COOK’S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE.
Cook’s “Great River.”—The Tide-rips, and their Power in Cook’s
Inlet.—The Impressive Mountains of the Inlet.—The Glaciers of
Turnagain Canal.—Old Russian Settlements.—Kenai Shore of the
Inlet, the Garden-spot of Alaska.—Its Climate best Suited to
Civilized Settlement.—The Old “Colonial Citizens” of the Russian
Company.—Small Shaggy Siberian Cattle.—Burning Volcano of
Ilyamna.—The Kenaitze Indians.—Their Primitive, Simple Lives.—They
are the Only Native Land-animal Hunters of Alaska.—Bears and Bear
Roads.—Wild Animals seek Shelter in Volcanic Districts.—Natives
Afraid to Follow Them.—Kenaitze Architecture.—Sunshine in Cook’s
Inlet.—Splendid Salmon.—Waste of Fish as Food by Natives.—The
Pious Fishermen of Neelshik.—Russian Gold-mining Enterprise on the
Kaknoo, 1848-55.—Failure of our Miners to Discover Paying Mines in
this Section.
That volcanic energy and amazing natural variation of the region
known as Cook’s Inlet, and the Peninsula of Alaska, endow it with a
certain fascination which it is hard to adequately define in words,
and difficult to portray. The rugged, uninviting boldness of the
Kenai Mountains turn us abruptly, after our departure at Noochek, to
the southward, where, in an unbroken frowning cordon of one hundred
and fifty miles in length, they bar us out from the waters of that
striking estuary—the greatest on the northwest coast, which is so
well exhibited by the map to everybody as Cook’s Inlet. But it is
known only in name—not by the faintest appreciation, even, of its
real character and of its strange belongings.
Two and three hundred miles still farther north than Sitka it does
not in itself present that increased wintry aspect at any season of
the year which would be most naturally looked for—but it does offer,
in physical contour and phenomena, a most marked contrast to the
Alexander archipelago and its people. It is an exceedingly dangerous
and difficult arm of the sea to navigate, and prompts an involuntary
thought of admiration for the nautical genius, skill, and courage of
Captain Cook, who sailed up to the very head of this entirely unknown
gulf, in 1778, seeking that mythical northwest passage round the
continent—his dauntless exploration to the utter limit of Turnagain
Canal—his extraordinary retreat in his clumsy ships, and safe
threading of his way out and through the hundreds of then absolutely
nameless and chartless islets and reefs to the shoals of Bering
Sea—all this, viewed to-day, seems simply marvellous, that he should
have escaped all these dangers which the best sailor now hesitates to
undertake, even with excellent courses laid down and determined for
him.
The ship’s entrance to this great land-locked gulf, which the
Russians named, for many years, the Bay of Kenai, lies between
the extreme end of that peninsula called Cape Elizabeth, and Cape
Douglas, which is a bold promontory jutting out from the Alaskan
mainland. Nearly half-way between the two points is a group of bleak,
naked islets, the Barren Islands: around them the tide-rips of this
channel, which they obstruct, boil in savage fury, and are the dread
of every navigator, civilized or Innuit, who is brought near to them;
these violent and irregular tidal currents here, even in perfectly
calm weather, will toss the waters so that the wildest fury of a
tempest elsewhere cannot raise so great a disturbance over the sea,
or one which will so quickly wash a vessel under.
When your ship, bound in, passes this Alaskan “Hell Gate,” she enters
into a broad and ample expanse of water caused by the widening
effect of two large bays which are just opposed to each other on
the opposite shores. The coast of the Kenai Peninsula is low, the
mountains contiguous are not high, though toward the interior the
ridges become much loftier; but everywhere between them and this
coast-line is that characteristic marshy tundra of the Arctic—a
low, flat, broad strip, varying in width from forty to fifty miles,
through which sluggishly flow a multitude of streams and brooks,
wooded with birch, poplar, and spruce everywhere on the banks, but
bare of timber over the great bulk of its expanse. As the inlet
contracts still further, especially at the point between the two
headlands of East and West Foreland, the tide again increases in
velocity and violence of action until it attains a speed of eight
and nine knots an hour, with an average vertical rise and fall of
twenty-four to twenty-six feet. The northeastern extremity of this
large arm of the sea, which Cook entered with the confident hope of
finding a watery circuit of a continent, and, being disappointed,
applied to it the name of “Turnagain,” presents a tidal phenomena
equal to that so well recognized in the Bay of Fundy. Here the tide
comes in with a thundering roar, raising a “bore” wave that advances
like an express train in rapidity, carrying everything before it
in its resistless onward, upward sweep. High banks of clay and
gravel, which at low-tide seem as though they were far removed from
submersion, are flooded instantly, to remain so until the ebb takes
place. The natives never fail to remember the angry warning of this
incoming tide; they always hurriedly rush out of their huts, scan
quickly everything surrounding, lest some utensil, some canoe, or
basket-weir be thoughtlessly left within the remorseless rush of that
swift-coming flood.
Those glacial sheets which fill countless ravines and cañons in
the mountain ridges at the head of Cook’s Inlet, especially of
Turnagain Canal, and avalanches of snow, from their lofty cradles
thereon, all sweep down together upon the wooded flanks below, and
are thus destroying great belts of forest and piling up innumerable
heaps of rocky débris to such an extent as to often change the
superficial aspect of an entire section of country from season to
season; meanwhile the tide rushing up and down over this drift of
avalanches and glaciers, carries the débris hither and thither, so as
to constantly alter the channels, and the very outlines of the coast
itself.
One of the oldest and best of Russian posts was early established on
the Kenai Peninsula, a few miles to the southward of that narrowing
of Cook’s Inlet, caused by the two Forelands. On the low banks of
the Kinik River, and facing the gulf, the ruins of the “Redoubt St.
Nicholas” are still to be plainly seen, though at the time of the
transfer of the Territory, this old post was yet fortified with a
high stockade and octagonal bastions. But both stockade and bastions
have disappeared since then; a number of new frame buildings have
been erected close by, and quite a colony of Russian half-breeds
are living here now, trading, and growing, to better advantage than
anywhere else in Alaska, fair crops of potatoes and turnips. They
keep a few hardy cattle, and it is said that as much as ten or twelve
acres of ground are under cultivation by them.
The aspect of the country surrounding this settlement is much more
suggestive of farming and cattle-raising than is that presented
anywhere else in the Alaskan Territory. The land is rolling and
hilly, the higher eminences being covered with thick spruce
forests; but as you advance into the interior, great swamps of
tangled heather, fir, jungle, and sphagnum are prevalent. The soil
everywhere, not covered with grass and forest, is mossy, with a
little grass and many bushes. The trees are large, fifty to sixty
feet high, and eighteen inches to twenty-four in diameter, mostly
spruce—no cedar or hemlock. That district adjoining the East Foreland
Head is, perhaps, the best with reference to dry, fertile soil,
for, in its vicinity, there are broad plains where wild timothy and
red-top grasses grow to the height of your waist and shoulders. An
extended experience of the Russians taught them to locate their
agricultural operations here; that the coast-line belt of the Kenai
Peninsula, between the Forelands and Kooshiemak Bay, a belt of low
and semi-prairie uplands some eighty miles in length, and varying in
depth from ten to twenty, was the most eligible base of agricultural
effort afforded anywhere in Alaska, the quality of the crops always
being best near the coast, the soil being drier, and the danger of
little nipping summer-frosts wholly abated.
The several small settlements which we find upon this pastoral
strip to-day have a curious history, as to the origin of their
inhabitants. About the period of 1836-38, the expenses of the Russian
American Company in maintaining their trading stations in Alaska
were increasing to an alarming degree, while the receipts remained
stationary, or fell off. An enquiry into its cause revealed it. The
fact was, that hundreds of superannuated employés were drawing their
salaries and subsistence, rendering no adequate return for the same.
These persons had grown old, and had lost their health in serving
the company; were, nearly all of them, infirm survivors of Shellikov
and Baranov’s parties, whose daring and energy had established the
company. It would be inhuman to discharge these aged and crippled
Russians, and throw them upon their own resources in such a region.
After much deliberation the company was authorized by the Crown to
make the following terms of settlement and relief, and thus locate
them as permanent pensioners and settlers in the country. Therefore
all of the old employés who had married or lived with native or
half-breed women, and who were unable to successfully engage in
the trading avocations of the company, by reason of age and other
infirmities, were, upon their written or witnessed request, after
being stricken from the pay-rolls, provided for in this manner.
The company was obliged to select and donate a piece of ground,
build a comfortable dwelling, furnish agricultural tools, seeds,
cattle and fowls, and supply the pensioner receiving all this with
provisions enough to support him and his wife for one year. These
“old colonial citizens” (as they were called), thus established,
were then exempted from all taxation, military duty, or molestation
whatsoever, and a list of their names was annually forwarded in
the reports of the company. The children of those settlers were at
liberty to enter or not, as they pleased, the service of the company
at stated salaries. The company, furthermore, was commanded to
purchase all the surplus produce of these pensioners, furs, and dried
fish, etc. This order of the Crown, thus fixing the status of those
old servants, also included the half-breeds who were equally infirm
by reason of such service. Such whites, or Russians, were officially
designated “colonial citizens,” the half-breeds were styled “colonial
settlers.”
The descendants of these pensioned servants of the Russian Company
are the men and women you observe to-day in those little hamlets
scattered along the east coast of Cook’s Inlet, or the Kenai
Peninsula. They are bright, clean, and, though very, very poor, still
appear wholly independent. They are engaged in small trading with the
Kenaitze savages and in their limited agricultural efforts, whereby
they have potatoes, turnips, and other hardy vegetables. The cattle,
of which they have a few in each settlement, are of the small, shaggy
Siberian breed, not much larger than Shetland ponies, and capable of
living in the rigors of a winter which would destroy or permanently
injure our breeds of neat cattle. These people make butter by
laboriously shaking the milk in bottles.
They are obliged to shelter their cattle during winters from the
driving fury of heavy snow-storms, and when the herd ranges in the
grass-season, the boys and old men always have to guard it from the
deadly attention of the big brown bears which infest the entire
region. They have a regular “round-up” in each hamlet every night.
[Illustration: THE VOLCANO OF ILYAMNA: 12,060 FEET
The most prominent Fire Mountain of that Chain forming the North
Shore of Cook’s Inlet]
Everywhere on the west coast of Cook’s Inlet the mountains rise
steeply and rugged from the sea, a wild and uninviting contrast with
the park-like terraces of the Kenai coast just opposite. Here are
the same lofty ridges and smoking peaks which startled and oppressed
the brave heart of Captain Cook, as they muttered and trembled in
volcanic throes when he sailed by. The two cones which rise
dominant are the summits of Mount Ilyamna and the “Rédoute,” from
which columns of brownish smoke ascend by day and ruddy fire-glowings
by night. So precipitous is this mainland shore of Cook’s Inlet
that at only two small points of the most limited area is there any
low land to be found, and these spots have been promptly utilized
by the Kenaitze Indians as sites for their villages of Toyonok and
Kustatan. The dense, sombre coniferous forest which we have become
so familiar with, clothes the flanks of those grim mountain walls
with the thickest of all coverings to a height of one thousand feet
above the beaches below. Here and there we glance into the recesses
of a cañon or a gorge where the naked, mossy surface of immense rocky
declivities arrests and fixes the eye, while the glittering caps
of ice and snow far away above fit down snugly upon long, rough,
treeless intervals, covered with heather, lichens, and varied arctic
sphagnum.
The upper waters of Cook’s Inlet are said to be quite remarkable for
their barrenness of fish—salmon only being plenty in the running
season, ascending all the numerous rivers and rivulets; the reason
most likely is due to the turbid upheaval of the bottoms everywhere
by that violent tidal bore which prevails, recurring twice every
twenty-four hours. The Indians here employ a curious trestle or
staging of poles, which they use in spearing salmon, and netting them
from its support.
An extensive spread of the largest fresh-water lake in Alaska just
over the divide from Cook’s Inlet, early led the Russians to explore
it, and to find a portage via its waters to the sea of Bering. But,
though this barrier can be passed by an active man in a single
day, yet it has divided, and continues to absolutely separate, two
distinct races of savages—the Innuits from the Indians; for the
Kenaitze are Indians, as we understand them, based upon our types of
the great plains and foothills of the Rocky Mountains; and, living
here as they do on the shores of Cook’s Inlet, they live, perhaps,
in the most romantic and picturesque region of Alaska. Burning
volcanoes, smoking and grumbling, a large inland sea rolling for
miles and miles therein, and lay at their feet; wide watery moors,
tundra, timber and lakes, and rivers rising in the snow-white peaks
everywhere visible, all combine to make the most striking lights and
shades of natural scenery that human thought can realize in fancy.
[Illustration: A Kenaitze Chief: Cook’s Inlet.]
These natives of Cook’s Inlet are strongly defined from those of
Kadiak as a separate people, both in language (which no white man has
ever been able to repeat), in appearance, and in disposition. They
are true Athabascans, or exactly like the meat-eating Indians of our
great North American interior. An average man here is an Indian of
medium height, say five feet seven or nine inches, well built and
symmetrical, lithe and sinewy. The cold glint of his small, jet-black
eyes is not relieved by any expression of good humor in his taciturn
features and physical bearing. His nose will present, as a rule, the
full aquiline or Julius Cæsar outline. Their skin is darker than that
of the Innuit, though now and then a comely young person will show
perceptible blood-mantlings to the cheeks. The mouth is large—lips
rather full; beardless faces are the rule. Their women are much
better-looking than either the Siwash squaws of the Sitkan region, or
the females of the Aleutian and Innuit races. Their hair is worn in
clubbed bunches and braids, hanging upon their backs, thickly larded
over with grease, and often powdered with feathers and geese-down.
In the immediate vicinity of the shores of Cook’s Inlet the primitive
habits of these savages have been very much changed by their daily
intercourse with the Creoles; but at the head of the gulf, especially
in the Sooshetno and Keknoo valleys, they are still dressed in their
deer-skin shirts and trousers, men and women alike. They work those
garments with a great variety of beads, porcupine quills stained in
bright colors, and grass plaitings.
These Kenaitze are the only real hunters in all Alaska. They place
little or no dependence on fish like the other tribes, unless we
except the walrus-eating Eskimo, who hunt, however, in water-craft
entirely. And were they not natural Nimrods, the abundance of game
which abounds in their district would stimulate such ambition alone
in itself. The brown bear[41] of Alaska is found almost everywhere;
but it seems to prefer an open, swampy country to that dense timber
most favored by its ursine relative, the black bear. It attains
its greatest size, and exhibits the most ferocity, on the Kenai
Peninsula. It should be called the grizzly, because it is frequently
shot here fully as large, if not larger,[42] than those examples
recorded in Oregon and California.
This wide-ranging brute is found away up beyond the Arctic Circle,
though never coming down to the coast of the icy ocean except
at Kotzebue Sound. It is a most expert fisherman, and a terror
to the reindeer and cariboo of those hyperborean solitudes. It
frequents, during the salmon season, all the Alaskan rivers and their
tributaries which empty into Bering Sea and the North Pacific, as
far as the fish can ascend. When the run for the year is over, then
the animal retires into the thick recesses of semi-timbered uplands
and tundra, where berries and small game, deer especially, are most
abundant.
Everywhere throughout this large extent of Alaska the footpaths, or
roads, of that omnipresent ursine traveller arrest your attention.
The banks of all streams are lined by the well-trodden trails of
these heavy brutes, and offer far better facilities for progress than
those afforded by the paths of men. Not only are the swampy plains
intersected by such well-worn routes of travel, but the mountains
themselves and ridges, to the very summits thereof, are thus laid
out; and the judgment of a bear in traversing a rough, mountainous
divide is always of the best—his track over is sure to be the most
practicable route. On the steep, volcanic uplands of the mountainous
coast of the west shore in Cook’s Inlet, groups of twenty, and even
thirty, of these huge bears can be seen together feeding upon the
berries and roots which are found there in season. Their skins are
not valuable, however, being “patched” and harsh-haired. Then they
are very fierce, so that they are not commonly hunted anywhere except
by the Kenaitze, who, like all other aboriginal hunters, respect them
profoundly, and invariably address a few eulogistic words of praise
to a bear before killing or attempting to kill it.[43]
[Illustration: Bear “Roads” over the Moors of Oonimak Islands.]
A peculiar dread which all the natives of this region have, of
visiting those areas where volcanic energy manifests itself, is
taken advantage of by those dumb beasts upon which the savage wages
relentless warfare; the immediate vicinity of craters, of steaming
hot springs and solfataras, will always be a rendezvous for game,
especially bears, which seem to fully understand that in staying
there they will never be disturbed. But the Kenaitze are ardent
hunters, nevertheless, and spend most of their time and energy in the
chase of land animals—making long journeys into the interior, and
gloomy recesses of mountainous cañons and defiles, to follow and find
the fur-bearing quarry peculiar to their country.
They have regular tracks of main travel, where, like stage stations
on our frontier post-roads, at intervals they have erected
shelter-huts, in which they often live with their families for months
of the year at a time; they make birch-bark canoes for their river
and lake transit, but in navigating Cook’s Inlet, they buy skin
bidarkas of the Kadiak model and use them altogether. They are fairly
independent of salt water, and seldom pass many hours upon it, except
in travelling and trading one with another, and the Creoles; they
are, however, very expert at fresh-water fishing through holes in the
ice for trout in the thousand and one lakes, large and small, which
are so common in their country.[44]
As these natives live in their permanent settlements, we find them
distinguished by a peculiar architecture. Their houses are fashioned
out of logs, and set above ground resting upon its surface; the
logs are hollowed out on one side so as to fit one upon the other
in true spoon-fashion, and make a really air and water-tight wall;
an enclosure of these walls will hardly ever be larger than 20 feet
square, and most of them never go over 12 or 15 feet; they have
regularly laid cross-rafters, with a low, or half-pitch, over which
spruce-bark shells are so spread as to shed rain and drifting snow;
these shingle slabs are kept in place by a number of heavy poles,
lashed transversely across; a fireplace is always in the centre
with a very small smoke-hole opened in the roof just above it; the
door is a square aperture cut through the logs at the least exposed
front, about large enough to easily admit the ingress and egress of
a crouching Indian. It is stopped in stormy weather by a bear-skin,
hung so as to fall directly over it from the inside. When the door is
thus closed the naturally dark interior becomes almost wholly so; but
the howling of a tempest, laden with rain, sleet or snow, as the case
may be, renders this gloomy indoor perfectly radiant to the senses of
its sheltered inmates, and they loll in robes and blankets and doze
away the time on the rude wooden platform which surrounds the walls
and keeps their bodies from the cold damp earth. Upon this staging
they spread grass mats and skins, and, in fact, it is a catchall for
everything.
[Illustration: The Bedroom Annex of a Kenaitze Rancherie.]
An odd feature seen in some of the most pretentious houses of those
inlet savages, is the presence of a little kennel-like bedroom
annex, which many of the most wealthy or important have built up
against the main walls. These boxlike additions are tightly framed
and joined to the houses, the only entrance being from the inside of
the main structure by a small hole cut directly through the logs of
the wall; they are sleeping chambers, and are furnished with a rough
plank floor, and sometimes a window made of a piece of translucent
bladder-gut. They are also reserved and special apartments during
the occasion of those visits of ceremony which Indians often pay,
one to each other. But the main idea is to have these tight little
dormitories so snug and warm that they will insure the comfortable
rest of the owner therein without much burdensome bed-clothing—in
many cases the Kenaitze can sleep here in the coldest weather
without any covering at all, and do. Such a bed is a great and
priceless luxury to them.
No furniture annoys the Kenai housekeeper, unless the small square
blocks of wood used occasionally as stools or seats can be so styled;
the grease and fire-boxes which we have seen in Sitkan households
are also duplicated here, but though made of wood they are not so
neatly put together. The traders recently have introduced a very
novel feature to the interior of nearly every Kenaitze house; it is
the common, cheap, box-imitation, in miniature, of a Saratoga trunk
with lock and key. Those oddly contrasted articles will be found
everywhere among these people, who keep in them all their valuables,
such as charms, and toys for the children, flashy handkerchiefs,
small tools fashioned out of bits of iron and steel, bags of thread
and stripped sinews, needles, ammunition, and their percussion-caps,
which are to them as pearls without price—nothing so precious.
Outside of this trunk-craze, and their odd sleeping-rooms, these
Indians do not live together or act differently from the usual habit
and manner of savages proper, so familiar to us by reason of repeated
descriptions published of our own meat-eaters who live near by. They
crave nothing from the white trader save powder, lead, good rifles,
percussion-caps, tobacco, calico, and the sham trunks alluded to.
The sun shines out over Cook’s Inlet much more than it does in the
Sitkan region and the Aleutian Islands. The proportion of fair,
bright weather is larger than that experienced anywhere else in all
Alaska or its coast. The winter months here are not excessively cold;
snow falls in December—sometimes as late as 3d of January before the
first flakes of the season arrive. By the first to middle of May
it has usually melted away on the lowlands, and the grass springs
up anew, green and luxuriant. Summer, and even winter storms, are
drawn along the lofty ranges of the Kenai Peninsula when all is
serene and pleasant at the same time on the moors and lowlands of the
inlet shores. Often, too, the people of that coast can look up to
a continued falling of heavy rain and snow on the mountain summits
of the steep ridges across the inlet, while they bask in unclouded
sunshine, and have no interruption of its comfort.
We ourselves have as yet made but slight use of the natural resources
and advantages of Cook’s Inlet. A party of San Francisco merchants
have established at the mouth of the Kassilov River a salmon
cannery, which has been worked to the full limit of demand; and a
smaller, similar factory is located at the head of this inlet, in the
Kaknoo estuary.
The finest salmon known to man, savage or civilized, both in flavor
and size combined, is that giant fish which runs in especial good
form and number into Cook’s Inlet, and which the Russians called the
“chowichah;”[45] they are most abundant during the summer neap-tides,
but they are not as numerous as are the several other varieties of
smaller and far less palatable salmonidæ, which also run up here with
them. The average length of these superb chowichah fish is four feet,
and a weight of fifty pounds is a low medium. They appear regularly
on the 20th and 22d of every May, running in pairs, refusing the
hook, though hugging the shore lines. Our people catch them in
floating gill-nets, and in weirs of brush and saplings of wicker-work
woven with spruce-roots and bark, which are erected on the mud-flats
at the river mouth, during low tide.
[Illustration: SALMON WEIRS OF THE KENAITZE
Method employed by Indians of Cook’s Inlet to catch Salmon]
The king salmon, however, is erratic in running to any one spawning
spot, and in this respect differs from all the rest of its family,
which is remarkably constant in annually returning to the same
spawning ground. But the abundance of salmon which we see in their
reproductive periods of each year, ascending every river and possible
rivulet that communicates with the sea in Alaska south of Bering’s
Straits, is a never-failing source of wonder and delight to the
white visitor and a measure of infinite creature-comfort to his
physical being while sojourning here. Also, the pleasant thought
constantly arises that when we shall have a populous empire on the
Pacific slope, as we have now in the Mississippi Valley and east
of the Alleghanies, what a handsome use we will make of this waste
of fish-food wealth[46] which we now observe in the vast realm
of its indulgence throughout Alaska. Also in another, but wholly
correct sense, the natives themselves shamefully waste the flesh of
those fine salmon. To illustrate the extraordinary nature of this
suggestion, let the following statements of fact be recalled: The
native population of Cook’s Inlet is not large—it is embraced in
about one hundred and sixty-eight families, averaging four souls to
each household; everyone of these families prepares at least seven
hundred and fifty to eight hundred pounds of dried salmon for its own
specific consumption during the winter months. That amount of cured
fish, therefore, is about one hundred and twenty-six thousand pounds,
and as every pound weight of dried meat is equal to an original
weight of at least eight or nine pounds of fresh, or undried, then
this cured total gives us an immense aggregate of 1,000,000 pounds
of fresh salmon; this, figured down, shows that a single Indian uses,
during the winter solstice—five months—the enormous amount of 1,430
pounds of this rich-meated article of diet, or about ten pounds
every day, in addition to the bear-meat, deer, and sheep-meat, seal
and beluga oil, berries and roots which he is constantly consuming,
at the same time, in the greatest freedom, and which are always
in abundant supply. The full thought of my presentation will be
better understood when it is remembered that a pound of fresh salmon
has more nourishing and sustaining quality than the same amount
dried. The salt-dried codfish with which we are so familiar is very
different in its texture, and weighs many times more than it would if
it were cured by the air and smoke-exposure to which the natives of
Alaska are driven in preserving their fish.
An exceedingly happy illustration of the singular force of habit
which the salmon have in returning every recurring season to the
exact localities of their birth was afforded near the Creole
settlement of Neelshik on the Kenai Inlet coast. A small stream runs
down to the gulf from the mountains and moors of the interior. Its
mouth had been closed by a barrier of surf-raised sand and gravel
during storms in the winter of 1879-80, and through which the
sluggish stream filtered in its course without overflowing. When
the salmon, which had descended the year previously from the upper
waters of the stream in the course of their reproductive circuit,
again returned to renew such labors in the following season, this
unexpected wall barred their ingress. They did not turn away, but
actually leaped out upon this sandy spit, and many of them succeeded,
by spasmodic springs and wriggling, while on the dry gravel, in
getting across and into the river-water beyond! the Creoles, in the
meantime, having nothing to do except to walk down from their houses
and gather up the self-stranded salmon as they fancied their size and
condition. Inasmuch as these “old colonial settlers” are very pious,
as well as very indolent, they were profuse in giving thanks to their
patron saints for this unexpected bounty.
The color of gold everywhere found by washing the sands of Cook’s
Inlet on the Kenai shore early aroused the cupidity of the Russians.
They made systematic examinations here under the lead of experienced
men, between 1848 and 1855, and the Russian American Company spent a
great deal of money in the same time by sustaining a large force of
forty miners, directed by Lieutenant Doroshin, in active operations
at the head of the inlet on the Kaknoo River, and in the Kenai
Mountains and Prince William or Choogatch Alps. Gold was found, but
in such small quantities, compared with the labor of getting it,
that the ardor of the Russians soon cooled, and nothing as yet has
resulted from the prospecting of our own miners in this district, who
have been all over these Slavonian trails since the transfer.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] _Ursus richardsonii._
[42] One shot at Kenai Mission in 1880 measured nine feet two inches
in length.
[43] Perhaps fully half the brown-bear skins taken by the Alaskan
natives are retained by them, used as bedding, and hung up as
portières over the entrance-holes or doors to their houses; the
smaller skins are tanned and then cut into straps and lines to use
in sledge-fastenings, snowshoe network bottoms, because this leather
does not stretch when moist like deer and moose skin.
[44] The greatest number of different mammals found wild in any one
region of Alaska is to be recorded here: bears, brown and black;
deer, reindeer and the woodland cariboo; big-horn mountain sheep,
a long-haired variety. These animals are all shot. The trapped
varieties are: beaver, land-otter, porcupines, whistling marmot or
woodchuck, large gray wolves, lynx, wolverine, marten, mink, ermine,
weasels, and muskrats. Wild-fowl: grouse both white and ruffled,
geese, ducks, sandhill cranes, and the great northern swan. Berries:
whortleberries, salmonberries, gooseberries, and cranberries; all
gathered in season and mixed with the everlasting rancid oil used by
every native in every section of Alaska.
[45] _Oncorhynchus chouicha_—examples of this species have a recorded
weight of one hundred pounds each, and six feet in length; it is also
abundant in the Yukon and Kuskokvim Rivers.
[46] Dr. T. H. Bean, who, as a trained ichthyologist, passed
the season of 1880 investigating the fish of Alaska by cruising
throughout its waters, says:
“The greatest fish-wealth of Alaska, so far as the shore fisheries
are concerned, lies in the abundance of salmon of the genus
_Oncorhynchus_, which is represented by five species—_chouicha_,
_keta_, _kisutch_, _nerka_, and _gorbuscha_. The first three of
these are the largest, the whole series being named in the order
of their size. _O. chouicha_ is the giant of the group, and is the
most important commercially; it attains to its greatest size in the
large rivers, which it ascends long distances in its spawning season.
In Alaska it is known to extend as far north as Bering Strait,
and it is especially abundant in Cook’s Inlet and in the Yukon.
Individuals weighing nearly one hundred pounds are occasionally
reported from these waters, and even in the Columbia. The finest
product of this salmon is the salted bellies, which are prepared
principally on the Kenai, Kassilov, and Yukon Rivers; the fame of
this luxury once extended to the centre of government in Russia, The
well-known ‘quinnat salmon’ is the same species; its importance, as
evidenced by the efforts of the United States Fish Commission and
other commissions toward its propagation and distribution, is too
well understood to require additional mention. The great bulk of the
salted salmon exported from Alaska are the small ‘red fish,’ _O.
nerka_; and this species is sought after simply on account of the
beautiful color of the flesh and not for its intrinsic value, which
is far below that of most of the other species. All the salmon extend
northward to Bering Strait, but only one, _gorbuscha_, is reported
as occurring north of the Arctic Circle; _gorbuscha_ is said by
trustworthy parties to reach the Colville River. In the early part
of its run the flesh of this little ‘humpback’ seems to me to be
particularly good. Other members of the family of _Salmonidæ_, and
very important ones, are the species of _Salmo_ (_purpuratus_ and
_gairdneri_) and _Salvelinus malma_, two of which reach a large size
in Alaska. The first two are not known to exist much to the northward
of Unalashka, while _malma_ is believed to extend to the Colville.
_S. gairdneri_ resembles the Atlantic salmon in size and shape, but
its habits are different; it is found filled with mature eggs in
June. I have not seen any very large examples of _S. purpuratus_ from
the Territory, but the species is extremely abundant and valuable for
food. The red-spotted char, _S. malma_, is everywhere plentiful and
is highly esteemed as a food-fish; it grows much larger in Northern
Alaska than in California, and has some commercial value as an export
in its sea-run condition under the name of ‘salmon trout.’ Natives of
Alaska make water-proof clothing from the skins of this fish.”