USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 12
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Near by, on the southern shore of Afognak Island, is the largest settlement of the "old colonial citizens" in the Territory ; three hundred and thirty of these people are living here in a very pictur- esque and substantial village ; a large chapel, which is also used as a school-house, is the distinguishing architectural feature, while a number of newly-built row-boats for fishermen, on the stocks, in a miniature shipyard, point to an industry worthy of attention. The town is spread over a large landed extent, which in many places between the dwellings is devoted to vegetable gardens. More land is under cultivation here than all the rest so treated in Alaska to-day ; the crops of potatoes, cabbages, turnips, and garden- salads, like radishes, etc., seldom fail except in very backward years. No ploughing* is done ; the earth prepared for potatoes is
* On Wood Island, however, a small field of rye, oats, or barley, is planted every year for the use of the horses kept there ; here a plough is employed.
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thrown with spades, picks, and hoes up as small ridges or tumuli, into the surface of which the seed is planted. A few of those shaggy little bulls and cows, which we have noticed before at Wood Island and Kadiak, are also roaming about, and a great many domestic fowls, such as chickens and ducks, are raised by the women and children, who take the poultry into the attics or lofts above their living rooms during the inclemencies of winter.
The desire of the Russians to have beef, milk, and butter, led to a very general importation of Siberian cattle from Petropaulovsk so that every post in Alaska, at one time, had at least a pair of these useful animals to start with. The greatest care was given to theni at first, everywhere ; they were especially fostered at Sitka, where the demand for their flesh and milk was most urgent, but at Kadiak and the Kenai mission on Cook's Inlet, the only partial success in causing an increase to the stock was achieved. Impressed with an idea that certain sections of the Kadiak region would serve admira- bly for sheep-husbandry, a San Francisco merchant-firm shipped a flock of rams and ewes-one hundred and fifty of them-sheep of the hardiest breed, to Kolma, a spot not far from St. Paul's Harbor, Kadiak. They were in charge of a trained Scotch shepherd; but while the flock did remarkably well in the summer, yet most of them perished during the following winter, not from exposure nor want of food, but the long-continued and frequent intervals when the sheep are obliged to be shut up tightly from the fury of wintry gales laden with sleet and rain and snow, causes their wool to "sweat" and fall from the skin in large patches, producing an emaciation and debility which the animal seldom fully recovers from. Also, the general dampness everywhere under foot during the summer season in many good grazing sections of Alaska, is such as to cause an abnormal increase of the hoofs, so that the horny toes turn and grow upward, destroying the peace and comfort of a sheep and literally confine its movements and destroy its thrifty life .*
These cereals never ripen, but are cut green, and fed as fodder. Corn is a total failure everywhere, even as fodder. No cereals have been ripened in Alaska ; the attempt, however, has been made a thousand times.
* The first cattle brought into Alaska were taken to Kadiak in 1795, and from this central station the stock was distributed-so that by 1833 it had increased to a herd of over two hundred and twenty. At the present writing it is very doubtful whether there are sixty head in the whole region. Every
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Since these little villages of Kadiak, Leesnoi, Yealova, and Af- ognak embrace within their limits a large majority of the sixteen or seventeen hundred Creoles who are residents and natives of Alaska, it may be interesting if a sketch be given of the physical and mental characteristics which distinguish them broadly from the aboriginal types. The original Creole was the offspring of a Rus- sian father and an Aleutian or Kaniag mother. He inherited the strong thickset frame and bushy, curly beard and brown hair of his father ; in many cases his eyes were as blue (and his hair some- times red), his skin as white, and his bearing just as good as was his Russian progenitors'. The aggressive energy, however, of the sire seldom was transmitted, the Creole being indolent and very pa- cific in disposition. If this original Creole, in his time and turn, married a full-blooded Aleutian or Kaniag girl, then the offspring would show a marked dominance of the mother's race-indeed, the child would be as much like other Aleutian babies as they are re- lated in looks among themselves ; but if this original Creole mar- ries an original Creole girl, sired like himself, then we have a type which cannot be distinguished at all from the full-blooded Sla- vonian, only much less demonstrative, alert, and pugnacious. Most of these old colonial citizens of this district of Kadiak are therefore full-blooded Russian quadroons and octoroons, and in every physi- cal aspect are as much like Russians as if of pure origin. Those early Creoles, male and female, who mated, as they matured, with the native males and females, in so doing caused all their offspring, long ago, to revert to the savage types, and we cannot distinguish them to-day.
Some of the Creole girls and women whom we observe in these settlements are exceedingly handsome, modest, and the only fault we can find with them is their absolute speechlessness-they can- not be induced to chat with us, though they seem to enjoy our presence. Most of them live in scrupulously clean houses, the floors scrubbed and sanded like a well holystoned ship's deck, walls papered and decorated with pictures of saints and other pious subjects ; old Russian furniture, chairs, settees, bureaus, and
season it is the habit of traders and others to send upon steamers as they go, a few head of beef-steers, which are turned out at Sitka, Kadiak, and Oonalashka to fatten during the summer, and then are slaughtered when winter ensues. Pigs thrive here, but live too much on the sea-refuse for the good of their flesh. So they are not favored.
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Phillip Villkor
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CREOLES AND ALEUTES
Pencil Portraits of typical Alaskan faces, selected from the Author's Portfolio
I. Luka Mandriggan, an Aleute,
9. Philip Vollkov, a Creole,
50
8. Matroona Vollkov, girl, I5
IO. Anoorka Meeseekin,
II
7. Fevronia Eevanov,
49 years of age
II. Deemietri Veatkin, a Creole, 48 years of age
6. Aggie Kooshing, ..
boy, 18 .
3. Ivan, an Aleute boy, 7 years of age
5. Domian, "
12
2. Paraskeeva, girl, 13
4. Natalia, an Aleute girl, 12 years of age
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THE GREAT ISLAND OF KADIAK.
clocks of our own make ; the bright, omnipresent "samovar " in which the boiling water for tea is never allowed to get cool ; little curtains over the small windows, and big curtains puckered around the beds-everything is usually elean, tidy, and quiet within the Creole's home.
The wants of the Creole are very few outside of what the coun- try in which he lives affords him. He manages to so deal in sea-otter, and fox and bear skins as to get from the trader's store what tea, sugar, flour, and cloth are required for his family. Beyond this exertion and that displayed in his gardening he rests wholly at peace with himself and all the rest of the world.
The Kaniags or Kadiakers, who are the natives of this island and contiguous islands, are in much greater numbers, and are to be found everywhere here in small hamlets that nestle in the deep fiords and bays of Kadiak. They resemble the Aleutes so closely in outward form and characteristics that the full description given in a following chapter of those people will cover the whole ground of this inquiry, only let it be remembered that the Kaniag is a trifle taller than his Aleutian cousin, has a fairer skin, a somewhat broader face, and is considerably more muscular. Like the Aleutes, he has small feet and hands, small black eyes set in deep sockets, little or no beard, and an abundance of coarse, straight, black hair, which he cuts off roughly just above his shoulders ; he has a trifle more beard and a better mustache, but this is a very fine distinc- tion. He is lighter-hearted, freer, and more jovial, but has less patience during seasons of privation or epidemic disease.
When the Kaniags gather together they are exceedingly talka- tive, abounding in jokes, in the recitation of funny legends, and stories of every imaginable nature associated with their simple lives. As they paddle their bidarkas and bidarrahs in making long journeys, they enliven the labor by continuous songs, snatches from church tunes, or lively airs taught them by the Russians and later by our soldiers and traders. They are in every respect much more susceptible of emotional impulses than are the Aleutes. This greater sociability is well exhibited by the invariable erection, in every settlement, of a " kashima," or public dance and work-house, or, in fact, a town-hall as we have it :- the Aleutes have nothing of the sort. They pass a good deal of their time on the land, travers- ing mountain trails in quest of bears, wolves, foxes, the land-otter, and the marmot, or " yeavrashkie," which is made into that famous
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OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
skin coat called the " parkie " all over this Alaskan country outside of the Sitkan archipelago.
As these natives exist to-day there are only eighteen hundred, a few more or less, of them, which is an immense shrinkage from the Russian enumeration of six thousand five hundred made by actual count of Baranov. They seem to be declining even now, year by year, even as the Koloshians of the Sitkan region do, so that the native population of the Kadiak district, if decreased * in the next two decades as it has in the last, will hardly have a living representative. No one can well avoid a train of fast-crowding thought when he stops in contemplation of sickness and death as it appears and is treated in savage settlements-the only medical counsel that they ever have is their own individual instinct. Ignor- ant as they are of the simplest anatomical details of their structure, it is not surprising that they should surrender to disorders and disease with that remarkable passive apathy which is so distinctive of the sick everywhere in such communities.
Indians, and these Aleutes and Kaniags, as they grow up, have no parental supervision whatever as to details of diet, of warm or cool clothing, or of any of those many attentions which our children receive from their parents. For the first ten or twelve years of their lives they literally run wild, and are semi-naked or wholly so, both male and female ; } this is their condition, then, at all seasons of the year. Exposed as they are, in their manner of living, to draughts, to insufficient covering, and damp, cold nooks for slum- ber, in which the air reeks with odors too vile for the power of language to express, naturally they lay a foundation, at the very outset of their existence, for pulmonic troubles in all the varied degrees of that dread disease. Consumption is, therefore, the simple and broad term for that single ailment which alone destroys the greatest number of these people, every season, in Alaska ; all the natives, the Eskimo, the Aleut, the Kaniag, and the Indians suffer from it alike, and they all exhibit that same stolid indifference to its stealthy but fatal advancement-no extra care, no attempt to
* The church records show that the people of the Kadiak district have decreased as follows : 1796-6,510; 1818-3,430; 1819-3,252; 1822-2,819; 1863-2,217; 1880-1,813. Small-pox, measles, and other imported diseases have caused this.
+ The little girls, as a rule, receive the earliest garments, generally nothing but a cotton shift and a torn blanket.
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THE GREAT ISLAND OF KADIAK.
shelter, to protect or to ward off in the slightest manner this trouble, until the very moment of supreme dissolution calls in a shaman and the sorrowing relatives.
After lung diseases, the next destroying factor of greatest power is embodied in the virulence of scrofulous affections, which take the form of malignant ulcers that eat into the vitals and slough away the walls of the large arteries. This most loathsome blood- poisoning renders a few settlements entirely leprous, especially so to our startled eyes when we visit them. And in this regard it is hard to find a village in the whole Alaskan boundary where at least one or more of the families therein has not got upon some one of its members the singularly prominent scars that attest this dis- ease. Often a comely young girl or man will, in turning suddenly, reveal under the jaws or on the neck and throat, a disgusting, livid eruption which a scrofulous ancestry has cursed the youth with. Since most of this complaint is on the surface, as it were, we naturally would look for some care on the part of the afflicted native, even if for no other end than self-contentment and the ready alleviation of this cutaneous misery ; but we will look in vain, the patient never gives it. On the contrary, it is utterly neglected, and by reason of the filthy habit of these people, it is immensely aggra- vated and made infinitely more violent. In regard to consumption this apathy on the part of the victim is not, in contrast, so very remarkable, since it is more concealed and not near so disagreeable both to the native and his associates.
Though consumption and scrofula are the two great indigenous sources of disease and death among the natives, yet there is still a list-quite a long one-of other ills, such as paralysis, inflamma- tory rheumatism and peritonitis, fits, and an abrupt ending of life in the middle-aged, called most graphically "general debility." As might be inferred from the method and exigencies of aboriginal life in Alaska, these natives do not survive to any great age ; rarely, indeed, will an authenticated case of the full limit of sixty years be recorded or observed-an overwhelming majority of them are old at thirty-five and forty. When a man or a woman in a set- tlement rounds the fiftieth year of his or her life, a noted example of the tribe is afforded ; but should this age be attained, and the man then be free from rheumatic troubles or the death-grasp of scrofu- lous or pulmonic disease, he is sure to be afflicted with injured and defective vision, if not totally blind ; the glint of snow and the in-
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tensely smoky interiors of every style of native dwelling so affect the eyes of these people that those organs of sight, in the middle- aged, are seldom without signs of decay-showing some one of the various stages of granular ophthalmia, as a rule.
Snow-blindness can be remedied and its pain abated by the use of peculiar goggles, which the savages know well how to make and use, but the greater evil of smoke-poison to the optic nerve is not obviated at all by any action on their part, though it would be easy so to do. They actually seem determined to live on so as to live as wretchedly in the future as they have in the past.
Another singular characteristic of these Alaskan savages is the fact that none of the many tribes have any medicine whatever ; nor have they any knowledge, so far as we can find out, of any medici- nal herb or mineral, and this again is the most extraordinary item of it all. Every less or great indisposition is treated by a uni- versal resort to the sweat-bath ; this is the sole specific, and this is the only relief, except when the shaman is called in to worry the last hours of the unhappy patient to death, or, perhaps, in rare cases, to prolong his wretched existence for a longer period, by stimulating an undue or extra nervous tension, which then causes, at times, the usually languid and resigned sufferer to rally, as it were, before the flame flickers out. Truly these people are predes- tinarians ; they are wonderful in their patience when suffering long and acutely, as they lie stretched out or squatted in their gloomy, noisome hovels.
All the traders, and every vessel that sails in Alaskan waters, have medicine-chests, and to their credit be it said that, as far as they can, they do everything in their power to aid the natives when sick ; but the aborigines have not the right idea of taking physic, since they appreciate nothing but forcible treatment-large doses of something that acts immediately, or nothing at all. For instance, if the trader gives an Indian a dose of Epsom-salts, the amount given must be at least four or five times as much as would do for himself, or there will be no effect on the patient whatever. Consequently, the simplest remedies known are the only ones which the white man dare give to these people, and they have, as a matter of course, very little power to relieve them. During the last six or seven years a violent form of typhoid-pneumonia has been wasting whole settlements on the Kadiak and Aleutian coasts ; the Creoles and the natives alike yield at once to the disease, making scarcely
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THE GREAT ISLAND OF KADIAK.
an effort to save themselves. The traders everywhere became seriously alarmed, as the force of sea-otter hunters was rapidly decreasing, and exerted themselves to their utmost in staying the epidemic, which seemed to be carried from one village to the other in vessels and by canoes. But the only medicines which can be used in the safe and successful treatment of this complaint were regarded as unworthy of notice by the suffering natives, who, not feeling immediately relieved after taking them, would then totally ignore their further use.
Bad enough are the indigenous ills of the savages in Alaska. They were, however, nothing to the horrors which followed the im- portation of small-pox by the Russians in 1838-39. This terrible scourge swept like wildfire up from its initial point at Sitka, over the whole length of the Alaskan mainland and island coast, until it faded out in the far north where it had nothing to prey upon. It actually carried in its grim grasp one-half of the whole population then living in that large area to an abrupt and violent deatlı-sev- eral districts were so afflicted that not a soul escaped-every human being was exterminated ; it was exceedingly fatal and viru- lent in the Sitkan archipelago. We, knowing the filth and expos- ure of the lives of these people, can readily understand how they fell down and were crushed under the march of this disease .* As might be supposed the Russians lost no time in thoroughly vacci- nating the survivors ; and they have been faithfully followed, in this duty, by our own sailors and traders who now live in the coun- try.
Another imported evil, the measles, is almost as deadly up here among the natives as small-pox. While it is a simple trouble arous- ing no especial anxiety with us, yet in this climate, together with the careless methods of life, it assumes a black form and becomes malignant and fatal. The last extended attack took place princi- pally in the villages of the Kadiak district in the winter of 1874- 75, where it so alarmed and impressed the sojourning members of an Icelandic Commission as to shake their desire to emigrate to
* La Perouse, who touched on this coast in 1786 at Litooya Bay, under the flanks of Mount Fairweather, declares that he saw marks of the small-pox on the savages who were there then ; most likely what he saw was the scar of scrofulous sores. In 1843-44 another small-pox outbreak on the Aleutian Islands took place, but the people had been vaccinated in the meantime, and nothing serious came of it.
8
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OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
that region-at least, when they returned to their country, they were never heard from in favor of Alaska.
A very natural question arises in this connection as to whether or no the savages of Alaska will ever increase in numbers or dimin- ish to actual extermination as time advances. It appears very plain, however, that the inhabitants of the Aleutian chain, the Peninsula, and Cook's Inlet are nearly as numerous to-day as they have been ever since the small-pox decimation of 1838-39. But all author- ities agree in declaring that these people have never regained their numerical force represented in the settlement prior to the advent of the scourge which depopulated them. As to the Eskimo of the Bering Sea coasts and the Koloshians of the Sitkan region, it seems well established, from what we can learn, that they have re- gained their former strength in part, and were they only provident they might live by hundreds where they now exist in tens. Indif- ferent, wholly indifferent when living, they are as apathetic when they face death.
After reading the quaint yet strong narrative of the ferocity and strength of the Kaniags which Shellikov * has given us, it is hard, indeed, to realize that bold pioneer's feeling as we now look in upon the steep slopes of Three Saints Bay, where, at the head of it, within the sweep of a sand-spit, he erected the first permanent white habitation ever planted on Kadiak with the aid of the one hundred and fifty or sixty Russians who formed his company. Here, to-day, we see a cluster of sod-walled barraboras and two small, frame trading-houses, in which live one hundred and ninety of the descendants of those hardy savages who terrified and nearly annihilated the party of Shellikov one hundred years ago in this very spot. Nothing else is left, for Baranov in 1796 removed the post itself to the present site of Kadiak village. As we scan the settlement of Three Saints we notice that the most prominent ob- ject is the rough-hewn walls and thatched roof of an old Greek chapel, in front of which is a rude trestle ; from the upper frame of this a bell hangs. Now a stooping figure emerges from the church door ; he seizes the clapper, or bell tongue, with both hands and swings it vigorously. Promptly the villagers emerge from their huts ; trotting and shambling in single file, they all troop into the chapel.
Grigoria Shellikova Stransvovania, or Shellikov's Journeys, from 1783 to 1787. Published, St. Petersburg, 1792-93. 12mo. 2 vols.
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THE GREAT ISLAND OF KADIAK.
Meanwhile the dusky sub-deacon still tolls and chimes away long after every inhabitant has been gathered in. These men and women who, with bowed heads and fervent crossings, bend and kneel as they enter that place of worship, are the children of the " blood-thirsty and implacable " Kaniags of whom Shellikov gave so vivid a picture to the Empress of all the Russias just a century ago.
They are hunting sea-otters, however, just as they did then, and living in precisely the same manner, save the variations of out- ward demeanor and intercourse due to the teachings of the Greek Church. But if you go among them and strive to have them tell you of the heroic battle made by their ancestors on the Oogak "kekour," you will be rewarded by either a stupid stare of vacancy or a muttered " Bogue ezniet " (God knows) !
The deep recess of Eagle Harbor, which lies between this point of earliest Russian occupation and Kadiak village, affords the location of another large native village, and its region is called the best grazing ground in all Alaska. On the surf-beaten islets at the mouth of the inlet a great many sea-lions are always found, and thus yield to these hunters of Orlova a rich return in hides and sinews so essential for the construction of the "bidarka." A few families of Creoles also reside here, who attend to a small herd of cattle, keep fowls, and generally look after their commissions as middle-men in the sea-otter revenues.
From the earliest colonial time to the present the little village of Karlook, on the north side of the island, has been the busiest spot in the country. Here is a salmon-fishing settlement right on the coast at the mouth of a small river, where from the ancient date of Russian occupation there has been a salt house and packing es- tablishment, in which the salt and dried fish used throughout the entire Alaskan region was annually secured and prepared. To-day we find two large canning establishments set up and sustained by San Francisco merchants. The run of salmon into this river of Karlook at the height of the season is so great that it interferes with the free movement of canoes in crossing the stream ; while the fishermen of long experience in such matters say that twenty thousand barrels of the red-meated flesh could be easily secured and packed away at Karlook every summer and autumn. This salmon,* so
* Oncorynchus nerka. The fishing is done entirely with seines, floating across the river twenty to twenty-five fathoms in length, three fathoms in
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OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
abundant here, is much smaller in average size than is the one com- mon in Cook's Inlet-it does not average ten pounds in weight. But the rich red color of its flesh is an object of the canner, who soon finds out what public taste prefers.
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