KILLISNOO AND THE LAND OF KAKES.
Around the point from Kootznahoo, a sharp turn leads through a veritable
needle’s eye of a passage to Koteosok Harbor, made by the natural
breakwater of a small island lying close to the Admiralty shore. This
island was named by Captain Meade as Kenasnow, or “near the fort,” as
the Kootznahoos designated it to him. It is a picturesque, fir-crowned
little island, and its dark, slaty cliffs are seamed with veins of pure
white marble. Its ragged shores hold hundreds of aquariums at low tide,
and in the way of marine curios there are, besides the skeletons of
whales, myriads of star fish and jelly fish and barnacles strewing the
beach; the acres of barnacles giving off a chorus of faint little
clicking sounds as they hastily shut their shells at the sound of any
one approaching.
On this little island of Kenasnow, the Northwest Trading Company has its
largest station, Killisnoo, where codfish are dried, herring and dogfish
converted into oil, and the air weighted with the most horrible smells
from the fish guano manufactured there. The company has extensive
warehouses, works, and shops on Kenasnow, and around the buildings there
are gathered quite a village of Kootznahoo Indians, who are employed at
the fishery. This station represents an investment of over $100,000, the
oil works alone having cost $70,000, and extravagant management having
doubled all the necessary expenses of the first plant. As there was no
water supply on the solid rock of Kenasnow, a reservoir with a storage
capacity of 90,000 gallons of water was constructed; and, with cedar
forests on every side, every bit of lumber used was brought by freight
from below.
Killisnoo was first established as a whaling station, but many causes
decided the company to abandon that branch of fishery. There is a
tradition that the Indians once regarded their great totemic beast, the
whale, with such veneration that they would never kill it, nor eat of
its flesh and blubber. The Kootznahoos have grown skeptical in many
ways, and they made no objections to harpooning the whale, until the
bomb exploded in 1882; and after the troubles following upon that
impious adventure, the company decided that whaling was not a profitable
business, and began to fish for cod and smaller fry.
The codfish are caught in the deeper waters of Chatham Strait around the
island, the Indians going out in the fleet of small boats to fish, and
turning their catch into large scows, which are towed in by the two
steam launches that are kept constantly busy. Connoisseurs pronounce
this cod remarkably fine, firm, and white, and as neither hake nor
haddock are ever found there, the Killisnoo codfish is not open to the
same suspicions as rest on so many Eastern fish. They average in weight
from three to five pounds, and the Indians are provided with boats and
paid two cents apiece for every codfish caught. A difficulty in the way
of drying in the open air in this moist climate has been solved by
building a drying-house, where the process is accomplished artificially.
There seems to be no limit to the quantity of fish that can be caught,
and during one visit at Killisnoo a scow was towed in from Gardner Point
loaded with eight thousand fine large cod, and 1,576 boxes of the dried
fish were ready to be shipped south.
From the end of August into January, the waters of Chatham Strait are
black with herring. The Indians used to catch them with primitive rakes,
made by driving nails through the end of a piece of board, and with this
rude implement they could quickly fill a canoe with herring, each nail
catching two and three fish. Seines have supplanted the aborigine’s
hand-rake, and a thousand barrels of silver herring have been taken at a
single haul, although the average haul is about half as many barrels,
and requiring eleven men to each net then. Each barrel of fish yields
about three gallons of oil at the oil works, which are managed by men
who have had charge of menhaden fisheries on the Atlantic coast. As the
result of the first year’s work, 82,000 gallons of herring oil were
shipped below in 1883, selling at the rate of thirty cents per gallon.
Within the year an attempt was made towards supplying the cod-liver oil
of pharmacy, and five cases of it sent below for trial received the
highest indorsement from physicians.
More picturesque and less fragrant than the buildings of the company
were the log and bark houses of the Indians, who have abandoned their
old village and fort of Kootznahoo, and settled around the Killisnoo
station. The local celebrity is the famous old head chief of the
Kootznahoos, Kitchnatti or Saginaw Jake, who, for the iniquities of his
tribe, was carried off as a hostage in the man-of-war _Saginaw_ in 1869.
He was a prisoner for a long time on board that ship at the Mare Island
Navy Yard in California, and when he was afterward returned to his
people, he became an apostle of peace and the greatest friend of the
white man. He is a crooked, bow-legged old fellow, and he superintended
the tying up of the ship in a most energetic way. He lurched and tacked
across the dock, waving his cane wildly to his underlings, and giving
hoarse, guttural words of the fiercest command. He wore a derby hat with
a gold band, and the uniform coat of a captain of the navy, while two
immense silver stars on his breast gave his name and rank as the
Killisnoo policeman, and a dangerous-looking billy was suspended from
his shoulder by a variegated sash.
Besides being a hostage of war, Kitchnatti was once denounced by a
terrible shaman, who had an incurable patient on hand. The chief was
found bound and tied for torture, and barely rescued in time by naval
friends. He has now no respect for his own medicine-men, and proved it
once by telling one of the curio collectors that he knew where there was
a shaman’s grave full of beautiful carvings and trophies. He was bidden
to get them, and offered a price for his grave-robbing. In a few days
Jake reappeared, looking sad and despondent. He mentioned the name of a
sub-chief, and, with a tone of severe disapproval, said:—
“Heap bad Indian. He rob medicine-man’s grave. Sell curios to trader.
Bad man.”
When Jake spied the photographers on shore, he made wild signals, ran
off to his cabin, and reappeared clad in fuller regalia; then, drawing
an old cutlass, braced himself up in a “present-arms” attitude before
the camera, and nodded for the operator to go on. He then led them to
his neatly whitewashed house, and showed them a cigar-box full of
letters of credentials and testimonials of character given him by naval
officers, ship captains, traders, and missionaries. All of these Indians
have a great fancy for these letters. They beg them from every one in
power, and carry them around tenderly wrapped in paper, to show them as
certificates of their worth, character, and importance. Some of Jake’s
letters were profusely sealed with great splotches of red wax, and there
is a story that he for a long time innocently showed a testimonial,
which ran: “The bearer of this paper is the biggest scoundrel in Alaska.
Believe nothing that he says, and look out, or he will steal everything
in sight.” These poor old men of letters have many funny jokes played on
them in this way, and it is really touching to see the innocent pride
with which they display these insignia.
Jake pointed with pleasure to a row of illuminated posters and portraits
of theatrical celebrities that decorated one wall of his cabin, and
explained that they were pictures of his friends. The faces were those
of Nat Goodwin, Gus Williams, John McCullough, Thomas Keane, and others,
and the high colors and grand attitudes much pleased the old chief. In
quite another vein Jake pointed to a small box tomb on the other side of
the channel, where he had buried his little daughter a few days before.
A flag-pole, with a small United States flag at half-mast, gave mute
testimony to Jake’s ideas of patriotism and mourning etiquette. His wife
betrayed her state of grief by wandering about in a black dress, with a
black umbrella held down closely over her head all of the time.
[Illustration: AN ALASKA “LADY”; AND BASKET WEAVERS AT KILLISNOO.]
At Killisnoo blackened faces were almost the rule, and every other
native woman had her face coated with a mixture of seal oil and soot. A
group of these blackamoors made a picture, as they sat inside a cabin
door weaving their pretty baskets of the fine inside bark and roots of
the cedar. One younger woman wore a silver pin sticking out through her
under lip, another had a large wooden labrette in her lip; and when the
photographer tried to take the group, their neighbors ran up and joined
in the tableau.
At Killisnoo, once, the anglers baited their lines and hung them
overboard, as inducements to the codfish. The lunch-gong summoned them
below, but they tied their lines and trusted to some fish swallowing the
hooks while they were gone. When the first angler came up and touched
his line, his face glowed, and he began pulling in the weighty prize.
When the line left the water a bottle was dangling on the end of it,
tied with a sailor’s knot, and hook and bait intact. The second angler
drew up a dried codfish, and then, when they looked around for the
captain of the ship, he was nowhere to be found.
There are a few Kake Indians among the fishermen and workmen at
Killisnoo, and their old home or proper domain is on Kouiu Island,
further down Chatham Straits. The Kakes are outcasts and renegades among
the tribes, and, from early days, there has been reason for the bad name
given them. They were hostile, treacherous, and revengeful, and were
dealt with warily by the old traders. In 1857 a war party paddled a
thousand miles down to Puget Sound, and at Whidby Island murdered Mr.
Ebey, a former collector of customs at Port Townsend, in retaliation for
an indignity put upon their men in the preceding year. They carried his
head back with them, and great war dances followed the return of the
avenging Kakes.
At the north end of Kouiu Island are the ruins of the three villages
destroyed during the Kake war, in 1869. The origin and incidents of this
war are thus sketched in a private letter by Captain R. W. Meade, U. S.
N., who commanded the U. S. S. _Saginaw_, at that time in Alaskan
waters:—
“The war was due originally to the killing of a Kake Indian at Sitka by
the sentry on guard at the lower end of the town. There had been some
trouble with the Indians outside the stockade, and General Jeff C.
Davis, who commanded the department, with headquarters at Sitka, had
given orders to prevent all Indians from leaving Sitka during the
night—I think it was New Year’s night. He had asked me to co-operate
with him, and my patrol-boats sent several canoes back to the Indian
village. About daylight a canoe was discovered leaving the village. The
soldier nearest the canoe hailed and ordered the canoe back, and as it
did not go back after a third or fourth hail, fired, killing a Kake
Indian. The canoe still continued to paddle off, and, though pursued by
the boats of the _Saginaw_, that had seen the firing, escaped.
Subsequently, in revenge for this, the Kake Indians murdered two Sitka
traders, Messrs. Maugher and Walker, and General Davis determined to
punish them by destroying their villages. I was asked to co-operate,
and, although I think the trouble could have been avoided in the first
place, yet, after the wanton murder of two innocent men, I felt it my
duty to give the Kake tribe—a very ugly one—a lesson. We therefore took
on board some twenty-five soldiers from the garrison at Sitka, and went
to the Kake country. The Indians abandoned their villages on our
approach, and three villages were destroyed by fire and shell. A
stockaded fort was also destroyed by midshipman, now Lieutenant Bridges,
of the _Saginaw_. The Indians were dismayed, and no further trouble, I
believe, has occurred with them. There was no loss of life on either
side—it was a bloodless war.”
The Kakes have never returned to these villages, and in diminished
numbers they roam the archipelago, creating trouble and disturbances
wherever they draw up their canoes. Their visits are dreaded equally by
the natives and whites, and Captain Beardslee peremptorily ordered them
out of Sitka when several war canoes, filled with a visiting party, came
abreast of the _rancherie_, shouting and singing their peculiar songs.
Their unpleasant reputation has, doubtless, kept settlers away from
Kouiu Island, and there is not yet as much as a salmon cannery or
packing house on its shores. The island is over sixty miles long, with
an irregular, indented shore, and wherever the surveyors have followed
its lines they have seen forests of yellow cedar. This timber will, in
time, make Kouiu and the adjoining island of Kuprianoff the most
valuable land sections in this part of the Territory. The yellow cedar
is said to be the only good ship timber on the Pacific coast, and is the
only wood that can resist the teredo, which eats up the pine piles under
wharves in two years from the time they are driven. The trees are found
five and seven feet in diameter, and attain the height of one hundred
and fifty feet, and the fine, closely grained, hard, yellow wood was
once exported to China in large quantities by the Russians. The Chinese
valued it for its fine, hard texture, and they carved it into chests and
small articles, and exported it as camphor wood. Its odor is by some
said to resemble sandal wood, and, by others, garlic, but it takes a
beautiful satiny polish, and will be as valuable as a cabinet wood as
for ship timber. Some of it that has been sent to Portland has been sold
at seventy-five dollars a thousand feet, and Mr. Seward prized very
highly the fine cedar that he carried home with him. As there has always
been complaint of the quality of the Oregon timber, and vessels built of
its pine could not be insured as A 1 but for three years, it may seem
strange that no attempts have been made to utilize the vast forests of
cedar scattered through the archipelago. Seven years ago a bill was
introduced in Congress asking that one hundred thousand acres of timber
land on Kouiu Island should be sold to a company, that guaranteed to
establish a shipyard and build a vessel of twelve hundred tons burthen
within two years. The same inscrutable reasons that for a long time
prevented anything being done for the development of Alaska prevented
the bill from becoming a law. Even the present act establishing a form
of civil government does not make the Territory a land district, and
nothing could seem more perverse than this action. Timber lands can
neither be bought nor leased, and as settlers can in no way acquire an
acre, there are few saw mills in the Territory, and their owners are
guilty of stealing government timber, and liable to prosecution if the
new officials press things to the finest point. Want of lumber has been
a serious hindrance and obstacle to settlers, and the miners at Juneau
had to pay freight on, and await the monthly consignments of, Oregon
pine that were shipped to a country crowded with better timber.