USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 25
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* This evil of habitual and gross intoxication under Russian rule was not characteristic of these islands alone. It was universal throughout Alaska. Sir
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under the control and influence of the Russians, they have adopted many Slavic customs, such as giving birthday-dinners, naming their children, etc. They are remarkably attached to their church, and no other form of religion could be better adapted or have a firmer hold upon the sensibilities of the people. Their inherent chastity and sobriety cannot be commended. They have long since thrown away the uncouth garments of Russian rule-those shaggy log-skin caps, with coats half seal and half sea-lion-for a complete outfit, cap-a-pie, such as our own people buy in any furnishing house, the same boots, socks, underclothing, and clothing, with ulsters and ulsterettes ; but the violence of the wind prevents their selecting the hats of our fashion and sporting fraternity. As for the women, they, too, have kept pace and even advanced to the level of the men, for in these lower races there is usually more vanity displayed by the masculine element than the feminine, according to my observation. In other words, I have noticed a greater desire among the young men than among the young women of savage and semi-civilized people to be gaily dressed, and to look fine ; but the visits of the wives of our treasury officials and the company's agents to these islands during the last ten years, bringing with them a full outfit, as ladies always do, of everything under the sun that women want to wear, has given the native female mind an undue expansion up there and stimulated it to unwonted activity. They watch the cut of the garments and borrow the patterns, and some of them are very expert dressmakers to-day. When the Russians controlled affairs, the women were the hewers of drift-wood and the draw- ers of water. At St. Paul there was no well of drinking-fluid about the village, nor within half a mile of the village. There was no drinking-water unless it was caught in reservoirs, and the cis- tern-water, owing to those particles of seal-fat soot which fall upon the roofs of the houses, is rendered undrinkable, so that the supply for the town until quite recently used to be carried by women from two little lakes at the head of the lagoon, a mile and a half as the
George Simpson, speaking of the subject when in Sitka, April, 1842, says: "Some reformation certainly was wanted in this respect, for of all the drunken as well as of all the dirty places that I had visited, New Archangel (Sitka) was the worst. On the holidays in particular, of which, Sundays in- cluded, there are one hundred and sixty-five in the year, men, women, and even children were to be seen staggering about in all directions."-Simpson : Journey Around the World, 1841-42, p. S8.
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crow flies from the village, and right under Telegraph Hill. This is quite a journey, and when it is remembered that they drink so much tea, and that water has to go with it, some idea of the labor of the old and young females can be derived from an inspection of the map. Latterly, within the last four or five years, the company have opened a spring less than half a mile from the " gorode," which they have plumbed and regulated, so that it supplies them with water now and renders the labor next to nothing, compared with all former difficulty. But to-day, when water is wanted in the Aleutian houses at St. Paul, the man has to get it-the woman does not ; he trudges out with a little wooden firkin or tub on his back and brings it to the house.
Some of the natives save their money; yet there are very few among them, perhaps not more than a dozen, who have the slight- est economical tendency. What they cannot spend for luxuries, groceries, and tobacco they manage to get away with at the gam- ing-table. They have their misers and their spendthrifts, and they have the usual small proportion who know how to make money, and then how to spend it. A few among them who are in the habit of saving have opened a regular bank-account with the company. Some of them have to-day two or three thousand dollars saved, drawing an interest of nine per cent.
When the ships arrive and go, the severe and necessary labor of lightering their cargoes off and on from the roadsteads where they anchor is principally performed by these people, and they are paid so much a day for their labor : from fifty cents to one dollar, accord- ing to the character of the service they render. This operation, however, is much dreaded by the ship-captains and sea-going men, whose habits of discipline and automatic regularity and effect of working render them severe critics and impatient coadjutors of the natives, who, to tell the truth, hate to do anything after they have pocketed their reward for sealing ; and when they do labor after this, they regard it as an act of very great condescension on their part.
As they are living to-day up there, there is no restraint, such as the presence of policemen, courts of justice, fines, etc., which we employ for the suppression of disorder and maintenance of the law in our own land. They understand that if it is necessary to make them law-abiding, and to punish crime, such officers will be among them, and hence, perhaps, is due the fact that from the time that
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the Alaska Commercial Company has taken charge, in 1870, there has not been one single occasion where the simplest functions of a justice of the peace would or could have been called in to settle any difficulty. This speaks eloquently for their docile nature and their amiable disposition.
These people are singularly affectionate and indulgent toward their children. There are no " bald-headed " tyrants in our homes as arbitrary and ruthless in their rule as are those snuffly babies and young children on the Seal Islands. While it is very young, the Aleut gives up everything to the caprice of his child, and never crosses its path or thwarts its desire ; the "deetiah " literally take charge of the house ; but as soon as these callow members of the family become strong enough to bear burdens and to labor, generally between twelve and fifteen years of age, they are then pressed into hard service relentlessly by their hitherto indulgent parents. The extremes literally meet in this application.
They have another peculiarity : when they are ill, slightly or seriously, no matter which, they maintain or affect a stolid resigna- tion, and are patient to positive apathy. This is not due to defi- ciency of nervous organization, because those among them who exhibit examples of intense liveliness and nervous activity behave just as stolidly when ill as their more lymphatic townsmen do. Boys and girls, men and women, all alike, are patient and resigned when ailing and under treatment ; but it is a bad feature after all, inasmuch as it is well-nigli impossible to rally a very sick man who himself has no hope, and who seems to mutely deprecate every effort to save his life. The principal cause of death among the people, by natural infirmity, on the Seal Islands is the varying forms of consumption and bronchitis, always greatly aggravated by that inherited scrofulous taint or stain of blood which was, in one way or another, flowing through the veins of their recent progeni- tors, both here and throughout the Aleutian Islands. There is nothing worth noticing in the line of nervous diseases, unless it be now and then the record of a case of alcoholism superinduced by excessive quass drinking. The "makoolah " intemperance among these people, which was not suppressed until 1876, was a chief factor to an immediate death of infants ; for, when they were at the breast, their mothers would drink quass to intoxication, and the stomachs of newly-born Aleutes or Creoles could not stand the infliction which they received, even second-hand. Had it not been
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for this wretched spectacle, so often presented to my eyes in 1872- 73, I should hardly have taken the active steps which I did to put the nuisance down ; for it involved me, at first, in a bitter personal controversy, which, although I knew at the outset was inevitable, still it weighed nothing in the scales against the evil itself. A few febrile disorders are occurring, yet they yield readily to good treatment.
The inherent propensity of man to gamble is developed here to a very appreciable degree, but it in no way whatever suggests the strange gaming love and infatuation with which all Indians and Eskimo elsewhere of Alaska are possessed. The chief delight of men and boys in the two villages is to stand on the street cor- ners " pitching " half-dollars. So devoted, indeed, have I found the native mind to this hap-hazard sport, that frequently I would detect groups of them standing ont in pelting gales of wind and of rain, "shying " silver coins at the little dirt-driven pegs. A few of them, men and women, play cards with much skill and intelli- gence.
One of the peculiarities * of these people is that they seldom undress when they go to bed-neither the men, women, nor chil- dren ; and also that at any and all hours of the night during the summer season, when I have passed in and out of the village to and from the rookeries, I always found several of the natives squatting before their house-doors or leaning against the walls, stupidly star- ing out into the misty darkness of the fog, or chatting one with the other over their pipes. A number of the inhabitants, by this dis- position, are always up and around throughout the settlement during the entire night and day. In olden times, and even recently,
* I was told by a very bright Russian, who spent a season here, 1871-72, as special agent of the Treasury Department, that the Aleutian ancestors of these people when they were converted and baptized into the Greek Catholic Church received their names, brand new, from the fertile brains of priests, who, after exhausting the common run of Muscovitic titles, such as our Smiths and Joneses, were compelled to fall back upon some personal characteristics of the new claimant for civilized nomenclature. Thus we have to-day on the Seal Islands a "Stepan Bayloglazov," or, "Son of a White Eye," "Oseep Baizyahzeekov," or "Son of Man without a Tongue." A number of the old Russian governors and admirals of the imperial navy are represented here by their family names, though I do not think, from my full acquaintance with the namesakes, that the distinguished owners in the first place had anything to do with their physical embodiment on the Pribylov Islands.
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these involuntary sentinels of the night have often startled the whole village by shouting at the top of their voices the pleasant and electric announcement of the "ship's light !" or they have frozen it with superstitious horror at daybreak by then reciting some ghostly vision that had appeared to them.
The urchins play marbles, spin tops, and fly kites, intermittently, with all the feverish energy displayed by such youth of our own sur- roundings ; they frolic at base-ball, and use "shinny " sticks with great volubility and activity. The girls are, however, much more repressed, and, though they have a few games, and play quietly with quaintly dressed dolls, yet they do not appear to be possessed of that usual feminine animation so conspicuously marked in our home-life.
The attachment which the natives have for their respective islands was well shown to me in 1874. Then a number of St. George peo- ple were taken over to St. Paul, temporarily, to do the killing inci- dental to a reduction of the quota of twenty-five thousand for their island and a corresponding increase at St. Paul. They became homesick immediately, and were never tired of informing the St. Paul natives that St. George was a far handsomer and more enjoy- able island to live upon ; that walking over the long sand reaches of "Pavel " made their legs grievously weary, and that the whole effect of this change of residence was "ochen scootchnie." Natu- rally the ire of the St. Paul people rose at once, and they retorted in kind, indicating the rocky surface of St. George and its great in- feriority as a seal-island. I was surprised at the genuine feeling on both sides, because, as far as I could judge from a residence on each island, it was a clear case of tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum be- tween them as to opportunities and climate necessary for a pleas- urable existence. The natives themselves are of one and common stock, though the number of Creoles on St. George is relatively much larger than on St. Paul. Consequently the tone of the St. George village is rather more sprightly and vivacious.
The question is naturally asked, How do these people employ themselves during the long nine months of every year after the close of the sealing season and until it begins again, when they have little or absolutely nothing to do? It may be answered that they simply vegetate, or, in other words, are entirely idle, mentally and physically, during most of this period. But, to their credit, let it be said that mischief does not employ their idle hands. They
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are passive killers of time, drinking tea and sleeping, with a few disagreeable exceptions, such as the gamblers. There are a half- dozen of these characters at St. Paul, and perhaps as many at St. George, who spend whole nights at their sittings, even during the sealing season, playing games of cards taught by Russians and per- sous who have been on the island since the transfer of the territory ; but the majority of the men, women, and children, not being com- pelled to exert themselves to obtain any of the chief or even the least of the necessaries of life, such as tea and hard bread, sleep the greater portion of the time, when not busy in eating and in the daily observances of that routine belonging to the Greek Catholic Church. The teachings, pomp, and circumstance of the religious ob- servances of this faith alone preserve these people from absolute stag- nation. In obedience to its promptings they gladly attend church very regularly. They also make and receive calls on their saints' days, and such days are very numerous. The natives add to these entertainments of their saints' day and birth-festivals, or "Eman- nimiks," the music of accordeons and violins. Upon the former and its variation, the concertina, they play a number of airs, and are real fond of the noise. A great many of the women in particu- lar can render indifferently a limited selection of tunes, many of which are the old battle-songs, so popular during the rebellion, woven into weird Russian waltzes and love-ditties, which they have jointly gathered from their former masters and our soldiers, who were quartered here in 1869. From the Russians and the troops also they have learned to dance various figures, and have been taught to waltz. These dances, however, the old folks do not enjoy very much. They will come in and sit around and look at the young performers with stolid indifference; but if they manage to get a strong current of tea setting in their direction, nicely sugared and toned up, they revive and join in the mirth. In old times they never danced here unless they were drunk, and it was the principal occupation of the amiable and mischievous treasury agents and others in those early days to stimulate this beery fun.
Seal-meat is their staple food, and in the village of St. Paul they consume on an average fully five hundred pounds a day the year round, and they are, by the permission of the Secretary of the Treasury, allowed occasionally to kill five thousand or six thousand seal-pups, or an average of twenty-two to thirty young "kotickie " for each man, woman, and child in the settlements. The pups will
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dress ten pounds each. This shows an average consumption of nearly six hundred pounds of seal-meat by each person, large and small, during the year. To this diet the natives add a great deal of butter and many sweet crackers. They are passionately fond of butter. No epicure at home or butter-taster in Goshen knows or appreciates that article better than these people do. If they could get all that they desire, they would consume one thousand pounds of butter and five hundred pounds of sweet crackers every week, and indefinite quantities of sugar. The sweetest of all sweet teeth are found in the jaw of the ordinary Aleut. But it is of course un- wise to allow them full swing in this matter, for they would turn their stomachs into fermenting-tanks if they had free access to an unlimited supply of saccharine food. The company issues them two hundred pounds a week. If unable to get sweet crackers, they will eat about three hundred pounds of hard or pilot bread every week, and, in addition to this, nearly seven hundred pounds of flour at the same time. Of tobacco they are allowed fifty pounds per week ; candles, seventy-five pounds ; rice, fifty pounds. They burn, strange as it may seem, kerosene-oil here to the exclusion of that seal-fat whichi literally overruns the island. They ignite and consume over six hundred gallons of kerosene-oil a year in the vil- lage of St. Paul alone. They do not fancy vinegar very much ; per- haps fifty gallons a year are used up there. Mustard and pepper are sparingly used, one to one pound and a half a week for the whole village. Beans they peremptorily reject ; for some reason or other they cannot be induced to use them. Those who go about the ves- sels contract a taste for split-pea soup, and a few of them are sold in the village-store. Salt meat, beef or pork, they will take reluct- antly, if it is given to and pressed upon them ; but they will never buy it. I remember, in this connection, seeing two barrels of prime salt pork and a barrel of prime mess salt beef opened in the com- pany's store shortly after my arrival in 1872, and, though the peo- ple of the village were invited to help themselves, I think I am right in saying these three barrels were not emptied when I left the isl- and in 1873. They use a very little coffee during the year-not more than one hundred pounds-but of tea a great deal. I do not know exactly-I cannot find among my notes a record as to that article -but I can say that they each drink not less than a gallon of tea per diem. The amount of this beverage which they sip from the time they rise in the morning until they go to bed late at night is
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astounding. Their "samovars," and latterly the regular tea-kettles of our American make, are bubbling and boiling from the moment the housewife bestirs herself at daybreak until the fire goes out when she sleeps. It should be stated in this connection that they are supplied with a regular allowance of coal every year by the com- pany, gratis, each family being entitled to a certain amount, which alone, if economically used, keeps them warm all winter in their new houses ; but for those who are extravagant, and are itching to spend their extra wages, an extra supply is always kept in the store- houses of the company for sale. Their appreciation of and desire to possess all the canned fruit that is landed from the steamer is marked to a great degree. If they had the opportunity, I doubt whether a single family on that island to-day would hesitate to bankrupt itself in purchasing this commodity. Potatoes they some- times demand, as well as onions, and perhaps if these vegetables could be brought here and kept to an advantage the people would soon become very fond of them. Most of these articles of food mentioned heretofore are purchased by the natives in the com- pany's store at either island. This food and the wearing apparel, crockery, etc., which the company bring up here for the use of the people, is sold to them at the exact cost price of the same, plus the expenses of transportation, and many times within my knowledge they have bought goods here at these stores at less rates than they would have been subjected to in San Francisco. The object of the company is not, under any circumstances, to make a single cent of profit out of the sale of these goods to the natives. They aim only to clear the cost and no more. Instructions to this effect are given to its agents, while those of the Government are called upon to take notice of the fact.
The store at St. Paul, as well as that at St. George, has its regu- lar annual "opening " after the arrival of the steamer in the spring, to which the natives seem to pay absorbed attention. They crowd the buildings day and night, eagerly looking for all the novelties in food and apparel. These slouchy men and shawl-hooded women, who pack the area before the counters, appear to feel as deep an interest in the process of shopping as the most enthusiastic vota- ries of that business do in our own streets. It certainly seems to give them the greatest satisfaction of their lives on the Pribylov Islands.
With regard to ourselves up here in so far as a purely physical
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existence goes, the American method of living on and in the climate of the Pribylov Islands is highly conducive to strength and health. Tea and coffee, seasoned with condensed milk and lump sugar ; hot biscuits, cakes and waffles ; potatoes, served in every method of cookery ; salt salmon, codfish, and corned beef ; mess pork, and, once a week, a fresh roast of beef or steaks ; all the canned vege- tables and fruits ; all the potted sauces, jams and jellies ; pies, pud- dings and pastries ; and the exhaustive list of purely seafaring dishes, such as pea and bean, barley and rice soups, curries and maccaroni; these constitute the staples and many of the luxuries with which the agents of the Alaska Commercial Company prolong their existence while living here in the discharge of their duties, and to which they welcome their guests for discussion and glad digestion.
A piano on St. Paul, in the company house ; an assorted library, embracing over one thousand volumes, selected from standard au- thors in fiction, science, and history, together with many other un- expected adjuncts of high comfort for body and soul, will be found on these islands, wholly unlooked for by those who first set foot upon them. A small Russian printed library has also been given by the company to the natives on each island for their special en- tertainment. The rising generation of sealers, however, if they read at all, will read our own typography.
Before leaving the consideration of these people, who are so in- timately associated with and blended into the business on these islands, it may be well to clearly define the relation existing between them, the Government, and the company leasing the islands. When Congress granted to the Alaska Commercial Company of San Fran- cisco the exclusive right of taking a certain number of fur-seals every year, for a period of twenty years on these islands, it did so with several reservations and conditions, which were confided in their detail to the Secretary of the Treasury. This officer and the president of the Alaska Commercial Company agreed upon a code of regulations which should govern their joint action in regard to the natives. It was a simple agreement that these people should have a certain amount of dried salmon furnished them for food every year, a certain amount of fuel, a school-house, and the right to go to and come from the islands as they chose; and also the right to work or not, understanding that in case they did not work, their places would and could be supplied by other people who would work.
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The company, however, has gone far beyond this exaction of the Government ; it has added an inexpressible boon of comfort, in the formation of those dwellings now occupied by the natives, which was not expressed nor thought of at the time of the granting of the lease. An enlightened business-policy suggested to the company that it would be much better for the natives, and much better for company too, if these people were taken out of their filthy, un- wholesome hovels, put into habitable dwellings, and taught to live cleanly, for the simple reason that by so doing the natives, living in this improved condition, would be able physically and mentally, every season when the sealing work began, to come out from their long inanition and go to work at once with vigor and energetic per- sistency. The sequel has proved the wisdom of the company.
Before this action on their part, it was physically impossible for the inhabitants of St. Paul or St. George Islands to take the lawful quota of one hundred thousand seal-skins annually in less than three or four working months. They take them in less than thirty working days now with the same number of men. What is the gain ? Simply this, and it is everything : the fur-seal skin, from the 14th of June, when it first arrives, as a rule, up to the 1st of An- gust, is in prime condition ; from that latter date until the middle of October it is rapidly deteriorating, to slowly appreciate again in value as it sheds and renews its coat ; so much so that it is prac- tically worthless in the markets of the world. Hence, the catch taken by the Alaska Commercial Company every year is a prime one, first to last-there are no low-grade "stagey" skins in it ; but un- der the old regimen, three-fourths of the skins were taken in August, in September and even in October, and were not worth their transportation to London. Comment on this is unnecessary ; it is the contrast made between a prescient business-policy, and one that was as shiftless and improvident as language can well devise .*
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