USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 19
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As we retrace our steps to Oonalashka village we become fully im- pressed with the size of this island. It bears so many mountain spurs, with a singularly rugged, cut-up coast, in which the deep indentations or gulf-fiords nearly sever the island in twain as they run in to al- most meet from the north and south sides. Beautiful mats of wild poppies are nodding their yellow heads as the gusts sweep over them on the hillsides, and a rank, rich growth of tall grasses by the creek- margins and the sea-shore in sheltered places shimmers and sways like so many fields of uncut green grain do at home. Vegetation everywhere, except on the summits of the highest peaks and ridges and the mural faces of the bluffs ! Even there some tiny lichens grow, however, and give rich tones of golden ochre and purplish- bronzed reflections from the cold, moist rocks, whereto they cling.
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OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
We pause in that little cemetery, just outside of the village of Illoolook. It is on a small knoll, under higher hills that rear themselves over it. Its disorder and neglect is a fair reminder of what we see in most of our own rural graveyards. The practice of all these natives is to inter by digging a shallow grave. The body is prepared in its best clothes, and coffined in a plain wooden box. A small mound and a larger or smaller wooden Greek cross is the only monument. Tiny oil-portraits of their patron saints, painted on tin or sheet-iron, especially made for these purposes, and fur- nished by the Church, are tacked to the crosses, with now and then a rude Russian inscription carved or painted thereon in addition. During certain periods of the summer, when the weather is pleas- ant, little squads of relatives will come out here from the village and pass a whole day in tea-drinking and renovating the crosses, sitting on the mounds as they chat, work, and boil their samovar. The Illoolook church-bells ring-they arouse us to resume the walk thus interrupted in this small city of Aleutian dead. As we enter the town, we see the occupants of turfy barraboras and frame cottages hastening from every quarter and trooping to the door of a yellow-walled and red-roofed house of worship. Perched on that three-barred cross which crowns the cupola of this chapel are half a dozen big black ravens, all croaking most lugubriously, as the clanging chimes peal out below them. That is their favorite roosting-place. The natives take no notice of those ill-omened birds, which as feathered scavengers, hop around the barraboras in perfect security, since no one ever disturbs them, unless it be some grace- less trader who is anxious to test the killing power of a new shot- gun. They breed in high chinks of the bluffs, and find abundant food cast upon the beaches by the sea. A few domestic fowls, some with broods of newly-hatched chicks, are running about or scratch- ing around the place. The priest's shaggy little bull and cow stand in front of a small stable or "scoatnik," lazily chewing their cud. There is no other live-stock in the hamlet, except a few dogs and cats; not a great many of the latter, however.
West of this Island of Oonalashka is a narrow-lined stretch of more than eight hundred miles of rapidly-succeeding islets and islands, until the extreme limit of the Alaskan border is reached at Attoo. In all this dreary wilderness of land and water only three small human settlements are to be found to-day, with a population of less than five hundred natives and six or seven white men.
·TIJ !.
THE VILLAGE AND HARBOR OF ATTOO
This Settlement is the extreme Western Town of North America : it is three thousand miles West of San Francisco
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THE GREAT ALEUTIAN CHAIN.
Attoo, Atkha, and Oomnak are the only villages, the last closely ad- joins Oonalashka, on a large island of the same name.
Attoo is the extreme western town which is or can be located on the North American continent. It is the first land made and dis- covered by the Russians, as they became acquainted with the Aleu- tian chain. Michael Novodiskov, a sailor who had survived Bering and the wreck of the St. Peter in 1741, took command of a small shallop in 1745, and sailed from Lower Kamchatka. He reached Attoo, and also landed on its sister island of Aggatoo, in the same
season. The Aleutes were then numerous, bold, and richly sup- plied with sea-otter skins. Now, nothing but the ruined sites of once populous villages remain behind to attest the truth of that early Russian narrative ; and the descendants, who number but a little more than one hundred souls, are living in a small hamlet that nestles in the shelter of that beautiful harbor on the north side of Attoo Island, at the rear of which abrupt hills and high moun- tains suddenly rise. A sand-beach before the village is fringed by a most luxurious growth of rank grass, that wild wheat of the north, the tasselled seed-plumes of which are waving as high as the waists, and even the heads of the natives themselves.
Sea-otters have been virtually exterminated or driven from the coast here, so that the residents of Attoo are, in worldly goods, poor indeed ; and a small trader's store is stationed here, more for the sake of charity than of commercial gain. But they have an abundance of sea-lion meat, of eggs and water-fowl ; a profusion of fislı-cod, halibut, algæ mackerel, and a few salmon. They have a liberal supply of drift-wood landed by currents upon the shores of this and the contiguous rugged islets. Several times during the last ten years have traders endeavored to coax these inhabitants to abandon Attoo and go with them to better situations for sea- otter hunting. But, although pinched by poverty, yet so strongly attached are they to this lonely island of their birth, that they have obstinately declined. Though they are poor, yet the contrast be- tween their cheerful, healthy faces and those debauched coun- tenances which we observed at the wealthy villages of Protassov and Belcovsky is a delightful one, and preaches an eloquent ser- mon in its own reflection. Naturally the people of Attoo do not enjoy much sugar, tea, cloth, and other little articles which they have learned to covet from the trader's store ; so we find them liv- ing nearer the primitive style of Aleutian ancestry than elsewhere
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in the archipelago, being dressed largely in tanned seal and bird- skins, of the fashion made and worn by their forefathers who wel- comed Novodiskov long, long ago.
The necessity of doing something in order to gain from the trader a few of the simplest articles, such as the natural resources of Attoo utterly failed to supply, has driven the natives to the care and conservation of blue foxes, which they introduced here many years past, and of which they secure, in traps, two or three liun- dred every season. The common red fox * of the whole Aleutian chain became extinct here in prior time; so, taking advantage of this fact, those blue foxes, so abundant and so valuable on the Seal Islands, were imported, and have ranged without deterioration, since ice-floes never bridge the straits that isolate this island from the nearest adjacent land, and upon which the common breed might cross over to ruin the quality of the fur of that transported Tulpes lagopus. They have also domesticated the wild goose, and rear flocks of them around their barraboras, being the only people in Alaska who have ever done so.
It hardly seems credible, at first thought, but the village of Attoo makes San Francisco practically the half-way town as we go from Calais, Me., to it, our westernmost settlement ! It is really but slightly short of being just midway, since Attoo stands almost three thousand miles west of the Golden Gate. + A strict geo- graphical centre of the American Union is that point at sea forty miles off the Columbia River mouth, on the coast of Oregon.
The nearest neighbors of the Attoo villagers are not of their own kith and kin-they are the Atkhan and Kamchadale Creoles and natives of the Russian Seal Islands, some two hundred miles
* The only fur-bearing animal found in every section of Alaska is the red fox (Vulpes fulvus). From Point Barrow to the southern boundary, and from the British line to the Island of Attoo, this brute is omnipresent. It varies greatly in size and quality of fur, from the handsome specimens of Nooshagak down to the diminutive yellow-tinged creatures that ramble furtively over the Aleutian Islands.
+ " The distance in statute miles between San Francisco and a point due south of Attoo, measured on the parallel of San Francisco, is 2,943.1 miles. The distance east from Attoo of a point due north of San Francisco, measured on the parallel of Attoo, is 2,214.5 miles. The amount of westing made in sailing from San Francisco to Attoo, on a great circle, is very nearly 2,582.5 miles."-(Henry Gannett, Geographer U. S. Geological Survey: letter to author. )
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west ; but on our side they are separated by more than four hun- dred and thirty miles of stormy water from the first inhabited island, which is Atkha, where a much larger and a much more fort- unately situated settlement exists on its east coast, at Nazan Bay. Here is a community of over two hundred and thirty souls, being all the people gathered together who previously lived in small scat- tered hamlets on the many large and small islands between Atkha and Attoo. They secure a comparatively good number of sea- otters, and are relatively well-to-do, being able to excite and sus- tain much activity in the trader's store.
General agreement among those who have visited the Atkhans, as traders and agents of the Government, is that these natives are the finest body of sea-otter hunters in all respects known to the business. They make long journeys from their homes, carried to the outlying islands of Semeisopochnoi, Amchitka, Tanaga, Kanaga, Adahk and Nitalikh, Siguam and Amookhta, some of them far dis- tant, on which they establish camps and search the reefs and rocks awash, as they learn by experience where the chosen haunts of the shy sea-otter are. Here they remain engaged in the clase over extended periods of months at a time, when, in accord with a pre- concerted date arranged with the traders, those schooners which carried them out from Atkha, return, pick them up, and take them back. Then the trader's store is made a grand rendezvous for the village ; the hunters tally their skins, settle their debts, make their donations to the church, and then promptly invest their surplus in every imaginable purchase which the goods displayed will warrant.
The women of Atkha employ long intervals, in which their husbands and sons are absent, by making the most beautifully woven grass baskets and mats. The finest samples of this weaving ever produced by a savage or semi-civilized people are those which come from Atkha. The girls and women gather grasses at the proper season, and prepare them with exceeding care for their primitive methods of weaving; and they spare no amount of labor and pains in the execution of their designs, which are now almost entirely those suggested by the traders, such as fancy sewing- baskets, cigar-holders, table-mats, and special forms that are eagerly accepted in trade, for they find a ready sale in San Francisco.
A peculiar and valuable food-fish is found in the Atkhan waters which has been attracting a great deal of attention as a substitute for the mackerel of our east coast, inasmuch as there is no such
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fish found on the Alaskan coasts. Among the sea-weed that floats in immense rafts everywhere throughout the Aleutian passes, the "yellow-fish," or " Atkha mackerel,"* is very abundant ; it is also plentiful off the Shoomagin Islands. It is a good substitute for the real mackerel,t resembling it in taste after salting, as well as in size and movements.
During early days of Russian order and control, the people of Atkha lived altogether on the north side of the island, and it was then the grand central depot of the old Russian American Com- pany. A chief factor was in charge, who had exclusive jurisdiction over all that country embraced in the Kurile archipelago, and the Commander group of Kamchatka, and the Aleutian chain as far east as Oomnak. It was a very important place then, and this ter- ritory of its jurisdiction was styled the "Atkhan Division." But within the last ten or twelve years, fish and drift-wood became very scarce on the Bering Sea coast, so the inhabitants made a sweeping removal of everything from the ancient site on Korovinsky Bay to that of Nazan, where the little hamlet now stands, overtopped by lofty peaks and hills on every side, except where it looks out over the straits to the bold headlands of Seguam. So thorough were they in this " nova-sailnah," that they even disinterred the remains of their first priest and re-buried them in front of their new chapel -a delightful exhibition of fond memory and respect where we might, perhaps, have least thought to have found them manifested.
The curious Island of Amlia shuts out the heavy swell of the Pacific Ocean from Nazan Harbor, and gives that little bay great peace and protection. This island is thirty miles in length, and nowhere has it a breadth of over four miles ; most of its entire extent is only some two miles from ocean to ocean. It consists of a string of sharp, conical peaks, which once were active volcanoes, but now cold and silent as the tomb. So abruptly do they rise from the oceans which they divide, that there is but one small spot on the south side where a vessel can lie at anchor and effect a landing.
Atkha is a large island, and it has very slight resemblance to that of Oonalashka in shape ; its indented fiörds are, however, less deep and not near so commodious and accessible. The snowy, smoking crater of Korovinsky Sopka stands like a grim sentinel
* Pleurogrammus monopterygius.
+ Scomber scombrus.
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overlooking the north end of the island, a sheer five thousand feet above the sea-beach at its feet. A few miles to the south another rises to almost as great an elevation, from the flanks of which a number of hot springs pour out a steady boiling flood ; then, at the northeast extremity, and handsomely visible from the village, is a silent, snowy crater which they call Sarichev. Korovinsky is the only disturber of the peace that rightfully belongs to Atkha. It is constantly emitting smoke and ashes, while earthquakes and subterranean noises are felt and heard all over the island at frequent though irregular periods during the entire year. In the ravines and canons of this volcano and its satellites are the only glaciers which the geologist has ever been able to find on any of these peaked, lofty islands west of Oonalashka, though a hundred eternal snow-clad summits and a thousand snow-filled gorges are easily discerned. The natives here also describe a series of mud-volcanoes, or " mud-pots," that exist on the island, in which this stuff is con- stantly boiling up with all the colors of the rainbow, about as they seethe and puff in the Geyser Basin of the Yellowstone Park.
There are a dozen or so small, mountainous, uninhabited islands between Atkha and the larger island of Adakh in the west. Very little is known of them, since they endanger life if a landing is made. The most imposing one is Sitkhin, a round, mountainous, lofty mass which culminates in a snow-covered peak over five thou- sand feet in height. The crater is dead, however, and no sign of ancient volcanic energy is now displayed, beyond the emission of hot springs from fissures in its rocky flanks. Adakh itself is quite a large island, rough and hilly to an excessive degree. A grand cone, which rises up directly in the centre high above all the rest, is called the " white crater." It is also a dead volcano like Sitkhin ; but steamy vapors from outpouring hot waters rise in many valleys and from the uplands. A succession of volcanic peaks reared from the sea, a few of them still smoking and muttering, constitute the islands of Tanaga and Kanaga in the vicinity of Adakh. No place is feasible for a boat to land on either of these wild islets, except on the west shore of Tanaga in Slava Rossia Bay.
A single immense peak, rising all by itself, solitary and alone, from the girdle of surf that encircles it-a band of foaming break- ers eighteen miles in circumference, is the islet of Goreloi. It is a formidable rival of the majestic volcano of Shishaldin, on Oonimak. Though nearly as high, yet it is not so symmetrical a cone. Wreaths
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and solid banks of fog are pressed against its volcanic sides, and hang around its glittering white head, so that the full impression of its grandeur cannot strike us as we gaze at its defiant presence, where, unsupported, it alone beats back the swell of a vast ocean.
That cluster of islands which stand between Goreloi and Attoo is an aggregate of cold volcanic peaks-Amchitka and Kyska being the largest-the Seven Peaks, or Semiseisopochnoi, smoking a little, all the rest entirely quiet. They offer no hospitality to a traveller, and the natives have done wisely in abandoning these sav- age island-solitudes to reside at Nazan Bay, where the country has a most genial aspect, and many stretches of warm sand-dune tracts are found, upon which vegetation springs into luxuriant life. Here, also, quite a herd of Kamchatkan cattle were cared for when the Russian régime was in vogue. This stock-raising effort was not a practical success, however, and the last of the bovine race disap- peared very shortly after the country changed ownership. Goats were also introduced here, as well as elsewhere throughout the fur- trading posts of the old company in Alaska ; but the morbid pro- pensity of those pugnacious little animals to feed upon the grasses which grow over roofs of the barraboras, and thus break in and otherwise damage such earthen tenements, made them so unpopular that their propagation was energetically and successfully discour- aged by the suffering Aleutes.
Two hundred miles of uninhabited waste extends between the natives of Atkha and their nearest neighbors, the villagers of Nikol- sky, who live in a small, sheltered bight of the southwest shore of Oomnak. This is one of the largest islands of the whole Aleutian group, very mountainous, with three commanding, overlooking peaks that are most imposing in their rugged elevation. Several large lakes nestle in their hilly arms, and feed salmon rivulets that rush in giddy rapids and cascades down to the ocean. Everything grows at Oomnak which we have noticed on its sister island of Oonalashka, except the willow ; while cross and red foxes are much more abundant here than at any other place in the whole archipel- ago. A great many hot springs boil up on the north side, and only as recently as 1878 a decided volcanic shock was experienced, which resulted in the upheaval of a small mud-crater between the vil- lage and Toolieskoi Sopka, a huge fire-mountain of the middle interior. Subterranean noises and tremors of the earth are chronic phenomena here, but the natives pay no attention to them. They
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complain, however, of inability to find fish where they usually found them in abundance prior to these earthquakes. Redoubled atten- tion, however, is paid to the salmon when they run, and thus the deficiency is made up.
Before the coming of the Russians, Oomnak was one of the most populous islands ; then there were over twenty villages, some of them quite large. One was so big that " the inhabitants of it were able to eat the carcass of an enormous whale in a single day !" The most stubborn and independent spirit displayed by the Aleutes prior to their subjugation was exhibited by the inhabitants of this
HELIOF
An Aleutian Mummy.
[Unrolled from its cerements.]
island. The four or five thousand hardy savages which the pro- mishlyniks met here in 1757-59 have dwindled to a microscopic number of less than one hundred and thirty souls, who reside at Nikolsky to-day. They enjoy a somewhat better climate, for a good deal less snow falls here than at Oonalashka, and the small vege- table-garden does much better than elsewhere, except at Attoo. They raise domestic fowls, and have a very fair sea-otter catch every winter, when they scour the south coast, and reside for months at Samalga, hunting that animal. Furious gales which prevail during certain seasons drive kahlans out upon the south beach,
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there to rest from the pelting of storms : then they are speedily apprehended and clubbed by the watchful Oomnak hunter.
That curious group, the "Cheetiery Sopochnie," or Islands of the Four Mountains, stands right across the straits, opposite Oomnak. From Kaygamilak, which lies nearest, eleven mummies were taken as they were found in a warm cave on the northeast side of this island. These bodies were placed there in 1724, or some twenty-five or thirty years before the Russians first appeared. The mummies * were in fine preservation, and were the remains of a noted chief and his family, who in that time ruled with an iron hand over a large munber of his people. The Island of Kayamil is a mere vol- canic series of fire-chimneys, the walls of which are not yet cool. The southeast shore in olden times was the site of several large settlements, where the people lived well upon an abundance of sea-lions, hair-seals, and water-fowl, which still repair to its bor- ders. Now that it is desolate and uninhabitable, large flocks of tundra geese spend the summers here, as they shed their feathers and rear their young, not a fox to vex or destroy them having been left by those prehistoric Aleutian hunters.
But on Tahnak, which is the largest of the group, plenty of red foxes are reported. The loftiest summits are also on this one of the four islets, and on the south side once lived a race of the most warlike and ferocious of all Aleutes. They were destroyed to a man by Glottov, and their few descendants have long since been merged with those of Oomnak, where they now live. Several small, high, bluffy islands stand around Tahnak, and between it and its sister, Oonaska, which is nearly as large, equally rugged and precipitous. Amootoyon is a quite small islet, and completes the quartet of " Cheetiery Sopochnie."
A most interesting volcanic phenomenon of recent record is afforded by the study of that small Bogaslov islet which now stands hot and smoking twenty miles north of Oomnak, and which, two years ago, raised a great commotion by firing up anew. In the autumn of 1796 the natives of Oomnak and Oonalashka were startled by a series of loud reports like parks of artillery, followed
* These specimens were procured at the urgent request of the author, who induced a trader to make the attempt, September 22, 1874. They were pre- sented by the Alaska Commercial Company of San Francisco to the Smith- sonian Institution.
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by tremblings of the earth upon which they stood. Then a dense dark cloud, full of gas and ashes, came down upon them from Bering Sea, swept by a northerly wind, and it hung over their astonished heads for a week or ten days, accompanied by earth- quakes and subterranean thunder ; then when an interval of clear- ing occurred by a change of winds, they saw distinctly to the northward a bright light burning over the sea. The boldest launched their bidarkas, and, after a close inspection, saw that a small island had been elevated about one hundred feet above the level of the surrounding waters ; that it had been forced up from some fissure of the bottom to the sea, and was still rising, while liquid streams of lava and scoriæ made it impossible for them to land. This plutonic action did not cease here until 1825, when it left above the green waters of Bering Sea an isolated oval peak with a serrated crest, almost inaccessible, some two hundred and eighty feet high, and two or three miles in circumference. The Russians landed here then for the first time, and the rocks were so hot that they passed but a few moments ashore. It has, however, cooled off enough now to be occupied by large herds of sea-lions, and is re- sorted to by flocks of sea-fowl. In this fashion of the making of Bogaslov was our vast chain of the Aleutian archipelago cast up from that line of least resistance in the earth's crust which is now marked by the position of these islands, as they alternately face the billows of the immense wastes of the Pacific, and those storm-tossed waves of the shoal sea of Bering.
CHAPTER IX.
WONDERFUL SEAL ISLANDS.
The Fur-seal Millions of the Pribylov Islands. - Marvellous Exhibition of Massed Animal-life in a State of Nature .- Story of the Discovery of these Remarkable Rookeries, July, 1786 .- Previous Knowledge of them Unknown to Man .- Sketch of the Pribylov Islands .- Their Character, Climate, and Human Inhabitants .- A Realm of Summer-fog .- The Seal- life here Overshadows Everything, though the Bird Rookeries of Saint George are Wonderful .- No Harbors .- The Roadsteads .- The Attractive Flora .- Only Islands in Alaska where the Curse of Mosquitoes is Re- moved. - Natives Gathering Eggs on Walrus Islet .- A Scene of Confusion and Uproar .- Contrast very Great between Saint Paul and Saint George. -Good Reason of the Seals in Resorting to these Islands to the Exclusion of all other Land in Alaska .- Old-time Manners and Methods of the Rus- sians Contrasted with Our Present Control. - Vast Gain and Improvement for Seals and Natives .-- The Character of the Present Residents .- Their Attachment to the Islands .- The History of the Alaska Commercial Com- pany .- The Wise Action of Congress .- The Perfect Supervision of the Agents of the Government .- Seals are more Numerons now than at First. -The Methods of the Company, the Government, and the Natives in Taking the Seals.
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