KASA-AN BAY.
Kasa-an, or Karta Bay opens from Clarence Strait directly west of Naha
Bay, and the long inlet runs in from the eastern shore of the Prince of
Wales island for twenty miles. There are villages of Kasa-an Indians in
the smaller inlets and coves opening from the bay, and carved _totem_
poles stand guard over the large square houses of these native
settlements. The bay itself is as lovely a stretch of water as can be
imagined, sheltered, sunny, and calm, with noble mountains outlining its
curves, and wooded islands drifted in picturesque groups at the end. It
was a Scotch loch glorified, on the radiant summer days that I spent
there, and it recalled one’s best memories of Lake George in the softer
aspects of its shores.
Smaller inlets opening from the bay afford glimpses into shady recesses
in the mountain-sides, and one little gap in the shores at last gave us
a sight of the trader’s store, the long row of lichen-covered and
moss-grown sheds of the fishery, with the usual cluster of bark houses
and tents above a shelving beach strewn with narrow, black canoes. A
group of Indians gathered on shore, their gay blankets, dresses, and
cotton kerchiefs adding a fine touch of color to the scene, and the men
in the fishery, in their high rubber boots and aprons, flannel shirts
and big hats, were heroic adjuncts to the picturesque and out-of-the-way
scene.
There was a skurrying to and fro and great excitement when the big
steamer rounded slowly up to the little wharf, and bow line, stern line,
and breast lines were thrown out, fastened to the piles and to the trees
on shore, and the slack hauled in at the stentorian commands of the
mate. Karta, or Kasa-an Bay has been a famous place for salmon for a
score of years, and is best known, locally, as the Baronovich fishery.
Old Charles V. Baronovich was a relic of Russian days, and a character
on the coast. He was a Slav, and gifted with all the cunning of that
race, and after the transfer of the country to the United States, he
disturbed the serenity of the customs officials by the steady smuggling
that he kept up from over the British border. He would import all kinds
of stores, but chiefly bales of English blankets, by canoe, and when the
collector or special agent would penetrate to this fastness of his, they
found no damaging proof in his store, and only a peppery, hot-headed old
pirate, who swore at them roundly in a compound language of Russian,
Indian, and English, and shook his crippled limbs with rage. He was also
suspected of selling liquor to the Indians, and a revenue cutter once
put into Kasa-an Bay, with a commander whom smugglers seldom baffled,
and who was bound to uncover Baronovich’s wickedness. The wily old Slav
received the officers courteously. He listened to the formal
announcement of the purpose of their visit, and bade them search the
place and kindly do him the honor of dining with him when they finished.
Baronovich dozed and smoked, and idled the afternoon away, while a watch
kept a close eye upon him, and the officers and men searched the
packing-house, the Indian houses and tents, and the canoes on the beach.
They followed every trail and broken pathway into the woods, tapped
hollow trees, dug under the logs, and peered down into the waters of the
bay, and finally gave up the search, convinced that there was no liquor
near the place. Baronovich gave them a good dinner, and towards the
close a bottle of whiskey was set before each officer, and the host led
with a toast to the captain of the cutter and the revenue marine.
This queer old fellow married one of the daughters of Skowl, the Haida
chief who ruled the bay. She is said to have been a very comely maiden
when Baronovich married her, and is now a stately, fine-looking woman,
with good features and a creamy complexion. While Baronovich was
cleaning his gun one day, it was accidentally discharged, and one of his
children fell dead by his own hand. The Indians viewed this deed with
horror, and demanded that Skowl should take his life in punishment. As
it was proved an accident, Skowl defended his son-in-law from the charge
of murder, and declared that he should go free. Ever after that the
Indians viewed Baronovich with a certain fear, and ascribed to him that
quality which the Italians call the “evil eye.”
With the passion of his race for fine weapons and fine metal work,
Baronovich possessed many old arms that are worthy of an art museum. A
pair of duelling pistols covered with fine engraving and inlaying were
bought of his widow by one of the naval officers in command of the
man-of-war on this station, and an ancient double-barrelled flint-lock
shot-gun lately passed into the hands of another officer. The shot-gun
has the stock and barrels richly damascened with silver and gold, after
the manner of the finest Spanish metal work, and the clear gray flints
in the trigger give out a shower of sparks when struck. Gunnell of
London was the maker of this fine fowling-piece, and it is now used in
the field by its new owner, who prefers it to the latest Remington.
Baronovich was a man with a long and highly-colored history by all the
signs, but he died a few years since with no biographer at hand, and his
exploits, adventures, and oddities are now nearly forgotten. The widow
Baronovich still lives at Kasa-an, unwilling to leave this peaceful
sunny nook in the mountains, but the fishery is now leased to a ship
captain, who has taken away the fine old flavor of piracy and smuggling,
and substituted a _régime_ of system, enterprise, and eternal
cleanliness.
The wandering salmon that swarm on this coast by millions show clear
instincts when they choose, without an exception, only the most
picturesque and attractive nooks to jump in. They dart and leap up
Kasa-an Bay to the mouths of all the little creeks at its head, and
three times during the year the water is alive with them. The best
salmon run in June and July, and in one day the seine brought in
eighteen hundred salmon in a single haul. Two thousand and twenty-one
hundred fish have weighted the net at different hauls, and the
fish-house was overrunning with these royal salmon. Indian women do the
most of the work in the fishery—cleaning and splitting the fish and
taking out the backbones and the worthless parts with some very deft
strokes from their murderous-looking knives. The salmon are washed
thoroughly and spread between layers of dry salt in large vats. Brine is
poured over them, and they are left for eight days in pickle. Boards and
weights are laid on the top of the vats, and they are then barrelled and
stored in a long covered shed and treated to more strong brine through
the bung-hole until ready for shipment. Of all salt fish the salt salmon
is the finest, and here, where salmon are so plentiful, a barrelled
dainty is put up in the shape of salmon bellies, which saves only the
fattest and most tender portions of these rich, bright red Kasa-an
salmon.
Over fifteen hundred barrels were packed in 1884, and under the new
_régime_ the Kasa-an fishery has distanced its rivals in quantity, while
the quality has a long-established fame.
These Kasa-an Indians are a branch of the Haidas, the finest of the
Indian tribes of the coast. They are most intelligent and industrious
people, and are skilled in many ways that render them superior to the
other tribes of the island. Their permanent village is some miles below
the fishery, and their square whitewashed houses, and the tomb and
mortuary column of Skowl, their great chief, makes quite a pretty scene
in a shady green inlet near Baronovich’s old copper mine. A few of their
houses at the fishery are of logs or rough-hewn planks, but the most of
them are bark huts, with a rustic arbor hung full of drying salmon
outside. These bits of bright-red salmon, against the slabs of rough
hemlock bark, make a gay trimming for each house, and when a bronzed old
hag, in a dun-colored gown, with yellow ’kerchief on her head, stirs up
the fire of snapping fir boughs, and directs a column of smoke toward
the drying fish, it is a bit of aborigine life to set an artist wild.
Their bark houses are scattered irregularly along the beach above
high-water mark, and a fleet of slender, black canoes, with high, carved
bows, are drawn up on the sand and pebbles. The canoe is the only means
of locomotion in this region of unexplored and impenetrable woods, and
the Indian is even more at home in it than on shore. No horseman cares
for his steed more faithfully than the Siwash tends and mends his
graceful cedar canoe, hewn from a single log, and given its flare and
graceful curves by being steamed with water and hot stones, and then
braced to its intended width. The Haida canoe has the same high,
double-beaked prow of the Chinook canoes of Puget Sound, but where the
stern of the latter drops in a straight line to the keel, the Haida
canoe has a deep convex curve. By universal fashion all of these canoes
are painted black externally, with the thwarts and bows lined with red,
and sometimes the interior brightened with that color. The black paint
used to be made from a mixture of seal oil and bituminous coal, and the
red paint was the natural clay found in places throughout all Indian
countries. Latterly the natives have taken to depending on the traders’
stores for paint, but civilization has never grasped them so firmly as
to cause them to put seats or cross-pieces in their canoes. They squat
or sit flat in the bottom of their dugouts for hours without changing
position. It gives white men cramps and stiff joints to look at them,
and sailors are no luckier than landsmen in their attempts to paddle and
keep their balance in one of these canoes for the first time. The
Indians use a broad, short paddle, which they plunge straight down into
the water like a knife, and they literally shovel the water astern with
it. The woman, who has a good many rights up here that her sisters of
the western plains know not, sits back of her liege, and with a waving
motion, never taking the paddle out of the water once, steers and helps
on the craft. Often she paddles steadily, while the man bales out the
water with a wooden scoop. When the canoes are drawn up on the beach
they are carefully filled with grass and branches, and covered with mats
or blankets to keep them sound and firm. A row of these high-beaked
canoes thus draped has a very singular effect, and on a gloomy day they
are like so many catafalques or funeral gondolas. Baronovich’s old
schooner, the _Pioneer of Cazan_, lies stranded on the beach in the
midst of the native boats, moss and lichens tenderly covering its
timbers, and vagrant grasses springing up in the seams of the old wreck.
The dark, cramped little cabin is just the place for ghosts of corsairs
and the goblins of sailors’ yarns, and although it has lain there many
seasons, no Indian has yet pre-empted it as a home for his family and
dogs.
[Illustration: THREE CARVED SPOONS AND SHAMAN’S RATTLE.]
The thrifty Siwash, which is the generic and common name for these
people, and a corruption of the old French voyagers’ _sauvage_, keeps
his valuables stored in heavy cedar chests, or gaudy red trunks studded
with brass nails; the latter costly prizes with which the Russian
traders used to tempt them. At the first sound of the steamer’s
paddle-wheels,—and they can be heard for miles in these fiords,—the
Indians rummaged their houses and chests and sorted out their valuable
things, and when the first ardent curio-seeker rushed through the
packing-houses and out towards the bark huts, their wares were all
displayed. The Haidas are famous as the best carvers, silversmiths, and
workers on the coast; and there are some of their best artists in this
little band on Kasa-an Bay. An old blind man, with a battered hat on his
head and a dirty white blanket wrapped around him, sat before one bark
hut, with a large wooden bowl filled with carved spoons made from the
horns of the mountain goat. These spoons, once in common use among all
these people, are now disappearing, as the rage for the tin and pewter
utensils in the traders’ stores increases, although many of them have
the handles polished and the bowls worn by the daily usage of
generations. The horn is naturally black, and constant handling and
soaking in seal oil gives them a jetty lustre that adds much to the
really fine carvings on the handles. Silver bracelets pounded out of
coin, and ornamented with traceries and chasings by the hand of “Kasa-an
John,” the famous jeweller of the tribe, were the prizes eagerly sought
and contended for by the ladies. The bangle mania rages among the Haida
maids and matrons as fiercely as on civilized shores, and dusky wrists
were outstretched on which from three to nine bracelets lay in shining
lines like jointed mail. Anciently they pounded a single heavy bracelet
from a silver dollar piece, and ornamented the broad two-inch band with
heraldic carvings of the crow, the bear, the raven, the whale, and other
emblematic beasts of their strangely mixed mythology. Latterly they have
become corrupted by civilized fashions, and they have taken to narrow
bands, hammered from half dollars and carved with scrolls, conventional
eagles copied from coins, and geometrical designs. They have no fancy
for gold ornaments, and they are very rarely seen; but the fancy for
silver is universal, and their methodical way of converting every coin
into a bracelet and stowing it away in their chests gives hope of there
being one place where the surplus silver and the trade dollars may be
legitimately made away with.
In one house an enlightened and non-skeptical Indian was driving sharp
bargains in the sale of medicine-men’s rattles and charms, and kindred
relics of a departed faith. His scoffing and irreverent air would have
made his ancestors’ dust shake, but he pocketed the _chickamin_, or
money, without even a superstitious shudder. The amateur curio-buyers
found themselves worsted and outgeneralled on every side in this rich
market of Kasa-an by a Juneau trader, who gathered up the things by
wholesale, and, carrying them on board, disposed of them at a stupendous
advance. “No more spoon,” said the old blind chief as he jingled the
thirteen dollars that he had received from this trader for his twenty
beautifully carved spoons, and the tourists who had to pay two dollars a
piece for these ancestral ladles echoed his refrain and began to see how
profits might mount up in trading in the Indian country. Dance blankets
from the Chilkat country, woven in curious designs in black, white, and
yellow wool, spun from the fleece of the mountain goat, were paraded by
the anxious owners, and the strangers elbowed one another, stepped on
the dogs, and rubbed the oil from the dripping salmon overhead in the
smoky huts, in order to see and buy all of these things.
Old Skowl bid defiance to the missionaries while he lived, and kept his
people strictly to the faith and the ways of their fathers. If they fell
sick, the _shaman_ or medicine-man came with his rattles and charms, and
with great _hocus-pocus_ and “_Presto change_” drove away or propitiated
the evil spirits that were tormenting the sufferer. If the patient did
not immediately respond to the treatment, the doctor would accuse some
one of bewitching his victim, and demand that he should be tortured or
put to death in order to relieve the afflicted one. It thus became a
serious matter for every one when the doctor was sent for, as not even
the chiefs were safe from being denounced by these wizards. No slave
could become a _shaman_, but the profession was open to any one else,
regardless of rank or riches, and the medicine man was a self-made
grandee, unless some great deformity marked him for that calling from
birth. As preparation for his life-work he went off by himself, and
fasted in the woods for many days. Returning, he danced in frenzy about
the village, seizing and biting the flesh of live dogs, and eating the
heads and tongues of frogs. This latter practice accounts for the image
of the frog appearing on all the medicine men’s rattles; and in the
totemic carvings the frog is the symbol of the _shaman_, or speaks of
some incident connected with him. Each _shaman_ elected to himself a
familiar spirit, either the whale, the bear, the eagle, or some one of
the mythological beasts, and gifted with its qualities, and under the
guidance of this totemic spirit, he performed his cures and miracles.
This token was carved on his rattles, his masks, drums, spoons, canoes,
and all his belongings. It was woven on his blankets, and after death it
was carved on bits of fossil ivory, whale and walrus teeth, and sewed to
his grave-clothes. The _shaman’s_ body was never burned, but was laid in
state in the large grave boxes that are seen on the outskirts of every
village. Columns capped with _totemic_ animals and flags mark these
little houses of the dead, and many of them have elaborately carved and
painted walls. The _shaman’s_ hair was never cut nor touched by profane
hands, and each hair was considered a sacred charm by the people.
Captain Merriman, while in command of the U. S. S. _Adams_, repeatedly
interfered with two _shamans_, who were denouncing and putting to
torture the helpless women and children in a village where the black
measles was raging. He found the victims of this witchcraft persecution
with their ankles fastened to their wrists in dark, underground holes,
or tied to the rocks at low tide that they might be slowly drowned by
the returning waters. All threats failing, the two _shamans_ were
carried on the _Adams_, and the ship’s barber sheared and shaved their
heads. The matted hair was carried down to the boiler room and burned,
for if it had been thrown overboard it would have been caught and
preserved, and the _shamans_ could have retained at least a vestige of
authority. The Indians raised a great outcry at the prospect of harm or
indignity being offered their medicine-men, but when the two shaved
heads appeared at the gangway, the Indians set up shouts of derision,
and there were none so poor as to do them honor after that. A few such
salutary examples did much to break up these practices, and though their
notions of our medicine are rather crude, they have implicit faith in
the white, or “Boston doctors.”
If these fish-eating, canoe-paddling Indians of the northwest coast are
superior to the hunters and horsemen of the western plains, the Haidas
are the most remarkable of the coast tribes, and offer a fascinating
study to anyone interested in native races and fellow man. From Cape Fox
to Mount St. Elias the Indians of the Alaska coast are known by the
generic name of Thlinkets, but in the subdivision of the Thlinkets into
tribes, or _kwans_, the Haidas are not included. The Thlinkets consider
the Haidas as aliens, but, except in the language, they have many things
in common, and it takes the ethnologist’s eye to detect the differences.
The greater part of the Haida tribe proper inhabit the Queen Charlotte
Islands in the northern part of British Columbia, and the few bands
living in villages in the southern part of Alaska are said to be
malcontents and secessionists, who paddled away and found homes for
themselves across Dixon Entrance. I have heard it stated, without much
authority to sustain it, however, that old Skowl was a deserter of this
kind, and, not approving of some of the political methods of the other
chiefs in his native village, withdrew with his followers and founded a
colony in Kasa-an Bay. This aboriginal “mugwump,” as he would be rated
in the slang of the day, was conservative in other things, and his
people have the same old customs and traditions as the Haidas of the
original villages on the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Where the Haidas really did come from is an unending puzzle, and in
Alaska the origin and migration of races are subjects continually
claiming one’s attention. There is enough to be seen by superficial
glances to suggest an Oriental origin, and those who believe in the
emigration of the Indians from Asia by way of Behring Straits, or the
natural causeway of the Aleutian Islands, in prehistoric times, find an
array of strange suggestions and resemblances among the Haidas to
encourage their theories. That the name of this tribe corresponds to the
name of the great mountain range of Japan may be a mere coincidence, but
a few scholars who have visited them say that there are many Japanese
words and idioms in their language, and that the resemblance of the
Haidas to the Ainos of northern Japan is striking enough to suggest some
kinship. Opposed to this, however, is the testimony of Marchand, the
French voyager, who visited the Haidas in 1791, and recognizing Aztec
words and terminations in their speech, and resemblances to Aztec work
in their monuments and picture-writings, first started the theory that
they were from the south, and descendants of those who, driven out of
Mexico by Cortez, vanished in boats to the north. To continue the
puzzle, the Haidas have some Apache words in their vocabulary, and have
the same grotesque dance-masks, and many of the same dances and
ceremonies that Cushing describes in his sketches of life among the
Zunis in New Mexico. Hon. James G. Swan, of Port Townsend, who has given
thirty years to a study of the Indians of the northwest coast, has
lately given much attention to the Haidas of the Queen Charlotte
Islands, and has made large collections of their implements and art
works for the Smithsonian Institute. He found the Haida tradition and
representation of the great spirit,—the Thunder Bird,—to be the same as
that of the Aztecs, and when he showed sketches of Aztec carvings to the
Haidas they seemed to recognize and understand them at once. Copper
images and relics found in their possession were identical with some
silver images found in ruins in Guatemala by a British archæologist.
Judge Swan has collected many strange legends and allegories during his
canoe journeys to the isolated Haida villages, and his guide and
attendant, Johnny Kit-Elswa, who conducts him to the great October
feasts and dances, is a clever young Haida silversmith and a remarkable
genius. Judge Swan has written a memoir on Haida tattoo masks,
paintings, and heraldic columns, which was published as No. 267 of the
_Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge_, January, 1874. _In The West
Shore_ magazine of August, 1884, he published a long article with
illustrations upon the same subjects, and his library and cabinet, his
journals and sketch-books, contain many wonderful things relating to the
history and life of these strange people.