USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 4
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OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
the spruce (Abies sitkensis and menziesii), the hemlock (Abies merten- siana), and the cedar (Thuja gigantea). The last is the most valu- able, is found nsually growing near the shores, and never in great quantities at any one place; wherever a sheltered flat place is found, there these trees seem to grow in the greatest luxuriance. In the narrower passages, where no seas can enter, the forest seems almost to root in the beach, and its branches hang pendent to the tides, and dip therein at high water. Where a narrow beach, capped with warm sands and soil, occurs in sheltered nooks, vividly green grass spreads down until it reaches the yellow seaweed "tangle " that grows everywhere in such places reached by high tide, for, owing to the dampness of the climate, a few days exposure at neap- tides fails to injure this fucoid growth. Ferns, oh! how beautiful they are !- also grow most luxuriantly and even abundantly upon the fallen, rotting tree-trunks, and even into the living arboreal boughs, and green mosses form great club-like masses on the branches.
Large trunks of this timber, overthrown and dead, become here at once perfect gardens of young trees, moss, and bushes, even though lying high above the ground and supported on piles of yet earlier windfall. Similar features characterize the littoral forests of the entire landlocked region of the northwest coast, from Puget Sound to the mouth of Lynn Canal.
In addition to these overwhelmingly dominant conifers already specified, a few cottonwoods and swamp-maples and alders are scat- tered in the jungle which borders the many little streams and the large rivers like the Stickeen, Tahko, and Chilkat. Crab-apples (Pyrus rivularis) form small groves on Prince of Wales Island, where the beach is low and capped with good soil. Then on the exposed, almost bare rocks of the western hilltops of the islands of the archi- pelago, a scrub pine (Pinus contorta) is found ; it also grows in small clumps here and there just below the snow-line on the moun- tains generally. Berries abound; the most important being the sal-lal (Gaultheria shallow)-they are eaten fresh in great quantities, and are also dried for use in winter-and another small raspberry (Rubus sp.), a currant (Ribes sp.), and a large juicy whortleberry. Of course these berries do not have the flavor or body which we prize at home in our small fruits of similar character-but up here they, in the absence of anything better or as good, are eaten with avidity and relish, even by the white travellers who happen to be
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KOOTZNAHOO INLET
Characteristic view of scenery in the Sitkan Archipelago. The high lands and peaks of Admiralty Island in the distance ; Indians fishing for halibut over rocky shoals in the foreground. An October sketch, looking East from Chatham Straits
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FEATURES OF THE SITKAN REGION.
around when the fruit is ripe ; wild strawberries appear in sheltered nooks ; a wild gooseberry too is found, but it, like the crab-apple of Prince of Wales Island, is not a favorite-it is drastic.
We find in many places throughout this district highland moors, which constitute the level plateau-summits of ridges and mountain foothills ; these areas are always sparsely timbered, covered by a thick carpet of sphagnous heather, and literally brilliant in June and July with the spangled radiance of an extensive variety of flowering annuals and biennials. In these moorland mantles, which are usually soaked full of moisture so as to be fairly spongy under foot, cranberries flourish, of excellent flavor, and quite abundant, though, compared with our choice Jersey and Cape Cod samples, they are very small.
Certainly the scenery of this Venetian wilderness of Lower Alaska is wonderful and unrivalled-the sounds, the gulfs, bays, fiords, and river-estuaries are magnificent sheets of water, and the snow- capped peaks, which spring abruptly from their mirrored depths, give the scene an ever-changing aspect. At places the ship seems to really be at sea, then she enters a canal whose lofty walls of sye- nite, slate, and granite shut out the light of day, and against which her rigging scrapes, and the passenger's hand may almost touch- a hundred thousand sparkling streams fall in feathery cascades, adown their mural heights, and impetuous streams beat themselves into white foam as they leap either into the eternal depths of the Pacific or its deep arms.
Probably no one point in the Sitkan archipelago is invested by nature with a grander, gloomier aspect than is that region known as the eastern shore of Prince Frederick's Sound, where the moun- tains of the mainland drop down abruptly to the seaside ; here a spur of the coast range, opposite Mitgon Islet, presents an unusu- ally dreadful appearance, for it rises to a vast height with an inclin- ation toward and over the water: the serrated, jagged summits are loaded with an immense quantity of ice and snow, which, together with the overhanging masses of rock, seems to cause its sea-laved base to fairly totter under that stupendous weight overhead ; the passage beneath it, in the canoe of a trayeller, is simply awful in its dread suggestion, and few can refrain from involuntary shuddering as they sail by and gaze upward.
A word about the Sitkan climate : you are not going to be very cold here even in the most severe of winters, nor will you complain
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OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
of heat in the most favorable of summers ; it may be best epitomized by saying in brief that the weather is such that you seldom ever find a clean cake of ice frozen in the small fresh-water ponds six inches thick; and you never will experience a summer warm enough to ripen a head of oats. The first impression usually made upon the visitor is that it is raining, raining all the time, not a pouring rain or shower, then clearing up quickly, but a steady " driz-driz-driz- zle "; it rained upon the author in this manner seventeen consecu- tive days in October, 1866, accompanied by winds from all points of the compass. Therefore, by contrast, the relatively clear and dry months of June and July in the archipelago are really delightful- clear and pleasant in the sun, and cool enough for fires indoors-then you have about eighteen hours of sunshine and six hours of twilight.
It is very seldom that the zero-point is ever recorded at tide-level during winter here, though in January, 1874, it fell to -7° Fah .; the thermometer at no time in the winter preceding registered lower than 11° above. A late blustering spring and an early, vigorous winter often join hands over a very backward summer-about once or twice every five years ; these are the backward seasons ; then the first frost in the villages and tidal bottoms occurs about the 28th to 31st of October, soon followed by the rain turning to snow, being as much as three feet deep on the level at times. Severe thunder- storms, with lightning, often take place during these violent snow- falls in the winter-strange to say they are not heard or seen in the summer ! Snow and rain and sleet continue till the end of April- sometimes as late as the 10th of May, before giving way to the en- joyable season of June and July. Then again the mild winters are marked by no frost to speak of-perhaps the coldest period will have been in November, little or no snow, six or seven inches at the most, and much clear and bracing weather.
The average rainfall in the Sitkan district is between eighty-four and eighty-six inches annually-it is a very steady average, and makes no heavier showing than that presented by the record kept on the coast of Oregon and Vancouver's Island. A pleasant season in the archipelago will give the observer about one hundred fair days ; the rest of the year will be given over to rain, snow, and foggy- shrouds, which wet like rain itself .* A most careful search during
* The chief signal officer of the U. S. Army has had a number of meteoro- logical observers stationed at half a dozen different posts in Alaska, and has
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FEATURES OF THE SITKAN REGION.
the last hundred years has failed to disclose in all the extent of this Sitkan region an arable or bottom-land piece large enough to rep- resent a hundred-acre farm, save in the valley of the Tahkoo River, where for forty or fifty miles a low, level platean extends, varying in width from a few rods to half a mile, between the steep mountain walls that compass it about. Red-top and wild timothy grasses grow here in the most luxuriant style, as they do for that matter every- where else in the archipelago on little patches of open land along the streams and sea-beaches ; the humidity of the climate makes the cost of curing hay, however, very great, and prevents the profit- able ranging of cattle.
We have strayed from the landing which we made at Wrangel, and, returning to the contemplation of that town, candor compels an exclamation of disappointment-it is not inviting, for we see nothing but a straggling group of hastily erected shanties and frame store-houses, which face a rickety wharf and a dirty trackway just above the beach-level ; a dense forest and tangled jungle spring up like a forbidding wall at the very rear of the houses, which are sup- plemented by a number of Indian rancheries that skirt the beach just beyond, and hug the point ; this place, however, though now in sad decline, was a place of much life and importance during 1875- 79, when the Cassiar gold-excitement in British Columbia, via the Stickeen River, drew many hundreds of venturesome miners up here, and through Wrangel en route. This forlorn spot was still earlier a centre of even greater stir and activity, for, in 1831, the Russians, fearing that they would be forced into war with the Hudson's Bay people, made a quick movement, came down here from Sitka, and built a bastioned log fortress right where the present Siwash ranch- eries stand. Lieutenant Zarenbo, who engineered the construction, called his work " Rédoute Saint Dionys," and had scarcely got un- der cover when he was attacked by several large bateaux, manned
had this service fully organized up there during the last ten years ; the in- quirer can easily gain access to a large amount of published data touching this subject.
The mean temperature of the year will run throughout the months in the Sitkan region about as follows-an average, for the time, of 44 7' Fah.
January, 29' 2' May, 45° 5' September, 51 9'
February, 36° 4' June, 55° 3' October, 49' 2' March, 37' 8' July, 55 6' November, 36 6'
April, 44° 7' August, 56° 4' December, 30° 2'
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OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
by employés of the great English company ; he fired upon them, beat them off, and held his own so well that the grateful Baron Von Wrangel, who then was governor-in-chief, bestowed the name of the plucky officer upon the large, rugged island which overshadows the scene of the conflict, and which it bears upon every chart to- day .*
Again, in 1862, the solitude of Wrangel was broken by the sudden eruption of over two thousand British Columbia and Cali- fornian miners, who rushed up the Stickeen River on a gold " excitement." Quite a fleet of sail and steam-vessels hung about the place for a brief season, when the flurry died out, and the rest- less gold-hunters fled in search of other diggings, taking all their belongings with them.
The steamer does not tarry long at Wrangel ; a few packages fall upon the shaky wharf, the captain never leaves the bridge, and in obedience to his tinkling bell, the screw scarce has paused ere it starts anew, and the vessel soon heads right about and west, out to the open swell of the great Pacific ; but it takes six or seven hours of swift travel over the glassy surface of Clarence Strait to pass the rough heads of Kuprianov Island on the right, flanked by the sombre, densely wooded elevations of Prince of Wales on the left. The lower, yet sharper spurs of the straggling Kou forests force our course here directly to the south. It is said that more than fifteen hundred islands, big and little, stud this archipelago from Cape Disappointment to Cross Sound. You will not attempt to count them, but readily prefer to believe it is so. From the great bulk of Vancouver's Land to the tiny islet just peeping above water, they are all covered to the snow-line from the sea-level with an olive-green coniferous forest-islands right ahead, islands on every side, islands all behind. You stand on deck and wonder where the egress from the unruffled inland lake is to be as you enter it ; no possible chance to go ahead much faster, is your con- stant thought, which keeps following every sharp turn of the vessel as she rapidly swings right about here, there, and everywhere, in following the devious path of this weird course to her destination.
Unless the fog shuts down very thick, the darkness of night does not impede the steamer's steady progress, for the pilot sees
* Zarenbo Island-it blocks the northern end of Clarence Strait, and af- fords many varied vistas of rare scenic beauty.
-
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FEATURES OF THE SITKAN REGION.
the mountain tops loom up darker against the blue-black sky, and with unerring certainty he guides the helm. When the ship is running through tide-rapids in the night, the boiling phosphores- cence of the foaming waters, as they rush noisily under our keel, gives a fresh zest to the novelty of the cruise, and the pilot's cries of command ring out in hoarse echoes over the surging tumult below ; meanwhile, the passengers anxiously and nervously watch the unquiet turns of the trembling vessel-then suddenly the helm is put up, and the steamer fairly bounds out of still water and the leeward of Coronation Island, into the rhythmic roll of the vast bil- lows of the Pacific, which toss her in strange contrast to the even keel that has characterized our long, land-locked sea-voyage up to this moment. The wrinkled, rugged nose of Cape Ommaney looms right ahead in the north, and soon we are well abreast of the moun- tainous front to the west coast of Baranov Island, running swiftly into Sitka Sound .*
Cape Ommaney is a very remarkable promontory ; it is a steep, bluffy cliff, with a round, high rocky islet, lying close by and under it. The eastern shore of that cape takes a very sharp northerly di- rection, and thus makes this southern extremity of Baranov Island an exceedingly narrow point of land. An unlucky sailor, Isaac Wooden, fell overboard from Vancouver's ship the Discovery, when abreast of it and homeward bound, Sunday, August 24, 1794, and -was drowned, after having safely passed through all the perils of that most remarkable voyage, extended as it was over a period of four consecutive years' absence from home. The rock bears the odd name "Wooden " in consequence.
The location of New Archangel, or Sitka village, is now con- ceded to be the one of the greatest natural beauty and scenic effect that can be found in all Alaska. The story of its occupation by the Russians is a recitation of violent deeds and unflinching courage on the part of the iron-willed Baranov and his obedient servants : he led the way down here from Kadiak first, of all white men, in 1799, after hearing the preliminary report of exploration made two years previously by his lieutenant, Captain James Shields, an Eng- lish adventurer and shipbuilder, who entered the service of the Russian Company in the Okotsk. Baranov, though small in stature,
* Sitka port is on the west coast of Baranov Island ; north latitude 57' 02' 52"; west longitude 135 17' 45".
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OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
was possessed of unusual physical endurance and muscular strength. He was absolutely fearless ; he never allowed any obstacle, no mat- ter how serious, which the elements or savage men were perpetually raising, to check his advances. He loved to travel and explore, and possessed rare executive or governing power over his rude and boisterous followers. He soon realized that the establishment of the headquarters of the company at St. Paul, Kadiak Island, was disadvantageous, and quickly resolved to settle himself perma- nently in the Bay of Sitka, or Norfolk Sound, where he could com- municate with the vessels of other nations and purchase supplies of them. Late in the autumn of 1799 he sailed to this port in the brig Catherine, accompanied by a large fleet of Aleutian and Ka- diak sea-otter hunters with their bidarkas, or skin-canoes. So abundant were sea-otters then, now so rare, that, with the assist- ance of these native hunters, he secured over fifteen hundred prime otter-skins in less than a month ; then satisfied with the trading re- sources of the locality, Baranov began the construction of a stock- aded post, the site selected for which was on the main island, about six miles to the northward of the Sitkan town-site of to-day. During the winter of 1799-1800 he and his whole force were busily engaged in the erection of substantial log houses and the surrounding stockade at this location. In the spring, two American fur-trading vessels made their appearance here, and the owners began to carry on a brisk traffic with the native Sitkans, right under the eyes of Baranov. Knowing that this must be stopped, the energetic Rus- sian hastened back to Kadiak and set the machinery in motion to that end. But his absence in the meantime from Sitka was im- proved upon by the Koloshians, who, acting in preconcerted plan, utterly destroyed the post. These savages on a certain day, when most of the garrison was far outside of the stockade, hunting and fishing, rushed in, several thousand of them, upon a few armed men, surrounded the block-house, assailed it from all sides at once, and soon forced an entrance. They massacred the defenders to a man, including the commander, Medvaidniekov, and carried off more than three thousand sea-otter pelts from the warehouses.
During this wild and bloody fight an English ship was lying at anchor far down the harbor, some ten miles from the scene ; three Russians and five Aleutes only, out of the hunting parties absent at the time of the attack, managed to secrete themselves in the woods, and hide until they could gain the decks and protection of this vessel,
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FEATURES OF THE SITKAN REGION.
and thus acquaint her captain, Barber, of the outrage ; he contrived to entice two of the leading Sitkan chiefs on board of his ship, plied them with drink, and soon had them securely ironed, and then, having quite a battery of guns, he was able to make his own terms for their release; this was done after the surrender of eighteen women (captured outside of the stockade) and 2,000 sea-otter skins was made to Barber, who at once sailed for Kadiak. Here the British seaman demanded from Baranov the salvage of 50,000 rubles for rescuing his men and women and property ; with this demand the Russian could not or would not comply; but, after many days in amicable argument, Captain Barber received and accepted 10,000 rubles in full settlement.
While the lurid light of the burning wreck of this first Sitkan post was flashing over the sound, and the Koloshes were howling and dancing around it in their fiendish exultation, nearly two hundred Aleutian hunters were surprised and slaughtered at various points in the vicinity, and a party of over one hundred of these simple natives perished almost to a man, on the same day, from eating poisonous mussels which they detached from the rocks in the strait that sep- arates Baranov Island from Chichagov; that canal still bears the name commemorative of this dreadful accident-it is called "Po- geebshie "* or " Destruction " Strait.
The enraged Russian manager was unable, by reason of a compli- cated flood of troubles with his subordinates elsewhere, to revisit Sitka until the spring of 1804; he then came down from Kadiak in a squadron consisting of three small sloops, in all considerably less than 100 tons burden ; these craft he had built and fitted out in Prince William Sound and Yakootat Bay during the preceding winter. He had with him forty Russians and three hundred Aleu- tian sea-otter hunters. With this small force the indomitable man resolved to attack and subjugate a body of not less than five or six thousand fierce, untamed savages, who were flushed with their cruel successes, and eager to shed more blood. He was unexpectedly strengthened by the sudden appearance in the bay of the Neva, 400 tons, which had sailed from London to Kadiak, and arrived just after Baranov's departure, but Captain Lissiansky, learning of the object of his trip, determined to assist in rebuilding the
* Not "Peril," as it is translated by American geographers and printed on all of our Alaskan maps.
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OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
Sitkan post and to punish the Indians, so he sailed at once for the place.
Baranov found the Sitkans all entrenched behind a huge stock- ade that was thrown up on the same lofty rocky site of the gov- ernor's castle in the town to-day. They reviled him and defied him, taunted him with his misfortunes, and easily succeeded in ex- citing him to a ferocious attack, in which, despite his demoniacal bravery, he was beaten off at first with the loss of eleven white sailors and hunters, he himself badly wounded, together with Lieutenants Arbuzov and Povalishin. The darkness of a violent rain
I
The Castle of Baranov : 1809-1827. [ Wholly remodelled and rebuilt by his successors.]
and sleet storm, with night close at hand, caused a cessation, for the time, of further hostilities, but in the morning the ship and the little sloops approached the beach and opened upon the startled savages a hot bombardment-the splintering of their log bastions and the terrible, unwonted noise accompanying, was too much for their self-control, and though, during the whole day they refused to fly, yet when night again came round they abandoned their fortifica- tion, and retreated silently and quickly in canoes to Chatham Strait.
The Russians then took possession of the present town-site of Sitka. The rocky eminence which the savages had so bravely held
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FEATURES OF THE SITKAN REGION.
was cleared of their rude barricades, and the foundations were laid then to the castle that still stands so conspicuous. Around this nucleus the Russian settlement soon sprang up in a few months, a high stockade was then erected between the village and the Indian rancheries, which still stands in part to-day; it was bastioned and fortified with an armament of three-pounder brass guns. From this time on the supremacy of the Russians was never questioned by the Indians of the Sitkan archipelago. The reckless daring of Baranov, evinced by his personal bearing at the head of a handful of men in repeated attacks upon the castle-rock encampment was exag- gerated by the savages in repetition among themselves, until his name to them became synonymous with a charmed life and supreme authority. Baranov himself called this spot the final headquarters of the Russian American Company, and henceforth it became so, and it was officially known as New Archangel ; but the tribal name of the savages who lived just outside the stockade fence was "Seet-kah," and soon the present designation was used by all visit- ors and Russians alike, brevity and euphony making it "Sitka."
It is not probable that the beautiful vistas of this sound influ- enced Baranov in the slightest when he selected it for his base of operations ; but there must have been mornings and evenings when this hardy man looked at them with some responsive pleasure, for certainly the human being who could remain insensible to their scenic glories must be one without a drop of warm blood in his veins. Those high-peaked summits of the Baranov Mountains, which over- shadow the town on the east, destroy, in a great measure, the effects of sunrise ; but the transcendent glow of sundown colors is the glow that floods the crown and base of Mt. Edgecumb on the western horizon of the bay, and repeats its radiance in tipping with golden gild the host of tiny islets which stud the flashing waters, to burn in lingering brightness on the peaks of Verstova and her sister hills, when all else is in darkness or its shades around about.
The most characteristic and expressive single view of Sitka is that one afforded from Japan Island, which is close by and right oppo- site the town : the place was in its greatest architectural grandeur prior to the departure of the Russians, in 1866. The lofty peak which rises abruptly back of the village is Verstova, to the bald summit of which a champagne picnic by the Russians was relig- iously made every summer. Although the mountain is slightly under three thousand feet in altitude and seemingly right at hand,
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OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE.
yet the journey to its crest is one that taxes the best physical ener- gies of strong men. The forest is so dense, so damp, the under- brush so thick and so tangled, that the walk requires a supreme bodily effort, if the trip be made up there and back in the same day.
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