USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 10
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48
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 ;
85
COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE.
but as you advance into the interior, great swamps of tangled heather, fir, jungle, and sphagnum are prevalent. The soil every- where, 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. All 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 vary- ing 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 inhabi- tants. 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 re- sources in such a region. After much deliberation the company was authorized by the Crown to make the following terms of settle- ment 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 com- pany, by reason of age and other infirmities, were, upon their writ- ten 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,
86
OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
build a comfortable dwelling, furnish agricultural tools, seeds, cat- tle and fowls, and supply the pensioner receiving all this with pro- visions 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 lib- erty to enter or not, as they pleased, the service of the company at stated salaries. The company, furthermore, was commanded to pur- chase 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 trad- ing with the Kenaitze savages and in their limited agricultural efforts, whereby they have potatoes, turnips, and other hardy vege- tables. 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 cat- tle. 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.
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
----
THE VOLCANO OF ILYAMNA; 12,060 FEET The most prominent Fire Mountain of that Chain forming the North Shore of Cook's Inlet
87
COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE.
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 main- land 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 coni- ferous forest which we have become so familiar with, clothes the flanks of those grim mountain walls with the thickest of all cover- ings 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 ar- rests 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 remarka- ble 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 ex- plore it, and to find a portage via its waters to the sea of Be- ring. 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 foot-hills 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 roll- ing 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 real- ize in fancy.
These natives of Cook's Inlet are strongly defined from those of
88
OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
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
A Kenaitze Chief : Cook's Inlet.
in liis taciturn features and physical bearing. His nose will pre- sent, 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
89
COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE.
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 ambi- tion alone in itself. The brown bear * 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 fre- quently shot here fully as large, if not larger,t than those examples recorded in Oregon and California.
This wide-ranging brute is found away up beyond the Arctic Cir- cle, 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 fre- quents, 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 foot-paths, 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
* Ursus richardsonii.
+ One shot at Kenai Mission in 1880 measured nine feet two inches in length.
90
OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
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"
34 874.
Bear "Roads" over the Moors of Oonimak Islands.
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.%
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
* 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, be- cause this leather does not stretch when moist like deer and moose skin.
91
COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE.
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 sta- tions 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 freshi-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 .*
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 sur- face ; 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 cen- tre with a very small smoke-hole opened in the roof just above it ;
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, por- cupines, 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.
-
92
OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
the door is a square aperture cut through the logs at the least ex- posed 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 clamp earth. Upon this staging they spread grass mats and skins, and, in faet, it is a catchall for everything.
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 eut 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
93
COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE.
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 minia- ture, 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 Jan- uary 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 Penin- sula 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 Fran- cisco merchants have established at the mouth of the Kassilov
94
OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
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 ;" * they are most abundant during the sum- mer 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.
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 de- light 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 em- pire 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 t which we now observe in the vast
* Oncorynehus chonicha-examples of this species have a recorded weight of one hundred pounds each, and six feet in length ; it is also abundant in the Ynkon and Knskokvim Rivers.
+ Dr. T. H. Bean, who, as a trained ichthyologist, passed the season of 1880 investigating the fish of Alaska by crnising throughont its waters, says :
" The greatest fish-wealth of Alaska, so far as the shore fisheries are con- cerned, 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. chouich is the giant of the group, and is the most important commercially ; it attains to its greatest size in the large rivers,
SALMON WEIRS OF THE KENAITZE Method employed by Indians of Cook's Inlet to catch Salmon
95
COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE.
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 thou- sand 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 un- dried, then this cured total gives us an immense aggregate of
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 prin- cipally 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 Salmonidw, and very important ones, are the species of Salmo (purpuratus and gairdneri) and Salrelinus malmø, two of which reach a large size in Alaska. The first two are not known to exist much to the northward of Unalashka, while malm 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. par- puratus from the Territory, but the species is extremely abundant and valnable for food. The red-spotted char, S. malmø, 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 con- dition under the name of 'salmon trout.' Natives of Alaska make water- proof clothing from the skins of this fish."
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.