USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 42
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* The oil obtained from the beluga and the large seal (mahklok) is a very important article of trade between the lowland people and those of the moun- tains, the latter depending upon it entirely for lighting their semi-subterra- nean dwellings during the winter, and to supplement their scanty stores of food. It is manufactured by a very simple process. Huge drift-logs are fash- ioned into troughs much in the same manner as the Thlinket tribes make their wooden canoes. Into these troughs filled with water the blubber is thrown in lumps of from two to five pounds in weight. ' Then a large number of smooth cobble-stones are thrown into a fire until they are thoroughly heated, when they are picked up with sticks fashioned for the purpose and deposited in the water, which boils up at once. After a few minutes these stones must be removed and replaced by fresh ones, this laborious process being continued until all oit has been boiled out of the blubber and floats on the surface, when it is removed with flat pieces of bone or roughly fashioned ladles, and decanted into bladders or whole seal-skins, then cached on pole-frames until sold or used by the makers.
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as being the worst. They do not appear elsewhere in the same number or ferocity, but they are quite unendurable at the best and most-favored stations. Breeding here, as they do, in these vast extents of tundra sloughs and woodland swamps, they are able to rally around and embarrass an explorer beyond all reasonable description. Language is simply inadequate to portray that misery and annoyance which the Alaskan mosquito-swarms inflict upon us in the summer, whenever we venture out from the shelter of trading-posts, where mosquito-bars envelop our couches and cross the doors and windows to our living-room. Naturally, it will be asked, What do the natives do ? They, too, are annoyed and suffer ; but it must be remembered that their bodies are daily anointed with rancid oil, and certain ammoniacal vapors constantly arise from their garments which even the mosquito, venomous and cruel as it is, can scarcely withstand the repellant power of. When the natives travel in this season, they gladly avail themselves, however, of any small piece of mosquito-netting that they can secure, no matter how small. Usually they have to wrap cloths and skins about their heads, and they always wear mittens in midsummer. The traveller who exposes his bare face at this time of the year on the Kuskokvim tundra or woodlands will speedily lose his natural appearance ; his eyelids swell up and close ; his neck expands in fiery pimples, so that no collar that he ever wore before can now be fastened around it, while his hands simply become as two carbuncled balls. Bear and deer are driven into the water by these mosquitoes. They are a scourge and the greatest curse of Alaska.
Two hundred miles up from the Kuskokvim mouth is a focal centre of the trade in this district. It is Kolmakovsky, established by the Russians in 1839. It consists of seven large, roughly built frame dwellings and log warehouses, and a chapel, which stand on a flat, timbered mesa well above the river, on its right or southern shore. Here the current of the stream has narrowed, and flows between high banks over a gravelly bed. These terraces, which rise from the water, are flat-topped, and covered with a tall growth of spruce. Mossy tundras and grassy meadows roll in between forest patches. The timber is much larger here than it is any- where else in the great Alaskan interior, and that scenery along this river is far wilder and more agreeable than any which is so monotonous and characteristic of the Upper Yukon. The deso- late flatness and muddy wastes of the Lower Kuskokvim are now
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KOLMAKOVSKY, ON THE KUSKOKVIM
Old Russian trading-post, established in 1839, two hundred miles up the River : these houses were once surrounded with a stockade, but such a defence has long been needless. This view is taken from the opposite bank of the River, looking over to the high hills of the Noosh- agak divide, and Mount Tamahloopat in the distance
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replaced by this pleasing change, which we have just mentioned, a short distance below Kolmakovsky.
Back of that post, and clearly defined against the horizon, are the snowy-capped summits of those mountains that form a Noosha- gak divide. One of them rises in an oval-pointed crest to a very considerable elevation * above all the rest, and is the landmark of every traveller who comes over the Yukon divide to Kolmakov. The river here, as it brawls swiftly in its course, is about seven hundred feet in width, with bends above and below where it ex- pands to fully twice that distance.
While the Kuskokvim is the only considerable rival of the Yukon in this whole Alaskan country, yet when seriously contrasted with the great Kvichpak t itself, then the Kuskokvim bears about the same resemblance to it that the Ohio River does to the Mississippi.
Kolmakovsky marks the limit of inland migration allotted to the Innuit race on its banks, who are not permitted by those Tinneh tribes of the interior to advance farther up the river. It is also removed from that disagreeable influence of Bering Sea, where the prevalence of rain and of furious protracted gales of wind make life a burden to a white man on the Lower Kuskokvim. Its environ- ing forests break the force of these storms, and there is also less fog, so that the sun usually shines out clear and hot, especially in July and August.
In the winter season, when frost has locked up miry swales and swamps, and snow lies in deep, limitless drifts, a white hunter at Kolmakov can join the Kuskokvamoots in trailing and shooting giant moose which come down from the mountains of the Noosh- agak divide. This animal is quickly apprehended by the native dogs, so that whenever winter weather will permit, a native Innuit spends most of his time, not employed by ice-fishing on the Kus- kokvim, in this sport.
The fur-trade at Kolmakovsky is quite active, but it is almost ex- clusively transacted with a few Indians up the river, and not with the numerous Innuits below. The latter are, commercially speak- ing, very poor, having not much of anything but little stores of
* Mount Tamahloopat : two thousand eight hundred feet.
The Russians and natives always called the Yukon River by this name. Our change was first made by those Hudson Bay traders who came over to it from the Mackenzie, and was subsequently universally adopted.
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"mahklok " seal-oil. These big phocaceans are almost as great fishermen as the Innuits are themselves, and find the mouth of the Kuskokvim as attractive as it is to their human foes. In this frame of mind the mahklok ventures on to those tidal banks of the estuary below, and this rash habit enables the natives to capture a great many of them there every year. Those Innuits below Kolmakovsky have no land-furs whatever, save a few inferior mink-skins; but they trade their surplus seal-oil with the Indians above and on the Yukon for that ground-squirrel parka and tanned moose-skin shirt which they universally wear. There is an exceeding rankness to an odor of rancid fish-oil, but the aroma from a bag of putrescent seal-oil is simply abominable and stifling to a Caucasian nose-an acrid funk, which pervades everything, and hangs to it for an indefin- ite length of time afterward in spite of every effort made to disinfect.
The Indians of the Upper Kuskokvim were once said to be a very numerous tribe ; but the severity of successive cold winters has so destroyed them, as a people, that to-day they exist there as a feeble remnant only of what they once were. An intelligent trader, Sipari, who has traversed their entire country, in 1872-76, declares that "forty tents," or one hundred souls is an ample enu- ineration of their number.
The Innuits of the Lower Kuskokvim are much better physical specimens of humanity than are those of their race living on the Lower Yukon. These latter are called by all traders the most clumsy and degraded of Alaskan savages. The portage from Kol- makovsky to the Kvichpak is only three days' journey in winter, or five days by water in canoes, during summer. It is a trip made by large numbers of the natives of both streams, in the progress of their natural barter and moose-hunting.
The forests of the Kuskokvim and the Nooshagak mountains and uplands are frequently swept by terrible conflagrations, which utterly destroy whole areas of timber as far as the eye can reach. This ruin of fire, of course, absolutely extinguishes all trapping for any fur-bearing animal hitherto found in those brulé tracts, and en- tails much privation upon the natives who have been accustomed to gain their best livelihood largely by hunting in those sections. A burnt district presents a desolate front for years after ; the fire does not, in its swift passage, do more, at first, than burn the foli- age and smaller limbs of trees in a dense spruce forest ; but it roasts the bark and kills a trunk, so that all sap-circulation is forever
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at an end in it. As the years roll by, these trunks gradually bleach out to almost a grayish white, the charred, blackened bark is all weathered off, and gradually such trees fall, as they decay at the stump, in every conceivable direction upon the ground, across one another, like so many jack-straws, making a perfectly impassable barricade to human travel without tedious labor. A brisk growth of small poplars, birch, and willow springs up in place of the orig- inal spruce forest, but none of these trees and shrubs ever grow to any great size. At rare intervals a young evergreen is seen to rise in sharp relief, towering over all deciduous shrubbery, and in the lapse of long years it will succeed in supplanting every growing thing around with its own kind again.
7.Stwaen Divide
" Brulé " Desolation ; Alaskan Interior.
[A riew on the Stickeen Divide : beurs, in search of lurvce, ripping open decayed logs.]
The traders at Kolmakovsky make up their furs into snug bales and descend the river in wooden and skin boats, every June, to a point below, about one hundred and fifty miles, where they meet their respective schooners, or go still lower to an anchorage of larger vessels, and renew their annual supplies. These river-boats are then poled and rope-walked up the river back to the post. The principal trade here is beaver, red foxes, mink, marten, land-otter. and brown and black bears.
The traders say it is exceedingly seldom that a white man ever comes in contact with the natives of the Lower Kuskokvim, and that there is nothing to call them there ; also, that the labors of the Russian missionaries of the Yukon never extended to this re- gion, though their registers and reports show quite a number of Christians on the Kuskokvim River. The only trace of Christian- ity among this tribe, outside of the immediate vicinity of a trad-
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ing-station with its chapel, consists of a few scattered crosses in burial-places adjoining the settlement. At the village of Kaltkha- gamute, within three days' travel of the Russian mission on the Yukon, a graveyard there contains a remarkable collection of gro- tesquely carved monuments and memorial posts, indicating very clearly the predominance of old pagan traditions over such faint ideas of Christianity as may have been introduced for these peo- ple. Among monuments in this place the most remarkable is that of a female figure with four arms and hands, resembling closely a Hindoo goddess, even to its almond eyes and a general cast of features. Natural hair is attached to its head, falling over the shoulders. The legs of this figure are crossed in true oriental style, and two of the hands, the lower pair, hold rusty tin plates, upon which offerings of tobacco and scraps of cotton prints have been deposited. The whole is protected by a small roof set upon posts.
Other burial posts are scarcely less remarkable in variety of feat- ure and coloring, and the whole collection would afford a rich har- vest of specimens to any museum. Nearly all these figures are human effigies, though grotesque and misshapen, and drawn out of proportion. No images of animals or birds, which would have in- dicated the existence of totems and clans in the tribe, were to be seen ; but here and there, over apparently neglected graves, a stick, surmounted by a very rude carving of a fish, a deer, or a beluga, indi- cative of the calling of the deceased hunter, could be discovered.
Petroff, who has made the only hand-to-hand examination ever conducted, by a white man, of the people of the Lower Kuskok- vim, says that they resemble in outward appearance their Eskimo neighbors in the north and west, but their complexion is perhaps a little darker. The men are distinguished from those of other In- nuit tribes by having more hair on the faces ; mustaches being quite common, even with youths of from twenty to twenty-five, while in other tribes this hirsute appendage does not make its ap- pearance until the age of thirty-five or forty. Their hands and feet are small, but both sexes are muscular and well developed, inclined rather to embonpoint. In their garments they differ but little from their neighbors hitherto described, with an exception of the male upper garment, or parka, which reaches down to the feet, even dragging a little upon the ground, making it necessary to gird it up for purposes of walking. The female parkas are a little shorter. Both garments are made of the skins of ground-squirrels, orna-
Characteristic Method of Eskimo Burial on the Kuskokvim River : this Coffin contains the Bodies of a famous Reindeer Hunter, his Squaw, and two Children
AN INNUIT TOMB
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mented with pieces of red cloth and bits of tails of that rodent. The women wear no head-covering except in the depth of winter, when they pull the hoods of reindeer parkas over their heads. The men wear caps, made of the skin of an Arctic marmot, resembling in shape those famous Scotch "bonnets," so commonly worn by Canadians.
Many young men wear a small band of fur around the head, into which they insert eagle and hawk-feathers on festive occasions. A former custom of this tribe, of inserting thin strips of bone or the quills of porcupines through an aperture cut in the septum, seems to have become obsolete, though the nasal slit can still be seen on all grown male individuals. Their ears are also universally pierced for an insertion of pendants, but these seem at present to be worn by children only, who discard them as they grow up. In fact, all ornamentation in the shape of beads, shells, etc., appears to be lavished upon their little ones, who toddle about with pendants rattling from ears, nose, and lower lip, and attired in frocks stiff with embroidery of beads or porcupine-quills, while the older girls and boys run almost naked, and the parents themselves are imper- fectly protected against cold and weather by a single fur garment.
The use of the true Eskimo kayak is universal among the Kus- kokvagmute, but in timbered regions of the upper river, in the vicinity of Kolmakovsky, the birch-bark canoe also is quite com- mon. The latter, however, is not used for extended voyages or for hunting, but is reserved chiefly for attending to fish-traps, for the use of women in their berrying and fishing expeditions, and for crossing rivers and streams.
The only indigenous fruit which this large population of the Lower Kuskokvim can enjoy is that of the pretty little "moroshkie," or red raspberry," which grows in great abundance on its short, tiny stalks throughout all swales and over rolling tundra. These berries are saturated in rancid oil, however, before they are eaten to any great extent, being air-dried first and pressed into thin cakes ; then, as wanted, they are pounded up in mortars and boiled, or simply thrown into a wooden basin (or kantag) of oil. Then the fingers, or rude horn spoons, are dipped in by happy feeders, who apparently relish this ill-savored combination just as keenly as one of our Gothamitic gourmands appreciates the flavor of a Chesapeake terrapin stewed in champagne.
* Rubus chamamorus.
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CHAPTER XIII.
LONELY NORTHERN WASTES.
The Mississippi of Alaska : the Yukon River, and its Thorough Exploration. - Its vast Deltoid Mouth .- Cannot be Entered by Sea-going Vessels .- Its · Valley, and its Tributaries. - Dividing Line between the Eskimo and the Indian on its Banks .-- The Trader's Steamer ; its Whistle in this Lone Waste of the Yukon .-- Michaelovsky, the Trading Centre for this Exten- sive Circumpolar Area. - The Characteristic Beanties of an Arctic Land- scape in Summer .- Thunder-stormns on the Upper Yukon ; never Experi- enced on the Coast and at its Month .- Gorgeous Arches of Auroral Light; Beautiful Spectacular Fires in the Heavens .- Unhappy Climate .- Saint Michael's to the Northward. - Zagoskin, the Intrepid Young Russian Ex- plorer, 1843 .- Snow Blizzards .- Golovin Bay; our People Prospecting there for Lead and Silver .- Drift-wood from the Yukon Strews the Beaches of Bering Sea .- Ookivok, and its Cliff-cave Houses .- Hardy Walrus-hunters .- Grantley Harbor ; a Reminder of a Costly American Enterprise and its Failure. - Cape Prince of Wales-facing Asia, thirty-six miles away .- Simeon Deschnev, the first White Man to see Alaska, 1648. His Bold Journey .- The Diomede Islands ; Stepping-stones between Asia and America in Bering Straits .- Kotzebue Sound : the Rendezvous for Arctic Traders; the Last Northern Station Visited by Salmon .- Interest- ing Features of the Place.
Lo! to the wintry winds the pilot yields, His bark careering o'er unfathomed fields, Now far he sweeps, where scarce a summer smiles, On Behring's rocks, or Greenland's naked isles. -- CAMPBELL.
Is it not a little singular that the lonely and monotonous course of the Yukon River, reaching as it does to the very limits of the path- less interior of a vast, unexplored region on either side, should be that one section of all others in Alaska the best known to us? An almost uninterrupted annual march has been made up and down its dreary banks since 1865, by men * well qualified to describe its
* The first white man to enter the Yukon and behold its immense volume was Glazoonov, a Russian post-trader of the old Company, who, with a small
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varying moods and endless shoals-every turn in its flood, every shelving bank of alluvium or rocky bluff that lines the margin of its turbid current, has been minutely examined, named and renamed to suit the occasion and character of a traveller.
The Yukon River is not reached by traders as any other stream of size is in Alaska, by sailing into its mouth. No ocean-going craft can get within sixty miles of its deltoid entrance. Were a sailor foolhardy enough to attempt such a thing, he would be hard aground, in soft silt or mud, a hundred miles from land in a direct line from the point of his destination. Therefore it is the habit of mariners to sail up as far north as Norton's Sound, and then turn a little to the southward and anchor their schooners or steamers under a lee of Stuart's and St. Michael's Islands, where the old post of Michaelovsky is established on the latter.
The "Redoute Saint Michael" was founded here in 1835 by Lieutenant Tebenkov, and has been ever since, and is to-day, the most important post in the Alaskan North. This post is a ship- ping point for the accumulated furs gathered by all traders from the Lower and Upper Yukon, and the Tannanah, the annual yield from such points being the largest and the most valuable catch of land-furs taken in Alaska. A vessel coming into St. Michael's at any time during the summer will find, encamped around its ware- houses many bands of Innuits and Indians who have come in there, over long distances of hundreds of miles, from the north, east, and south. They are there as traders and middlemen. The fur-trad- ing on the Yukon is very irregular as to its annual time and place -- the traders constantly moving from settlement to settlement, be- cause this year they may get only a thousand skins where they got
band of promishlyniks, managed to overcome the hostility of the natives suf- ficiently to get up as far as the present site of Nulato. This was in 1833. Lieutenant Zagoskin, of the Russian Navy, made a thorough engineering ex- amination of the river up as far as the " Ramparts," between the years 1842- 45, inclusive, locating its positions and courses by astronomical and magnetic observations. After him, named in regular order of their priority in visiting the river, came the following Americans, the first in 1865, the last in 1885 :- Kennicott, Pease, Adams, Ketchum, Dall, Whymper, Mercier, Raymond, Hill and Shaw (two miners, from its very source), Nelson, Petroff, then Schwatka and Everett (also from its source). All of these men have given to the world more or less elaborate accounts of the Yukon through the medium of pub- lished works, letters, and lectures. The literature on the single subject of the Kvichpak is decidedly voluminous.
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five thousand last season, and vice versa. It is impossible to locate the best single spots for trade ; the catch in different sections will vary every winter according to the depth of snow, the severity of climate, the prevalence of forest fires, or starvation of whole vil- lages, owing to unwonted absence of fish, and so on.
In midsummer the Yukon is reached by small, light-draft, stern- wheel steamers, which, watching their opportunity, run down from St. Michael's and enter its mouth, towing behind them a string of five or six large wooden boats which are each laden with several tons of merchandise. The scream of their whistles and puffing of these little trading-steamers as they slowly drag such tows against
Trader's Steamer towing Bateaux laden with Goods up the Yukon. [The Kvichpak just below Mercier's Station.]
a rapid current, is the only enlivenment which the immense lonely solitudes of the Yukon are subjected to by our people. That area of watery waste is so wide and long, and the boats are so small and few in number, that even this innovation must be watched for every year with a hawk's eye, or it will pass unobserved.
The waters of the Kvichpak are discharged into Bering Sea through a labyrinth of blind, misleading channels, sloughs, and swamps, which extend for more than one hundred miles up until they unite near Chatinak with the main channel of that great river. This enormous deltoid mouth of the Yukon is a most mournful and depressing prospect. The country itself is scarcely above the level of tides, and covered with a monotonous cloak of scrubby willows and rank sedges. It is water, water-here, there, and everywhere
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-a vast inland sea filled with thousands upon thousands of swale islets scarcely peeping above its surface. Broader and narrower spaces between low delta lands are where the whirl of its current is strongly marked by a rippling rush and the drift-logs that it carries upon its muddy bosom. These are the channels, the paths through the maze that leads from the sea up to the river proper ; and where they unite, at a point above Andrievsky and Chatinak, the Yukon has a breadth of twenty miles ; and again, at many places, away on and up this impressive stream as far as seven or eight hundred miles beyond, this same great width will be observed, but the depth is very much decreased.
Myriads of breeding geese, ducks, and wading water-fowl resort to this desolation of the deltoid mouth of the Yukon, where, in countless pools and the thick covers of tall grass and sedge, they are provided with a most lavish abundance of food and afforded the happiest shelter from enemies ; but the stolid Innuit does not affect the place. The howling wintry gales and frightful curse of mosquitoes in the summer are too much even for liim. His people . live in only six or seven small wretched hamlets below Andrievsky and Chatinak-less than five hundred souls in all, including the en- tire population found right on the coast of the delta, between Pas- tolik in the north and Cape Romiantzov on the south. Above Anvik on the main river the Innuit does not like to go. He has no love for those Indians who claim that region all to themselves and resent his appearance on the scene. Whenever he does, however, he is always in company with the traders, and he never gets out of their sight and protection, even when making that overland portage from St. Michael's by the Oonalakleet trail.
As we emerge from those dreary, low and watery wastes of the delta at Chatinak, the bluffs there, though desolate enough then- selves, with their rusty barren slopes, yet they give us cheerful as- surance of the fact that all Alaska is not under water, and that the borders of its big river are at last defined on both sides. High roll- ing hills come down boldly on the left bank as we ascend ; but the right shore is still low and but little removed from the flatness of a swale. The channel of the river now zigzags from side to side (in the usual way of running bodies of water which wash out and undermine), building up bars and islets, and sweeping in its resist- less flood an immense aggregate of soil and timber far into Bering Sea. The alluvial banks, wherever they are lifted above this surging
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