Wrangell Island and Alaska Summers
Wrangell Island is about fourteen miles long, separated from the
mainland by a narrow channel or fiord, and trending in the direction of
the flow of the ancient ice-sheet. Like all its neighbors, it is
densely forested down to the water’s edge with trees that never seem to
have suffered from thirst or fire or the axe of the lumberman in all
their long century lives. Beneath soft, shady clouds, with abundance of
rain, they flourish in wonderful strength and beauty to a good old age,
while the many warm days, half cloudy, half clear, and the little
groups of pure sun-days enable them to ripen their cones and send
myriads of seeds flying every autumn to insure the permanence of the
forests and feed the multitude of animals.
The Wrangell village was a rough place. No mining hamlet in the placer
gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw, approached
it in picturesque, devil-may-care _abandon_. It was a lawless draggle
of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines, wrangling around the
boggy shore of the island for a mile or so in the general form of the
letter S, without the slightest subordination to the points of the
compass or to building laws of any kind. Stumps and logs, like precious
monuments, adorned its two streets, each stump and log, on account of
the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted with grass and bushes, but
muddy on the sides below the limit of the bog-line. The ground in
general was an oozy, mossy bog on a foundation of jagged rocks, full of
concealed pit-holes. These picturesque rock, bog, and stump
obstructions, however, were not so very much in the way, for there were
no wagons or carriages there. There was not a horse on the island. The
domestic animals were represented by chickens, a lonely cow, a few
sheep, and hogs of a breed well calculated to deepen and complicate the
mud of the streets.
Most of the permanent residents of Wrangell were engaged in trade. Some
little trade was carried on in fish and furs, but most of the
quickening business of the place was derived from the Cassiar
gold-mines, some two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles inland,
by way of the Stickeen River and Dease Lake. Two stern-wheel steamers
plied on the river between Wrangell and Telegraph Creek at the head of
navigation, a hundred and fifty miles from Wrangell, carrying freight
and passengers and connecting with pack-trains for the mines. These
placer mines, on tributaries of the Mackenzie River, were discovered in
the year 1874. About eighteen hundred miners and prospectors were said
to have passed through Wrangell that season of 1879, about half of them
being Chinamen. Nearly a third of this whole number set out from here
in the month of February, traveling on the Stickeen River, which
usually remains safely frozen until toward the end of April. The main
body of the miners, however, went up on the steamers in May and June.
On account of the severe winters they were all compelled to leave the
mines the end of September. Perhaps about two thirds of them passed the
winter in Portland and Victoria and the towns of Puget Sound. The rest
remained here in Wrangell, dozing away the long winter as best they
could.
Indians, mostly of the Stickeen tribe, occupied the two ends of the
town, the whites, of whom there were about forty or fifty, the middle
portion; but there was no determinate line of demarcation, the
dwellings of the Indians being mostly as large and solidly built of
logs and planks as those of the whites. Some of them were adorned with
tall totem poles.
The fort was a quadrangular stockade with a dozen block and frame
buildings located upon rising ground just back of the business part of
the town. It was built by our Government shortly after the purchase of
Alaska, and was abandoned in 1872, reoccupied by the military in 1875,
and finally abandoned and sold to private parties in 1877. In the fort
and about it there were a few good, clean homes, which shone all the
more brightly in their sombre surroundings. The ground occupied by the
fort, by being carefully leveled and drained, was dry, though formerly
a portion of the general swamp, showing how easily the whole town could
have been improved. But in spite of disorder and squalor, shaded with
clouds, washed and wiped by rain and sea winds, it was triumphantly
salubrious through all the seasons. And though the houses seemed to
rest uneasily among the miry rocks and stumps, squirming at all angles
as if they had been tossed and twisted by earthquake shocks, and
showing but little more relation to one another than may be observed
among moraine boulders, Wrangell was a tranquil place. I never heard a
noisy brawl in the streets, or a clap of thunder, and the waves seldom
spoke much above a whisper along the beach. In summer the rain comes
straight down, steamy and tepid. The clouds are usually united, filling
the sky, not racing along in threatening ranks suggesting energy of an
overbearing destructive kind, but forming a bland, mild, laving bath.
The cloudless days are calm, pearl-gray, and brooding in tone,
inclining to rest and peace; the islands seem to drowse and float on
the glassy water, and in the woods scarce a leaf stirs.
The very brightest of Wrangell days are not what Californians would
call bright. The tempered sunshine sifting through the moist atmosphere
makes no dazzling glare, and the town, like the landscape, rests
beneath a hazy, hushing, Indian-summerish spell. On the longest days
the sun rises about three o’clock, but it is daybreak at midnight. The
cocks crowed when they woke, without reference to the dawn, for it is
never quite dark; there were only a few full-grown roosters in
Wrangell, half a dozen or so, to awaken the town and give it a
civilized character. After sunrise a few languid smoke-columns might be
seen, telling the first stir of the people. Soon an Indian or two might
be noticed here and there at the doors of their barnlike cabins, and a
merchant getting ready for trade; but scarcely a sound was heard, only
a dull, muffled stir gradually deepening. There were only two white
babies in the town, so far as I saw, and as for Indian babies, they
woke and ate and made no crying sound. Later you might hear the
croaking of ravens, and the strokes of an axe on firewood. About eight
or nine o’clock the town was awake. Indians, mostly women and children,
began to gather on the front platforms of the half-dozen stores,
sitting carelessly on their blankets, every other face hideously
blackened, a naked circle around the eyes, and perhaps a spot on the
cheek-bone and the nose where the smut has been rubbed off. Some of the
little children were also blackened, and none were over-clad, their
light and airy costume consisting of a calico shirt reaching only to
the waist. Boys eight or ten years old sometimes had an additional
garment,—a pair of castaway miner’s overalls wide enough and ragged
enough for extravagant ventilation. The larger girls and young women
were arrayed in showy calico, and wore jaunty straw hats, gorgeously
ribboned, and glowed among the blackened and blanketed old crones like
scarlet tanagers in a flock of blackbirds. The women, seated on the
steps and platform of the traders’ shops, could hardly be called
loafers, for they had berries to sell, basketfuls of huckleberries,
large yellow salmon-berries, and bog raspberries that looked wondrous
fresh and clean amid the surrounding squalor. After patiently waiting
for purchasers until hungry, they ate what they could not sell, and
went away to gather more.
Yonder you see a canoe gliding out from the shore, containing perhaps a
man, a woman, and a child or two, all paddling together in natural,
easy rhythm. They are going to catch a fish, no difficult matter, and
when this is done their day’s work is done. Another party puts out to
capture bits of driftwood, for it is easier to procure fuel in this way
than to drag it down from the outskirts of the woods through rocks and
bushes. As the day advances, a fleet of canoes may be seen along the
shore, all fashioned alike, high and long beak-like prows and sterns,
with lines as fine as those of the breast of a duck. What the mustang
is to the Mexican _vaquero_, the canoe is to these coast Indians. They
skim along the shores to fish and hunt and trade, or merely to visit
their neighbors, for they are sociable, and have family pride
remarkably well developed, meeting often to inquire after each other’s
health, attend potlatches and dances, and gossip concerning coming
marriages, births, deaths, etc. Others seem to sail for the pure
pleasure of the thing, their canoes decorated with handfuls of the tall
purple epilobium.
[Illustration: Indian Canoes.]
Yonder goes a whole family, grandparents and all, making a direct
course for some favorite stream and camp-ground. They are going to
gather berries, as the baskets tell. Never before in all my travels,
north or south, had I found so lavish an abundance of berries as here.
The woods and meadows are full of them, both on the lowlands and
mountains—huckleberries of many species, salmon-berries, blackberries,
raspberries, with service-berries on dry open places, and cranberries
in the bogs, sufficient for every bird, beast, and human being in the
territory and thousands of tons to spare. The huckleberries are
especially abundant. A species that grows well up on the mountains is
the best and largest, a half-inch and more in diameter and delicious in
flavor. These grow on bushes three or four inches to a foot high. The
berries of the commonest species are smaller and grow almost everywhere
on the low grounds on bushes from three to six or seven feet high. This
is the species on which the Indians depend most for food, gathering
them in large quantities, beating them into a paste, pressing the paste
into cakes about an inch thick, and drying them over a slow fire to
enrich their winter stores. Salmon-berries and service-berries are
preserved in the same way.
A little excursion to one of the best huckleberry fields adjacent to
Wrangell, under the direction of the Collector of Customs, to which I
was invited, I greatly enjoyed. There were nine Indians in the party,
mostly women and children going to gather huckleberries. As soon as we
had arrived at the chosen campground on the bank of a trout stream, all
ran into the bushes and began eating berries before anything in the way
of camp-making was done, laughing and chattering in natural animal
enjoyment. The Collector went up the stream to examine a meadow at its
head with reference to the quantity of hay it might yield for his cow,
fishing by the way. All the Indians except the two eldest boys who
joined the Collector, remained among the berries.
The fishermen had rather poor luck, owing, they said, to the sunny
brightness of the day, a complaint seldom heard in this climate. They
got good exercise, however, jumping from boulder to boulder in the
brawling stream, running along slippery logs and through the bushes
that fringe the bank, casting here and there into swirling pools at the
foot of cascades, imitating the tempting little skips and whirls of
flies so well known to fishing parsons, but perhaps still better known
to Indian boys. At the lake-basin the Collector, after he had surveyed
his hay-meadow, went around it to the inlet of the lake with his brown
pair of attendants to try their luck, while I botanized in the
delightful flora which called to mind the cool sphagnum and carex bogs
of Wisconsin and Canada. Here I found many of my old favorites the
heathworts—kalmia, pyrola, chiogenes, huckleberry, cranberry, etc. On
the margin of the meadow darling linnæa was in its glory; purple
panicled grasses in full flower reached over my head, and some of the
carices and ferns were almost as tall. Here, too, on the edge of the
woods I found the wild apple tree, the first I had seen in Alaska. The
Indians gather the fruit, small and sour as it is, to flavor their fat
salmon. I never saw a richer bog and meadow growth anywhere. The
principal forest-trees are hemlock, spruce, and Nootka cypress, with a
few pines (_P. contorta_) on the margin of the meadow, some of them
nearly a hundred feet high, draped with gray usnea, the bark also gray
with scale lichens.
We met all the berry-pickers at the lake, excepting only a small girl
and the camp-keeper. In their bright colors they made a lively picture
among the quivering bushes, keeping up a low pleasant chanting as if
the day and the place and the berries were according to their own
hearts. The children carried small baskets, holding two or three
quarts; the women two large ones swung over their shoulders. In the
afternoon, when the baskets were full, all started back to the
camp-ground, where the canoe was left. We parted at the lake, I
choosing to follow quietly the stream through the woods. I was the
first to arrive at camp. The rest of the party came in shortly
afterwards, singing and humming like heavy-laden bees. It was
interesting to note how kindly they held out handfuls of the best
berries to the little girl, who welcomed them all in succession with
smiles and merry words that I did not understand. But there was no
mistaking the kindliness and serene good nature.
While I was at Wrangell the chiefs and head men of the Stickeen tribe
got up a grand dinner and entertainment in honor of their distinguished
visitors, three doctors of divinity and their wives, fellow passengers
on the steamer with me, whose object was to organize the Presbyterian
church. To both the dinner and dances I was invited, was adopted by the
Stickeen tribe, and given an Indian name (Ancoutahan) said to mean
adopted chief. I was inclined to regard this honor as being unlikely to
have any practical value, but I was assured by Mr. Vanderbilt, Mr.
Young, and others that it would be a great safeguard while I was on my
travels among the different tribes of the archipelago. For travelers
without an Indian name might be killed and robbed without the offender
being called to account as long as the crime was kept secret from the
whites; but, being adopted by the Stickeens, no one belonging to the
other tribes would dare attack me, knowing that the Stickeens would
hold them responsible.
The dinner-tables were tastefully decorated with flowers, and the food
and general arrangements were in good taste, but there was no trace of
Indian dishes. It was mostly imported canned stuff served Boston
fashion. After the dinner we assembled in Chief Shakes’s large
block-house and were entertained with lively examples of their dances
and amusements, carried on with great spirit, making a very novel
barbarous durbar. The dances seemed to me wonderfully like those of the
American Indians in general, a monotonous stamping accompanied by
hand-clapping, head-jerking, and explosive grunts kept in time to grim
drum-beats. The chief dancer and leader scattered great quantities of
downy feathers like a snowstorm as blessings on everybody, while all
chanted, “Hee-ee-ah-ah, hee-ee-ah-ah,” jumping up and down until all
were bathed in perspiration.
After the dancing excellent imitations were given of the gait,
gestures, and behavior of several animals under different
circumstances—walking, hunting, capturing, and devouring their prey,
etc. While all were quietly seated, waiting to see what next was going
to happen, the door of the big house was suddenly thrown open and in
bounced a bear, so true to life in form and gestures we were all
startled, though it was only a bear-skin nicely fitted on a man who was
intimately acquainted with the animals and knew how to imitate them.
The bear shuffled down into the middle of the floor and made the motion
of jumping into a stream and catching a wooden salmon that was ready
for him, carrying it out on to the bank, throwing his head around to
listen and see if any one was coming, then tearing it to pieces,
jerking his head from side to side, looking and listening in fear of
hunters’ rifles. Besides the bear dance, there were porpoise and deer
dances with one of the party imitating the animals by stuffed specimens
with an Indian inside, and the movements were so accurately imitated
that they seemed the real thing.
These animal plays were followed by serious speeches, interpreted by an
Indian woman: “Dear Brothers and Sisters, this is the way we used to
dance. We liked it long ago when we were blind, we always danced this
way, but now we are not blind. The Good Lord has taken pity upon us and
sent his son, Jesus Christ, to tell us what to do. We have danced
to-day only to show you how blind we were to like to dance in this
foolish way. We will not dance any more.”
Another speech was interpreted as follows: “‘Dear Brothers and
Sisters,’ the chief says, ‘this is else way we used to dance and play.
We do not wish to do so any more. We will give away all the dance
dresses you have seen us wearing, though we value them very highly.’ He
says he feels much honored to have so many white brothers and sisters
at our dinner and plays.”
Several short explanatory remarks were made all through the exercises
by Chief Shakes, presiding with grave dignity. The last of his speeches
concluded thus: “Dear Brothers and Sisters, we have been long, long in
the dark. You have led us into strong guiding light and taught us the
right way to live and the right way to die. I thank you for myself and
all my people, and I give you my heart.”
At the close of the amusements there was a potlatch when robes made of
the skins of deer, wild sheep, marmots, and sables were distributed,
and many of the fantastic head-dresses that had been worn by Shamans.
One of these fell to my share.
The floor of the house was strewn with fresh hemlock boughs, bunches of
showy wild flowers adorned the walls, and the hearth was filled with
huckleberry branches and epilobium. Altogether it was a wonderful show.
I have found southeastern Alaska a good, healthy country to live in.
The climate of the islands and shores of the mainland is remarkably
bland and temperate and free from extremes of either heat or cold
throughout the year. It is rainy, however,—so much so that hay-making
will hardly ever be extensively engaged in here, whatever the future
may show in the way of the development of mines, forests, and
fisheries. This rainy weather, however, is of good quality, the best of
the kind I ever experienced, mild in temperature, mostly gentle in its
fall, filling the fountains of the rivers and keeping the whole land
fresh and fruitful, while anything more delightful than the shining
weather in the midst of the rain, the great round sun-days of July and
August, may hardly be found anywhere, north or south. An Alaska summer
day is a day without night. In the Far North, at Point Barrow, the sun
does not set for weeks, and even here in southeastern Alaska it is only
a few degrees below the horizon at its lowest point, and the topmost
colors of the sunset blend with those of the sunrise, leaving no gap of
darkness between. Midnight is only a low noon, the middle point of the
gloaming. The thin clouds that are almost always present are then
colored yellow and red, making a striking advertisement of the sun’s
progress beneath the horizon. The day opens slowly. The low arc of
light steals around to the northeastward with gradual increase of
height and span and intensity of tone; and when at length the sun
appears, it is without much of that stirring, impressive pomp, of
flashing, awakening, triumphant energy, suggestive of the Bible
imagery, a bridegroom coming out of his chamber and rejoicing like a
strong man to run a race. The red clouds with yellow edges dissolve in
hazy dimness; the islands, with grayish-white ruffs of mist about them,
cast ill-defined shadows on the glistening waters, and the whole
down-bending firmament becomes pearl-gray. For three or four hours
after sunrise there is nothing especially impressive in the landscape.
The sun, though seemingly unclouded, may almost be looked in the face,
and the islands and mountains, with their wealth of woods and snow and
varied beauty of architecture, seem comparatively sleepy and
uncommunicative.
As the day advances toward high noon, the sun-flood streaming through
the damp atmosphere lights the water levels and the sky to glowing
silver. Brightly play the ripples about the bushy edges of the islands
and on the plume-shaped streaks between them, ruffled by gentle passing
wind-currents. The warm air throbs and makes itself felt as a
life-giving, energizing ocean, embracing all the landscape, quickening
the imagination, and bringing to mind the life and motion about us—the
tides, the rivers, the flood of light streaming through the satiny sky;
the marvelous abundance of fishes feeding in the lower ocean; the misty
flocks of insects in the air; wild sheep and goats on a thousand grassy
ridges; beaver and mink far back on many a rushing stream; Indians
floating and basking along the shores; leaves and crystals drinking the
sunbeams; and glaciers on the mountains, making valleys and basins for
new rivers and lakes and fertile beds of soil.
Through the afternoon, all the way down to the sunset, the day grows in
beauty. The light seems to thicken and become yet more generously
fruitful without losing its soft mellow brightness. Everything seems to
settle into conscious repose. The winds breathe gently or are wholly at
rest. The few clouds visible are downy and luminous and combed out fine
on the edges. Gulls here and there, winnowing the air on easy wing, are
brought into striking relief; and every stroke of the paddles of Indian
hunters in their canoes is told by a quick, glancing flash. Bird choirs
in the grove are scarce heard as they sweeten the brooding stillness;
and the sky, land, and water meet and blend in one inseparable scene of
enchantment. Then comes the sunset with its purple and gold, not a
narrow arch on the horizon, but oftentimes filling all the sky. The
level cloud-bars usually present are fired on the edges, and the spaces
of clear sky between them are greenish-yellow or pale amber, while the
orderly flocks of small overlapping clouds, often seen higher up, are
mostly touched with crimson like the out-leaning sprays of maple-groves
in the beginning of an Eastern Indian Summer. Soft, mellow purple
flushes the sky to the zenith and fills the air, fairly steeping and
transfiguring the islands and making all the water look like wine.
After the sun goes down, the glowing gold vanishes, but because it
descends on a curve nearly in the same plane with the horizon, the
glowing portion of the display lasts much longer than in more southern
latitudes, while the upper colors with gradually lessening intensity of
tone sweep around to the north, gradually increase to the eastward, and
unite with those of the morning.
The most extravagantly colored of all the sunsets I have yet seen in
Alaska was one I enjoyed on the voyage from Portland to Wrangell, when
we were in the midst of one of the most thickly islanded parts of the
Alexander Archipelago. The day had been showery, but late in the
afternoon the clouds melted away from the west, all save a few that
settled down in narrow level bars near the horizon. The evening was
calm and the sunset colors came on gradually, increasing in extent and
richness of tone by slow degrees as if requiring more time than usual
to ripen. At a height of about thirty degrees there was a heavy
cloud-bank, deeply reddened on its lower edge and the projecting parts
of its face. Below this were three horizontal belts of purple edged
with gold, while a vividly defined, spreading fan of flame streamed
upward across the purple bars and faded in a feather edge of dull red.
But beautiful and impressive as was this painting on the sky, the most
novel and exciting effect was in the body of the atmosphere itself,
which, laden with moisture, became one mass of color—a fine translucent
purple haze in which the islands with softened outlines seemed to
float, while a dense red ring lay around the base of each of them as a
fitting border. The peaks, too, in the distance, and the snow-fields
and glaciers and fleecy rolls of mist that lay in the hollows, were
flushed with a deep, rosy alpenglow of ineffable loveliness. Everything
near and far, even the ship, was comprehended in the glorious picture
and the general color effect. The mission divines we had aboard seemed
then to be truly divine as they gazed transfigured in the celestial
glory. So also seemed our bluff, storm-fighting old captain, and his
tarry sailors and all.
About one third of the summer days I spent in the Wrangell region were
cloudy with very little or no rain, one third decidedly rainy, and one
third clear. According to a record kept here of a hundred and
forty-seven days beginning May 17 of that year, there were sixty-five
on which rain fell, forty-three cloudy with no rain, and thirty-nine
clear. In June rain fell on eighteen days, in July eight days, in
August fifteen days, in September twenty days. But on some of these
days there was only a few minutes’ rain, light showers scarce enough to
count, while as a general thing the rain fell so gently and the
temperature was so mild, very few of them could be called stormy or
dismal; even the bleakest, most bedraggled of them all usually had a
flush of late or early color to cheer them, or some white illumination
about the noon hours. I never before saw so much rain fall with so
little noise. None of the summer winds make roaring storms, and thunder
is seldom heard. I heard none at all. This wet, misty weather seems
perfectly healthful. There is no mildew in the houses, as far as I have
seen, or any tendency toward mouldiness in nooks hidden from the sun;
and neither among the people nor the plants do we find anything flabby
or dropsical.
In September clear days were rare, more than three fourths of them were
either decidedly cloudy or rainy, and the rains of this month were,
with one wild exception, only moderately heavy, and the clouds between
showers drooped and crawled in a ragged, unsettled way without
betraying hints of violence such as one often sees in the gestures of
mountain storm-clouds.
July was the brightest month of the summer, with fourteen days of
sunshine, six of them in uninterrupted succession, with a temperature
at 7 A.M. of about 60°, at 12 M., 70°. The average 7 A.M. temperature
for June was 54.3°; the average 7 A.M. temperature for July was 55.3°;
at 12 M. the average temperature was 61.45°; the average 7 A.M.
temperature for August was 54.12°; 12 M., 61.48°; the average 7 A.M.
temperature for September was 52.14°; and 12 M., 56.12°.
The highest temperature observed here during the summer was seventy-six
degrees. The most remarkable characteristic of this summer weather,
even the brightest of it, is the velvet softness of the atmosphere. On
the mountains of California, throughout the greater part of the year,
the presence of an atmosphere is hardly recognized, and the thin,
white, bodiless light of the morning comes to the peaks and glaciers as
a pure spiritual essence, the most impressive of all the terrestrial
manifestations of God. The clearest of Alaskan air is always
appreciably substantial, so much so that it would seem as if one might
test its quality by rubbing it between the thumb and finger. I never
before saw summer days so white and so full of subdued lustre.
The winter storms, up to the end of December when I left Wrangell, were
mostly rain at a temperature of thirty-five or forty degrees, with
strong winds which sometimes roughly lash the shores and carry scud far
into the woods. The long nights are then gloomy enough and the value of
snug homes with crackling yellow cedar fires may be finely appreciated.
Snow falls frequently, but never to any great depth or to lie long. It
is said that only once since the settlement of Fort Wrangell has the
ground been covered to a depth of four feet. The mercury seldom falls
more than five or six degrees below the freezing-point, unless the wind
blows steadily from the mainland. Back from the coast, however, beyond
the mountains, the winter months are very cold. On the Stickeen River
at Glenora, less than a thousand feet above the level of the sea, a
temperature of from thirty to forty degrees below zero is not uncommon.