LONELY NORTHERN WASTES.
The Mississippi of Alaska: the Yukon River, and its Thorough
Exploration.—Its vast Deltoid Mouth.—Cannot be Entered by Sea-going
Vessels.—Its Valley, and its Tributaries.—Dividing Line between
the Eskimo and the Indian on its Banks.—The Trader’s Steamer; its
Whistle in this Lone Waste of the Yukon.—Michaelovsky, the Trading
Centre for this Extensive Circumpolar Area.—The Characteristic
Beauties of an Arctic Landscape in Summer.—Thunder-storms on
the Upper Yukon; never Experienced on the Coast and at its
Mouth.—Gorgeous Arches of Auroral Light; Beautiful Spectacular
Fires in the Heavens.—Unhappy Climate.—Saint Michael’s to the
Northward.—Zagoskin, the Intrepid Young Russian Explorer,
1842.—Snow Blizzards.—Golovin Bay; our People Prospecting
there for Lead and Silver.—Drift-wood from the Yukon Strews
the Beaches of Bering Sea.—Ookivok, and its Cliff-cave
Houses.—Hardy Walrus-hunters.—Grantley Harbor; a Reminder of
a Costly American Enterprise and its Failure.—Cape Prince of
Wales—facing Asia, thirty-six miles away.—Simeon Deschnev, the
first White Man to see Alaska, 1648. His Bold Journey.—The Diomede
Islands; Stepping-stones between Asia and America in Bering
Straits.—Kotzebue Sound; the Rendezvous for Arctic Traders; the
Last Northern Station Visited by Salmon.—Interesting Features of
the Place.
Lo! to the wintry winds the pilot yields,
His bark careering o’er unfathomed fields,
Now far he sweeps, where scarce a summer smiles,
On Behring’s rocks, or Greenland’s naked isles.
—CAMPBELL.
Is it not a little singular that the lonely and monotonous course
of the Yukon River, reaching as it does to the very limits of the
pathless interior of a vast, unexplored region on either side, should
be that one section of all others in Alaska the best known to us?
An almost uninterrupted annual march has been made up and down its
dreary banks since 1865, by men[157] well qualified to describe its
varying moods and endless shoals—every turn in its flood, every
shelving bank of alluvium or rocky bluff that lines the margin of its
turbid current, has been minutely examined, named and renamed to suit
the occasion and character of a traveller.
The Yukon River is not reached by traders as any other stream of
size is in Alaska, by sailing into its mouth. No ocean-going craft
can get within sixty miles of its deltoid entrance. Were a sailor
foolhardy enough to attempt such a thing, he would be hard aground,
in soft silt or mud, a hundred miles from land in a direct line from
the point of his destination. Therefore it is the habit of mariners
to sail up as far north as Norton’s Sound, and then turn a little
to the southward and anchor their schooners or steamers under a
lee of Stuart’s and St. Michael’s Islands, where the old post of
Michaelovsky is established on the latter.
The “Rédoute Saint Michael” was founded here in 1835 by Lieutenant
Tebenkov, and has been ever since, and is to-day, the most important
post in the Alaskan North. This post is a shipping point for the
accumulated furs gathered by all traders from the Lower and Upper
Yukon, and the Tannanah, the annual yield from such points being the
largest and the most valuable catch of land-furs taken in Alaska.
A vessel coming into St. Michael’s at any time during the summer
will find, encamped around its warehouses many bands of Innuits and
Indians who have come in there, over long distances of hundreds of
miles, from the north, east, and south. They are there as traders and
middlemen. The fur-trading on the Yukon is very irregular as to its
annual time and place—the traders constantly moving from settlement
to settlement, because this year they may get only a thousand skins
where they got five thousand last season, and _vice versa_. It is
impossible to locate the best single spots for trade; the catch in
different sections will vary every winter according to the depth of
snow, the severity of climate, the prevalence of forest fires, or
starvation of whole villages, owing to unwonted absence of fish, and
so on.
In midsummer the Yukon is reached by small, light-draft, stern-wheel
steamers, which, watching their opportunity, run down from St.
Michael’s and enter its mouth, towing behind them a string of five
or six large wooden boats which are each laden with several tons
of merchandise. The scream of their whistles and puffing of these
little trading-steamers as they slowly drag such tows against a rapid
current, is the only enlivenment which the immense lonely solitudes
of the Yukon are subjected to by our people. That area of watery
waste is so wide and long, and the boats are so small and few in
number, that even this innovation must be watched for every year with
a hawk’s eye, or it will pass unobserved.
[Illustration: Trader’s Steamer towing Bateaux laden with Goods up
the Yukon.
[_The Kvichpak just below Mercier’s Station._]]
The waters of the Kvichpak are discharged into Bering Sea through a
labyrinth of blind, misleading channels, sloughs, and swamps, which
extend for more than one hundred miles up until they unite near
Chatinak with the main channel of that great river. This enormous
deltoid mouth of the Yukon is a most mournful and depressing
prospect. The country itself is scarcely above the level of tides,
and covered with a monotonous cloak of scrubby willows and rank
sedges. It is water, water—here, there, and everywhere—a vast inland
sea filled with thousands upon thousands of swale islets scarcely
peeping above its surface. Broader and narrower spaces between low
delta lands are where the whirl of its current is strongly marked by
a rippling rush and the drift-logs that it carries upon its muddy
bosom. These are the channels, the paths through the maze that leads
from the sea up to the river proper; and where they unite, at a point
above Andrievsky and Chatinak, the Yukon has a breadth of twenty
miles; and again, at many places, away on and up this impressive
stream as far as seven or eight hundred miles beyond, this same great
width will be observed, but the depth is very much decreased.
Myriads of breeding geese, ducks, and wading water-fowl resort
to this desolation of the deltoid mouth of the Yukon, where, in
countless pools and the thick covers of tall grass and sedge, they
are provided with a most lavish abundance of food and afforded the
happiest shelter from enemies; but the stolid Innuit does not affect
the place. The howling wintry gales and frightful curse of mosquitoes
in the summer are too much even for him. His people live in only six
or seven small wretched hamlets below Andrievsky and Chatinak—less
than five hundred souls in all, including the entire population
found right on the coast of the delta, between Pastolik in the north
and Cape Romiantzov on the south. Above Anvik on the main river the
Innuit does not like to go. He has no love for those Indians who
claim that region all to themselves and resent his appearance on
the scene. Whenever he does, however, he is always in company with
the traders, and he never gets out of their sight and protection,
even when making that overland portage from St. Michael’s by the
Oonalakleet trail.
As we emerge from those dreary, low and watery wastes of the delta at
Chatinak, the bluffs there, though desolate enough themselves, with
their rusty barren slopes, yet they give us cheerful assurance of
the fact that all Alaska is not under water, and that the borders of
its big river are at last defined on both sides. High rolling hills
come down boldly on the left bank as we ascend; but the right shore
is still low and but little removed from the flatness of a swale. The
channel of the river now zigzags from side to side (in the usual way
of running bodies of water which wash out and undermine), building
up bars and islets, and sweeping in its resistless flood an immense
aggregate of soil and timber far into Bering Sea. The alluvial banks,
wherever they are lifted above this surging current, which runs at
an average rate of eight miles an hour, are continually caving down,
undermined, and washed away. So sudden and precipitate are these
landslides, sometimes, that they have almost destroyed whole trading
expeditions of the Russians and natives, who barely had time to
escape with their lives as the earthy avalanches rolled down upon the
river’s edge and into its resistless current.
Above the delta large spruce and fir-trees, aspens, poplars, and
plats of alders and willows grow abundantly on the banks; but they do
not extend far back from the river on either side into any portions
of the country, which is low and marshy, and which embraces so large
a proportion of the entire landscape. Small larch-trees are also
interspersed. The river is filled with a multitude of long, narrow
islands, all timbered as the banks are, and which are connected one
with the other by sand and gravel bars, that are always dry and fully
exposed at low-water stages. Immense piles of bleached and splintered
drift-logs are raised on the upper ends of these islands, having
lodged there at intervals when high water was booming down.
Between Anvik and Paimoot are many lofty clay cliffs, entirely made
up of clean, pure earth of different bright colors—red, yellow,
straw-colored, and white, with many intermediate shades. The Yukon
runs down from its remote sources at the Stickeen divide in British
Columbia, down through a wild, semi-wooded country, a succession of
lakes and lakelets, through a region almost devoid of human life.
That extensive area, wherein we find such scant or utter absence
of population, is, south of the Yukon, very densely timbered with
spruce-trees on the mountains, and with poplars, birch, willow, along
the courses of the stream and margins of the lakes. Its immediate
recesses only are occasionally penetrated by roving parties of Indian
hunters, who now and then leave the great river and the Tannanah for
that purpose. It is a silent, gloomy wilderness. To the northward
of the Yukon this variety in timber still continues; indeed, it
reaches as far into the Arctic Circle and toward the ocean there as
the seaward slopes of those low and rolling mountains extend, which
rise in irregular ridges trending northeast and southwest. These
hills are between one hundred and one hundred and fifty miles from
the banks of the Kvichpak. Beyond this divide and water-shed of the
northern tributaries of the Yukon a forest seldom appears in any case
whatsoever, except where a low, straggling spur of hills stretches
itself down to the shores of an icy sea; but it is stunted and scant
in its hyperborean distribution thereon.
It is not necessary to enter into a description of the appearance and
disposition of these Yukon Indians who live on this great river above
Anvik, since they resemble those savages which we are so familiar
with in the British American interior, Oregon, and Dakota.
The Russians, in regarding them, at once took notice of their marked
difference from the more stolid Innuits, so that they were styled,
jocularly, by Slavonian pioneers, “Frenchmen of the North,” and
“Gens de Butte.” The Innuits called them “Ingaleeks,” and that is
their general designation on the river to-day. They differ from our
Plain Indians in this respect only: they are all dog-drivers. They
rely upon the river and its tributaries largely for food, using
birch-bark canoes—no skin-boats whatever. They have an overflowing
abundance of natural food-supply of flesh, and fowl also, and when
they suffer, as they often do, from starvation, it is due entirely
to their own startling improvidence during seasons of plenty, which
occur every year. A decided infusion of Innuit blood will be observed
in the faces of the Indians who live at Anvik, and some distance
up the river from that point of landed demarcation between Innuit
and Ingaleek. In olden times the latter were wont to raid upon
the settlements of the former, and carried off Innuit women into
captivity whenever they could do so, treating the Eskimo just as the
Romans raped the Sabines.
An Innuit is not thrifty at all, but when brought into comparison
with the Indian he is a bright and shining light in this respect.
Among the Ingaleeks of the Yukon a spring famine regularly prevails
every year during the months of April and May, or until the ice
breaks up and the salmon run. One would naturally think that the
bitter memories of gnawing hunger endured for weeks before an arrival
of abundant food, would stimulate that savage to glad exertion when
it did arrive so as to lay by of such abundance enough to insure
him and his family against recurring starvation next year. Strange
to say, it does not. The fish come; the famished natives gorge
themselves, and thus engorged, loaf and idle that time away which
should be employed in drying and preserving at least sufficient to
keep them in stock when the fish have left the stream. Often we will
actually see them lazily going to their slender store which they have
newly prepared, and eat thereof, while salmon are still running in
the river at their feet! Such improvidence and reckless disregard
of the need of the morrow is hard indeed for us to realize. Many of
the beasts of the field and forest with which the savage is well
acquainted set him annually, but in vain, a better example.
White traders during the last twenty years have so thoroughly
traversed the course of the Yukon, and, since our control of
Alaska, little stern-wheel steamers annually make trips from the
sea, accompanied with retinues of white men—these incidents have
thoroughly familiarized the Indians here with ourselves. But the
wilder Ingaleeks of the Tannanah, only six or seven hundred souls
in number, however, are as yet comparatively unknown to us. With an
exception of a white trader’s visit to their country in 1875,[158]
and the recent descent of the Tannanah by a plucky young officer
of the United States Army,[159] these Koltchanes have been unknown
at home and wholly undisturbed by us. There are less than sixteen
hundred Indians living over the entire Yukon region—a fact which
speaks eloquently for an exceeding scantiness of the population of
that vast landed expanse of this interior of the Alaskan mainland—a
great arctic moor north of the Kvichpak, which is a mere surface of
slightly thawed swale, swampy tundra, lakes and pools, sloughs and
sluggish rivers, in the summer solstice, while the wildest storms
of frigid winds, laden with snow and sleet, career in unchecked
fury over them during winter. Such an extreme climate is the full
secret of its marked paucity of human life. But that desolation of
winter does not prevent an immense migration of animal life to this
repellant section every summer from the south. Myriads of water-fowl,
such as geese, ducks, and the smaller forms, breed and moult here
then in all security, and free from molestation, while great herds of
reindeer troop over the lichen-bearing ridges. The musk-ox, however,
has never been known to range here or anywhere in Alaska within the
memory of man. Its fossil remains have been disinterred from the
banks of the Yukon, at several places (just as those of the mammoth
have), but that, with a few bleached skulls, is the only record of
this animal we can find which we would most naturally anticipate
meeting with on such ground, apparently so well adapted for it.
There is some difference of opinion as to whether the Yukon or the
Mississippi is the larger river, with respect to the volume of their
currents. The variation in this regard can hardly be very great,
either one way or the other. The Tannanah is the Missouri of the
Kvichpak, and swells the flood of that river very perceptibly below
its junction.
[Illustration: Michaeiovsky.
[_Extreme northern settlement of white Americans._]]
Michaeiovsky has been, and will continue to be, the chief rendezvous
of a small white residency of the Alaskan North. It is an irregularly
built _omnium_ of old Russian dwellings, warehouses, and a few of
our own structure. The stockade which once encircled it has long ago
been dispensed with, though the antique bastions and old brass cannon
still stand at one or two corners as they stood in early times,
well placed to overawe and intimidate a bold and hostile savage
people then surrounding them. The buildings are clustered together
on a small peninsula of an island, about twenty-five or thirty
feet above high-water mark; littered all around them are the small
outbuildings and the summer tents of Innuit and Indian tourists who
are loitering about for the double purpose of gratifying a little
curiosity, and of trading. An abundance of drift-wood from the Yukon
lies stranded on the beaches, and a large pile of picked, straight
logs have been hauled from the water and stacked upon one side of a
slope. The whole country, hill and plain, in every direction from
this post is a flat and alternately rolling moorland, or tundra, the
covering of which is composed principally of mosses and lichens, and
a sphagnous combination which produces in the short growing season
a yellowish-green carpet, with patches of pale lavender gray where
the lichens are most abundant. At sparse and irregular intervals
bunches of coarse sedge grasses rise, and the entire surface of moor
is crossed at various angles with lines of dwarf birches and an
occasional clump of alders and stunted willows. The most attractive
feature in such an arctic landscape, when summer has draped it
as we now behold it, is the nodding seed-plumes of the equisetum
grasses—they are tufts of a pure, fleecy white that, ruffled in the
breeze, light up the sombre russet swales with an almost electrical
beauty. Everywhere here, in less than eighteen inches or two feet
beneath this blossoming flora, will be found a solid foundation of
perpetual frost and ice—it never thaws lower. The flowers of that
tundra embrace a list of over forty beautiful species, chief among
them being phloxes, a pale-blue iris, white and yellow poppies,
several varieties of the red-flowered saxifrages, the broad-leaved
archangelica, and many delicately fronded ferns.
Twittering, darting flocks of barn-swallows hover and glide over
the old faded roofs and walls of Michaelovsky, and the bells of a
red-painted church, just beyond, come jangling sweetly across the
water, mingled with that homelike chattering of these swallows. But
a pious mission here is a practical failure in so far as any effect
upon the Innuit mind is concerned. During summer-time, in the Upper
Yukon country, thunder-showers are very common; down here, on the
coast, they are never experienced. The glory, however, of an auroral
display is divided equally between them, when from September until
March luminous waves and radii of pulsating rose, purple, green, and
blue flames light up and dance about the heavens—gorgeous arches of
yellow bands and pencil-points of crimson fire are hung and glitter
in the zenith. These exhibitions beggar description; they are weirdly
and surpassingly beautiful, far beyond all comparison with anything
else of a spectacular nature on earth.
In the autumn and in the early days of December, a low declination
of the sun tints up the clouds at sunrise and sunset into beautiful
masses of colors that rapidly come and go in their origination and
fading. Twilight is a lovely interval of the day in this latitude,
and is even enjoyed by the hard-headed traders themselves. Winter
is a weary drag here—about seven months—lasting from October until
well into May; but, in spite of its intense cold, there are many long
periods of its endurance characterized by clear, lovely weather,
while the warmer summer is rendered disagreeable by a large number of
cold misty days, rain, and gloomy palls of overhanging clouds which
shut down upon everything like a leaden cover.
We are accustomed to associate an occurrence of a real mirage with
dry, arid, desert countries, where the thirsty and sun-burned
traveller is mocked by illusions of clear lakes and a green oasis
just ahead. In truth, the mirage of an Alaskan tundra in midwinter
is fully as remarkable, and quite as tantalizing. When the trader
starts out with his dog-team, on an intensely still, cold day, the
vibrations of the air are so energetic that those blades of grass
which stick out from the snow, just ahead, seem to him like thickets
of willow- and birch-trees, around which he must make a painful
detour. Then, again, the ravines and valleys are transformed into
vast lakes, with the loftiest and most precipitous shores. On the
coast here, during cool, clear days in March, hills, which are thirty
or seventy-five miles away from the windows of Michaelovsky, are
lifted up and transported to the very beach of the island itself,
contorted and fantastic changes constantly taking place in the
picture, until suddenly a slight something, or a change perhaps in an
observer’s position, causes the singular delusion to vanish.
St. Michael’s is all by itself to-day; yet it, at one time, was not
the only settlement on the island; for, close by the fort, there were
two Mahlemoöt villages, Tahcik and Agahliak, whose inhabitants were
first to cordially invite the Russians to locate here in 1835. But
in 1842 the ravages of small-pox absolutely depopulated these native
towns, and a few survivors fled in dismay from the place—they never
came back, nor have their descendants returned. For some reason or
other the Russians made the most persistent and energetic attempt
to develop a successful vegetable garden in this region and to
keep cattle. But, beyond a small exhibit of eatable cabbages, good
radishes and turnips, and a few inferior potatoes, grown in the warm
sand-dunes of Oonalakleet, nothing more, substantially, ever resulted
from it.
Generally the snow falls, at Michaelovsky, as the beginning of its
hyemal season, about October 1st, and by October 20th ice has formed,
and has firmly locked up the Yukon by November 1st to 5th. These
icy fetters break away by June 5th, and in a week or ten days the
great river is entirely clear. The sea is usually covered by sludgy
floes as early as the middle or end of every October, which remain
opening and closing irregularly until next June. The months of July
and August are the warmest, ranging from 48° to 54° Fahr. during
daytime.[160]
From St. Michael’s to the westward a low basaltic chain of hills
borders the coast, and, parallel to it some thirty miles inland, a
few peaks attain an elevation of one thousand to fifteen hundred
feet. Jutting out at a sharp angle from this volcanic range stands
that low peninsula, tipped with the granitic headland named (by Cook
more than a century ago) Cape Denbigh. This point forms the southern
wall for that snug, tightly enclosed Bay of Norton, thus partitioned
off from a sound of the same title. The Oonalakleet River empties
into Norton’s Sound, at a point about midway between Michaelovsky
and Denbigh. The debouchure of this stream is marked by the richest
vegetation to be found anywhere in all of this entire region north
of Bristol Bay. It is due to the warm sand-dune flats which are
located here; and here is one of the liveliest Mahlemoöt villages of
that north. That river is an exclusive gateway to the Yukon during
the winter season, from and to Michaelovsky, and these Innuits are
the chief commission merchants of Alaska. In a village, now called
Kegohtowik, near by, Zagoskin received his first initiation into
the wild life which he led up here as an explorer, since it was the
first camp[161] he ever made among the Innuits after he had started
out from Michaelovsky. This young Russian was kindly received by the
wondering natives, who unharnessed his dogs and hung up his sleds
on the cache scaffolds as a token of their hospitality. Into their
kashga he was taken with every demonstration of regard and curiosity.
He happened to have arrived just as these people were preparing for
and celebrating a great festival of homage to an Eskimo sea-god who
rules the icy waters of Bering and the Arctic Ocean. He quaintly
records their proceeding in this language:
“I had an opportunity of observing the natives preparing for a great
festival called by them ‘drowning little bladders in the sea.’ In the
front part of the kashga, on a strip of moose or other skin, there
were suspended about a hundred bladders taken from animals killed
by arrows only. On these bladders are painted various fantastic
figures. At one end of the trap hangs an owl with a man’s head and a
gull carved from wood; at the other end are two partridges. By means
of threads running to the crop-beam these images are made to move
in imitation of life. Below the bladders is placed a stick six feet
in height, bound about with straw. After dancing in front of the
bladders a native takes from the stick a small wisp of straw, and
lighting it, passes it under the bladders and birds so that the smoke
rises around them. He then takes the stick and straw outside. This
custom of ‘drowning little bladders in the sea’ is in honor of the
sea-spirit called ‘Ug-iak;’ but I cannot discover,” says Lieutenant
Zagoskin, “how the custom originated, or why they use bladders from
animals killed by arrows in preference to those killed by other
means. To all questions upon the subject the natives answered: ‘It
is a custom which we took from our fathers and our grandfathers.’
It seems to be of great antiquity, as the natives can give no
information as to its origin or the reasons for its adoption.[162]
Before these bladders they dance all day in their holiday dress,
which consists of light parka, warm boots, and short underdress for
the men; and parkas, reindeer-trousers, colored in Innuit style, for
women, and ornamented with glass beads and rings.”
And again, in this connection, the pleasures of a dog-sled journey
overland to the Yukon are graphically narrated by the same traveller,
who resumed his trip, after spending the night as above related, on
snow-shoes and dog-sleds laden with his provisions and instruments.
On the morning of December 9, 1842, he struck the Oonalakleet River
and started up its frozen channel. He says:
“The weather was at first favorable, but it soon changed, and a
driving snow-storm set in, blinding our eyes so that we could not
distinguish the path. A blade of grass seventy feet distant had
the appearance of a shrub, and sloping valleys looked like lakes
with high banks, the illusion vanishing upon nearer approach. On
December 9th, at midnight, a terrible snow-storm began, and in the
short space of ten minutes covered men, dogs, and sledges, forming
a perfect hill above them. We sat at the foot of a hill, with the
wind from the opposite side, and our feet drawn under us to prevent
them from freezing, and covered with our parkas. When we were covered
by the snow, we made holes with sticks through to the open air. In
a short time the warmth of the breath and perspiration melted the
snow so that a man-like cave was formed about each individual. In
these circumstances our travellers passed five hours, calling to one
another at intervals to keep awake, it being certain death to sleep
in that intense cold. If we had been on the other side of the hill,
exposed to the full fury of the wind, we would have been buried in
the snow and suffocated.”
Such are the experiences of all travelling traders on the Yukon, who
encounter these wintry “poorgas” in the pursuit of their calling
every year of their lives spent in that great Alaskan moorland.
Familiarity with this subject never breeds contempt for it in the
minds of those hardy men—that pain and privation to which these
characteristic storms subject all human beings who are caught and
chained on a tundra, or in the mountains, by their wild rushing and
bitterly cold breath, is never forgotten.
On the shores of Norton’s Sound are many low clayey bluffs, which,
as they are annually undermined by the surf and chiselled by frost,
fall in heavy crumbled masses upon the beach. This exposes their
long-concealed deposit of the tusks and bones of those pre-glacial
elephants, the mammoth and the mastodon. Such fossil ivory has been
used by all Innuits from time immemorial in making their sleds and in
tipping their spears, lances, and arrows.
A party of Americans spent the summer of 1881 exploring the country
at the head of that deep indentation in the north shore of Norton’s
Sound called Golovin Bay. They were miners, and engaged in locating
the sources from which the Innuits had been bringing large masses
of lead-ore with a micaceous sparkle. The hope of a silver-mine had
allured these hardy prospectors, who had not reckoned, however, on
what they would have to face during the long winter, on the ice that
was always left in the soil. Still, in the summer this bay of Golovin
is an attractive anchorage—the most agreeable landscape presented
anywhere on our Arctic coast. Several rivers empty into it, and on
the slopes of the uplands of the northwest side is a growth of white
pines that reach a height of fifteen or twenty feet. These small
rounded conifers, scattered in clumps over the green and russet
tundra, an absence of underbrush, and the dark-green lines of stunted
willows and birches that fill the ravines on the sloping sides of
gently rising hills, suggest the parking of an old-country place
where the orchards are separated by hedges.
The beaches everywhere are profusely littered with drift-logs from
the Yukon, twenty to forty feet in length, thickly strewn. They
are pushed high above tides by the ice-floes in winter. What the
result would be of failure to gain that abundant supply of fuel, now
so easy of attainment, upon the natives of this entire region, is
not difficult to determine. As they live to-day they are steadily,
rapidly diminishing in number. The whalemen have substantially
exterminated their chief sources of life—the whale and the walrus.
Seals are not as abundant as on the Greenland coasts, and if, in
addition to their extra labor of securing food-supply, they were
obliged to do without wood, a practical depopulation of the Alaskan
coast of Bering Straits and the Arctic Ocean would be effected soon.
As the trader shapes his course from St. Michael’s for Port Clarence
and Kotzebue Sound, his little vessel skirts the low north shore
of Norton’s Sound very closely. He may stop for an hour or two, if
the weather permits, at Sledge Islet, standing “off and on” while
the Innuits come out to the schooner in their skin “oomiaks” or
bidarrahs. This barren rock was so named by Captain Cook, who,
when he landed on it, found nothing but a native’s hand-sled. Its
inhabitants were all sojourning on the mainland, berrying. It is only
about a mile in its greatest length, less than half a mile wide,
and raised almost perpendicularly from the sea to a height of five
or six hundred feet. When the modicum of walrus-oil and ivory which
these natives have to barter has been hoisted on board, the schooner
shapes her course for another islet—the curious “Ookivok,” or King’s
Island—which stands, a mere rock as it were, in the flood that
sweeps through Bering Straits. It is rugged, and strewn with immense
quantities of basaltic fragments, scoriæ, and rises so precipitately
from the sea that no place for a beach-landing can be found.
Here on the south side, clinging like nests of barn-swallows, are
the summer houses of the Ookivok walrus-hunters. They are from fifty
to one hundred feet above the brawling surf that breaks incessantly
beneath them, and secured to the perpendicular cliffs by lashings and
guys of walrus-thongs. The wooden poles thus fastened to the rocks
are covered with walrus-hides. On these unique brackets those hardy
Innuits spend the warmer weather. Their winter residences are mere
holes excavated in the interstices and fissures of the same bluff
to which their flimsy summer dwellings are attached, the entrances
to most of them being directly under the frail platforms upon which
these Mahlemoöt families are perched with all of their rude household
belongings. The nakedness of the island is so great as to forbid life
to even a spear of grass or moss—nothing but close, leathery lichens,
that grow so tightly to its weathered rocks that they appear to be
part and parcel of the splintered basaltic cubes or olivine bluffs
themselves. A more uninviting spot for human habitation could not be
found in all the savage solitudes of the north. But the Innuit is
here, not for the pleasure of location; he is here for that command
which this station gives him over all walrus-herds floating up and
down on the ice-floes of Bering Sea at the sport of varying moods of
wind and current.
[Illustration: Ookivok.]
From the rugged crests of King’s Island the natives can apprehend
drifting sea-horses as they sleep heavily on broad ice-cakes, and
make ample preparation for their capture. The violence of the wind
is so great that the small, flat summit of this islet cannot be
utilized as a place of residence—the winds that howl over and around
its rock-strewn head would hurl the Innuits, bag and baggage, into
those angry waves which thunder incessantly below. Long experience
at plunging through surf with their handsomely made kayaks, and
returning to land on these perilous shores of King’s Island, has made
the Ookivok people the boldest and the best watermen in the north.
Their little skin canoes are of the finest construction, and their
surplus time is largely passed in carving walrus-ivory into all
fashions of rude design for barter in the summer, when the ice shall
disappear and the sails of whaling-ships and fur-trading schooners
challenge their attention in the offing.
What a winter these people must witness! What a succession of furious
storms and snow-laden gales! When their summer comes it brings but
little sunlight to their rocky retreat; for, standing, as it does, in
the full sweep of that warmer flood which flows up from the Japanese
coast into the Arctic, cold, chilly fogs and obstinate clouds
envelope them most of the time. But sympathy is utterly wasted; were
they to be transported to California, and surrounded with all the
needs of a creature existence, they would soon entreat, beg, implore
us to return them to the inhospitable rock from which they were
taken. The whalers have, at various intervals during the last twenty
years, carried Innuits down to spend the winter with them at the
Sandwich Islands, under an idea that these people would be delighted
with the soft, warm climate there, and such fruits and flowers, and
be grateful for the trip. But in no instance did an individual of
this hyperborean race fail to sigh for his home in Bering Sea, or
the Arctic Ocean, soon after landing at Hawaii. Those Innuits who
were without kith or kin became just as homesick and forlorn as any
natives did who had relatives behind awaiting their return.
A few hours’ sailing, with a free wind, to the north from King’s
Island, brings you into full view of a bold headland at the
entrance to Port Clarence. Cape York is a noted landmark in this
well-travelled highway to the Arctic Ocean—well travelled by
the whaling fleets of the whole world until recently; now, an
elimination of cetacean life from these waters has caused their
substantial abandonment by those vessels, and no others come,
save a trading-schooner ever and anon at wide intervals. A roomy
harbor, sheltered from the south by a long pier of alluvium, is Port
Clarence. Leading beyond it is an immense inner basin, walled in all
about by steep slate precipices: this is Grantley Harbor. High hopes
and great expectations were centred here in 1865-66, by the location
of that short cable-end which, underrunning Bering Straits, was to
unite an overland telegraph wire from St. Petersburg with that one we
were to build, in the same fashion, from Portland, Ore., thus to span
the Old and New Worlds by this short submarine link. Naturally, then,
it made this point of its beginning a most interesting locality. In
obedience to an order of a few wealthy, energetic capitalists, who
did not then believe in the practicability of the Atlantic cable,
many stately ships, freighted with men and goods, left San Francisco
in the summer of 1865, and, again, in the succeeding season of 1866,
for divers points in Alaska and Siberia. These men were to build
the line overland. They were landed at St. Michael’s and at Port
Clarence, and at several harbors on the Asiatic coast. They had
fairly got to work, when, late in 1866, the success of the submarine
cable between Newfoundland and Ireland was assured. That success
compelled an abandonment of the Collins Overland Telegraph, and
these men were consequently recalled, and sailed back to California
in those handsome vessels of the telegraph fleet. How the Innuits
of Port Clarence marvelled when these smart, richly dressed men
disembarked, and put up houses in which to store their treasures of
food and telegraph materials, as well as to actually live in—to stay
there with them, in their own rude country, where no such thing had
ever been even dreamed of before. After the ships had squared their
yards and filled away, without calling the Americans on board, then
the Mahlemoöt heart was filled with unknown and strange emotions of
joy and curiosity—both of these passions were fully satisfied ere the
white men left Grantley Harbor.
With Cape York just astern, you pass under the lee of those sheer and
lofty walls of that shoulder to our continent, Cape Prince of Wales.
Its bold front stands in full but silent recognition of an Asiatic
coast westward, just thirty-six miles away, over the shallow flood of
Bering Straits. What changes in a great northland and seas would have
been wrought had a tithe of such volcanic energy which raised up the
Aleutian archipelago been only exerted here in throwing a basaltic
dike across from continent to continent! Had the upheaval and power
that elevated the large island of Oonimak alone been focused here,
we should have no division of the Old World and the New. That
ocean-river which flows steadily into the icy wastes of a known and
unknown polar basin above Alaska and Siberia would not now give that
life which it so freely grants both animals and vegetables in the
wide reach of the North Pacific. A dam of adamantine rock or basalt
across the Straits of Bering would cause a startling revision of
all the natural order of life in Bering Sea and our Arctic Ocean.
[Illustration: CAPE PRINCE OF WALES
That extreme narrowing of the American shore of Bering Straits: the
Asiatic coast is only thirty-six miles to the Westward from this
Point, which was located and named by Captain Cook, August 7, 1778]
Cape Prince of Wales, which forms the extreme narrowing of Bering
Straits, is a high, rugged promontory, with walls on the south side
that are abrupt precipices of a full thousand feet, while the uplands
rise, culminating in a snowy crown that is twenty-five hundred feet
above the level of the sea. Deep gulches seam these vertical walls,
and are the paths of numerous tiny rivulets that trickle and run in
cascades down from the spongy moorlands above. When, however, you
stand in to the straits, homeward bound from the Arctic Ocean, this
cape on that side presents a wholly different outline. It slopes up
gradually from the beaches, and presents the appearance of a tundra
gently rising to a small ridge-like summit. This lowland on the north
side is projected under the sea for a distance of over eight miles
in a northerly direction, making an exceedingly dangerous shoal, and
justly dreaded by the mariner.
The Siberian side and opposite headland is the bold and lofty East
Cape, and is connected with the mainland by a low neck of rolling
tundra, which is characteristic of Cape Prince of Wales also. Both of
these outposts of two mighty continents present, at a small distance,
the resemblance of islands.
On June 20th, two hundred and thirty-eight years ago (1648), Simeon
Deschnev, a Cossack chief trader, sailed from the mouth of the
Siberian river Kolyma, standing to the eastward, where he intended
to cruise until the country of those Chookchie natives, who had
ivory for trade, should be reached. His party sailed in three small
“kotches,” which were rude wooden shallops, decked over, about
thirty feet long and twelve in beam, drawing but little water.
They pushed on and on in that region to the eastward, from which
direction the nomadic natives of the Kolyma had always returned
laden with walrus-ivory. Fields of ice retarded them; no populous
trading-villages rewarded their scrutiny of the rugged coast as they
advanced. The known waters behind them closed up with floes, so
returning was impossible; while the unknown waters ahead were open
and invited exploration. In this manner, hugging the coast, Deschnev
and his companions sailed through the straits, landing once there in
September. He called it an “isthmus,” and described the appearance of
the Diomede Islands, which he plainly saw from the shore. Although
no mention is made by any one of this party of having seen the
American continent, yet it must have been observed by them, for the
bold headland of Cape Prince of Wales can be easily descried on any
clear day from the Asiatic side. Deschnev’s voyage had been quite
forgotten until Müller, in hunting over old records in 1764, found
the narrative then, and at once published it in the “Morskoi Sbornik.”
A long interregnum elapsed between the hardy voyage of Simeon
Deschnev and the next or second passage of the straits by the keel of
a white man’s vessel. Not until August, 1728, did Bering sail through
here. He went only a short distance above, into the Arctic Ocean,
and returned without giving any sign thereafter of the importance of
the pass or its nature, believing, most likely, that what land he
saw on the eastern side was a mere island and not a great American
continent. But that intrepid navigator, Captain Cook, who comes third
in this early initiation of our race, made no mistake: he fully
realized that the division of two hemispheres was here effected,
and so declared the fact, and then gave to these straits, in a most
chivalric manner, the name of Bering, August, 1778.
[Illustration: The Diomedes.
“Fairway Rock.” “Ignalook” (America). “Noornabook” (Asia).
[_Viewed from the Arctic Ocean; looking S.S.W. 7 m._]]
Midway, stepping-stones as it were, across those straits are the
Diomedes, two barren, rocky islets and a sheer rock. The largest and
the most western is about three miles long and one in width; it is
seven or eight hundred feet in abrupt elevation from the water, and
the line of division between the Siberian possessions and our own
just takes it in. The sister island is somewhat smaller, less than
half as large, but it is as bold and sheer in its rocky elevation,
leaving a channel-width of two miles only in between. The first
is named Ratmanov, or _Noornabook_; the second, Kroozenstern, or
_Ignalook_; while that high isolated hay-cock mass, about seven miles
south of Kroozenstern, is called Fairway Rock. Bering Straits has an
average depth of only twenty-six fathoms, with a hard, regular bottom
of sand, gravel, and silt.
This gateway to the Arctic Ocean is closed by ice-floes usually by
the middle or end of October every year, and opened again in the
following season by May 25th or June 1st, but the ice-fields do not
allow much room for navigation north until the middle or end of June,
sometimes not until the month of July has been well passed.
On that low, northern tundra slope of Cape Prince of Wales is the
largest Innuit village in the Alaskan northland. Four hundred souls
live there in a settlement which they style Kingigahmoot, and they
bear unmistakable evidence of the vicious and degrading influence
which evil whalers and rum-traders have exerted. We are struck by
their saucy flippancy, their restless, meddlesome, and impertinent
bearing. It is because these people have been for a great many years
thoroughly familiarized with and degraded by all the tricks and petty
treacheries of dishonest and disreputable white men. They do not
draw a line in favor of any decency in our race to-day, and hence
their disagreeable manner. Otherwise, beyond shaving the crowns of
their heads, they do not differ from the Innuits whom we have met
heretofore. They are seamen in the full sense of the word—hardy,
reckless navigators who boldly launch themselves into stormy waters
and cross from land to land in tempest and in fogs, depending solely
upon the frail support of their walrus-skin baidars, or oomiaks.
These are very neatly made, however, the covering of seal- and
walrus-hides being stretched and sewed tightly over wooden frames
that are lashed at the joints with sinew and whalebone-thongs. They
hoist a square sail of deer-skins or cotton drilling, and run before
the wind in heavy gales; or they employ paddles and oars, and urge
their craft against head-winds and perverse currents. Their poverty
is the only redemption which they have had from absolute destruction;
for were they possessed of furs that would encourage the regular
visits of traders, they would, with their disposition to debauchery,
have been utterly exterminated long before this time. But they are
poor, very poor, having nothing to tempt the cupidity of white
traders—nothing but small stores of walrus-oil and teeth, and a few
red and white foxes, perhaps. Therefore our people never stop long
near them, just laying the vessel’s sails aback for a few minutes,
or an hour, while the dusky paddling crews of the oomiaks surrounding
the schooner exhibit their slim stocks of oil and ivory.
These northern Innuits are not known anywhere to have a village
located far back from the sea save at three places, where, on the
Selawik, the Killiamoot, and the Kooak Rivers, are settlements of
a few people who are at least fifty and one or two hundred miles
inland; but they are the exceptions only to their rule of living.
Some thirty-five villages of these hyperborean Innuits of Alaska are
scattered along the coast between St. Michael’s and Point Barrow;
they possess an aggregate (estimated) inhabitation of three thousand
men, women, and children. The Diomede and Prince of Wales natives are
the most active middlemen or commission merchants among their people;
they conduct all the trade between the Asiatic Chookchie savages and
the American Innuits, chiefly with those of Kotzebue Sound. Before a
wholesale destruction by our people, in 1849-57, of the whales that
once were so abundant in these waters, the life of those natives was
a comparatively easy struggle for existence, and they were far more
numerous then than they are to-day; but a fleet of four and five
hundred whaling-ships, manned by the hardiest men of all nations,
literally swept that cetacean life from the North Pacific and Bering
Sea, and drove it so far into the Arctic Ocean that its remnant,
which is still there, is practically safe and beyond human reach.
As you leave the Straits of Bering behind, your little vessel cuts
the cold, green waves of the Arctic Ocean rapidly, especially if
under the pressure of a warm southwester which funnels up stiffly
through the pass. You find nothing to catch your eye in all that
long reach from Cape Prince of Wales to the entrance of Kotzebue
Sound, which is an objective point of all the traders who come into
the Arctic. Here is the last safe Alaskan harbor for a sea-going
vessel as we go north. It is a big one; and it is a famous place
for a geologist and Innuits alike. To the latter it is of especial
significance, since the small rivers which empty there mark an
extreme northern limit of salmon-running in America.
The shores which bound this large gulf rise as perpendicular bluffs,
either directly from the water or from a shelving beach. In some
places the land is remarkably low (as it always is when bordering
the coast), and only so much raised above tide-level as to render
the idea probable that it is of an alluvial formation, the result
of accumulated mud and sand, brought down in former times by the
melting and running of large glacial rivers, and then thrown up later
by recent ice-floes of the Arctic Sea. The cliffs are, in part,
abrupt and rocky; others are made up of falling masses of mud, sand,
and ice. The rocky cliffs are dominant on the western and southern
shores, while the diluvial bluffs and flats complete that remaining
east and northeast circuit of the sound. Lowlands border a major
portion of the Bay of Good Hope, and form the land of Cape Espenberg
and contiguous country.
A most striking natural feature of this final rendezvous of the
salmon-loving Innuits is the Peninsula of Choris, which divides the
inner waters of the Bay of Escholtz from those of Good Hope. It is
a narrow, variously indented tongue; its northern end is separated
from the southern, and connected by a slender neck of very low land.
This lower point assumes the shape of a round and somewhat conical
eminence, surmounted by a flat, hut-like peak, the sides of which
rise a few feet perpendicularly above a surrounding surface, as
though raised artificially by masonry. The whole height is about six
hundred feet above sea-level. Both sides of that quaint headland
terminate in rocky cliffs which, toward the west, are one hundred
and fifty or two hundred feet high, stratified, unbroken, and
dipping to the west at an angle of thirty degrees. They are composed
of micaceous slate, with no included minerals. This slate is of a
greenish hue, with a very considerable predominance of mica. In it
are garnets, veins of feldspar enclosing crystals of schorl, and
fissures filled with quartz. At one point, nearly midway between
the southern end of this peninsula and its low neck, is a singular
bed of pure milk-white quartz, that marks its locality from a long
distance by the masses of large white blocks which have fallen down
by natural processes of cleavage and frost-chiselling, and these
remain unaltered in their snowy color in spite of the corroding
action of time and weather. Again, still nearer the neck, a narrow
bed of limestone forms a distinct protrusion above some mica-schist,
about thirty feet in length and five in depth. It reappears in such
strength, however, at the southern end of the peninsula, that it
forms most of the rock exposed, and produces four perpendicular and
contiguous promontories, separated from each other by small, receding
bays, that present curious walls striped a white and blue tint in
beautifully blended stratification, most unique and attractive to the
eye. The upper part of this limestone contains iron pyrites, and has
cavities filled with chlorite. The lower strata are more abundantly
mixed with micaceous schistus, containing compact actynolite, and
flat prisms of a glassy shade of it, crystals of tourmaline, and
those various concretions of iron pyrites. The quartz is, in some
places, colored a real topaz tint. Such, in brief, is a faint
description of those geological attractions which the Arctic rocks of
Kotzebue Sound present to a student.
The country everywhere, that borders the Arctic Ocean and this sound,
is low. The land rises by faint and gradual slopes; it is covered
with clay soils and the characteristic vegetation of a tundra. The
many low, projecting points of Kotzebue Sound are thickly strewn with
large and smaller masses of vesicular and of compact lava, containing
olivine. Some of these blocks extend into the sea; others are
embedded in the sandy soil of the beach; but many are insulated and
awash above the surf. They are honeycombed with empty cavities. The
sands of this Arctic Ocean beach partake of the black and volcanic
nature of those blocks. These large and numerous erratic blocks of
basalt, collected chiefly on such jutting points, must have been
conveyed there by ice-sheets from a very considerable distance, for
no volcanic formation is to be seen in their vicinity.
A suggestive wreck lies half buried in the sand and drift of the
north shore of Choris Peninsula—it is the scant and weathered
remnants of a large whaling-bark, which was run ashore here
and burned. Its own crew did so to prevent its capture by the
_Shenandoah_—that cruiser which, during our civil war, swooped
down upon our Asio-Alaskan whaling-fleet, as a fish-hawk drops
upon a flock of startled gulls. Again, on the south side of Good
Hope Bay, in this same remarkable sound of Kotzebue, is a bluff of
solid blue clay, from the face of which the frost-king annually
strikes large masses. The weathered débris of these fallen sections
reveal many fine specimens of well-preserved remains of huge
pachyderms—mammoths—and their finding has given a fit name of
“Elephant Point” to the place.
Across that peninsula, which Choris Point and its comical little
tender of Chamisso Islet project from, lies the long and narrow
estuary of Hotham Inlet, where all Innuits, from Icy Cape to the
far north and Bering Straits in the south, annually repair for
salmon-fishing in August. Into the mouths of a half-dozen small
streams which empty there, and that large one, of Kooak River, the
humpbacked salmon runs, for a brief period, in great numbers: then
the harvest of the Eskimo is at hand. Nowhere else above this point
can a salmon ever be taken, and as it is the last chance of these
natives, they improve it. Flocks of fat ducks and geese hover over
and rest upon the smooth, shallow waters of this inlet, alternately
feeding there and then alighting upon the tundra where crowberries
and insects abound. Our whalers have taught these Innuits how to
make and use gill-nets, with which they now catch their fish almost
exclusively; and not unwisely have those natives made the change, for
they have not got any slender willow brush and alder-saplings which
their brethren use so effectually in making rude traps on the Yukon,
Kuskokvim, and Nooshagak Rivers. They also stretch these gill-nets
over certain narrow places, from shore to shore, of lagoons and
lakes, where flocks of water-fowl are wont to fly (in early morning
and late in the evening), and succeed in capturing a great many
luckless birds by this simple method.
FOOTNOTES:
[157] The first white man to enter the Yukon and behold its immense
volume was Glazoonov, a Russian post-trader of the old Company, who,
with a small band of promishlyniks, managed to overcome the hostility
of the natives sufficiently to get up as far as the present site of
Nulato. This was in 1833. Lieutenant Zagoskin, of the Russian Navy,
made a thorough engineering examination of the river up as far as
the “Ramparts,” between the years 1842-45, inclusive, locating its
positions and courses by astronomical and magnetic observations.
After him, named in regular order of their priority in visiting the
river, came the following Americans, the first in 1865, the last
in 1885:—Kennicott, Pease, Adams, Ketchum, Dall, Whymper, Mercier,
Raymond, Hill and Shaw (two miners, from its very source), Nelson,
Petroff, then Schwatka and Everett (also from its source). All of
these men have given to the world more or less elaborate accounts
of the Yukon through the medium of published works, letters, and
lectures. The literature on the single subject of the Kvichpak is
decidedly voluminous.
[158] François Mercier, according to whom “Ingaleek” signifies
“incomprehensible.”
[159] Lieutenant H. T. Allen, Engineer Corps, United States Army.
[160] An average temperature prevails in this region for the year as
follows:
January, -.5°
February, -.6°
March, 9.5°
April, 22.1°
May, 32.8°
June, 45.2°
July, 53.1°
August, 52.1°
September, 43.3°
October, 28.0°
November, 18.3°
December, 8.9°
[161] December 5, 1842. The refreshing honesty and frankness of this
explorer’s thorough work on the Yukon and Kuskokvim deserve to be
better known.
[162] It is the same reply that is honestly given to any query made
as to the reason of almost every one of these Innuit mummeries. Too
many attempts have been made to attach serious meaning to such idle
ceremonies.