USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 17
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Especially gratifying is the landscape, thus adorned, to the senses of any ship-worn traveller, who literally feasts his eyes upon it. But if he should go ashore and step upon what appeared to him, from the vessel's deck, to be a firm greensward, he will find instead a quaking, tremulous bog, or he will slide over a moss- grown shingle, painted and concealed by cryptogamic life, where he fondly anticipated a free and ready path. The thick, dense carpet of crowberry* plants that is spread everywhere over the hill- sides, into which the pedestrian sinks ankle-deep at every step, makes a stroll very laborious when undertaken at any distance from the sea-beach.
If a wide survey is accomplished here of Oonalashka Island, the studies made will give a perfect understanding of every other island
* Empetrum nigrum. The natives call it "shecksa." It is their chief supply of fuel.
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to the westward in this great archipelago, which is enveloped dur- ing the major portion of each year in fogs, and swept over by fre- quent gales. Such a combination of the elements, with mists and hidden sea-currents, make it a region dreaded by mariners ; yet there is enough sunshine now and then to make the life of our lands- men very comfortable, even though they cannot engage in any other profitable calling than that of sea-otter trading with the natives.
Summers are mild, foggy, and humid. The average temperature is about 50° Fahrenheit. Winters are also mild, foggy, and humid, with a slightly colder average of 30°. The thermometer nowhere in the Aleutian chain ever went much below zero at sea-level. There is no record even of a consecutive three or four weeks in winter lower than 3º or 5° above zero. The mercury seldom ever falls as low as 10°. There is no nice distinction of the four seasons here. We can notice only two. Winter begins in October and ends by May 1st to 5th, when summer suddenly asserts herself for the rest of the year not thus appropriated.
Flurries of snow sometimes fall in August and often in Septem- ber. It never stays long on the ground or even on the hilltops then, and generally melts as fast as it comes, away into December ; but on the highest peaks it is seen all the year round. From January to May 1st or 5th, as a rule, snow covers everything in a spotless shroud from two to five feet deep. The high, blustering wintry gales make this snow intensely disagreeable to us, driving into and through air-tight crevices, and literally making the inmates of the village huts prisoners for weeks at a time. The dogs and sleds so common and characteristic elsewhere in the vast expanse of Alaska are never seen here. They would be a mere nuisance to these people, since the rugged inequalities of the Aleutian country simply prohibit their use.
This is, however, the chosen land for lingering fogs. The foggy cloudiness of the Aleutian Islands is most remarkable. There are not a dozen fogless days in the whole year at Oonalashka, though the sun may be seen half the time. Fifty sunshiny days in the year is a handsome average. Thunder is never heard, or seldom ever, while lightning is never seen, although the dark swelling clouds seem to constantly suggest it; also the northern lights- these auroral displays are almost unknown, and when seen are very, very faint.
But the wind-ah, the winds that riot over this range of rocky
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islands ! They are always stirring. A perfect calm has never been recorded at Oonalashka. They are strong and come from all points of the compass ; they are freshest and most violent in October and November, December, and March. Gales follow each other in quick succession during these months every year, lasting usually about three days each.
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All sides of Oonalashka Island are deeply indented by bays and fiords ; but the points on the southern coast are avoided and not well known. They are not safe to approach on account of reefs and rocks, awash and sunken, which extend out to sea a long distance, and upon them the heavy billows of the Pacific Ocean break in- cessantly, as well as against the cliff-beaches of this forbidding shore. But around the northern and eastern margins of the island more good harbors are located than can be found on all of the other islands of the Aleutian archipelago put together. They call the bay which we entered, as we sailed in from Akootan Pass, " Captain's Harbor." It is the same place where the natives first gazed upon a white man and his ship after the frightful massacres of 1762 and 1763. Here in 1769 Layvashava, with a crew of those Siberian promislilyniks, anchored during the whole of one autumn and engaged the aston- ished inhabitants in active trade ; but it was a guarded and tedious barter, since the Aleutes had a lively recollection of the terrible past, so recent and so bloody.
The island of Oonalashka chanced to be the scene of that only real desperate and fatal blow ever struck by the simple natives of the Aleutian chain at their Cossack oppressors. By 1761 the Russians had advanced to the eastward as far as Oonimak, and up to this time the relations between the natives and the white in- vaders had been altogether of an outwardly friendly character, the former submitting, as a rule, patiently to the demands of the new- comers, but the Cossack Tartars, encouraged by their easy con- quests, rapidly proceeded from bad to worse, committing outrages of every kind, so that in 1762 they had reduced the Aleutes to the verge of absolute slavery, and continued to act in this manner until the patience and the timidity of the simple race were exhausted. The arrival of a brutal, domineering, lustful party of over one hundred and fifty of these Cossack Russians at Chernovsky, on the north- west coast of this island, in the summer of 1762, under the nominal command of a Siberian trader named Drooshinnin, proved to be " the last straw laid upon the camel's back." At a given signal the
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despoiled and ravished natives arose in every one of the then popu- lous Oonalashkan settlements (twenty-four villages), flocked to- gether, and unitedly fell upon their oppressors. They slaughtered every man except four, who happened, luckily for them, to have been absent from their vessels in Chernovsky Harbor, hunting grouse in the mountains. They were secreted in the recesses of a hot cave (that is still pointed out in the flanks of Makooshin Moun- tain), by the kindness of a charitable native, until they were able to escape and join the expedition of Solovaiyah, which appeared at the offing of Oomnak early in the following year. Fired by a recital of the Drooshinnin slaughter, this fierce Cossack turned his half-savage comrades, and worse yet, himself, loose upon the un- happy people of Oonalashka, and literally exterminated every male, old and young, that he could find, visiting each settlement in swift rotation of death and desolation. The men and boys fled to the fastnesses of the interior, followed by many of the women, and when the inclemencies of winter began to threaten their starvation, they humbly sued for peace, and became the abject and submissive vassals of the promishlyniks ever after.
A smoking volcano that rears its ragged crown high above all the surrounding hills and peaks is Makooshin ; it juts, alone and unsupported, as a bold promontory, five thousand four hundred and seventy-five feet above, and into the green waters of Bering Sea. It is the chief point of scenic interest on Oonalashka Island, and the objective one in particular, if the day be clear, as the visitor sails up and into the harbor of Illoolook. While it is not near so majestic in elevation, or perfect of outline, as the Shishal- din Mountain, yet it is wild and striking. It can be easily ascended in July and August, when the winds do not blow their hardest, and when there is the least snow. No one remembers, nor is there any legend of any disturbance more serious than the shaking of the earth and loud noises which Makooshin is charged with. In 1818 it made the whole island tremble violently during a period of sev- eral days, emitting, however, nothing but dense columns of smoke, and fine ashes were sifted lightly everywhere with the winds. A resounding cannonade that then burst from its bowels sorely alarmed the people, however, who fled from their little hamlets clustered at its base.
Immediately under the steep slopes and large proportions of this quiescent volcano is a small settlement of sixty natives, housed in
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Viewed from Bering Sea : bearing S.E. by S. 26 miles distant. Sept. 26, 1876
THE VOLCANO OF MAKOOSHIN : 5,475 FEET
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those typical Aleutian barraboras, with a small chapel, of course. Here, in 1880, lived the oldest inhabitant of the Oonalashka parish, an Aleut who had an undisputed age of eighty-three years. These simple souls have that same faith in the good behavior of Ma- kooshin which distinguished the citizens of Herculaneum and Pom- peii with reference to the dangers of Vesuvius. But the most amusing indignation is expressed by them in speaking of the bad behavior of an Oomnak crater, just across the straits from them, which in 1878 broke out into earthquakes, smoke, fire, and mud- showers, that so frightened the fish all about in these waters as to literally cause a famine at Makooshin. The finny tribes seem to be driven off by a trembling of the rocky bottom to the sea.
It was at Makooshin that the first Russians landed under Stepan Glottov in 1757. These traders in their reports declared that the natives here then "were very numerous and warlike," and that they had a great deal of that peculiar trouble with them which we so thoroughly understand now in the light of their infamous record. Certain it is that a more innocent-looking, indolent group of Aleutes cannot be found in all this region to-day than are these descendants of the " blood-thirsty savages," which Glottov saw in council here. They trap cross-foxes on the flanks of the great mountain which over- shadows their settlement, and do but little else. They are not at all impressed by the volcano, and cannot understand why we should walk over a long portage of eight miles from Oonalashka Harbor just to ascend it : because, they say truly, that the chances are ten to one against our seeing anything when we shall get up there, in- asmuch as fog will surely shut down over everything. In spite, however, of their argument we ascended, and they were right. We could not see a rod beyond our footing in any direction, and had it not been for their guidance, as the fog continued, we would have had a very difficult matter in regaining the lowlands at all that day .*
When Makooshin is seen from Bering Sea, in the early autumn, the snow rests upon its peculiar form so as to make a most strik- ing suggestion of its being extended as a huge corpse, with a sheet thrown over the upper part only of the body. The natives have
* But on two other occasions the author has had clear and unfogged glimpses of this singular mountain, which he made careful studies of; they are presented to the reader in this connection.
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many folk-lore stories and legends which belong to the mountain ; but these yarns are like the ballads of our sailor boys, they run on forever, ending in the same manner as they began. A hot spring sends a little rivulet of warm water across our path as we come down, and we notice that most of the boggy places are tinged with iron oxides.
In over-looking any of these islands from an interior view of high altitude, you are impressed by the large number of fresh-water lakes and ponds that nestle in the valleys, in the uplands, and even in the depressions on the loftiest summits. One of the prettiest pools of water which can be imagined is formed by the red, bowl- shaped walls of an extinct crater that makes the top of Paistrakov Mountain : this is a very prominent landmark just across the bay from Oonalashka village, looking west.
A superb survey of Oonalashka Island can be made by the as- cent of Mount Wood, which rears its sharp, syenitic peak two thou- sand eight hundred feet behind and right over the village and har- bor of Illoolook. The path to the summit is not difficult, and the panorama spread out under your eyes well repays the effort. It gives you a better idea of what a singularly mountainous region the island is, of the comparative absence of level or bottom-land areas -everything seems to spring from the surrounding ocean mirror, to hills-from hills, in turn, to mountains that end in sharp and rugged peaks. Upon the rocky, frost-riven shingle of these sum- mits nothing can grow except those tiny polar lichens which we find existing, clinging to the earth and rocks of the uttermost limits of the North as far as we have knowledge.
If the fog lifts its gray-blue curtain from the unruffled, clear surface of Captain's Harbor, and rolls back and away from the red and brown head of the cold crater of Paistrakov on the left, and from the black, jagged outlines of the " Prince " on your right, you will then have at your feet a picture of surpassing scenic beauty, both of contour and color, before and under your delighted vision. The rougher waters of Bering Sea have power no farther inland than their foaming at the feet of Waterfall Head and the dark bases of the Prince, for they rapidly fade into a smooth, still peace as the queer, hook-like sand-spit of Oolachta Harbor is reached, and the anchorage of Illoolook village is attained ; its houses and bar- raboras just peep out from the obscuring foothills of the moun- tain upon which we stand, and we can faintly discern a deli-
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cate fringe of sea-foam along the border of a long-curved beach in front. Two schooners and a steamer lie motionless upon the glassy bay, like so many microscopic water insects.
Turning right about and looking south, our eyes fall upon a radically different landscape-a bewildering, labyrinthian maze of Oonalashkan mountain peaks and ranges, rising in defiance to all law and order of position, with that lovely island-studded water of the head to Captain's Harbor in the foreground. Ridge after ridge, summit after summit, fades out one behind the other into the oblivion of distance, where the suggestion of a continuance to this same wild interior is vividly made, in spite of wreaths of fog and lines of snowy sheen, relieved so brightly by that greenish-blue of the mosses and sphagnum in which they are set. A few pretty snow-buntings flutter over the rocks to the leeward of our position; their white, restless forms are the only evidence or indication of animal life in our rugged vista of an Oonalashkan interior. Yet, could we see better, we might notice a lurking red fox, and flush a bevy or two of summer-dressed ptarmigan, feeding as they do on the crowberries, the sphagnum, willow-buds and insect-life.
While gazing into the endless succession of valleys, and scan- ning the varied peaks, a puff of moist wind suddenly strikes our cheeks-we turn to its direction and behold it bearing in and up from Bering Sea-a thick and darkening bank of fog which rapidly envelopes and conceals everything that it meets. It ends our sight- seeing, and peremptorily orders a return to the village below from which we came.
When we look at the Aleutes we are impressed at once with their remarkable non-resemblance to the Sitkans. They constantly re- mind us of Japanese faces and forms in another costume. The average Aleut is not a large man ; he is below our medium stand- ard-being about five feet six inches in stature, though, of course, there are a few exceptions to this rule, when examples will be found six feet tall, and many that are mere dwarfs. The women are in turn proportionately smaller. The hair is coarse, straight, and black ; the beard scanty ; check-bones are broad, high, and very prominent ; the nose very insignificant and almost flattened out at the bridge-the nostrils thick and fleshy ; the eyes very wide-set- very small, too, with a jet-black pupil and iris ; the eyebrows very faintly marked ; the lips are thick ; the mouth large ; the lower jaw is very square and prognathous ; the ears are small, set close to
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the head, and almost always pierced for brass or silver rings. The complexion is a light yellowish-brown ; in youth it is often fair, almost white, with a faint blush in the cheeks ; in middle age and to senility the skin always becomes very strongly wrinkled and seamed, with a leathery harshness. They all have full even sets of teeth, but never take the least care of them whatever. They have small, well-shaped hands and feet, but the finger-nails are exceed- ingly thin and brittle, bitten off, and never trimmed neatly. They walk in a clumsy, shambling manner, with none of that lithe, springy stepping so characteristic of the Rocky Mountain Indians. When we meet them as we saunter through the settlement, men, women, and children alike drop their eyes to the ground, and pass by in stupid humility, or indifference, as the case may be.
As we see these people at Oonalashka, so they are seen in every respect elsewhere, as they exist between Attoo and Bristol Bay and the Shoomagin Islands. They spend most of their time, men and women, in their skin-canoes, hunting the sea-lion and sea-otter-in codfishing and travelling to and from their favorite salmon-runs and berrying-grounds. Therefore, they have not enabled a sym- metrical figure to develop-their legs are always sprung at the knees, some badly bowed, and all are unsteady in walking. While there is nothing about the countenances of the women or girls which will warrant the term of handsome, yet they are not so ugly as the squaws of the Sitkan archipelago. Many of them have very kindly expressions, and a gleam of true womanly instinct far above their surroundings.
No people are more amiable or docile than are these natives of the Aleutian Islands to-day. They are quiet and respectful in their intercourse with the traders, and are all duly baptized members of the Greek Catholic Church. A chapel is never absent from their villages. They hunt sea-otters and trap foxes for their means of trading for those simple luxuries and necessaries of their life which they cannot find in their own country. There are no other fur- bearing animals here, and no other industries whatever in which they can engage.
As they live here to-day, they are married and sustain very faith- fully the relation of husband and wife. Each family, as a rule, has its own hut or barrabora. They have long, long ago ceased to dress in skins ; but they still retain and wear the primitive water-proof coat or "kamlayka " and boots or tarbosars, which are made from
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seal and sea-lion intestines. In the poverty-smitten stations of Akoon and Avatanak the early bird-skin "parkas " will probably be most commonly worn ; (but it is because these natives are so miser- ably poor in furs that they do so). They get from the trader's store at every village a full assortment of our own shop-made clothes, and, on Sunday in especial, many shiny broadcloth suits will be dis- played by the luckier hunters. The women are all attired in cotton dresses and gowns, made up pretty closely in imitation of the pre- vailing fashions among our own people. They wear the boots and shoes which are regularly brought up from San Francisco. But whenever they go out fox-trapping, or enter their bidarkas, they wear the "tarbosar" or water-proof boot of primitive use-the up- pers to it are made from the intestines or the gullets of marine mammalia, and it is soled with the tough flipper palms of a sea-lion.
They have the same weakness for our conventional high stove- pipe hats which we display ; but the prevalence of those boisterous gales and winds peculiar to these latitudes prevents that use of the cherished " beaver" that they otherwise would make of it. Instead, they universally wear low-crowned, leather-peaked caps, to which they love to add a gay red-ribbon band, suggested most likely by the recollection which they have of that gorgeous regalia of the Russian army and naval officers, who were wont to appear in full dress very often when among them in olden time.
The Aleutian men dress very plainly, young and old alike, little or no attention being given by them to details of color or orna- mentation, as is the common usage and practice of most semi-civil- ized races ; but they do lavish a great deal of care and skill in the decoration of their antique "kamlaykas," "tarbosars," and their bi- darkas : the seams of these garments and the boats are frequently embellished with gay tufts of gaily colored sea-bird feathers and lines of goose-quill embroidery.
True feminine desire for all the bright ribbons and cheap jew- elry that a trader spreads before her consumes the heart of the Aleutian woman, especially if she be young and admired by her people. The women are, therefore, only limited by their means, when it comes to bedecking themselves with all of these trinkets and gewgaws of the kind which the artful trader exhibits for that purpose. They braid their hair up in two queues usually and let them hang down behind upon their backs. They never wear bon- nets, or hats, for that matter ; but as they go to church or from hut
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to hut they tie cotton handkerchiefs over their heads. When hasty little errands out of doors, or sudden gossiping trips are under- taken, a shawl is thrown over the woman's head and held there, with the gathered ends together, under her chin by one hand. The shawls are of bright colors, and supply the place of woollen gar- ments, though ready-made cloaks and dolmans are not uncommon at those points where the sea-otter-hunting harvest is the best : her skirts, overskirts, waists, and stockings are all of cotton.
As these people have really but one idea and no variation of oc- cupation, they all live alike, in the same general manner. The difference between the families is only that of relative cleanliness and thrift. The most important and serious business of their shore-life is that embodied in the construction and repair of their huts, or barrabkies. If it is well built it makes a warm, dry shel- ter, and answers every requirement of a comfortable domicile. An excavation is made in the earth on the spot selected in the village site, ten or twelve feet square, and three or four feet deep. A wooden frame and lining is then put into this sub-cellar, and the excavated earth is then thrown back against and over it, with an outer wall of carefully-cut sod and boggy peat, being laid up two and three feet thick, sloping down to which is a well-thatched roof of grass and sedge, that abounds everywhere on the sandy margins of the sea- shore. Some of these huts are made very much larger than this pattern just defined, having regularly spread wings, like a Maltese cross, on the floor. The entrance to the barrabkie is usually through a low doorway that is made to a small annex or storm hallway, also built of sod and peat. This shields another little door, which opens into the living-room that the architect steps down into as he enters. A single window is put at the opposite end of the room from the door, in which a small glazed sash is usually employed. The floor is either covered with boards which the native has purchased from the trader, or else it is the hard- trodden earth itself, upon which the women strew grass and spread mats of the same texture.
A diminutive cast-iron stove is now very generally used by the Aleutes. It commonly stands right in the centre of the room, and upon it the cooking can be done, instead of being driven to the hall- way fireplace, or "povarnik," of the olden time, when the smoke then stifled them from the burning of that fat of seals, fish and birds, which was used very largely for fuel. Therefore, they were obliged
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to stew and broil on a special fireplace constructed outside of the living-room. A great many old-style "peechka " stoves of the Rus- sians are still in use, but no new ones are being made any more, since the introduction of our little iron stoves. This living-room of the hut is usually curtained or partitioned into two sections, one of which is the bedchamber, or "spalniah." They have a great variety of beds and bedsteads, or bunks rather. They are proud of a well-stuffed couch of feathers, and take more real, solid com- fort in sleeping thereon than in anything else that transpires of an enjoyable nature in their lives. The dealers sell a series of the most gaudily printed spreads for these beds, and sometimes you will be much surprised to see a white counterpane and fluted pillow- shams spread over an Aleutian couch. Those beds are always raised well up from the floor, and sometimes a curtain is specially hung around them-a borrowed Russian idea, unquestionably. A rude table, two or three empty cracker-boxes from the trader's store for chairs, and a rough bench or two, is about all the furni- ture ever seen in a barrabkie. The table-ware and household utensils do not require a large cupboard for their reception. Cups and saucers of white crockery, highly decorated in flaring blue and red floral designs, plates to match, a few pewter teaspoons, will usually be found in sufficient quantity for the daily use of the family ; and these are loaned out to a neighbor also, on occasions of festivity, when an entire circle of chosen friends join under the roof of some one barrabora in tea-drinking and " praznik " feasting.
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