SITKA—THE INDIAN RANCHERIE.
The doorway of the Greek church, and the dial on its tower, face toward
the harbor, and command the main street. Beyond the houses at the right
there is a little pine-crowned hill, with the broken and rusty ruins of
a powder-magazine on its slope, and on a second hill beyond is the
graveyard where the Russians buried their dead. An old block house, that
commanded an angle of the stockade, stands sentry over the graves, and
the headstones and tombs are overgrown with rank bushes, ferns, and
grasses. Prince Maksoutoff’s first wife, who died at Sitka, was buried
on the hill, and a costly, elaborately carved tombstone was sent from
Russia to mark the spot. After the transfer and withdrawal of troops,
the Indians, in their maraudings, defaced the stone, and attempted to
carry it off. It was broken in the effort, and left in fragments on the
ground. Lieutenant Gilman, in charge of the marines during the stay of
the _Adams_, became interested in the matter, hunted for the grave in
the underbrush, and undertook the work of replacing the tombstone.
Beyond the Russian cemetery, on the same overgrown hillside, are the
tombs of the chiefs and medicine-men of the Sitka _kwan_. The grotesque
images and the queer little burial boxes are nearly hidden in the tangle
of bushes and vines, and their sides are covered with moss.
The Russians had a special chapel out on this hill for the Indians to
worship in, as shown in old illustrations of Sitka, but the building has
disappeared. There was a heavy stockade wall also, separating the Indian
cemetery and village from the white settlement, but it has nearly all
been torn down and carried off by the Indians during the years of
license allowed them after the troops left, and only fragments of it
remain in places.
Entering through the old stockade gate, the Indian _rancherie_ presents
itself, as a double row of square houses fronting on the beach. Each
house is numbered and whitewashed, and the ground surrounding it
gravelled and drained. The same neatness marks the whole long stretch of
the village, and amazement at this condition is only ended when one
learns that the captain of the man-of-war fines each disorderly Indian
in blankets, besides confining him in the guard-house, and that the
forfeited blankets are duly exchanged for paint, whitewash, and
disinfectants. Police and sanitary regulations both are enforced, and
the Indians made to keep their village quiet and clean. When all the
Indians are home from their fishing and trading trips, and congregated
here in the winter, they number over a thousand, and all goes merry at
the _rancherie_. There are no _totem_ poles, or carved,
grotesquely-painted houses to lend outward interest to the village, and
the Indians themselves are too much given to ready-made clothes and
civilized ways to be really picturesque.
Annahootz, Sitka Jack, and other chiefs have pine doorplates over their
lintels, to announce where greatness dwells, but the palace of Siwash
Town is the residence of “Mrs. Tom,” a painted cabin with green blinds,
and a green railing across the front porch. Mrs. Tom is a character, a
celebrity, and a person of great authority among her Siwash neighbors,
and wields a greater power and influence among her people, than all the
war chiefs and medicine-men put together. Even savage people bow down to
wealth, and Mrs. Tom is the reputed possessor of $10,000, accumulated by
her own energy and shrewdness. We heard of Mrs. Tom long before we
reached Sitka, and, realizing her to be such a potentate among her
people, we were shocked to meet that lady by the roadside, Sunday
morning, offering to sell bracelets to some of the passengers. The
richest and greatest chiefs are so avaricious that they will sell
anything they own.
Mrs. Tom invited us to come to her green-galleried chalet in Siwash
town, “next door to No. 17,” at any time we pleased. On the rainiest
morning in all the week we set our dripping umbrella points in that
direction, and found the great Tyee lady at home. It was raw and chill
as a New York November, but Mrs. Tom strolled about barefooted, wearing
a single calico garment, and wrapping herself in a white blanket with
red and blue stripes across the ends. Her black hair was brushed to
satiny smoothness, braided and tied with coquettish blue ribbons, and
her arms were covered with bracelets up to her elbows. She is a plump
matron, fat, fair, and forty in fact, and her house is a model of
neatness and order. On gala occasions she arrays herself in her best
velvet dress, her bonnet with the red feather, a prodigious necktie and
breastpin, and then, with two silver rings on every finger, and nine
silver bracelets on each arm, she is the envy of all the other ladies of
Siwash town. When she came to the ship to be photographed by an admiring
amateur, she had, besides her ordinary regalia, a dozen or more pairs of
bracelets tied up in a handkerchief, and we began to believe her wealth
as boundless as her neighbors say it is. Like all the Indians she puts
her faith mostly in blankets, and her house is a magazine of such units
of currency, while deep in her cedar boxes she has fur robes of the
rarest quality.
Mrs. Tom has acquired her fortune by her own ability in legitimate
trade, and each spring and fall she loads up her long canoe and goes off
on a great journey through the islands, trading with her people. On her
return she trades with the traders of Sitka, and always comes out with a
fine profit. A romance once wove its meshes about her, and on one of her
journeys it was said that Mrs. Tom bought a handsome young slave at a
bargain. The slave was considerably her junior, but in time her fancy
overlooked that discrepancy, and after a few sentimental journeys in the
long canoe she duly made him Mr. Tom, thus proving that the human heart
beats the same in Siwash town as in the Grand Duchy of Gerolstein.
This interesting bit of gossip, duly vouched for by some of the white
residents, is opposed by others, who say that Mr. Tom is a chief of the
Sitka _kwan_ in his own right, and that he made the _mésalliance_ when
he wedded his clever spouse, and that he owns a profitable potato-ranch
further down Baranoff Island. Any one would prefer the first and more
romantic biography, but, anyway, Mr. Tom is a smooth-faced,
boyish-looking man, and evidently well trained and managed by his
spouse. In consideration of their combined importance, he was made one
of the delegated policemen of Siwash town, and he makes malefactors
answer to him, as he has learned to answer to his exacting wife.
On the occasion of another morning call, Mrs. Tom was meditating a new
dress, and the native dressmaker who was to assist in the creation was
called in to examine the cut of our gowns, when we called upon her that
time. There was a funny scene when Mrs. Tom discovered that what
appeared to her as a velvet skirt on the person of one of her visitors,
was merely a sham flounce that ended a few inches under a long, draped
overskirt. Her bewildered look and the sorry shake of her head over this
evidence of civilized pretence amused us, and in slow, disapproving
tones she discussed the sham and swindle with her dressmaker. She showed
us her accordeons, and gave us a rheumatic tune on one of them, and we
were afterwards told that she gives dancing parties in winter to the
upper ten of Siwash town, who dance quadrilles to the accordeon’s
strains.
Sitka Jack’s house is a large square one fronting directly on the beach,
and during his absence at Pyramid Harbor the square hearthstone in the
middle was being kept warm by the relatives he had left behind him. When
this house was built, in 1877, it was warmed by a grand _potlatch_, or
feast and gift distribution, that distanced all previous efforts of any
rivals. An Alaska chief is considered rich in proportion as he gives
away his possessions, and Sitka Jack rose an hundredfold in Siwash
esteem when he gave his grand _potlatch_. All his relatives assisted in
building the house, and this same community idea entitles them to live
in it. Over five hundred blankets were given away at his _potlatch_, and
the dance was followed by a great feast, in which much whiskey and
native _hoochinoo_ figured. Ben Holladay, Sr., with a large yachting
party, was in the harbor at the time, and lent interest to the occasion
by offering prizes for canoe races and adding a water carnival to the
other festivities. Sitka Jack nearly beggared himself by this great
house-warming, but his fame was settled on a substantial basis, and he
has since had time to partly recuperate. He has aged rapidly of late
years, and now he delights to crouch by his fireside in winter evenings
and relate the story of his great _potlatch_ of seven years ago, which
was such an event that even the white residents date by it. Another
great _potlatch_ made the summer of 1882 historical, and the presence of
the _Dakota_, with General Miles and his regimental band aboard, stirred
the _rancherie_ to redoubled efforts.
Jack and Kooska, the silversmiths of the Sitka _kwan_, are very skilful
workmen, and one can sit beside their work benches and watch them
fashion the bracelets that are in such demand. During the summer months
they can sell their ornaments faster than they can make them, and in two
hours after a steamer’s arrival their stock is exhausted, and they work
night and day on special orders while the vessel is at the wharf. If you
give them the order in the morning the bracelets are ready in the
afternoon, as carefully finished and engraved as any of the others of
their make. In one doorway we saw a woman crouching or lying face
downwards, and slowly engraving a silver finger ring. She had a broken
penknife for an engraver’s tool, and she held it in her closed hand,
blade down, and drew it towards her as she worked. Her attitude, and the
management of the steel, set the oriental theorists off into
speculations again, and they decided that she herself must have come
straight across from Japan, so identical were her proceedings with those
of the embroiderers and art workers in the kingdom of Dai Nippon.
She was quite unconscious and self-possessed while we stood chattering
about her, and continued to chew gum in the most nonchalant manner.
Inside of this barred doorway, the other members of the family were
sitting about the fire, taking their morning meal. For their ten o’clock
breakfast they were enjoying smoked salmon with oil, and an unhealthy
looking kind of dough, or bread, washed down by very bad tea, judging
from the way in which the tin teapot was allowed to boil and thump away
on the coals. They are none of them epicures, and even in the matter of
salmon they make no distinction, and cure and eat the rank dog salmon
almost in preference to the choicer varieties. Although they are expert
hunters, and bring in all the venison and wild fowl for the Sitka
market, they seldom eat game themselves. It takes away a civilized
appetite to see them eat the cakes of black seaweed, the sticks and
branches covered with the herring roe that they whip from the surface of
the water at certain seasons, and the dried salmon eggs that they are so
particularly fond of. They eat almost anything that lives in the sea,
and the octopus, or devil-fish, is a dainty that ranks with seal
flippers for a feast. Clams of enormous size, found on the beaches
through the islands, and mussels are other staple dishes.
The Sitka Indians, we were assured by a resident, “are the sassiest and
most rascally Siwashes to be found in the country,” but outwardly they
differed very little from the other tribes that we had seen. They have
the same broad, flat faces, and from generations of canoe-paddling
ancestors have inherited a magnificent development of the shoulders,
chests, and arms. This development is at the expense of the rest of the
frame, and, from sitting cramped in their canoes, the lower limbs are
dwarfed and crooked, and their bodies affect one with the unpleasant
sense of deformity. They are stumbling and shambling in their gait, and
toe in to exaggeration; and these amphibious, fish-eating natives are as
different as possible from the wild horsemen of the plains, or the
pastoral tribes of the southwest. The Sitkans have the same mythology
and totemic system as the rest of the Thlinket tribes, and reverence the
spirits of the raven, the wolf, the whale, bear, and eagle; and their
worship of the spirits and ashes of their ancestors is quite equal to
the Chinese. They cremate their dead, with the exception of the medicine
men, who are laid away in state, and the poles and fluttering rags set
up around the village indicate the sacred spots where the ashes lie.
They worship the spirits of the earth, air, and water; and the spirits
of the departed ones, now occupying the bodies of the ravens that fly
overhead, exempt those huge croakers from shot and snare. They show some
belief in a future state by saying that the flames of the aurora
borealis are the spirits of dead warriors dancing overhead. When a chief
dies his wives pass to his next heir, and unless these relicts purchase
their freedom with blankets, they are united to their grandsons, or
nephews, as a matter of course. High-strung young Siwashes sometimes
scorn these legacies, and then there is war between the totems, all the
widows’ clan resenting such an outrage of decency and established
etiquette. Curiously with this subjection of the women, it is they who
are the family autocrats and tyrants, giving the casting-vote in
domestic councils, and overriding the male decisions in the most
high-handed manner. Hen-pecking is too small a word to describe the way
in which they bully their lords, and many times our bargain with the
ostensible head of the family was broken up by the woman arriving on the
scene, and insisting that he should not sell, or should charge us more.
Woman’s rights, and her sphere and influence, have reached a development
among the Sitkans, that would astonish the suffrage leaders of Wyoming
and Washington Territory. They are all keen, sharp traders, and if the
women object to the final price offered for their furs at the Sitka
stores, they get into their canoes, and paddle up to Juneau, or down to
Wrangell, and even across the border to the British trading posts. They
take no account of time or travel, and a journey of a thousand miles is
justified to them, if they only get another yard of calico in exchange
for their furs. All the Thlinkets are great visitors, and canoe loads of
visiting Indians can always be found at a village. The Sitka and the
Stikine _kwans_ seem to affiliate most, but visits from members of all
the tribes make the Sitka _rancherie_ an aborigine metropolis.
Busybodies and cosmopolitans, like Sitka Jack, live all over the
archipelago, and it was this roaming propensity that gave the military
forces so much trouble during garrison days at Sitka. The land forces
could do nothing with the scornful Indians in their light _kanims_, and
when the order was given to let no Indian leave the _rancherie_, they
snapped their fingers at the challenging and forbidding sentries, and
paddled away at their pleasure. They have a great respect for a gun-boat
with its ceremony, pomp, and strict discipline, and its busy steam
launches, that can follow their canoes to the most remote creeks and
hiding-places in the islands. The Indians employed on the _Adams_ were
diligent and faithful servitors, and were much pleased with their
sailors’ caps and toggery, and the official state surrounding them.
Indian legends and traditions can be had by the score at Sitka, but it
is hard to verify any of them, and the myths, rites, and folk-lore of
the people are not to be gathered with exactness during the touch-and-go
excitement of a summer cruise. Bishop Veniaminoff mastered their
language, and translated books of the Testament, hymns, and catechism,
and published several works on the Koloshians. Baron Wrangell also wrote
a great deal concerning them, and abstracts from these two writers have
been given by Dall and Petroff. No ethnologists have made studies among
the Thlinkets since Veniaminoff and Wrangell, a half century ago, and
the field lies ready for some northern Cushing.