CAPE FOX AND NAHA BAY.
From the Tongass fishery, which is some miles below the main village of
the Tongass Indians and the deserted fort where United States troops
were once stationed, the ship made its way by night to Cape Fox. At this
point on the mainland shore, beyond Fort Tongass, the Kinneys, the great
salmon packers of Astoria, have a cannery that is one of the model
establishments up here. Two large buildings for the cannery, two houses,
a store, and the scattered line of log houses, bark houses and tents of
the Indian village, are all that one sees from the water. In the cannery
most of the work is done by the Indians, but a few Chinamen perform the
work which requires a certain amount of training and mechanical skill.
The Indians cast the nets and bring in the shining silver fish with
their deep moss-green backs and fierce mouths, and heap them in slippery
piles in an outside shed overhanging the water. A Chinaman picks them up
with a long hook, and, laying them in a row across a table, goes through
a sleight-of-hand performance with a sharp knife, which in six minutes
leaves twenty salmon shorn of their heads, tails, fins, and inwards.
Experienced visitors to such places took out their watches and timed
him, and in ten seconds a fish was put through his first rough process
of trimming, and passed on to men who washed it, cleaned it more
thoroughly, scraped off a few scales, and by a turn of revolving knives
cut it in sections the length of a can. Indian women packed the tins,
which were soldered, plunged into vats of boiling water, tested,
resoldered, laquered, labelled, and packed in boxes in quick routine.
There was the most perfect cleanliness about the cannery, and the salmon
itself is only touched after the last washing by the fingers of the
Indian women, who fill the cans with solid pieces of bright red flesh.
In 1883 there were 3,784 cases of canned salmon shipped from this
establishment as the result of the first season’s venture. In the
following year, 1,156 cases were shipped by the July steamer, and the
total for the season was about double that of the preceding year.
Owing to the good salmon season and the steady employment given them at
the cannery, the Indians held their things so high that even the most
insatiate and abandoned curio-buyers made no purchases, although there
has been regret ever since at the thought of the wide old bracelets and
the finely-woven hats that they let escape them. At Cape Fox a shrewd
Indian came aboard, and spied the amateur photographer taking groups on
deck. Immediately he was eager to be taken as well, and followed the
camera around, repeating, “How much Siwash picture?” He was not to be
appeased by any statements about the photographer doing his work for his
own amusement, and pleaded so hard that the artist finally relented and
turned his camera upon him. The Indian stiffened himself into his most
rigid attitude, when directed to a corner of the deck between two
lifeboats, and when the process was over he could hardly be made to stir
from his pose. When we pressed him to tell us what he wanted his picture
for, he chuckled like any civilized swain, and confessed the whole
sentimental story by the mahogany blush that mantled his broad cheeks.
Up Revillagigedo Channel the scenery is more like that of the Scotch
lakes, broad expanses of water walled by forest ridges and mountains
that in certain lights show a glow like blooming heather on their sides.
The Tongass Narrows, which succeed this channel of the long name, give
more views of cañons filled with water, winding between high bluffs and
sloping summits. It was a radiant sunny morning when we steamed slowly
through these beautiful waterways, and at noon the ship turned into a
long green inlet on the Revillagigedo shore, and cast anchor at the head
of Naha Bay. Of all the lovely spots in Alaska, commend me to this
little landlocked bay, where the clear green waters are stirred with the
leaping of thousands of salmon, and the shores are clothed with an
enchanted forest of giant pines, and the undergrowth is a tangle of
ferns and salmon-berry bushes, and the ground and every log are covered
with wonderful mosses, into which the foot sinks at every step.
The splash of the leaping salmon was on every side and at every moment,
and the sight of the large fish jumping above the surface and leaping
through the air caused the excitable passenger at the stern to nearly
capsize the small boat and steer wildly. As the sailors rowed the boat
up the narrow bay, where the ship could barely swing round with the
tide, the Chicago man pensively observed: “There’s a thousand dollars
jumping in the air every ten minutes!”
The anglers were maddened at the sight of these fish, for although these
wild northern salmon can sometimes be deluded by trolling with a
spoon-hook, they have no taste for such small things as flies, and are
usually caught with seines or spears, except during those unusual salmon
runs when the Indians wade in among the crowded fins and shovel the fish
ashore with their canoe paddles.
At the head of Naha Bay, over a narrow point of land, lies a beautiful
mountain lake, whose surface is a trifle below the high-water mark, and
at low tide there is a fine cascade of fresh water foaming from between
the rocks in the narrow outlet. During the run of salmon, the pool at
the foot of the fall is crowded with the struggling fish; but the net is
cast in the lake as often as in the bay, and the average catch is eighty
barrels of salmon a day. The salmon are cleaned, salted, and barrelled
in a long warehouse overhanging the falls, and a few bark houses
belonging to the Indians who work in the fishery are perched
picturesquely on the little wooded point between the two waters.
Floating across this lovely lake in a slimy boat that the Indians had
just emptied of its last catch of salmon, the beauty of its shores was
more apparent, and the overhanging trees, the thickets of ferns, bushes,
and wild grasses, the network of fallen logs hidden under their thick
coating of moss, and the glinting of the sunshine on bark and moss and
lichens, excited our wildest enthusiasm. In Alaska one sees the greatest
range of greens in nature, and it is an education of the eye in that one
color to study the infinite shades, tints, tones, and suggestions of
that primary color. Of all green and verdant woods, I know of none that
so satisfy one with their rank luxuriance, their beauty and
picturesqueness; and one feels a little sorrow for those people who,
never having seen Alaska, are blindly worshipping the barren, burnt,
dried-out, starved-out forests of the East. In still stretches of this
lake at Naha there are mirrored the snow-capped summits whose melting
snows fill its banks, and the echo from a single pistol-shot is flung
back from side to side before it dies away in a roar. Beyond this lake
there is a chain of lakes, reached by connecting creeks and short
portages, and the few white men who have penetrated to the farthest tarn
in the heart of Revillagigedo Island say that each lake is wilder and
more lovely than the last one. A mile below the fishery, and back in the
woods, there is a waterfall some forty feet in height; and a mountain
stream, hurrying down from the clear pools and snow-banks on the upper
heights, takes a leap over a ledge of rocks and covers it with foam and
sparkling waters.
The fishery and trading-post at Naha Bay was established in 1883, and
shipped 338 barrels of salted salmon that first season. In 1884 over 500
barrels were shipped, and throughout June and July the salmon were
leaping in the bay so thickly that at the turn of the tide their
splashing was like falling rain.