin, square or oblong sheets of this metal are so fitted into oblong wooden handles as to resemble the small hash-knives used in our kitchens.

But the Sitkan housekeeper glories in her boxes—great chests and little ones—in which she stores everything of value belonging to the family, except the dogs and the canoes. The big boxes, corded up with bark ropes, are her blanket and fur treasuries; the smaller ones contain her oolachan “butter” and dried fish and meat. The larger chests are from two and a half to four feet square; the lesser are between a foot to two feet. The sides of such a box are made of a single piece of thinly shaven cedar board, which by steaming is bent three times at a right angle, and pegged tightly and very neatly up to the fourth corner. The bottom is a separate solid plank, keyed in with little pegs very solidly, and water-tight; the cover is cut out of a thick slab, and fits over and sets down heavily on the upper edge of the chest. Those boxes are all decorated in designs of the peculiar type so common among these savages, painted in black and white. The next desideratum of the squaw is a full supply of cedar-bark mats, which she plaits from strips of this material, and which are always spread out on the ground or rude plank floor when the Indian prepares to roll up in his blanket for slumber. Such mats are the pride of all Thlinket squaws, and vary much in texture and in pattern.

But the daily routine of the dusky housekeeper is a very different one indeed from that characteristic of woman’s labor in caring for our homes. No sweeping or dusting in the Indian rancherie; no bed-chambers to change the linen in and tidy up; no kitchen or servants to look after; nothing whatever of the kind. Yet the Indian matron is always busy. She has to hew the firewood and drag it in; she has to carry water and attend to all of the rude cooking and filling of the trenchers; she looks after the mats and the sewing of the children’s fur and other garments—not much to be sure in the way of dressmaking—she has to make all of the tedious berry-trips, picking and drying of the fruit, as well as attending to the preservation, in the same manner, of the fish and game which the man brings in. She has an infinite amount of drudgery to do in the line of gathering certain herbs, bark, and shell-fish. Many small roots indigenous to the country, containing more or less starch, are eagerly sought after, dried, and stored away by the women. The inner sap-layer of the spruce and also that of the hemlock—the cambium layer—is collected by cutting the trees down and then barking the trunks for that object. It is shaved off in ribbons and eaten in great quantities, both fresh and dried, and is considered very wholesome. It is sweet, mucilaginous, but distinctly resinous in flavor. The rank-growing seeds, shoots, and leaf-stalks of the Epilobium heracleum, and many others, are plucked and carried by the squaws in huge bundles to the family fire, and there eaten by all hands, the stalks being dipped, mouthful after mouthful, in oil.

She has, however, no washing whatever of clothes to do for anybody, except what little she may see fit to do for herself; she never treats the dishes even to that ordeal. With all this, however, it seems rather strange that the clothes of the Indians, consisting of dresses, shirts and blankets for the men; and for women, petticoats, chemises, dresses (sometimes), and blankets also—that these articles usually appear neat and tolerably clean—the children excepted, as they are always dirty beyond all adequate description. Every individual attends to his or her own washing—if the husband wants a clean shirt, he washes it himself.

Before the introduction of the potato through early white fur-traders, the only plant cultivated by the Alaskan savages was a potent weed which they grew as a substitute for tobacco—the importation of the latter, however, has taken its place entirely to-day, because the Virginian weed is far more pleasant. But the old stone mortars and pestles that are still to be found knocking around the most venerable town-sites, bear evidence to the industry of making native tobacco here ages ago. This plant was prepared for use by drying over a fire on a little frame stretcher, then bruised to a powder in the stone mortars, then moistened and pressed into cakes. It was not smoked in a pipe, but, mixed with a little clamshell lime (burnt for the purpose), it was chewed or held in the cheek, just as the Peruvian Indians use coca.[25] Everybody knows how fond Indians are of tobacco—there is no exception to the rule in Alaska, and no excuse for attempting to recite in these pages the well-worn story anew.

No domesticated animals, except dogs, are to be found with the Alaskan Indians—no cats or fowls. The original breed of curs has been very much disguised by imported strains; the present natives are gray and black, shaggy, wolfish beasts, about the size of a large spitz dog. These cowardly, treacherous animals alone make a white man’s stay in an Indian village a burden to his existence.

The work bestowed by several of the Sitkan clans upon their so-called potato gardens is hardly to be designated as the “cultivation” of that tuber. It forms to-day, this vegetable does, a very important part of the food-supply, and where a white man takes hold of such a garden the result, in a small way, is very satisfactory; but the Siwash finds that the greater part of the low, flat, rich soil in this country is so thickly wooded that the task of clearing the ground is altogether too much for him to even consider, much less undertake. But when he can find a place where an old settlement once existed, though long abandoned—there the sites of decayed rancheries are sure to be of rich, warm soil—such are the spots which the Siwash calls his garden, and where his potatoes are rudely planted, little or no attention being paid to the hoeing and drilling which we deem essential, therefore the variety in use has been run down so that the size and yield is very small, and the quality watery and poor.

While we observe the very general possession of firearms in every rancherie, and we hardly ever see a canoe-load of savages unless the barrels of several muskets or rifles project over the gunwale, yet these Sitkan Indians are not great hunters; but the potent fact that there is no place in all this region where foot travel is practicable into the interior, or even along the coast margin itself, affords an excellent reason; they do, however, kill a very considerable number of black bears every year, at two special seasons therein, i.e., when these brutes are found prowling upon the sea-beach. But they never follow bruin into the mountainous recesses, where he invariably retreats.

In the early spring, during that brief period when the weeds and grasses first grow green along the outskirts of the timber in warm sheltered nooks down by the tide-level, black bears come below from the cold, gloomy cañons above and feed upon the sprouting skunk-cabbage[26] and other succulent shoots, browsing here and rooting up there, these tender growths, just as hogs do in our orchards and clover-fields. Again, late in autumn, when the salmon rush up into the estuaries and through the shallows by countless myriads, bruin is once more tempted down to the sea-beaches, and again gets into trouble. In the same manner the Indians secure the beautiful little mule-deer,[27] which also loves tender vegetation, and in this love falls an easy prey to the silent approach of a canoe with its skulking crew. Geese and ducks, during winter months, spend much time on the quiet fiörds in large flocks, and constitute the chief gunning of the Siwashes, who shoot them from their canoes with the same old flint-lock trade-muskets first used by the whites a hundred years ago. The Indian admires this pattern still above all other patterns—despises the percussion-cap, which in this damp region often fails him, and the trader, knowing this weakness of the savage, always has a stock of these flint-lock muskets, newly made, on hand. A supply is steadily furnished by the Hudson’s Bay Company at Victoria.

But the one thing of joy, of delight, and of infinite use to the native of the Sitkan archipelago is his canoe. Life, indeed, would be a sad problem for him were it not for this adjunct of his own creation. Upon its construction he lavishes the best of his thought, the height of his manual skill, and his infinite patience. The result of this attention is to fashion from a single cedar log a little vessel which challenges our admiration invariably, for its fine outline and its seaworthiness and strength.

All the canoes of this region have a common model, and are similar in type, though they differ much in details of shape and size. They are all made from the indigenous pine[28] and giant cedar,[29] the wood of which is light, durable, and worked very readily; but it is apt to split parallel to its grain. This constitutes the only solicitude of the Indian’s mind. He keeps the canoe covered with mats and brush whenever it is hauled out, even for a few days, to avoid this danger, for whenever a canoe is heavily laden, and working, as it will do, in a rough channel, it is in constant danger of splitting at the cleavage lines of its grain, and thus jeopardizing its living as well as dead freight.

With an exception of the bow and stern-pieces, each canoe, no matter how large or how small, is made in the same manner and from a single log, which is roughed out in the forest, then towed around to the permanent village, where it is hauled up in front of the architect’s house. Here he works upon it during winter months, usually in odd hours, employing nothing but his little adze-like hatchet and fire to assist in giving it shape and fine lines. The requisite expansion amidships, to afford that beam required, is effected by steaming with water and hot stones and the insertion of several thwart sticks. Canoes are smoothed outside and painted black, with a red or white streak under the gunwale in most cases; inside they bear the regular fine tooth-marks of the excavating adze, and are smeared with red-ochre. The paddles are usually made of yellow cypress, and a great variety of small wooden baling dippers are also provided, one or two for each canoe, because the water often slops over the gunwales in bad weather. The canoe itself is never suffered to leak. The average size is one of fifteen to twenty feet in length, which will carry from eight to ten savages, with baggage. One having a length of from thirty to thirty-five feet carries as many men. The smaller canoes of from twelve to thirteen feet are usually used by one or two savages in their quick, irregular trips to and from the village, and are easily launched and hauled out by one man.

It is very doubtful, indeed, whether the Sitkan ever took or takes any real enjoyment in hunting or fishing. If he does, it is never exhibited on his countenance or evidenced by his language. It is, in fact, the serious business of his life, and the steady routine of its prosecution has robbed him of every enjoyable sporting sensation which we love to experience when after fish or game. Perhaps, however, he may recall the thrill of that feeling which he felt when, as a boy, he was first taken out in his father’s canoe to the halibut banks, and there permitted to bait a huge wooden hook and haul away upon the taut kelp-line when the “kambala” had swallowed it; but the necessity of going out to this shoal in all sorts of disagreeable weather every summer and winter of his subsequent existence, at very frequent intervals, soon destroyed pleasurable emotions. Therefore, he fashions his acute-angled wooden hooks, his iron-tipped fish and seal spears, and polishes up his musket with none of those enjoyable anticipations which possess the soul of a white sportsman.

In 1841-42 the best understanding of the Russian and English traders agreed in reporting a population of over twenty thousand Indians within the limits of the Alexander archipelago; to-day the same country can show no more than a scant seven thousand. The inroads that small-pox and measles have made, by which these savages were destroyed even as fire sweeps through and burns drought-withered thickets, leave little doubt as to the great numerical superiority of earlier days as compared with the present. This decay and abandonment is everywhere exhibited now even in the permanent villages, where houses have been deserted completely: some are shut up, mouldering, and rotting away upon their foundations; others, large and fit for the shelter of fifty or sixty natives, will be found tenanted by only two or three Siwashes. All the standing carved posts in this entire region, with rare exceptions, are, as a rule, more or less advanced into decay. A rank growth of weeds, dark and undisturbed in some cases, presses up close to inhabited houses, the traffic not being sufficient to keep them down. The original features of these settlements, in a few years more of this unchecked neglect and decay, will have entirely disappeared as they have already at Sitka. At the present hour, however, we can go among them, and readily call up to our minds what they once were when they were swarming with occupants who were dressed in tanned-leather shirts and sea-otter cloaks, as they thronged about the ships of Cook and Vancouver.

Slavery, which was originally firmly interwoven with the social fabric of these people, has been about abolished—slaves themselves to-day are very scarce, and are not much more so than in name. They were the captives taken in savage warfare between opposing clans, and were most horribly tortured and cruelly treated by their masters.

As a rule the young people marry young, after the stolid fashion of Indians. They approve of polygamy, but seldom do you find a man with more than one squaw, simply because the women do not contribute materially and primarily to the support of the family, and attend only to the accessory duties of it; thus it becomes an increased tax upon the dull energies of the savage whenever he adds an extra woman to his household. The squaws are all well treated everywhere up here; they have just as much to say as their lords and masters whenever the occasion of buying, selling, or hiring arises; as to the children (we will not see many of them to-day), they are always kindly cared for by both parents, and the whole tribe is as indulgent, since they are constantly roaming about the village, after the custom of youngsters universally.

A candid verdict will result, in view of the surroundings of the Koloshian, that the only vice which can be legitimately charged up against him, or his kind, is the sin of gambling. To this dissipation the Alaskan savage is desperately prone; the monotonous chant of the stick-shuffling players is ever on the air in the villages. These worthies sit on the ground, in a circle usually, in the centre of which a mat is spread; six or seven small wooden pins about as large as the little finger of your hand, upon which various values are marked or carved, are taken into the hands of the first gambler, who thrusts them into a ball of soft teased cedar bark, or holds them under his blanket, then shuffles them rapidly, meanwhile shouting a deep guttural hah-hah-ee-nah-hah! the others watch him with lynx-like eyes for a few moments, when one of the players suddenly orders the shuffler to show his hands, in which the sticks are firmly clinched, and at the same time endeavors to guess the value of these sticks in either one hand or the other, which have been held up—he pauses a moment, then makes his decision, the clinched hand designated is opened, the little sticks fall to the mat, and the caller wins or loses just as he happens to hit the value expressed by the markings on these pins: if he guesses correctly he wins everything in the pot or pool, and takes up the wooden dice in turn, to shuffle, shout, and repeat for the rest of the circle. This game is usually sustained night and day, until some one of the party remains the winner of everything that the others started in with.

That wretched debauchery which an introduction of rum into the rancheries of these natives has caused, cannot be justly laid at the Indian’s door; this intense morbid craving for liquor among the Alaskan savages of this region is most likely due to the climate—it is not near so strong in the appetite of the natives who live east of the coast range. Although Congress has legislated, and our officials have endeavored to carry out the prohibition statutes, yet the matter thus far is wholly beyond control—the savage cannot only smuggle successfully within these intricate watery channels, but he now thoroughly understands the distillation of rum itself from sugar and molasses.

There is something in this atmosphere which enables a white man to drink a great deal more with impunity than he can in any other section of the United States or Territories—the quantities of strong tea, the nips of brandy, wine, and cordials which he will swallow with perfect physical indifference, in the course of every day of his life, at Sitka for instance, would drive him to delirium in an exceedingly short time if repeated at San Francisco. Naturally enough, we find that the same craving for stimulants is reflected by Indian stomachs; and now that they have fully grasped the understanding of how to successfully satisfy that aching, no valid reason can be presented why the Thlinket will not continue to gratify a burning desire in this fatal direction to the ultimate extinction of his race. This fault of our civilization is far more potent to effect his worldly degeneration, than any one or all of our combined virtues are to regenerate his earthly existence.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] All savages are called by this name up here—the sex being indicated by “buck” and “squaw.” Children are called “pappooses.”

[17] This Act wisely does not establish a full-fledged form of territorial government in Alaska, because the lack of a suitable population to maintain it reputably was conclusively shown by the census returns of 1880: it creates an executive and a judiciary; it extends certain laws of the United States relating to crimes, customs, and mining, over Alaska, and provides for their enforcement. The land laws of the United States should also be made operative in Alaska, they are expressly omitted in the present act.

[18]

[19] The exact measurements of such a rancherie, and of which the author submits a careful drawing, were: Breadth in front of house, 54 feet 6 inches; depth from front to back, “in the clear,” 47 feet 8 inches; height of ridge of roof, 16 feet 6 inches; height of eaves, 10 feet 8 inches; girth of main vertical posts and horizontal beams, 9 feet 9 inches; width of outer upright beams, 2 feet 6 inches, thickness, about 6 inches; width of carved totem post in front of house, 3 feet 10 inches, height, (?) 50 feet.

[20] Whole volumes have been written upon this subject of the totem and consanguinity among these savages of the northwest coast. Further description or discussion, in this instance, is superfluous.

[21] The blanket is now, however, the general recognized currency among these people. It is the substitute among them of that unit of value, the beaver skin, which has been for so long the currency of the great Hudson Bay region. The blankets used in Alaskan trade are of all colors—green, blue, yellow, red, and white—of the very best woollen texture, none others will do. They are rated in value by the “points” or line-marks woven into the edge, the best and largest being a “four-point,” the smallest and poorest being “one-point.” The unit of value is a single “two and a half point” blanket, worth a little over $1.50. Everything is referred to this unit, even a large four-point blanket is said to be worth so many blankets. Traders not infrequently buy in blankets, taking them, when in good order, from the Indians as money, and selling them out again as trade demands.

[22] There are naturally in every clan certain individuals of hereditary Indian wealth and a long pedigree, who speak in better language, who have a fine physical presence, a more dignified bearing, and the self-possession and pride of incarnate egotism. From these men the chiefs are selected, and although the chieftainship is not necessarily hereditary, yet it is often retained in this manner for many generations in one family. The covers of this volume, however, cannot be expanded wide enough to permit the further discussion and enumeration of a thousand and one singular points in this connection which rise in the author’s mind.

[23] Clupea mirabilis.

[24] Squalus acanthias.

[25] This accounts for the puzzling appearance of ancient stone mortars and pestles in Alaska, throughout the Sitkan region. Ethnologists have endeavored to reason that certain extinct tribes must have cultivated grain up here
of some kind and used it as food. I am indebted to the venerable Dr. W. F. Tolmie for this fact, he showing me the mortars and giving the reason of their use in December, 1866, at Victoria, B. C.

[26] Lysichiton sp.

[27] Cervus columbianus—a well-grown specimen weighs about one hundred and fifty pounds. Great numbers are taken in the Tahkoo region, though it is found everywhere.

[28] Abies sitkensis.

[29] Thuja gigantea.

CHAPTER IV.
THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELIAS.

The Hot Spring Oasis and the Humming-bird near Sitka.—The Value and Pleasure of Warm Springs in Alaska.—The Old “Redoubt” or Russian Jail.—The Treadwell Mine.—Futility of Predicting what may, or what will not Happen in Mining Discovery.—Goal of Alaska not fit for Steaming Purposes.—Salmon Canneries.—The Great “Whaling Ground” of Fairweather.—Superb and Lofty Peaks seen at Sea One Hundred and Thirty-five Miles Distant.—Mount Fairweather so named as the Whalemen’s Barometer.—The Storm here in 1741 which Separated Bering and his Lieutenant.—The Grandeur of Mount St. Elias, Nineteen Thousand Five Hundred Feet.—A Tempestuous and Forbidding Coast to the Mariner.—The Brawling Copper River.—Mount Wrangel, Twenty Thousand Feet, the Loftiest Peak on the North American Continent.—In the Forks of this Stream.—Exaggerated Fables of the Number and Ferocity of the Natives.—Frigid, Gloomy Grandeur of the Scenery in Prince William Sound.—The First Vessel ever built by White Men on the Northwest Coast, Constructed here in 1794.—The Brig Phœnix, One Hundred and Eighty Tons, No Paint or Tar.—Covered with a Coat of Spruce-Gum, Ochre, and Whale-oil, Wrecked in 1799 with Twenty Priests and Deacons of the Greek Church on Board.—Every Soul Lost.—Love of the Natives for their Rugged, Storm-beaten Homes.

A bronzed humming-bird[30] lies upon the author’s table, that once hovered and darted over the waters of Sitka Sound. Its torn and rudely stuffed skin was given to him at Fort Simpson with the remark that it came from the hot springs just below New Archangel; and that nowhere else in all of a vast wilderness, outside of the immediate vicinity of these springs, ever did or could a humming-bird be found. Should, therefore, a visitor to this Alaskan solitude chance to travel within it during the months of April and May, if he will but follow the path of that wee brave bird, he will be led into a veritable green and fragrant oasis, encircled all round about with savage icy mountains and snowy forests.

Twenty miles south of Sitka, on the same island, in a pretty little bay sheltered by a score of tiny islets, there—from the sloping face of a verdant bank, the finest hot springs known to Alaska flow up and out to the sea. Fleecy clouds of steamy moisture rise over all to betray from a distance this delightful retreat; the luxuriant vegetation, the variety of shrubs in full blossom here, when all botanical life about them is as dead as cold can make it, create thereon a spot in the early spring where all the senses of a traveller can rest with exquisite pleasure—the waters of the bay in front are covered with geese and ducks, while the rugged mountains that rise as a wall behind are teeming with deer and bear and grouse, secluded in the jungle.

The Indians, from time immemorial, have resorted to these hot waters of Baranov Island; four distinct and freely flowing springs take their origin in those crevices and fissures of the feldspathic granite foundation of the earth hereabouts; the temperature of the largest spring, at its source, is 150° to 160° Fah.; the waters are charged with sulphur to a very great extent. So jealous were the savages of any attempt among themselves which might savor of a monopoly of the use of these healing, beneficent warm streams, that no one tribe ever dared to build a village upon the site; but, by tacit consent, all were allowed to camp thereon. Some Indians often came from a distance of three hundred miles away to enjoy the sanitary result of bathing here, a few days or a few weeks, as their troubles might warrant.

Naturally the Russians, burdened at Sitka with all diseases which flesh is heir to, turned their attention very promptly to this sanitarium; they erected a small hospital and two spacious bathhouses over the springs, keeping everything in the strictest order and cleanliness, without and within doors. A sad change confronts us to-day—in so far as care of human hands; but the savage Sitkan is here, exulting in his renewed supremacy.

The occurrence, however, of hot springs is quite frequent everywhere in this archipelago; yet their extent and volume of outflow is not so great as evidenced by those we have just noticed of Baranov Island. Indians love to immerse their entire bodies in pools and eddies of these hot rivulets, which are cooled sufficiently by flowing a dozen or fifty yards from their origin over pebbly bottoms; Siwashes will soak themselves in this manner for hours at a time, with nothing but their heads visible. Though the Koloshian, like all others of his kind, never verbally complains, yet he is subject to acute rheumatism, to fevers, and to divers malignant cutaneous diseases; these springs, wherever known to him, are always well regarded as his happy relief and hope. Certain it is that when you behold the parboiled skin of a native, after bathing here, the fair almost white complexion really startles, for, prior to the immersion, he was a coppery brown or black.

Midway between these thermal fountains and Sitka is the site of an old Russian jail or prison; in a deep inlet, with no land in sight, but lofty mountains rising abruptly from the water’s edge, is the “Redoubt.” Here a small alpine lake empties itself in a foaming cascade channel of a few yards in width, that quickly plunges into a cañon, the perpendicular walls of which are a full thousand feet in mural height. The Russians erected mills of various kinds along the rapids to avail themselves of such abundant water-power; the buildings stood upon a bare rocky portion of the channel, and were kept in order by an old veteran in command; a squad of soldiers aided him; the fish, dried and salted salmon, which were required for the use of the company, were annually caught here as they swarmed up the cascade from the sea, into Gloobaukie Lake.

The great facility of travel afforded by these sheltered canals of the Alexander archipelago, has enabled and facilitated a most energetic and persistent search for gold and silver by our miners, but the rugged features of the country and its dense timber and jungle have rendered the progress of such investigation slow, and one of great physical difficulty. In the sands of every stream flowing between California and Cook’s Inlet the “color” of gold can be found, but the paying quantities therein seldom warrant a mining camp or settlement. To-day the only mining rendezvous which we find in Alaska is a little village of rough cabins called “Juneau City,” located on the north side of Gastineaux Channel, at a point near the upper end of that passage; near by, and adjacent, is established a large gold-quartz stamp-mill[31] on Douglas Island, where the mining experts feel justified in predicting a steady and inexhaustible yield of paying ore—it is paying handsomely at present.

This subject of what is, or what is not, a good mining region or investment is one to which no rational man can well afford to commit himself. Those who have had extended experience in these matters know that it is a topic which baffles the best investigator, and returns no safe answer to the most intelligent cross-examination. The true advice which can be honestly given is that which prompts every man interested to look and resolve wholly for himself, for he, in fact, knows just as much as anybody else. At the most, the finding of a rich or desirable lead of gold or silver in a new country is an accident or sheer opportunity of chance. Whether it will hold out, or end in a “pocket,” is also only to be determined by working it for all it is worth. Once in a while a man makes a rich find, and is rewarded; but an overwhelming majority of prospectors are ever wandering in fruitless, restless, tireless search for those golden ingots which are still hidden in the recesses of mountain ledges, or buried in the alluvium of river bottoms. The miners in Alaska embrace various nationalities—Australians and Canadians, Cornishmen and Californians, Oregonians and British Columbians predominate—but the number aggregated is not large.[32]

If gold or silver-quartz mines of free-milling ore (no matter how low the grade) can be located anywhere on the shores of these mountainous fiörds of the Alexander archipelago, their wealth will be great, because the transportation to them and from them is practically without cost. The expense of working such valuable quartz mines up a hundred or more miles from the sea, will result in abandonment, where reaching them involves frequent transfers of supplies, and the working season is cut by the rigor of winter to less than half or one-third of every year. The same mines, down within the dockage of an ocean-steamer in the Sitkan district would be a steady source of wealth and industry all the year round.

The coal which is found here is not satisfactory for steamers’ use—too heavily charged with sulphur. Copper ore is well-known, but not worked in competition with the Lake Superior and Arizona cheap outputs. At the present writing there are no active industries whatsoever in the Sitkan archipelago beyond the energetic stamp-mill of the Treadwell Mine on Douglas Island, and the limited placer diggings of Juneau City. Until a market is created for its large natural resources of food-fishes, the little canneries which our people have started here will not develop; nor will the timber be of much commercial importance until the great reservoirs of the lower coast are exhausted. Statisticians and political economists can easily figure out the time when a population of twenty-five or thirty millions of our own people will be living upon the Pacific coast alone; then the real value of those latent resources[33] of the Sitkan watery wilderness must be patent to a most indifferent calculator.

With this survey of the Alexander archipelago fixed on our minds, we pass from it through the bold Cross Sound headlands that loom above those storm-churned swells of an open ocean, which break here in unceasing turmoil, and we sail out into an area that charts tell us is the “Fairweather ground,” over which that superb peak itself and sister, Crillon, stand like vast sentinel-towers, rearing their immense bulk into many successive strata of clouds, until the elevation of thirteen thousand and fourteen thousand feet is reached, sheer and bold above the sea. This great expanse of the Pacific Ocean between us and Kadiak Island, five hundred and sixty miles to the west, and again down to Victoria, nine hundred miles farther to the south, was the rendezvous of the most successful and numerous whaling fleet that the history of the business records. In these waters the large “right” whale did most congregate, and the capture of it between 1846 and 1851 drew not less than three and four hundred ships with their hardy crews to this area backed by the Alaskan coast. They never landed, however, unless shipwrecked, which was a rare occurrence, but cruised “off and on” with the majestic head of Mount Fairweather as their point of arrival and departure.

When the whalemen saw the summit of that snow-clad peak unveiled by clouds they were sure of fair weather for several consecutive days afterward, hence the name. Early one June morning Captain Baker, of the Reliance, called the author up to see a mountain which was sharply defined in the warm, hazy glow of the dawning sunrise on the horizon—there, bearing N.N.E.,[34] was the image of Mount Fairweather, just as clear cut as a cameo, and lofty as the ship’s spars, though one hundred and thirty-five miles distant! Closely associated and fully as impressive and quite as high, was the heavier form of the snowy Crillon.

That long stretch of more than four hundred miles of bare Alaskan coast, between Prince William’s Sound and Cape Spencer, which stands at the northern entrance to the Sitkan waters, is one that sustains very little human or animal life, and is so rough and is so bleak, that from September until May it is feared and avoided by the hardiest navigator. The flanks of Mounts Fairweather and Crillon rise boldly from the ocean at their western feet, and this sheerness of elevation undoubtedly gives them that effect of cloud-compelling, which does not lose its awe-inspiring power even when a hundred miles away. To the northward and westward of Fairweather, however, the alpine range which it dominates abruptly sets back from the coast some forty or fifty miles, then turns about and faces the sea in an irregular, lofty half-moon of more than three hundred miles in length. A low table-land, or rolling shelf, is extended at its base, intervening between the mountains and the wash of the Pacific. It is timbered with spruce quite thickly, and reported by the Indians to be the best berrying ground in all Alaska.

The Fairweather shore is a steep, woody one, much indented with roadstead coves or bays; the coast line is hilly and uneven, with some rocks and rocky islets scattered along not far out from the surf. The sand-beaches which extend from Fairweather toward the feet of those under St. Elias are remarkably broad and extensive; so much so that, from the ship’s mast-head, large lagoons within the outer swell of the open ocean are frequently seen. These beach-locked estuaries communicate with the ocean by shallow breaks in the outer beach-wall of sand and gravel, across all of which the sea rolls with great violence.

MT. SAINT ELIAS: 19,500 FEET

Under the shadow of this great mountain. Bering’s crew landed in July, 1741; they were the first white men to behold its sullen grandeur, and it fitly stands as the initial point of that early recognition of Russian America. In clear weather it is distinctly seen by mariners, 150 miles at sea; usually, however, it is wrapped in clouds

Right under the towering slopes of Fairweather, as at St Elias, is a large area of upland entirely destitute of verdure of any kind, except the brown and russet mosses and lichens; huge, rugged masses of naked rocks are strewn about in every direction—an old prehistoric lava-flood, perhaps.

The coast, from the head of Cross Sound to Fairweather, is not sandy, but may be well described as the surf-beaten base of a frozen range of magnificent Alpine peaks.

In the centre of the arc of this grand crescent-range is the superb body and hoary crest of Mount St Elias, which is, save Mount Wrangel, now known to be the loftiest peak on the North American coast; the latter is slightly higher. Triangulated from a base line in Yakootat, in 1874, by one[35] of the most accomplished mathematicians of the U. S. Coast Survey, the summit of that royal mountain was determined to be more than nineteen thousand feet above the level of the tide at the observer’s feet. It was under the shadow of this “bolshoi sopka” that Bering first saw the Continent of North America on the 18th of July, 1741, and undoubtedly he discerned it from a long distance, ere his boat landed. Two days before anchoring, he records the fact that “the country had terrible high mountains, which were covered with snow.”

When he finally landed (it was St. Elias’ day), near a point that he named as he named the lofty central peak, Cape St. Elias, he found the temporary summer-houses of a band of natives; those people themselves had fled in terror from an unwonted invasion, but the Russians soon had reason to regret their subsequent better understanding.

After the storm which parted Bering, early in June, from the company of the second vessel of his expedition, he had hoped to fall in with her ever afterward, and while eagerly scanning the coast and horizon about him for some sign of his lost comrades, the hand of fate caused him to turn to the northward, when, had his helm been set south, he would have met the object of his search. For the other vessel, the St. Paul, had proceeded on its solitary course, and anxiously sought the commander, until it, too, had sighted this same coast, three days earlier than had its storm-separated consort. Tschericov came to anchor off some distance from “steep and rocky cliffs”[36] in “lat. 56°,” July 15. Weary and expectant, the captain sent his mate with the long-boat and a crew of ten or twelve of his best men away to the shore for the purpose of inquiry and for a fresh supply of water. The ship’s boat disappeared behind the point sheltering a small wooded inlet; it and its men were never seen again by their shipmates. Troubled in mind, but thinking that the surf, perhaps, had stove the boat in landing, the captain sent his boatswain in the dingy with five men and two carpenters, all well armed, to furnish the necessary assistance. The small boat disappeared also, and it, too, was never seen again. At the same time a great smoke was constantly ascending from the shore. Shortly afterward two huge canoes, filled with painted, yelling savages, paddled out from the recesses of the bay, and lying at some distance from the ship, all howled, in standing chorus, “Agai—agai!” then, flourishing their rude arms, they rapidly returned to the shore. Sorrowfully the disturbed and distressed Tschericov turned his ship’s course about and hurried home,[37] not knowing the fate of his men, unable to help them, and, to this day, no authentic inkling of what became of these Slavonian seamen has ever been produced. Unquestionably, they were tortured and destroyed.

The rains caught in the ship’s sails filled the casks of the Saint Paul, since Tschericov, deprived of his boats and thoroughly alarmed, made no further attempts to land; but he had not the faintest idea of the presence, at that moment, of his superior officer in the same waters, and only a few leagues to the northward, who also, like himself was eagerly looking for his storm-parted consort. What a most remarkable voyage, this voyage of the discovery of the Alaskan region—what a chapter of disappointment, of hardship, and of death!

That bluffy sea-wall which forms a face to the low coast plateau at the feet of the St Elias Alps is cut by no great river, nor indented by any noteworthy gulf or inlet, except at Yakootat Bay. Here a succession of precipitous glaciers sweep down from the lofty cradles of their birth to the waters of the sea, making an icy cliff of more than fifteen miles in breadth, where it breaks in constant reverberation and repetition. At the mouth of Copper River all silt carried down from old eroded glacial paths has been deposited for thousands and thousands of years, until a big deltoid chart of sea-water channels in muddy relief of bank and shoal has been formed, and through which the flood of an ice-chilled river takes its rapid course.

The gloomy, savage wildness of this region of supreme mountainous elevation, with its vast gelid sheets and precipitous cañons, its sombre forests and eternal snows, all as yet wholly unexplored, and only faintly appreciated as we can from the remote distance of shipboard observation—this region cannot remain much longer untrodden by the geologist and the naturalist, while the artist must accompany them if an adequate presentation is ever to be given of its weird, titanic realities.

The Mount St Elias shore-line is made up of small projecting points, awash. These alternate with low cliffy or else white sandy beaches, which border a flat, rolling woodland country that extends back from the sea ten to thirty miles, where it suddenly laps and rises upon the lofty flanks of the Elias Alps. Into the ocean many rocky shoals and long sandy bars stretch for miles, and streams of white muddy glacial or snow waters rush into the surf at frequent intervals—hundreds of them.

There are sand-beaches and silt-shoals which extend from Cape Suckling, up seventy-five miles to Hinchinbrook Island, that stands as a gate-post to the entrance of Prince William’s Sound: here is a long sand-ridge which is more than sixty miles in length and from three to seven miles broad, lying between the ocean and the mainland, which in turn is composed of low wooded uplands and of steep abrupt cliffs and hills that are quickly lost in the lofty snowy range of the Choogatch Alps. Through a section of this dreary sand-wall the impetuous flood of the Copper or Atna River forces its way, carrying its heavy load of glacial mud and silt far into the ocean. How the winds do blow here! How the trader dreads to tarry “off and on” this coast!

There are a few lonely places in this world, and the wastes of the great Alaskan interior are the loneliest of them all. Those of Siberia are traversed occasionally by wandering bands, but those of Alaska, never. The severe exigencies of climate there are such as to substantially eliminate savage life, and to rear an impregnable barrier to that of civilization.

When Alaska was first transferred, an estimate of many thousands of Indians inhabiting its vast interior was gravely made and as gravely accepted by us; but a thorough investigation made by our traders and officers of our Government during the last fifteen years has exposed that error. Hundreds only live where thousands were declared to exist. The Indians who live on the banks of the Copper River are, perhaps, the most poverty-stricken of all their kind in Alaska. Their shiftless spruce-bark rancheries and rude belongings are certainly the most primitive of their race, and render that weird Russian legend of the massacre of Seribniekov in 1848, which declared them so numerous and savage, absolutely grotesque. They are perfectly safe as they live in their wild habitat. The cupidity of savage or civilized man never has and never will molest them. But if half is true as to what they relate of huge glaciers which empty into their river, then those that have been described in Cross Sound have formidable rivals, which may yet prove to be superiors, perhaps, although it seems incredible.

MT. WRANGEL: 20,000 FEET

In the Forks of Copper River: it is the loftiest Mountain on the North American Continent

The Suchnito or Copper River has long been a bugbear, for the Russians[38] years ago have returned from several unsuccessful attempts to ascend it, and gave the excuse of being driven out of the valley by savage and warlike natives. Recently it has been thoroughly explored, and the “savages” are found to be less than two hundred inoffensive natives, who constitute the whole population of this mysterious Atna or Maidnevskie region. But navigating the river is terrific labor, inasmuch as it is a continuous, swift rapid throughout its entire course.

This river is a short, turbulent, brawling stream, less than two hundred and fifty miles in length, but rising in the heart of a lofty and mighty mass of volcanic mountains. It receives a score of imposing glaciers, which almost rival those of Icy Bay in Cross Sound. The silt that these gelid rivers pour into its channel has given it a deltoid mouth of extended and most intricate area.

Triangulations made by an officer of the Army last year declare that Mount Wrangel is the loftiest peak on the North American continent. The feet of this magnificent volcanic dome are washed by the forks of Copper River, which is eighteen thousand six hundred and forty feet below the apex of its smoking cap. Then the river at this point is more than two thousand feet above sea-level, so the vast altitude of more than twenty thousand feet for Mount Wrangel seems to be truthfully claimed.

The soil which borders the abrupt banks of the Copper River is entirely composed of glacial silt and gravel. It is moist and boggy in the driest seasons, covered with rank growing grasses and dense thickets of poplars, birches, and willows, that line the margins of the stream. The higher lands, as they rise from the narrow valley, are in turn clothed with a dense growth of spruce-forest, which gradually fades out into russet-colored areas of rock-sphagnum as the altitude increases to that point where nothing but the cold and frost-defying lichen can cling alive to the weather-splintered summits of alpine heights above.

Fish (salmon) are the chief reliance of these natives of Copper River; they depend almost wholly upon the annual running of those creatures. The difficulty of hunting is so great that the savage is content with shooting a few mountain sheep, a wandering moose or two, and, perhaps, a stray bear in the course of the year. Also, huckleberries and salmon berries are abundant on the sunshiny slopes of the high glacial river-terraces during August and September.

West of the Copper River mighty masses of the Choogatch Mountains rise directly from the sea without any intervening lowland, save at three tiny points upon which savage man has hastened to fix his abode. Many crests to this range on the north side of Prince William’s Sound must have a mean elevation of over ten thousand feet, densely wooded with semper-virent coniferous forests up to a height of one thousand feet above sea-level, and covered with everlasting snowy blankets to within three or four thousand feet of the ocean at their bases. The body of Prince William’s Sound is so forbidding in its dark grandeur that even the stolid Russians never tired of narrating its stirring impression upon their senses. Although the interior of this gulf is completely land-locked, being sheltered from the south by the islands of Noochek and Montague, yet it is by no means a safe or pleasant sheet of water to navigate, inasmuch as furious gales and “woollies” sweep down upon it from the steep mountain sides and cañons, so that, without even a moment’s warning, the traveller’s craft is suddenly stricken, and compelled to instantly run for shelter under the lee of some one of the hundreds of islands and capes which stud its waters or point its coast. Immense glaciers are descending from the cavernous inlets of the northern and eastern shores, and shedded fragments of ice, large and small, are cemented by the tide into large sheets, which are finally swept out and lost in the ocean.

VALDES GLACIER

View at the head of Valdes Inlet, Prince William’s Sound: typical study of hundreds of such gelid rivers which discharge into the waters of this gloomy sound. A September sketch, made at low-tide

The shores of these canals are formed of high, stupendous mountains that rise abruptly from the water’s edge perpendicularly, and often overhanging. The dissolving snow upon their summits gives rise to thousands upon thousands of little cataracts, which fall with great impetuosity down their seamed sides and over sheer and rugged precipices. This fresh water, clear as crystal and cold as winter, thus descending into the green and blue salt sea, changes that tone to one of a strange whitish hue in its vicinity, as it also does in many fiörds of the Sitkan region. This peculiar flood always arrests attention and excites the liveliest curiosity in the mind of him who beholds it for the first time. Everywhere, save to the southward, mountains can be seen looming up in the background with snowy peaks and guttered ridges, and they attest the wild legends of their sullen grandeur which the first white men related who ever beheld them. These hardy sailors, when sent out in the ship Three Saints from Kadiak, in 1788, arrived in the Gulf of Choogatch, or this Sound of Prince William, during the month of May. They anchored in a little bay of Noochek Island, and there established a trading-station. This is the only post, Fort Constantine, or “Noochek,” that has ever been located by our people in all this section of a vast wilderness; to-day it is but little changed—a couple of trading-stores standing on the foundations of Ismailov’s[39] erection, in which the only three white men now known to reside in all that region of alpine wonder are living, surrounded by a small village of sixty natives.

The large size of those spruce-trees on the southern slopes of Kenai Peninsula, Montague, and Noochek Islands of Prince William’s Sound, so impressed the Russians that they established a shipyard at Resurrection Bay as early as 1794; by the close of that year they actually built and launched a double-decker, 73 feet long by 23 feet beam, of 180 tons burden—the first three-masted, full-rigged ship ever constructed on the west coast of the North American continent; she was named the Phœnix, and as she slid from her ways into the unruffled waters of this far-away place the exultation and delighted plaudits[40] of her builders echoed in strange discord with the wild surrounding. Baranov had no paint or even tar, so that this pioneer ship was covered with a coat of spruce-gum, ochre, and whale-oil. A few small vessels only were built after this, inasmuch as the company found it much more economical to purchase in European yards the sailing-craft and steamers which it was obliged to employ: but, to-day the traces of the Russian ship-carpenter’s axe can be still plainly recognized at many points of the western coast of the sound, and on Montague Island huge logs, as roughed out nearly a full century ago, are lying now, as they lay then, slightly decayed in many instances; the anticipation which felled them was never realized, and they have never been disturbed consequently.

In these early colonial Alaskan days, Fort St. Constantine, or Noochek Island, was a very important trading-centre; it was visited by all the tribes living on the Mount St. Elias sea-wall to the eastward as far as Yakootat, and also by the Copper Indians. Then the sea-otter was abundant, and in its ardent chase those Choogatch savages captured, incidentally, large numbers of black and brown bears, marten, and mink. Now, with the practical extermination of the sea-otter, we find a very poor lot of natives at this once flourishing post; but, for the means of a simple physical existence, they have no lack of an abundant supply of salmon, seal-blubber and flesh—meat of the marmot, porcupine, and bear, varied by the frequent killing of mountain sheep, which are found all over this alpine range; fine foxes are plentiful too.

These Indians live in houses partly underground, which we shall describe as we visit Kadiak, and in purely race-characteristics those people also closely resemble the Kadiak Eskimo. From the north of the Copper River, however, toward the Sitkan archipelago, the Koloshian or Thlinket is dominant in the form and features of those savages which we find in a few small and widely separated villages that exist on the narrow table-land between the high mountains and the unbroken swell of the ocean. These natives all, however, agree in describing their country as an excellent hunting-ground, well timbered, and traversed by numerous small streams which take their rise in the glaciers and eternal snows of the St. Elias Alps.

By some happy dispensation of the Creator every savage is so constituted that here in Alaska, at least, he believes in his own particular area of existence as the very best realm of the earth—he becomes homesick and refuses to be comforted if taken to California or Oregon, enters into a slow decline, and soon dies if not returned to the dreary spot of his birth—a sad illustration of fatal nostalgia.

An Alaskan Indian or Innuit has very little of what may be styled true slavish superstition; certainly he is credulous, but he rather encourages it for the sake of the romance. He gives slight attention to augurs or omens; he ventures out in search of food alike under all sorts of varying conditions of health and weather; he has a few charms or amulets, but does not surrender to them by any means. Shamans, or sorcerers, never have had the influence with him that they have exerted in the barbarism of our own ancestry, and which they possess among the savages of Central and South America and Africa to-day. It is no solution of this difference in disposition to call him stupid, for it is not true; he is far more alert, mentally, than the ghost-ridden Australian, or fetich-slave of Africa; and, again, the sun-worshipping and intensely superstitious Incas were far superior, intellectually, to him.

Most of the Innuits give hardly a thought to the subject, yet they are exceedingly vivacious and social among themselves; much more so than the Indians. They relate a great many supernatural stories, but it is only in amusement, and it seldom ever provokes serious attention.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Selasphorus rufus—it is common in California, Oregon, and parts of Washington Territory, and Southern British Columbia—never found north of Victoria on the coast, except as above stated: it winters in Central America.

[31] The Treadwell Mine—free-milling gold ore; 120 stamps; employs 150 to 250 men—situated right at the tide-level.

[32] Eight hundred, or a thousand, perhaps. They come and go suddenly, alternating in travel as the rumors relative to their occupation circulate.

[33] A few small saw-mills have been erected at several points in this Sitkan district to supply the local demand of trading-posts and mining-camps. With reference to quality or economic worth, the timber found herein may be classified as follows, in the order of its value: 1. Yellow cedar (Cupressus nutkaensis) and Thuja gigantea, the red variety. 2. Sitkan spruce (Abies sitkensis). This is the most abundant. 3. Hemlock (Abies mertensiana). 4. Balsam fir (Abies canadensis). The finest growth of this timber is found upon Prince of Wales Island, Admiralty, and Kou Islands, within the Alaskan lines.

[34] Tuesday, June 13, 1874. It did not seem possible at first that the officer’s observations were accurate, but the captain verified the ship’s position anew, and confirmed the correctness of Lieutenant Glover’s entry and sights: “bearing N.N.E., 135 m.”

[35] Marcus Baker. Unfortunately no one connected with this Coast Survey Party was able to make an adequate drawing of the mountains, and it was so enveloped in clouds as to be partially invisible when the author cruised under its lee.

[36] That point, most likely, was Kruzov Island, and the bay into which the unhappy Russians were decoyed was Klokachev Gulf. This island forms the western shore of Sitka Sound.

[37] He reached Kamchatka on the 9th October following, with only forty-nine survivors out of his original crew of seventy. Bering never did; he was shipwrecked and died on a bleak island, of the Commander group, December 8, 1741. They seem to have really sailed over this course of six thousand miles almost together, anxiously searching for each other, yet unconscious of their proximity.

[38] When the surveying parties of the War Department were ascending Copper River last summer, certain Indians, who had been instrumental in slaying the Russian party of Seribniekov in 1848, were very much alarmed. They were sure that the fates had come for them at last. One of these natives, an aged man, now wholly blind, was reported as saying that he was ready to die, and knew what the white men wanted. This old fellow, Lieutenant Allen says, was one of the finest-looking savages that he ever saw. The face of the blind man was one of remarkable character—a large, massive head, high aquiline nose, with a full, thin-lipped mouth and broad forehead. He was totally blind and his hair white as snow.

The Russian party were sleeping in their sledges, which they compelled the natives to draw while ascending the river. At a preconcerted signal the unwilling Indians turned and brained their taskmasters with hatchets. These natives had welcomed the Russians; but when they were made to perform the labor of dogs they turned upon their white oppressors, naturally. The massacre of Seribniekov and his party in this manner made the Indians very restless and determined in their opposition to further intercourse with the Russians. The memory of hostility has, however, died out, and nothing of the kind was shown to our people last year as they charted the valley and river.

Lieutenant H. T. Allen.