\ AN HENRY W. ELLIOTT ILLUSTRATED BY MANY DRAWINGS FROM NATURE, AND MAPS LONDON SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVIXGTON 1886 > \Att rights reserrerf] 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 cer- tainly be startling. Scores of weighty volumes, hundreds of pamphlets and mag- azine articles, and a thousand newspaper letters, have been devoted to the subject of Alaskan life, scenery, and value. In contempla- tion of this, viewed from the author's standpoint of extended per- sonal experience, he announces his determination to divest him- self 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. 20051" CHAPTER I DISCOVERY, OCCUPATION, AND TRANSFER pp. 1-12 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 Competi- tion of the Promyshlineks finally Leads to the Organization and Domina- tion of the Russian American Company over all Alaska, 1799. Its Remark- able Success under Baraiiov's Administration, 1800-18, inclusive. Its Rapid Decadence after Baraiiov'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. CHAPTER H. FEATURES OF THE SITKAN REGION , pp. 13-35 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 during 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 Canons. The Sitkan Climate. Neither Cold nor Warm. Excessive Humidity. Stickeen Gold Excitement of 1862 and 187."). 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. vi CONTENTS. (ii \ITER m. !\ \i I. in: 01- THK SITKXN- pp. ::<> -'''! Tli- Whit- Man ami the Jn.lian Trading. Th- Shrewdu-.-s and Avarice of the Savage. Small Valu< of tin- entire Land Fur Trade of Alaska. The Futile Effort of the Greek Catholic Church to Intlm-m-- tin- Sitkau In- dians. Tin- Reason why Missionary Work in Alaska ha- been and is Impotent --Tlif Difference between the Fish-eating Indian of Alaska and tin kg Savage of the Plains. Simply One of Physique. The -t Indians of Alaska. Deep < 'hosts and Handy Leirs from Canoe-travel. Livim: in Fixeil Settlements because Obliged To. Larg- "Rancher !-" or Houses Built by the Haidahs. Communistic Families. Great Gamblers. Indian "House-Raisin;: Bees."' Grotesque Tot-m Posts. Indian Doctors "Kill or Cure." Dismal Interior of an Indian " Rancher!. -.' Th- Toilet and Dress of Alaskan Siwashes. -Tin; Unwrit- ten Law of the Indian Village. What Constitutes a Chief. The Tribal 1 their Scrupulous Regard. Fish th- Main Support of Sitkan Indians. Th- Running of the Salmon. Indians Kat Everything. Their S:i!:ids and Sauces. Their Wooden Dishes and Cups, and Spoons iorn. The Family Chests. The Indian Woman a Household Drudge, ha- no Washing to Do, However. Sitkan Indians not Great Hunters. They are I'nrivalled Canoe-builders. Small-pox and Measles have U-duc.-d th- Indians of the Sitkan Archipelago to a Scanty Number. - -Abandon. -.1 Settlements of these Savages Common. The Debauchery of Rum among these People. The White Man to Blame for This. CHAPTER IV. Tin. AI.I-IM Eoxneo* M.n-vr ST. I'l.i \s pp. (>r "M The Hot Spring Oasis and the Humining-hird near Sitka. The Value and Pleasure ,.f Warm Springs in Alaska. The Old "Redoubt" or Ru.-- Jail. The Treadu-ell Mine. Futility of Predicting what niwy, or what >t Hap],.-n in Mining Discovery. Coal of Alaska not fit fo Steam jrposes. Salmon Canneries. The Great "Whaling Ground'' of -uperb and Lofty I'eaks Men at Sea One Hundred and Tllirt Di^tallt. Mount Fairweather so named as th 4 - Whal- Barometer. The Storm here in IM] w lnch Separated. i;-rtn- awl t-nant. -The Crand-ur of Mount St. Elias, Nineteen Th^i.-and t. A Tempertaooa and Forbidding Coast to the Mariner, pn Riv-r Mount Wrantrel, Tw-ntv Th..usand F-t, l'-:k on the North American Continent. lln th- Fork- the Number and Ferocity of the res. Frigid, (Hoomy Crandenr of the Scenery in Prince 'William Th, First ?Ml ever built by White Men on the Northwest CONTENTS. Vll Coast, Constructed here in 1794 The Brig Plmnix, 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 Dea- cons of the Greek Church on Board. Every Soul Lost. Love of the Natives for their Bugged, Storm-beaten Homes. CHAPTEE V. COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE pp. 82-97 Cook's "Great River." The Tide-rips, and their Power in Cook's Inlet. The Impressive Mountains of the Inlet. The Glaciers of Turnagain Canal. Old Russian Settlements. Kenai Shore of the Inlet, the Garden-spot of Alaska. Its Climate best Suited to Civilized Settlement. The Old "Colonial Citizens'' of the Russian Company. Small Shaggy Siberian Cattle. Burning Volcano of Ilyamna. The Kenaitze Indians. Their Primitive, Simple Lives. They are the Only Native Land-animal Hunt- ers of Alaska. Bears and Bear Roads. Wild Animals seek Shelter in Volcanic Districts. Natives Afraid to Follow Them. Kenaitze Archi- tecture. Sunshine in Cook's Inlet. Splendid Salmon. Waste of Fish as Food by Natives. The Pious Fishermen of Neelshik. Russian Gold- mining Enterprise on the Kaknoo, 1848-55. Failure of our Miners to Discover Paying Mines in this Section. CHAPTER VI. THE GREAT ISLAND OP KADIAK pp. 98-126 Kadiak the Geographical and Commercial Centre of Alaska. Site of the First Grand Depot of the Old Russian Company. Shellikov and his Remark- able History, 1784. His Subjection of the Kaniags. Bloody Struggle. He Founds the First Church and School in Alaska at Three Saints Bay, 1786, One Hundred Years ago. Kadiak, a Large and Rugged Island. The Timber' Line drawn upon it. Luxuriant Growth of Annual and Biennial Flowering Plants. Reason why Kadiak was Abandoned for Sitka. The Depot of the Mysterious San Francisco Ice Company on Wood Island. Only Road and Horses in Alaska there. Creole Ship and Boat Yard. Tough Siberian Cattle. Pretty Greek Chapel at Yealovnie. Afognak, the Larg- * est 'Village of li Old Colonial Citizens." Picturesque and Substantial Vil- lage. Largest Crops of Potatoes raised here. No Ploughing done ; Earth Prepared with Spades. Domestic Fowls. Failure of Our People to Raise Sheep at Kolma. -What a "Creole" is. The Kaniags or Natives of Ka- diak ; their Salient Characteristics. Great Diminution of their Num- bers. Neglect of Laws of Health by Natives. Apathy and Indifference to Death. Consumption and Scrofula the Scourge of Natives in Alaska ; Measles equally deadly. Kauiags are Sea-otter Hunters. The Penal ( ONTBNTS. ,n of Ookamok. the Botany Bay of Alaska. -The Wild Coast of the on th- Mountains.-Belcovsky, the 1 Oonga, 01 lishint' Rendezvous. _ Ti : Shoomau-in b0M, 1741. -The Coal Mines here \Vurtl. CHAPTER VH. Tin < TIIK OTTER PP- 127 ~ 1 Searching for the Otter. Exposure and Danger in Hunting Sea-otters. The . I'ati. nc. -.ana Skill of the Captor. Altasov and his Baud of Cruel ri^i Rnergjrofthfl Karly Russian Sea-otter Traders. Their ,1 for Sea-otter Skius Leads the Russians to Ex- plore th- Kntir- Ala-kan Coast. 17UO-1780. Great Numbers of BMrOtteM when they were First Discovered in Alaska. Their Partial Extermiua- -:!. More Secured during the Last Five Years than in all ta I'n-c, iling. What is an Otter? A Description of its :ige Life. Its Singh- Skin soni.-tiiiK-s Worth $500. The Typical Sea- Hunt-r A Description of Him and his Family. Hunting the Sca- the Sole Remunerative Industry of the Aleutians. Cloomy, Stonn-^ beaten Haunts of the Otter. Saanak. the Grand Rendezvous of the Hunters. The "Surround" of the Otter. " Clubbing" the Otter. :ing" the Otter. " Surf-shooting" Them. CHAPTER \T[L TIIK (iKEAT ALEI-TFAN CHAIN pp. 1^5-187 utian Islands. A Great Volcanic Chain. Symmetrical Beauty of i.-iMin <'<'!!. The Banked Fires in Oonimak. Once most Densely 1'opulated of all the Aleutians ; now Without a Single Inhabitant. )' Contrast in the Scenery of the Aleutian and Sitkan Archipelagoes. Fog, Fog, Fog, Everywhere Veiling and Unveiling the Chain Inces- santly. Schools of Hump-back Whales. The Aleutian WliUlers. Odd and -The Whale-backed Volcano of Akootan. Striking Outlinea of Kahlerta 1'oint and the " l',i>hop." Lovely Bay of Oonatashka. !!<.wled trom its Shore. Illoolook Village. The "Curved Bea< -ciimtiiig Picture to the Ship-wear^- Trav- Etaow in Au_',i-t. -Winds that Riot over this A^eutiaft Massacre of Drooshinnin and One Hundred and Fifty af his i This the only Desperate ;m 5!) Cuori- (.] SKA-LIONS, " :!r)4 si \ i ION ROOKERY AT TOLSTOI, " 358 NATIVKS CIIKKI-IM; rniN SKA-I.KNS, .... " 364 Tin: SEA-LION PEN AT NOVASTOSHNAH, ... " 3C5 Si-KiMJiM. THE ALAKM, 300 NOOSHA<;.\K, 374 PORTRAIT OF "CIIAMI," AND THE FAVORITK POSITION OF INNUITS, " 378 PORTRAITS OF A JESTING INNUIT MOTHER AND THE SON OK AHGAAN, " 395 'I in: SVDDI.I; HACKED HAIR-SEAL, Histrioplioca, . . 400 THE KrsKoKviM RIVER BELOW KOLMAKOVSKY, . . 403 KOI.MAKOVSKY, 400 TOM i{ OF INNUITS, " 410 CAPE PRINCE OF WALES, 439 POONOOK WINTER VILLAGE, 443 <;mri OF WALRUS, 447 PINNACLE ISLET, NEAR ST. MATTHEW ISLAND, . . " 461 ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT. PAGE VIGNETTE: HAIDAHS HUNTING HAIR SEALS, .... Tin,' LUIMIKS IN- A VAST WILDERNESS, .16 I'. \i: A NOV'S CASTLE (1817-26), ... 30 SITKAN CHIMES, .... 39 OLD IM,I\\ CIIAI-KI., SITKA, .... 41 HAIDAH K\\<-IIERIE, ... 4g EtacnOM Sin. WIN,. INTKKIOR, ... 48 I'. \KING OOLOCHANS, STICKEEN RlVER, 57 KI-.N MT/.E CHIEF, .... 88 BEAR ROADS, OOMMAK !M.\\D, . . 90 KI.NAIT/.I: RAN. III.KII . COOK'S INLET, . . 93 OOGASHIK, VILLAGE OF, ... 119 SKA-OTTEK, ...... loi BARHABKIE, OR ALEUTIAN HUT 135 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. XV PAOB ALEUTIAN MUMMY, 185 ALEUTES CATCHING HALIBUT, 212 BOBROVIA, OR OTTER ISLAND, 219 FUR-SEALS SCRATCHING, 271 FUR-SEALS RISING TO BREATHE AND SURVEY, 300 PORTRAIT OF A PRIBYLOV SEALER, . . . . . . . 338 A SKINNED CARCASS, AND SKIN THEREFROM, . . . . . 342 INTERIOR OF A FUR-SEAL SALT-HOUSE, 345 NATIVES DRIVING SEA-LIONS, . . . . . . . . . 368 SEA-LION BIDARRAII, 371 INNUIT WOMAN, 377 INNUIT HOME ON THE KUSKOKVIM, 379 THE BIG MAHKLOK, OR Erignathus, ....... 383 THE INNUIT KASHGA, 385 SECTION OF THE KASHGA, 386 INNUIT DOG, " TATLAH," 388 "BRULE," OR BURNT DISTRICTS, 409 STEAMER ON THE YUKON, ......... 414 MlCHAELOVSKY, 419 OOKIVOK, OR KING'S ISLAND, 426 THE DIOMEDES, 430 INNUIT WHALING CAMP, ......... 439 RINGED SEAL, Phoca fcetida, 441 WALRUS-HUNTER, 444 SECTION OF INNUIT WINTER HOUSE AT POONOOK, . . . . 446 NEWACK'S BROTHER, . . . . . . . . . . 455 NEWACK AND OOGACK, PEN PORTRAITS OF, ...... 457 NATIVES GIVING THE WALRUS A DEATH-STROKE, .... 459 "DOUBLE PURCHASE" OF THE'!NNUITS, ...... 461 MAPS. SPECIAL MAP OF ST. PAUL ISLAND, .... Facing page 215 SPECIAL 'MAP OF ST. GEORGE ISLAND, ... " 226 SpECIAl, MAP OF NOVASTOSHNAH ROOKERY, . . 314 SPECIAL MAP OF LAGOON ROOKERY, .... " 315 GENERAL MAP OF ALASKA, ...... At end of Volume. 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 Competi- tion of the Promyshlineks finally Leads to the Organization and Domina- tion of the Russian American Company over all Alaska, 1799. Its Remark- able Success under Barauov'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 haud-in-haud with Bering and his crew. Flushed with the outspoken favor of his sovereign, Bering and his lieutenant, Tschericov, sailed east from Petropaulovsky, Kam- chatka, 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. 2 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 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 Septem- ber, 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 com- pany, 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 appeai'ed 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 DISCOVERY, OCCUPATION, AND TRANSFER. 3 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 absohitely any- thing 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 star- board 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 consulta- tion, 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 de- creased 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 even- ing 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, tht*y ha'd five fathoms of water ; a second anchor was thrown out, and again the tackle parted ; and while, in the energy of wild de- spair, prostrated by sheets of salty spray that swept over them in bursts of fury, they were preparing a third bower, a huge comb- ing 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 4 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. dropped, and thus this luckless voyage of Alaskan discovery came to an end. Bering died here, on one of the Commander Isjands,* 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, f 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 induce- ment could have done, the prompt fitting out and venture of many new expeditions for the freshly discovered laud and islands of Alaska. So, in 1745, Michael Novidiskov 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 * Bering's Island he was wrecked on the east coast, at a point unde. bluffs now known as "Kommandor." Scarcely a vestige of this shipwreck now remains there. f That curious creature is extinct. It formerly inhabited the st':i--h<>ivs of these two small islands. The German naturalist Steller, who was the sur- geon of Bering's ship, has given us the only account we have of thfe 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 cr^w of Be- ring'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 Uerini: or Cop- per Island and fill up large casks with the flesh of this sea-cow. Its laive size, inactive habits, and clumsy progress in the water, together with its utter fear- lessness of man, mad.' its extinction rapid and feasible. I make the restoration from ;i careful study of the details of Steller's description. LLJ C I 'S I- C DISCOVERY, OCCUPATION, AND TRANSFER. 5 sea-otter, and like unto him were all of the long list of Kussian ex- plorers 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.* The history of this early exploration of Russian America is the stereotyped story of wrongs inflicted upon simple natives by ruth- less, fearless adventurers year in and year out the eager, persist- ent 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 him- self 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 dis- tinct 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 man- ner : 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 subdivis- ions one of these always claimed by the owners who had fur- nished 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 partici- pant was to give one-tenth part of his portion, as received above, to the Government at St. Petersburg, which, stimulated by such gen- erous swelling of its treasury, never failed to keep an affectionate eye upon its subjects over here, and encouraged them to the ut- most limit of exertion. * 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. 6 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. Tliis Imperial impetus undoubtedly was the spur which caused most of that cruel domination of the Kussians 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 ex- ceedingly 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 con- dition, 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 con- cluded 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 pur- chase 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 antago- nisms 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 exist- ence up there among ourselves now ; and when we come to think back, and contrast the stormy past with the calm present, it is diffi- cult to comprehend it ; yet it is not so strange if it be remem- bered that they were practically beyond all reach of authority, and lived for many consecutive years in absolute non-restraint. DISCOVERY, OCCUPATION, AND TKANSFEK. 7 It is easy to trace the several steps and understand the motives which led to our purchase of Alaska. There was no subtle state- craft involved, and no significance implied. The Russian Govern- ment 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 coun- cil 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 any- thing else there which would redound to the national honor and strength. This view they were well grounded in, after the ripe ex- perience of a century's control and ownership. One period in that history of Russian rule afforded to the au- thorities 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 prac- tical business man, while every one of his successors, although dis- tinguished men in the naval and army circles of the home govern- ment, 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 associa- tion 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 Em- peror 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 ter- ritory 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 govern- ment of the country, a church establishment, a military force, and, 8 or it ABCTIC PROVINCE. 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 Si- beria 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 Com- pany all these rights of exclusive jurisdiction to a vast domain with- out 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 he Russians with the Mon- gols 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.* 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 * 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. 15 silver kopecks = 1 peteealtin. 2 copper kopecks = 1 grosh. 20 silver kopecks = 1 dvoogreevenik. 3 copper kopecks = 1 alteen. 25 silver kopecks = 1 chetvertak. 5 copper kopecks = 1 peetak. 50 silver kopecks = 1 polteenah. 5 silver kopecks = 1 peetak. 100 silver kopecks = 1 ruble. 10 silver kopecks = 1 greevnah. 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 1 ' currency in Alaska during Russian rule was stamped on little squares of walrus hide. A still smaller coin, called the " pdooslilm-," worth i 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 polooshkit, Ixilf u lure 1 * l;ln. From an- other small coin, the "fainga" (equal to | kopeck in value), is derived the Russian word for money, deingah or DISCOVERY, OCCUPATION, AND TRANSFER. 9 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 ad- ministrative 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 govern- mental salaries, which were continued to them by the Crown. In cases of mutiny or revolt the powers of the governor were ab- solute. He had also the fullest jurisdiction at all times over offend- ers 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. Some- thing usually " happened " to save them the tedious journey, how- ever. 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 re- tained 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, cred- itor 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 pit- tance in lieu of wages, allowed them, made it a matter of utter im- possibility 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 indebted- ness to the great corporation which employed them. As long as the Russian Company maintained a military or naval 10 OUR AKCTIC PROVINCE. 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 com- fort and abundance than did those courtly chief magistrates of Alaska who succeeded the plain Baranov in 1818, and who estab- lished and maintained the vice-regal comfort of their physical ex- istence 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 procla- mation 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 Gov- ernment 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, to- gether 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 ef- fect upon the successful conduct of the business, as it was prose- cuted throughout Russian America. After Baranov's suspension and departure, in the autumn of 1818, not a single practical mer- chant 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 be- gan to diminish every year, while the official writing, on the other hand, became suddenly more voluminous, graphic, and declared a DISCOVERY, OCCUPATION, AND TRANSFER. 11 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, erec- tion of buildings, construction of ships of all sizes, and the estab- lishment 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 any- thing ; 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 shipbuilding, 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 Impe- rial 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 sfee could avoid. In the meantime, pending these domestic difficulties between the Crown and the company, the charter ex- pired ; the Government refused to renew it, and sought, by send- ing out commissioners to Sitka, for a solution of the vexed prob- lem. 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 Com- pany 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 stock- holders 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 con- 12 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. ceived the idea of taking the charter of the Russian Company them- selves, 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 be- came known to Secretary Seward, who at once had his interest ex- cited in tn*e 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,* May, 1867, and formally transferred to our flag on the 18th of October following. If the Russian Government had not been in an exceedingly f riendly state of mind with regard to the American Union, this some- what 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 sur- render 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. Rus- sia 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. * $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 enter- prises, attorneys' fees, etc. So, in short, Russia really gave her American pos- sessions to the American people, reaping uo direct emolument or profit whatso- ever 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 during 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 Canons. 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 conven- tional 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.* The superficial magnitude of this region * 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 Terri- tories. Population in 1880: Whites, 430; Creole, 1,756; Eskimo, 17,617; Aleut, 2,145; Athabascan, 3,927 ; Thlinket, 6,763 total, 33,426. 14 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 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 tower- ing peaks, and the maze of large and small rivers, make a com- 1 unison of Alaska, in any other respect than that of mere super- ficial 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 Ameri- can Union by her remote situation, and still more so by the un- liappmess 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 vicin- ity, 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 ener- getic, 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 BaiTow and Cape Fox, or Attoo and the Kiuik mouth. In going to Alaska to-day, the traveller is invariably taken into the Sitkan district, and no farther ; naturally he goes there and no- where beyond, for the best of all reasons : lie 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 passengers comfortable existence in transit ; it is a landlocked 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 FEATUKES OF THE SITKAN KEGlOjST. 15 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 west- ward 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 Fran- cisco 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 depart- ure, 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 laud and sea. These physical obstructions in the path of travel to aU 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 in- teresting section, then, indeed, wih 1 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 16 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 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 Lodges in a Vast Wilderness. wheel break and echo back loudly on your ear from the various strips of ringing rocky shingle at the base of bluffy intersections. 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 FEATURES OF THE SITKAN REGION. 17 the curious idiosyncrasy possesses you by which you seem to see in the scenery just ahead an exact resemblance to the bluffs, the sum- mits and the cascades which you have just left behind. Your em- phatic 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 ava- lanches ; 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 back- ground 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 stu- pidly stare at the big " Boston " vessel swiftly passing, with uplifted paddles or keeping slight headway, you retvmi their gaze with in- terest, 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 short- comings 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* town lies just * When the Cassiar mines in British Columbia were prosperous, Wrangel was a very busy little transfer-station the busiest spot in Alaska ; then be- tween 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 pub- lic 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 2 18 OUR AKCTIC PRO YIN (]:. 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 In- dians 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. 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 Avell suited for their preserva- tion ; 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 in tin- summer of 18813 : " 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 tint head of a gloomy harbor, filled with gloomy islands. Frowning cliffs, beetling crags, stretch away on all sides surrounding it. Lofty promontories guard it, hacked by range after range of sharp, volcanic peaks, which in turn are lost :igain>t 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." - If 5 e FEATURES OF THE SITKAN REGION. 19 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 canon, great or small, without finding an eternal ice- sheet anchored there : careful estimation places the astonishing ag- gregate 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 * and Mt. Crillonf are simply unrivalled in frigid grandeur by anything that is lauded in Switzerland or the Hima- layas, 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 ar- tillery ; but, of course, these bergs are very, very small compared with those of Greenland, and only a few ever escape from the intri- cate labyrinth of fiords which are so characteristic of this Sitkan district. An ice-sheet comes down the canon, and as it slides into the water of the canal or bay, wherever it may be, the pressure ex- erted 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 canons 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 * 14,708 feet. f 13, 400 feet. 20 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 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 en- tire 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.* 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 be- hold it, and it alone. There is not room in this narrative for fur- ther 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 usu- ally 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 stream- ing fronds of kelp that grow abundantly in all of these multitudi- nous fiords, 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 seaweed, 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 eighte'en 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 fiords on both sides, usually, of the * I am aware that geologists do not all subscribe to this view, which -was the doctrine of Agassiz. FEATURES OF THE filTKAlST REGION. 21 channels, cause the wind to either blow up them, or down : it liter- ally funnels through with terrific velocity when the " southeaster " 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 compara- tive 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 east- ward, 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 (bride). 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 con- trast to that sombre and monotonous line of the conifers below. The variety is limited, being substantially confined to three evergreens, 22 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. the spruce (Abii'sxith'ti^i* and menziesii), the hemlock (Abies mert'-n- siana), and the cedar (Thuja gigantea). The last is the most valu- able, 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 seaweed " 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 landlocked 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 scat- tered in the jungle which borders the many little streams and the large rivers like the Stickeen, Tahko, and Chilkat. Crab-apples (I'lji'ii* ru-nlaris) 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 archi- pelago, a scrub pine (Pinus contorta) is found ; it also grows in small clumps here and there just below the snow-line on the moun- tains 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 (Utihii* *},.), a currant (Ribes sp.), and a large juicy whortleberry. Of course these ben-ies" 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 FEATURES OF THE SITKAUT EEGION. 23 around when the fruit is ripe ; wild strawberries appear in sheltei-ed 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. 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 animals 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, fiords, 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 sye- nite, 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 moun- tains of the mainland drop down abruptly to the seaside ; here a spur of the coast range, opposite Mitgon Islet, presents an unusu- ally dreadful appearance, for it rises to a vast height with an inclin- ation 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 j{ or II AIICTIC PROVINCE. of heat in the most favorable of summers ; it maybe best epitomized 1 >y saving 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-driz- zle " ; it rained upon the author in this manner seventeen consecu- tive 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 thunder- storms, with lightning, often take place during these violent snow- falls 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 en- joyable 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, li ttle or no snow, six or seven inches at the most, and much clear and bracing weather. The average rainfall in the Sitkau 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.* A most careful search during * The chief signal officer of the U. S. Army has had a number of meteoro- logical observers stationed at half a dozen different posts in Alaska, and has FEATURES OF THE SITKAIST REGION. 25 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 rep- resent a hundred-acre farm, save in the valley of the Tahkoo Kiver, 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. Eed-top and wild timothy grasses grow here in the most luxuriant style, as they do for that matter every- where 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 profit- able 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 sup- plemented 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 ranch- eries stand. Lieutenant Zar'enbo, who engineered the construction, called his work "Redoute Saint Dionys," and had scarcely got un- der cover when he was attacked by several large bateaux, manned had this service fully organized up there during the last ten years ; the in- quirer 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. January, 29 2' May, 45 5' September, 51 9' February, 36" 4' June, 55 3' October, 49 2' March, 37" 8' July, 55 6' November, 36 D '6' April, 44 T August, 56" 4' December, 30 2' 26 les 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 fail- 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 princi- ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKANS. 37 pally 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 advan- tage on the rough shelves at his back ; a wood-burning stove diffuses a genial glow, but no chairs or benches are convenient. A " Siwash " * 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 twiue. 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 * All savages are called by tins name up here the sex being indicated by "buck" and " sijuaw.'' Children are called " pappooses. " 38 OUR ARCTIC PKOVIXrK. eloquently discourses as lie strokes each pelt out on the counter, in turn praising its size and jts 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 proffei-ed. In this shrewd and aggravating manner does the simple untu- tored 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 ex- clusive franchise in this district, then the Indian had no alterna- tive but the single post-trader's terms ; and then the white man's profits were enormous. But now, with the keen rivalry of com- peting 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 fur trade, however, in the whole Sitkan district is now of small commercial importance ; thirty or forty thousand dollars an- nually 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 blade 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 ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKAISTS. 39 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 pelt- ries from the back-country Indians, who were never permitted by the coast tribes to come down to the sea and then tradin^ the The Sitkan Chimes. stock anew in their own right over to the Kussian and English posts, they reaped a large advance. Now, however, the indepen- dent white trader penetrates to the interior himself, and the Alas- kan 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 40 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. British Columbia, who, prospecting in every ravine and cafion, never let an opportunity pass to trade and trap for good furs, has also con- tributed 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, can- delabra, ornately framed pictures oil-paintings of the saints and rich vestments ; two priests officiate, a reader chants rapid au- tomatism, 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 Creolo congregation, men, women, and children, stand and kneel and cross themselves, erect and bowed, for hours and hours at a time dui'ing 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 stock- ade, but the Siwashes returned the fire fearlessly with their smooth- ABOKIGIXAL LIFE OF THE SITKAXS. 41 bore 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. 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 im- Old Indian Chapel at Sitka. . [Greek Catholic Church, June 9, 187-1.] possible 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 occu- pation of these savages, and contrast your observation with that so vividly recorded of them by Cook, Vancouver, Portlock, and Dixon, and many other early ti'avellers, 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 42 on: ARCTIC PROYIISTK. 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 ear- nestly 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 Gov- ernment 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* which Con- gress, 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. AVlule the most impressive feature of the Sitkan archipelago is unquestionably that of the awe-inspiring solemnity and grand '" This Act wisely does not establish a full-Hedged form of territorial gov- ernment in Alaska, because the lack of a suitable population to maintain it reputably was conclusively shown by the census returns of 1880 : it CM 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 opera- tive in Alaska, they are expressly omitted in the present act. ABOKIGHSTAL LIFE OF THE SITKAN8. 43 beauty of its strange "wilderness, yet the most interesting single idea is the Indian and the life he leads therein ; with the single ex- ception 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 working-man'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 breth- ren 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 * differ but little in their manner of life and customs, and speak closely related dialects of the same * I. Chillkahts: Lynn Canal and Glacier Bay. II. Hoonialis : Chichagov Island and islets. III. Aicks : North end Admiralty Island. IV. Tahkoos: Mainland, Stephen's Passage and Juneau City. V. KJiootznahoos : South end Admiralty Island. VI. Sitkas : Baranov Island. VII. Kakho : Kou and Kuprianov Islands, Prince Frederick Sound, mainland coast. VIII. Stickeens : Wrangel, Zarenbo and Etholin Islands, Stickeen River mouth. IX. Haidah : Prince of Wales Island. X. Tonyass : Mainland, Cape Fox to Cape Warde, and contiguous islands. 44 OUR ARCTIC PROVIXCK. 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 nun. 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 denned 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 enume- rate, 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 lai-ge 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 physiog- nomy 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 ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKA^S. 45 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 com- pletely ; 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 archi- pelago, the most substantial houses being those of the Haidahs, who give more care to the accurate fitting together and ornamen- tation 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 num- ber 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 fish- eries, which occupy the greater proportion of the natives' time in going to and coining 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 46 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. ten to thirty feet in width ; it constitutes a street, and in which the carved posts and temporary fish-drying frames, etc., are usunlly 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 archi- tects and builders ; they, however, soon assume a uniform, incon- spicuous, gray color, and become yellowish-green in spots, or over- A Haidah Rancherie. grown 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 con- siderable distance. In localities where the encroachment of mountain and water make the village area vei*y scant, two rows of houses are occasion- ally 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. ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKAXS. 47 Each house usually shelters several families, in one sense of the term ; these are related to each other and under the tacitly ac- knowledged 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 founda- tions, 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 cov- ered 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 degen- eracy. 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 fell- -48 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. ing 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 contem- plated 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 hew- ing 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 Section Showing Arrangement of Interior of a Rancherie. precursor to a grand " potlatch," or giving away of the portable property of the savage for whom the labor is undertaken. Some of the larger houses have required the repeated assem- bling 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 ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKANS. 49 entire combination of men, women, and children, as the great beams are placed in position.* 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 tempo- rary 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 hol- lowed 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 to- gether, 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 * The exact rneasvirements 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 iuches ; height of eaves, 10 feet 8 inches ; girth of main ver- tical 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, (V) 50 feet. 4 .")() OUR ARCTIC 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 fam- ily 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 pur- chased 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 raucherie, 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 indi- cated for the purchase of the coffin-box. In it may be placed but a single body, then again it will contain several all relatives, how- ever. But should the deceased savage have been one of great im- portance, 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 quar- ters 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.* The doorway to the Alaskan house is usually a circular hole -' Whole volumes have been written upon this subject of the totem and consanguinity among these savages of the northwest coast. Further descrip- tion or discussion, in this instance, is superfluous. ABORIGINAL LIFE OP THE SITKANS. 51 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 portiere 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 hali- but, while the boxes which contain the real wealth of such peeple blankets,* 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, * 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. 62 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. of many shades of startling disgust, cause you to speedily turn and gladly seek, with no delay, the outer stairway, even though a tem- pest 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 Ko- loshian has no idea of sewerage or of its need, the refuse slops, bones, shells, fish-debris, and a medley of similar and worse nui- sances are lazily thrown out of this doorway on either side and straight ahead, as they are from the entrance to ever)' other raucherie 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 basket- ware; 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 them- selves 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 counte- nances 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 fish- ing 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 ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKANS. 53 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 every- where within the confines of the Alexander archipelago ; or, in differ- ent 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 indi- vidual 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 sim- ple life, every move that they make, what they capture in the for- est or hook out from the sea, is regularly recounted in the ranch- eries 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 stimu- lates 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 suf- ferer 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 54 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 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 regu- lations, and a subordinate authority of its own governing it, and it alone.* The Sitkan Indians trouble themselves very little about the inte- rior country ; but the coast line, and especially the margins of rivers and streams, are duly divided up among the different fami- lies. These tracts are regarded as strictly private property, just as we would regard them if fenced in as farms aud 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 pro- prietary 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 ; "There are naturally in every clan certain individuals of hereditary Indian wealth and a long pedigree, who speak in better language, who have a line 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. ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKAXS. 55 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 ber- ries, 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 beau- tiful 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. Hali- but 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 quan- tities, fishing with a hook and line from their canoes, which are an- chored over the . favored spots by stones attached to cedar-bark ropes or cables. They still employ their own primitive, clumsy -look- ing 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 lit- 56 on; ARCTIC PROVINCE. tie 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 Sit- kan 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 num- bers 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 (if 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 * 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 Clupea in irulnlix. ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKANS. 57 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 un- covered without removuag it .from its buried position ; the eager savages all squat around it, -and eat the contents with every indica- tion on their hard faces of keen gastronomic delight faugh ! The same ill-favored and. heartily-hated " dog-fish "* of our Cape Cod fishei'men is also very abundant in these far-away waters. Indians Raking Oolochans and Herring. Stickeen River. Eecently, 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, * Squalus acantliias. 58 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. their berries, in fact everything that they eat. A little wooden trencher or tub, grotesquely carved, always is to be seen (and sinelled), placed alongside of the monotonous kettle of stewed fish, or pile of dried lish, which constitutes the regular spread fora 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 liave seen an attempt made to wash the face or hands with water, but they do rub oil vigor- ously 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 decid- ed innovation made by contact with ourselves in their aboriginal cooking outfit, though the introduction of tin and cheap earthen- ware dishes is growing more general every day. Most of the In- dian 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. 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 A STICKEEN SQUAW Hoiling Berries and Oil, Toasting Herrings, etc. ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKANS. 59 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 re- semble 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 dif- ferent one indeed from that characteristic of woman's labor in car- ing for our homes. No sweeping or dusting in the Indian ranch- erie ; 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 tedi- ous 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 60 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. the man brings in. She has aii 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 dis- tinctly resinous in flavor. The rank-growing seeds, shoots, and leaf-stalks of the Epilobiam 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, mouth- ful after mouthful, in oil. She has, however, no washing whatever of clothes to do for any- body, except what little she may see fit to do for herself ; she never treats the dishes eren 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 indi- vidual 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 po- tent weed which they grew as a substitute for tobacco the impor- tation of the latter, however, has taken its place entirely to-day, be- cause 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 clam- shell lime (burnt for the purpose), it was chewed or held in the cheek, just as the Peruvian Indians use coca.* Everybody knows * This accounts for the puzzling appearance of ancient stone mortars and pestles in Alaska, throughout the Sitkun region. Ethnologists have t-ndeav- ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKANS. 61 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 clogs, 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 pi*esent 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 " cultiva- tion " 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 satisfac- tory ; 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 clear- ing 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 it- self, affords an excellent reason ; they do, however, kill a very con- siderable 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 re- cesses, where he invariably retreats. ored 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. 62 OUK ARCTIC I 'KOV IX rK. Ill the early spring, (luring that brief period when the weeds and Brasses tirst 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 canons above and feed upon the sj >nmting skunk-cabbage * and other succulent shoots, browsing lin-e 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, f 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, dur- ing winter mouths, spend much time on the quiet fiords 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 ah 1 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 re- sult of this attention is to fashion from a single cedar log a little vessel which challenges our admiration invariably, for its fine out- line and its seaworthiness and strength. All the canoes of this region have a common model, and are simi- lar in type, though they differ much in details of shape and size. They are all made from the indigenous piue| and giant cedar. 55 the w< >( d of which is light, durable, and worked very readily ; but it is apt to split parallel to its grain. This constitutes the only solici- Lysichiton p. f Cerrus columbianm a vr.'ll -inwn sprrimrn weighs about oiu: hundred and fifty pounds. Great numbers are taken in the Tahkoo region, thoutrh it is found everywhere. t Abi, tx'ti. Th nju (jiy 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 ex- tinction of his race. This fault of our civilization is far more potent to effect his worldly degeneration, than any one or all of our com- bined virtues are to regenerate his earthly existence. CHAPTER IT. 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. Coal of Alaska not fit for Steam- ing Purposes. Salmon Canneries. The Great "Whaling Ground' 1 of Fairweather. Superb and Lofty Peaks seen at Sea One Hundred and Thirty-five Miles Distant. Mount Fairweather so named as the Whale- men'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 Phcenu', 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 Dea- cons of the Greek Church on Board. Every Soul Lost. Love of the Natives for their Rugged, S.torm-beateu Homes. A BRONZED humming-bird* 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 re- mark 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 * 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. 68 OUR ARCTIC 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 slop- ing 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 lux- uriant vegetation, the variety of shrubs in full blossom here, when all botanical life about them is as dead as cold can uofcke 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, Hecluded 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 f eld- spathic granite foundation of the earth hereabouts ; the tempera- ture of the largest spring, at its source, is 150 to 1GO 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 Kussians, 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 bath- houses over the springs, keeping everything in the strictest order and cleanliness, without and within doors. A sad change con- fronts 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 every- where 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 suffi- THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELIAS. 69 ciently by flowing a dozen or fifty yards from their origin over peb- bly 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 malig- nant 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 immersioii, he was a coppery brown or black. Midway between these thermal fountains and Sitka is the site of an old Eussian 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 canon, 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 flow- ing 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* on Douglas Island, * The Treadwell Mine free-milling gold ore ; 120 stamps ; employs 150 to 250 men situated right at the tide-level. 70 OUK AKtTIC I'KOVI\< K. 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 com- mit 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-examina- tion. The true advice which can be honestly given is that which prompts every man interested to look and resolve wholly for him- self, 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 1)\- 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 prospect- ors 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 Califomians, Oregonians and British Columbians predominate but the number aggregated is not large.* 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 fiords of the Alexander archipelago, their wealth will be great, because the transportation to them and from them is prac- tically without cost. The expense of working such valuable quartz mines up a hundred or more miles from the sea, will result in aban- donment, where reaching them involves frequent transfers of sup- plies, 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 indus- * Eight hundred, or a thousand, perhaps. They come and go suddenly, alternating in travel as the rumors relative to their occiipation circulate. THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELIAS. 71 tries 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 reser- voirs 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 re- sources * of the Sitkau 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 thou- sand feet is reached, sheer and bold above the sea. This great ex- panse 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, how- ever, 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. * 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 yigantea, the red variety. 2. Sitkan spruce (Abies stt- /' axis). This is the most abundant. 3. Hemlock (Abies mertensiana). 4. Balsam fir (Abies canadeiixits). The finest growth of this timber is found upon Prince of Wales Island, Admiralty, and Kou Islands, within the Alaskan lines. 72 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. Whon the whalemen saw the summit of that snow-clad peak un- veiled by clouds they were sure of fair weather for several consec- utive days afterward, hence the name. Early one June morning Captain Baker, of the Jtfliniirr, called the author up to see a moun- tain which was sharply defined in the warm, hazy glow of the dawn- ing sunrise on the horizon there, bearing N.N.E.,* 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 Alas- kan 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 Cril- lon rise boldly from the ocean at their western feet, and this sheer- ness of elevation undoubtedly gives them that effect of cloud-com- pelling, which does not lose its awe-inspiring power even when a hundred miles away. To the northward and westward of Fair- \\ cither, 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 ex- tended at its base, intervening between the mountains and the wash of the Pacific. It is timbered with spruce quite thickly, and re- ported 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 exten- sive ; 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 shal- June 13, 1874. It did not seem possible at first that the officer's >servations were accurate, but the captain verified the ship's position anew, :inTH short; ,>f Sitka Sound. f He ivarh.-.l Kamchatka on the 9th October following, with only forty- nine survivors out of his original crew of seventy. Bering never did ; he was -hipwn-cked 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 mil.-s almo>t t.^.-th, r, anxiously searching for each other, yet unconscious of their proximity. THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELIAS. 75 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 pla- teau 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 rever- beration and repetition. At the mouth of Copper River all silt car- ried down from old eroded glacial paths has been deposited for thou- sands 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 moun- tainous elevation, with its vast gelid sheets and precipitous canons, 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 Eiver forces its way, carrying its heavy load of glacial mud and silt far 76 OUR ARCTIC PROVINt K. into the ocean. How the winds do blow here ! How the trader dreads to tarry >l otV 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 Sibe- ria 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 thou- sands 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 raucheries and rude be- longings 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 cu- pidity 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. The Suchnito or Copper River has long been a bugbear, for the Russians * years ago have returned from several unsuccessful at- *When the surveying parties of the War Department wen- ascending Cop- per River last summer, certain Indians, who had been instrumental in slaying tin' Russian party of Seribniekov in 1848, were very much alarmed. Tlu-v wi-iv 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 lie was ready to die, and knew what the white men wanted. This old fellow, Lieutenant Allen was on.- of the lin.-st-looking savages that he ever saw. The face of the blind man was one of remarkable character a laive. massiv In ad. high aquiline nose, with a full, thin-lipped mouth and broad forehead. He was totally blind and his hair white as snow. Tli- l.'nssian party wnv .-lei-ping 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 I- .1 THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELIAS. 77 tempts to ascend it, and gave the excuse of being driven out of the valley by savage and warlike natives. Recently it has been thor- oughly 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 im- posing 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 de- clare that Mount Wrangel is the loftiest peak on the North Ameri- can 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 sum- mits of alpine heights above. Fish (salmon) are the chief reliance of these natives of Cop- per River ; they depend almost wholly upon the annual running of those creatures. The difficulty of hunting is so great that the 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. 7S on: ARCTIC PROVINCE. 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 sun- shiny 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 low- land, 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 for- ests 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 landlocked, being sheltered from the south by the islands of Noochek and Mon- tague, 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 canons, 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 cavern- ous inlets of the northern and eastern shores, and shedded frag- ments of ice; large and small, are cemented by the tide into large sheets, which are finally swept out and lost in the ocean. The shores of these canals are formed of high, stupendous moun- tains 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 rug- ged precipices. This fresh water, clear as crystal and cold as win- ter, 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 fiords 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 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 ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELI AS. 79 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 Constan- tine, 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 Isrnailov's * 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 Xoochek Islands of Prince "\Vill- iam'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 Ameri- can continent ; she was named the Phcenix, and as she slid from her ways into the unruffled waters of this far-away place the exultation and delighted plaudits f 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, inas- much 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 * Ivan Ismailov and Gayorgi Bocliorov ; they went in the dual capacity of explorers and traders, lured into the undertaking by rumors which had pre- vailed at Kadiak respecting great numbers of sea-otters in this bay. f Had these enthusiastic builders then been able to have foreseen the tragedy which this vessel precipitated, five years later, they would have scarcely thus expressed themselves, but rather have stood in silence, with bowed heads, as the work of their hands swept into the flood that embraced her. In 1799 she sailed from the Okotsk, bound for Sitka, with the newly-ordained Bishop Joasaph and twenty priests and deacons of the Greek Church; she was never seen or heard of afterward, nor was anything seen or heard of her pas'sengers and crew she took them with her to the bottom of the sea. 80 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 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 con- sequently. In these early colonial Alaskan days, Fort St. Constant ine, 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 ex- termination of the sea-otter, we find a very poor lot of natives at this once flourishing post ; but, for the means of a simple phys- ical 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 Kiver, 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 par- ticular area of existence as the very best realm of the earth he becomes homesick and refuses to be comforted if taken to Cali- fornia 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 THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELI AS. 81 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 ances- try, 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. CHAPTER V. COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE. Cook's "Great River." The Tide-rips, and their Power in Cook's Inlet. The Impressive Mountains of the Inlet. The Glaciers of Turuagain Canal. Old Russian Settlements. Kenai Shore of the Inlet, the Garden-spot of Alaska. Its Climate best Suited to Civilized Settlement. The Old "Colonial Citizens'" of the Russian Company. Small Shaggy Siberian Cattle. Burning Volcano of Ilyamna. The Kenaitze Indians. Their Primitive, Simple Lives. They are the Only Native Land-animal Hunt- ers of Alaska. Bears and Bear Roads. Wild Animals seek Shelter in Volcanic Districts. Natives Afraid to Follow Them. Kenaitze Archi- tecture. Sunshine in Cook's Inlet. Splendid Salmon. Waste of Fish as Food by Natives. The Pious Fishermen of Neelshik. Russian Gold- mining Enterprise on the Kaknoo, 1848-55. Failure of our Miners to Discover Paying Mines in this Section. THAT volcanic energy and amazing natural variation of the region known as Cook's Inlet, and the Peninsula of Alaska, endow it with a certain fascination which it is hard to adequately define in words, and difficult to portray. The rugged, uninviting bold- ness of the Kenai Mountains turn us abruptly, after our departure at Noochek, to the southward, where, in an unbroken frowning cordon of one hundred and fifty miles in length, they bar us out from the waters of that striking estuary the greatest on the north- west coast, which is so well exhibited by the map to everybody as Cook's Inlet. But it is known only in name not by the faintest appreciation, even, of its real character and of its strange belong- ings. Two and three hundred miles still farther north than Sitka it does not in itself present that increased wintry aspect at any season of the year which would be most naturally lopked for but it does offer, in physical contour and phenomena, a most marked contrast to the Alexander archipelago and its people. It is an exceedingly dangerous and difficult arm of the sea to navigate, and prompts an COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE. 83 involuntary thought of admiration for the nautical genius, skill, and courage of Captain Cook, who sailed up to the very head of this entirely unknown gulf, in 1778, seeking that mythical northwest passage round the continent his dauntless exploration to the utter limit of Turnagain Canal his extraordinary retreat in his clumsy ships, and safe threading of his way out and through the hundreds of then absolutely nameless and chartless islets and reefs to the shoals of Bering Sea all this, viewed to-day, seems simply marvel- lous, that he should have escaped all these dangers which the best sailor now hesitates to undertake, even with excellent courses laid down and determined for him. The ship's entrance to this great land-locked gulf, which the Russians named, for many years, the Bay of Kenai, lies between the extreme end of that peninsula called Cape Elizabeth, and Cape Douglas, which is a bold promontory jutting out from the Alaskan mainland. Nearly half-way between the two points is a group of bleak, naked islets, the Barren Islands : around them the tide-rips of this channel, which they obstruct, boil in savage fury, and are the dread of every navigator, civilized or Innuit, who is brought near to them ; these violent and irregular tidal currents here, even in perfectly calm weather, will toss the waters so that the wildest fury of a tempest elsewhere cannot raise so great a disturbance over the sea, or one ^hich will so quickly wash a vessel under. When your ship, bound in, passes this Alaskan "Hell Gate," she enters into a broad and ample expanse of water caused by the widening effect of two large bays which are just opposed to each other on the opposite shores. The coast of the Kenai Peninsula is low, the mountains contiguous are not high, though toward the interior the ridges become much loftier ; but everywhere between them and this coast-line is that characteristic marshy tundra of the Arctic a low, flat, broad strip, varying in width from forty to fifty miles, through which sluggishly flow a multitude of streams and brooks, wooded with birch, poplar, and spruce everywhere on the banks, but bare of timber over the great bulk of its expanse. As the inlet contracts still further, especially at the point between the two headlands of East and West Foreland, the tide again in- creases in velocity and violence of action until it attains a speed of eight and nine knots an hour, with an average vertical rise and fall of twenty-four to twenty-six feet. The northeastern extremity of this large arm of the sea, which Cook entered with the confident 84 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. hope of finding a watery circuit of a. continent, and, being disap- pointed, applied to it the name of "Turnagain," presents a tidal phenomena equal to that so well recognized in the Bay of Fundy. Here the tide comes in with a thundering roar, raising a " bore " wave that advances like an express train in rapidity, carrying every- thing before it in its resistless onward, upward sweep. High banks of clay and gravel, which at low-tide seem as though they were far removed from submersion, are flooded instantly, to remain so until the ebb takes place. The natives never fail to remember the angry warning of this incoming tide ; they always hurriedly rush out of their huts, scan quickly everything surrounding, lest some utensil, some canoe, or basket-weir be thoughtlessly left within the remorseless rush of that swift-coming flood. Those glacial sheets which fill countless ravines and canons in the mountain ridges at the head of Cook's Inlet, especially of Turnagain Canal, and avalanches of snow, from their lofty cradles thereon, all sweep down together upon the wooded flanks below, and are thus destroying great belts of forest and piling up innumerable heaps of rocky debris to such an extent as to often change the superficial aspect of an entire section of country from season to season ; mean- while the tide rushing up and down over this drift of avalanches and glaciers, carries the debris hither and thither, so as to con- stantly alter the channels, and the very outlines of the ^oast itself. One of the oldest and best of Russian posts was early estab- lished on the Kenai Peninsula, a few miles to the southward of that narrowing of Cook's Inlet, caused by the two Forelands. On the low banks of the Kim'k River, and facing the gulf, the ruins of the "Redoubt St. Nicholas" are still to be plainly seen, though at the time of the transfer of the Territory, this old post was yet fortified with a high stockade and octagonal bastions. But both stockade, and bastions have disappeared since then ; a number of new frame buildings have been erected close by, and quite a colony of Russian half-breeds are living here now, trading, and growing, to better ad- vantage than anywhere else in Alaska, fair crops of potatoes and turnips. They keep a few hardy cattle, and it is said that as much as ten or twelve acres of ground are under cultivation by them. The aspect of the country surrounding this settlement is much more suggestive of farming and cattle-raising than is that presented anywhere else in the Alaskan Territory. The land is rolling and hilly, the higher eminences being covered with thick spruce forests ; COOK'S IX LET AXD ITS PEOPLE. 85 but as you advance into the interior, great swamps of tangled heather, fir, jungle, and sphagnum are prevalent. The soil every- where, not covered with grass and forest, is mossy, with a little grass and many bushes. The trees are large, fifty to sixty feet high, and eighteen inches to twenty-four in diameter, mostly spruce no cedar or hemlock. That district adjoining the East Foreland Head is, perhaps, the best with reference to dry, fertile soil, for, in its vicinity, there are broad plains where wild timothy and red- top grasses grow to the height of your waist and shoulders. An extended experience of the Russians taught them to locate their agricultural operations here ; that the coast-line belt of the Kenai Peninsula, between the Forelands and Kooshiemak Bay, a belt of low and semi-prairie uplands some eighty miles in length, and vary- ing in depth from ten to twenty, was the most eligible base of agricultural effort afforded anywhere in Alaska, the quality of the crops always being best near the coast, the soil being drier, and the danger of little nipping summer-frosts wholly abated. The several small settlements which we find upon this pastoral strip to-day have a curious history, as to the origin of their inhabi- tants. About the period of 1836-38, the expenses of the Russian American Company in maintaining their trading stations in Alaska were increasing to an alarming degree, while the receipts remained stationary, or fell off. An enquiry into its cause revealed it. The fact was, that hundreds of superannuated employes were drawing their salaries and subsistence, rendering no adequate return for the same. These persons had grown old, and had lost their health in serving the company ; were, nearly all of them, infirm survivors of Shellikov and Baranov's parties, whose daring and energy had established the company. It would be inhuman to discharge these aged and crippled Russians, and throw them upon their own re- sources in such a region. After much deliberation the company was authorized by the Crown to make the following terms of settle- ment and relief, and thus locate them as permanent pensioners and settlers in the country. Therefore all of the old employes who had married or lived with native or half-breed women, and who were unable to successfully engage in the trading avocations of the com- pany, by reason of age and other infirmities, were, upon their writ- ten or witnessed request, after being stricken from the pay-rolls, provided for in this manner. The company was obliged to select and donate a piece of ground, 86 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. build a comfortable dwelling, furnish agricultural tools, seeds, cat- tle and fowls, and supply the pensioner receiving all this with pro- visions enough to support him and his wife for one year. These " old colonial citizens" (as they were called), thus established, were then exempted from all taxation, military duty, or molestation whatsoever, and a list of their names was annually forwarded in the reports of the company. The children of those settlers were at lib- erty to enter or not, as they pleased, the service of the company at stated salaries. The company, furthermore, was commanded to pur- chase all the surplus produce of these pensioners, furs, and dried fish, etc. This order of the Crown, thus fixing the status of those old servants, also included the half-breeds who were equally infirm by reason of such service. Such whites, or Russians, were officially designated "colonial citizens," the half-breeds were styled "colonial settlers." The descendants of these pensioned servants of the Russian Company are the men and women you observe to-day in those little hamlets scattered along the east coast of Cook's Inlet, or the Kenai Peninsula. They are bright, clean, and, though very, very poor, still appear wholly independent. They are engaged in small trad- ing with the Kenaitze saVages and in their limited agricultural efforts, whereby they have potatoes, turnips, and other hardy vege- tables. The cattle, of which they have a few in each settlement, are of the small, shaggy Siberian breed, not much larger than Shetland ponies, and capable of living in the rigors of a winter which would destroy or permanently injure our breeds of neat cat- tle. These people make butter by laboriously shaking the milk in bottles. They are obliged to shelter their cattle during winters from the driving fury of heavy snow-storms, and when the herd ranges in the grass-season, the boys and old men always have to guard it from the deadly attention of the big brown bears which infest the entire region. They have a regular " round-up " in each hamlet every night. Everywhere on the west coast of Cook's Inlet the mountains rise steeply and rugged from the sea, a wild and uninviting contrast with the park-like terraces of the Kenai coast just opposite. Here are the same lofty ridges and smoking peaks which startled and oppressed the brave heart of Captain Cook, as they muttered and trembled in volcanic throes when he sailed by. The two cones SOJ 5 COOK'S INLET A:N T D ITS PEOPLE. 87 which rise dominant are the summits of Mount Ilyamna and the " Redoute," from which columns of brownish smoke ascend by day and ruddy fire-glowings by night. So precipitous is this main- land shore of Cook's Inlet that at only two small points, of the most limited area is there any low land to be found, and these spots have been promptly utilized by the Kenaitze Indians as sites for their villages of Toyonok and Kustatan. The dense, sombre coni- ferous forest which we have become so familiar with, clothes the flanks of those grim mountain walls with the thickest of all cover- ings to a height of one thousand feet above the beaches below. Here and there we glance into the recesses of a canon or a gorge where the naked, mossy surface of immense rocky declivities ar- rests and fixes the eye, while the glittering caps of ice and snow far away above fit down snugly upon long, rough, treeless intervals, covered with heather, lichens, and varied arctic sphagnum. The upper waters of Cook's Inlet are said to be quite remarka- ble for their barrenness of fish salmon only being plenty in the running season, ascending all the numerous rivers and rivulets ; the reason most likely is due to the turbid upheaval of the bottoms everywhere by that violent tidal bore which prevails, recurring twice every twenty-four hours. The Indians here employ a curious trestle or staging of poles, which they use in spearing salmon, and netting them from its support. An extensive spread of the largest fresh-water lake in Alaska just over the divide from Cook's Inlet, early led the Russians to ex- plore it, and to find a portage via its waters to the sea of Be- ring. But, though this barrier can be passed by an active man in a single day, yet it has divided, and continues to absolutely separate, two distinct races of savages the Innuits from the Indians ; for the Kenaitze are Indians, as we understand them, based upon our types of the great plains and foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains ; and, living here as they do on the shores of Cook's Inlet, they live, perhaps, in the most romantic and picturesque region of Alaska. Burning volcanoes, smoking and grumbling, a large inland sea roll- ing for miles and miles therein, and lay at their feet ; wide watery moors, tundra, timber and lakes, and rivers rising in the snow-white peaks everywhere visible, all combine to make the most striking- lights and shades of natural scenery that human thought can real- ize in fancy. These natives of Cook's Inlet are strongly defined from those of 88 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. Kadiak as a separate people, both in language (which no white man has ever been able to repeat), in appearance, and in disposition. They are true Athabascans, or exactly like the meat-eating Indians of our great North American interior. An average man here is an Indian of medium height, say five feet seven or nine inches, well built and symmetrical, lithe and sinewy. The cold glint of his small, jet-black eyes is not relieved by any expression of good humor A Kenaitze Chief: Cook's Inlet. in his taciturn features and physical bearing. His nose will pre- sent, as a rule, the full aquiline or Julius Csar outline. Their skin is darker than that of the Innuit, though now and then a comely young person will show perceptible blood-mantlings to the cheeks. The mouth is large lips rather full ; beardless faces are the rule. Their women are much better-looking than either the Si wash squaws of the Sitkan region, or the females of the Aleutian and Innuit races. Their hair is worn in clubbed bunches and COOK'S I]N"LET AND ITS PEOPLE. 89 braids, hanging upon their backs, thickly larded over with grease, arid often powdered with feathers and geese-down. In the immediate vicinity of the shores of Cook's Inlet the primitive habits of these savages have been very much changed by their daily intercourse with the Creoles ; but at the head of the gulf, especially in the Sooshetno and Keknoo valleys, they are still dressed in their deer-skin shirts and trousers, men and women alike. They work those garments with a great variety of beads, porcupine quills stained in bright colors, and grass plaitings. These Kenaitze are the only real hunters in all Alaska. They place little or no dependence on fish like the other tribes, unless we except the walrus-eating Eskimo, who hunt, however, in water-craft entirely. And were they not natural Nimrods, the abundance of game which abounds in their district would stimulate such ambi- tion alone in itself. The brown bear * of Alaska is found almost everywhere ; but it seems to prefer an open, swampy country to that dense timber most favoi-ed by its ursine relative, the black bear. It attains its greatest size, and exhibits the most ferocity, on the Kenai Peninsula. It should be called the grizzly, because it is fre- quently shot here fully as large, if not larger, f than those examples recorded in Oregon and California. This wide-ranging brute is found away up beyond the Arctic Cir- cle, though never coming down to the coast of the icy ocean except at Kotzebue Sound. It is a most expert fisherman, and a terror to the reindeer and cariboo of those hyperborean solitudes. It fre- quents, during the salmon season, all the Alaskan rivers and their tributaries which empty into Bering Sea and the North Pacific, as far as the fish can ascend. When the run for the year is over, then the animal retires into the thick recesses of semi-timbered uplands and tundra, where berries and small game, deer especially, are most abundant. Everywhere throughout this large extent of Alaska the foot-paths, or roads, of that omnipresent ursine traveller arrest your attention. The banks of all streams are lined by the well-trodden trails of these heavy brutes, and offer far better facilities for progress than those afforded by the paths of men. Not only are the swampy * Ursus richardsonii. f One shot at Kenai Mission in 1880 measured nine feet two inches in length. 1)0 ARCTIC l'U<>\ IN< K. plains intersected by such well-worn routes of travel, but the mountains themselves and ridges, to the very summits thereof, are thus laid out ; and the judgment of a bear in traversing a rough, mountainous divide is always of the best his track over is sure to be the most practicable route. On the steep, volcanic uplands of the mountainous coast of the west shore in Cook's Inlet, groups of twenty, and evon thirty, of these huge bears can be seen together feeding upon the berries and roots which are found there in season. Their skins are not valuable, however, being "patched" Bear "Roads" over the Moors of Oonimak Islands. and harsh-haired. Then they are very fierce, so that they are not commonly hunted anywhere except by the Kenaitze, who, like all other aboriginal hunters, respect them profoundly, and invariably address a few eulogistic words of praise to a bear before killing or attempting to kill it.* A peculiar dread which all the natives of this region have, of visiting those areas where volcanic energy manifests itself, is taken advantage of by those dumb beasts upon which the savage wages relentless warfare ; the immediate vicinity of craters, of steaming * Perhaps fully half the brown-bear skins taken by the Alaskan nativ retained by them, used as bedding, and hung up as portieres over the entrance- holes or doors to their hou.aHh of Alaska, so far as the shore fisheries are con- cerned, lies in the abundance of salmon of the genus Grinu'lii/m-lius, -which is represented by five species cJiom'rftit, hta, /.-isi/frfi, /,n7v, and f^i-tmxrjiit. The first three of these are the largest, the whole series being named in the order of their si/e O. //// is the giant of the group, and is the most commercially ; it attains to its greatest size in the large rivers, z - h o O u. _ O ^ w c DC rt UJ "O - Z ^ O -G 1! u g COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE. 95 realm of its indulgence throughout Alaska. Also in another, but wholly correct sense, the natives themselves shamefully waste the flesh of those fine salmon. To illustrate the extraordinary nature of this suggestion, let the following statements of fact be recalled : The native population of Cook's Inlet is not large it is embraced in about one hundred and sixty-eight families, averaging four souls to each household ; everyone of these families prepares at least seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred pounds of dried salmon for its own specific consumption during the winter months. That amount of cured fish, therefore, is about one hundred and twenty-six thou- sand pounds, and as every pound weight of dried meat is equal to an original weight of at least eight or nine pounds of fresh, or un- dried, then this cured total gives us an immense aggregate of which it ascends long distances in its spawning season. In Alaska it is known to extend as far north as Bering Strait, and it is especially abundant in Cook's Inlet and in the Yukon. Individuals weighing nearly one hundred pounds are occasionally reported from these waters, and even in the Columbia. The finest product of this salmon is the salted bellies, which are prepared prin- cipally on the Kenai, Kassilov, and Yukon Eivers ; the fa,me of this luxury once extended to the centre of government in Russia. The well-known * quinnat salmon ' is the same species ; its importance, as evidenced by the efforts of the United States Fish Commission and other commissions toward its propagation and distribution, is too well understood to require additional mention. The great bulk of the salted salmon exported from Alaska are the small 'red fish,' 0. nerka ; and this species is sought after simply on account of the beautiful color of the flesh and not for its intrinsic value, which is far below that of most of the other species. All the salmon extend northward to Bering Strait, but only one, gorbuscha, is reported* as occurring north of the Arctic Circle ; yorbusclia is said by trustworthy parties to reach the Colville River. In the early part of its run the flesh of this little ' humpback ' seems to me to be particularly good. Other members of the family of almontdcB, and very important ones, are the species of Salmo (purpurutus and (juinlut ri) and Sahelinus intdnui, two of which reach a large size in Alaska. The first two are not known to exist much to the northward of Unalashka, while Mutnm is believed to extend to the Colville. S. gairdnen resembles the Atlantic- salmon in size and shape, but its habits are different ; it is found filled with mature eggs in June. I have not seen 'any very large examples of S. pur- puratus from the Territory, bxit the species is extremely abundant and valuable for food. The red-spotted char, 8. innlmn., is everywhere plentiful and is highly esteemed as a food-fish ; it grows much larger in Northern Alaska than in California, and has some commercial value as an export in its sea-run con- dition under the name of 'salmon trout.' Natives of Alaska make water- proof clothing from the skins of this fish." 96 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 1,000,000 pounds of fresh salmon ; this, figured down, shows that a single Indian uses, during the winter solstice five months the enormous amount of 1,430 pounds of this rich-meated article of diet, or about ten pounds every day, in addition to the bear-meat, deer, and sheep-meat, seal and beluga oil, berries and roots which he is constantly consuming, at the same time, in the greatest free- dom, and which are always in abundant supply. The full thought of my presentation will be better understood when it is remembered that a pound of fresh salmon has more nourishing and sustaining quality than the same amount dried. The salt-dried codfish witli which we are so familiar is very different in its texture, and weighs many times more than it would if it were cured by the air and smoke-exposure to which the natives of Alaska are driven in pre- serving their fish. An exceedingly happy illustration of the singular force of habit which the salmon have in returning every recurring season to the exact localities of their birth was afforded near the Creole settle- ment of Neelshik on the Kenai Inlet coast. A small stream runs down to the gulf from the mountains and moors of the interior. Its mouth had been closed by a barrier of surf-raised sand and gravel during storms in the winter of 1879-80, and through which the sluggish stream filtered in its course without overflowing. When the salmon, which had descended the year previously from the upper waters of the stream in the course of their reproductive circuit, again returned to renew such labors in the following season, this unexpected wall barred their ingress. They did not turn away, but actually leaped out upon this sandy spit, and many of them suc- ceeded, by spasmodic springs and wriggling, while on the dry gravel, in getting across and into the river-water beyond ! the Creoles, in the meantime, having nothing to do except to walk down from their houses and gather up the self-stranded salmon as they fancied their size and condition. Inasmuch as these " old colonial settlers " are very pious, as we'll as very indolent, they were profuse in giving thanks to their patron saints for this unexpected bounty. The color of gold everywhere found by washing the sands of Cook's Inlet on the Keuai shore early aroused the cupidity of the Russians. They made systematic examinations here under the lead of experienced men, between 1848 and 1855, and the Eussian Ameri- can Company spent a great deal of money in the same time by sus- taining a large force of forty miners, directed by Lieutenant Doro- COOK'S IISTLET AND ITS PEOPLE. 97 shin, in active operations at the head of the inlet on the Kaknoo River, and in the Kenai Mountains and Prince William or Choogatch Alps. Gold was found, but in such small quantities, compared with the labor of getting it, that the ardor of the Russians soon cooled, and nothing as yet has resulted from the prospecting of our own miners in this district, who have been all over these Slavonian trails since the transfer. 7 CHAPTER VI. THE GREAT ISLAND OF KADIAK. Kadiak the Geographical and Commercial Centre of Alaska. Site of the. First Grand Depot of the Old Riissian Company. Shellikov and his Remark- able History, 1784. His Subjection of the Kaniags. Bloody Struggle. He Founds the First Church and School in Alaska at Three Saints Bay, 1786, One Hundred Years ago. Kadiak, aLarge and Rugged Island. The Timber Line-drawn upon it. Luxuriant Growth of Annual and Biennial Flowering Plants. Reason why Kadiak was Abandoned for Sitka. The Depot of the Mysterious San Francisco Ice Company 011 Wood Island. Only Road and Horses in Alaska there. Creole Ship and Boat Yard. Tough Siberian Cattle. Pretty Greek Chapel at Yealovnie. Afognak, the Larg- est Village of "Old Colonial Citizens." Picturesque and Substantial Vil- lage. Largest Crops of Potatoes raised here. No Ploughing done ; Earth Prepared with Spades. Domestic Fowls. Failure of Our People to Raise Sheep at Kolma. What a "Creole" is. The Kaniags or Natives of Ka- diak ; their Salient Characteristics. Great Diminution of their Num- bers. Neglect of Laws of Health by Natives. Apathy and Indifference to Death. Consumption and Scrofula the Scourge of Natives in Alaska ; Measles equally deadly. Kaniags are Sea-otter Hunters. The Penal Station of Ookamok, the Botany Bay of Alaska. The Wild (.'oast of the Peninsula. Water-terraces on the Mountains. Belcovsky, the Rich and Profligate Settlement. Kvass Orgies. Oonga, Cod-fishing Rendezvous. The Burial of Shoomagin here, 1741. The Coal Mines here Worthless. THE boldest and the most striking cape in this wilderness of bluffy headlands and jutting promontories is that point which marks the dividing line between the Kadiak region and Cook's Inlet Cape Douglas. It is a lofty alpine ridge or spur, abruptly thrust out at a right angle to the coast, and into and over the sea for a distance of three miles, where it drops suddenly with a sheer precipitous fall of over one thousand feet into the waves that thunder on its everlasting foundations. Baffling winds here, and turbulent tide- rips distress that navigator who, coming down from the inlet, seeks the harbor of St. Paul's village. He hardly regards this seared and rugged headland with that admiration which the geologist and THE GEE AT ISLAND OF KADIAK. 99 the artist always will. The "woollies," which blow fiercely off from it, worry him and challenge all his nautical skill. Kadiak Island is the centre, geographical and commercial, of a most interesting and wide-extended district, perhaps the most so, of the Alaskan Territory, and Kadiak village, or Saint Paul Harbor is, in turn, the central and all-important settlement of this district.* It was the site of the first grand depot of the old Russian American Company, and also the location of the first missionary establish- ment and day-school ever founded on the northwest coast of the continent. From the quiet moorings of this beautiful Kadiak bay hundreds of shallops and vessels bearing courageous monks and priests have set out in every direction over all Alaska, carrying scores of them to preach the gospel among its savage inhabitants, who then were savage indeed to all intents and purposes. The first visit ever made by white men to the great Island of Kadiak was the landing here in the autumn of 1763, at Alikitak Bay, of Stepan Glottov, a Russian sea-otter trader, who went into winter- quarters at the southeastern extremity of the island, on a spot now called Kahgooak settlement. The natives were ugly, hostile, re- fused all intercourse, and ke'jt the Russians in a chronic state of fear. Scurvy broke out in their camp and nearly destroyed the in- vaders, leaving less than one-third of them alive in the spring. They managed then, with the greatest effort, to launch their vessel and get away, the savages meanwhile constantly attempting to fin- ish that destruction which bodily disease had so well-nigh effected. The beginning of the eighth decade of the eighteenth century is a true date of the real epoch of Russian domination in Alaska, All history of white exploration in this country prior to that is sim- ply the cruel legend of an eager, heartless band of outraging Mus- covites, doing everything just for the gain of the present moment, sowing so badly that they dared not remain and reap. One of those big-brained, cool, and indomitable Russians, who gave then as they give now, the stamp of high character to the race, was for several years prior to 1780 prominently engaged in the American fur trade. Grrigor Ivan Shellikov was this man. He was a citizen of the Sibe- rian town of Roolsk. He resolved to survey in person those scenes * With the exception of Prince of Wales Island in the Sitkan archipelago, Kadiak is the largest Alaskan island. There is not much difference between these two islands in landed area ; the former, however, is the bigger. 100 OUR ARCTIC TROVIX* K. of rapid demoralization and ruin to the profitable prosecution of his Alaskan business, and, if possible, to attempt a change for the bet- ter. An evident decrease in furs, together with the hostile atti- tude of the natives, provoked altogether by their inhuman treatment at the hands of the " promishlyniks," called for reform in the most emphatic manner. After a carefully deliberated plan of action had been determined upon between himself and his partners, the broth- ers Gollikov, he at once proceeded to the Okotsk Sea and fitted out three small vessels for his expedition.* He did not reach Kadiak until 1784, two years after starting out, when two of his vessels came to anchor in the harbor now known, as it was then christened by him, Three Saints Bay. Shellikov was a read}' and willing cor- respondent. His numerous letters to his Siberian partners and Lis own published ''Journeys" give us a clear idea of the hardihood of his enterprise, and they have a rare ethnographic value. From them we learn of the great liking which Shellikov's party took to the Island of Kadiak, and how they resolved, soon after making a short reconnoissance, to establish themselves permanently if they could gain the confidence of its savage inhabitants. Shellikov sent out a scouting party and captured a Kaniag, brought him into camp, and loaded the bewildered native with pres- ents and kindness, then sent him back to his people ; but the native, though won wholly over himself, f could not prevail upon his hostile countrymen, who soon gave the Eussians ample evidence of their enmity. A party of the latter in two of the ships' boats were exploring and hunting, when they were disturbed by the ap- pearance of a " perfect cloud " of natives that were encamped on rough and precipitous uplands of Oogak Island, a short distance from the main island itself. Shellikov resolved to proceed himself to the spot and endeavor to win them over to amity and trade. He ex- * These "galiots" where characteristically named by Shellikov's spiritual advisers, viz.: The Three Saint*; The Archnnyd .Mi,-h