USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 43
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current, which runs at an average rate of eight miles an hour, are continually caving down, undermined, and washed away. So sudden and precipitate are these landslides, sometimes, that they have almost destroyed whole trading expeditions of the Russians and natives, who barely had time to escape with their lives as the earthy avalanches rolled down upon the river's edge and into its resistless current.
Above the delta large spruce and fir-trees, aspens, poplars, and plats of alders and willows grow abundantly on the banks; but they do not extend far back from the river on either side into any por- tions of the country, which is low and marshy, and which embraces so large a proportion of the entire landscape. Small larch-trees are also interspersed. The river is filled with a multitude of long, nar- row islands, all timbered as the banks are, and which are connected one with the other by sand and gravel bars, that are always dry and fully exposed at low-water stages. Immense piles of bleached and splintered drift-logs are raised on the upper ends of these islands, having lodged there at intervals when high water was booming down.
Between Anvik and Paimoot are many lofty clay cliff's, entirely made up of clean, pure earth of different bright colors-red, yellow, straw-colored, and white, with many intermediate shades. The Yukon runs down from its remote sources at the Stickeen divide in British Columbia, down through a wild, semi-wooded country, a succession of lakes and lakelets, through a region almost devoid of human life. That extensive area, wherein we find such scant or ut- ter absence of population, is, south of the Yukon, very densely tim- bered with spruce-trees on the mountains, and with poplars, birch, willow, along the courses of the stream and margins of the lakes. Its immediate recesses only are occasionally penetrated by roving parties of Indian hunters, who now and then leave the great river and the Tannanah for that purpose. It is a silent, gloomy wilder- ness. To the northward of the Yukon this variety in timber still continues ; indeed, it reaches as far into the Arctic Circle and tow- ard the ocean there as the seaward slopes of those low and rolling mountains extend, which rise in irregular ridges trending northeast and southwest. These hills are between one hundred and one hun- dred and fifty miles from the banks of the Kvichpak. Beyond this divide and water-shed of the northern tributaries of the Yukon a forest seldom appears in any case whatsoever, except where a low, straggling spur of hills stretches itself down to the shores of an
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icy sea ; but it is stunted and scant in its hyperborean distribution thereon.
It is not necessary to enter into a description of the appearance and disposition of these Yukon Indians who live on this great river above Anvik, since they resemble those savages which we are so familiar with in the British American interior, Oregon, and Dakota.
The Russians, in regarding them, at once took notice of their marked difference from the more stolid Innuits, so that they were styled, jocularly, by Slavonian pioneers, "Frenchmen of the North," and "Gens de Butte." The Innuits called them "Ingaleeks," and that is their general designation on the river to-day. They differ from our Plain Indians in this respect only : they are all dog- drivers. They rely upon the river and its tributaries largely for food, using birch-bark canoes-no skin-boats whatever. They have an overflowing abundance of natural food-supply of flesh, and fowl also, and when they suffer, as they often do, from starvation, it is due entirely to their own startling improvidence during seasons of plenty, which occur every year. A decided infusion of Innuit blood will be observed in the faces of the Indians who live at Anvik, and some distance up the river from that point of landed demarcation between Innuit and Ingaleek. In olden times the latter were wont to raid upon the settlements of the former, and carried off Innuit women into captivity whenever they could do so, treating the Es- kimo just as the Romans raped the Sabines.
An Innuit is not thrifty at all, but when brought into compari- son with the Indian he is a bright and shining light in this re- spect. Among the Ingaleeks of the Yukon a spring famine regularly prevails every year during the months of April and May, or until the ice breaks up and the salmon run. One would naturally think that the bitter memories of gnawing hunger endured for weeks be- fore an arrival of abundant food, would stimulate that savage to glad exertion when it did arrive so as to lay by of such abundance enough to insure him and his family against recurring starvation next year. Strange to say, it does not. The fish come ; the fam- ished natives gorge themselves, and thus engorged, loaf and idle that time away which should be employed in drying and preserving at least sufficient to keep them in stock when the fish have left the stream. Often we will actually see them lazily going to their slender store which they have newly prepared, and eat thereof, while salmon are still running in the river at their feet! Such im-
27
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providence and reckless disregard of the need of the morrow is hard indeed for us to realize. Many of the beasts of the field and forest with which the savage is well acquainted set him annually, but in vain, a better example.
White traders during the last twenty years have so thoroughly traversed the course of the Yukon, and, since our control of Alaska, little stern-wheel steamers annually make trips from the sea, accom- panied with retinues of white men-these incidents have thoroughly familiarized the Indians here with ourselves. But the wilder In- galeeks of the Tannanah, only six or seven hundred souls in num- ber, however, are as yet comparatively unknown to us. With an exception of a white trader's visit to their country in 1875,* and the recent descent of the Tannanah by a plucky young officer of the United States Army,t these Koltchanes have been unknown at home and wholly undisturbed by us. There are less than sixteen hundred Indians living over the entire Yukon region-a fact which speaks eloquently for an exceeding scantiness of the population of that vast landed expanse of this interior of the Alas- kan mainland-a great arctic moor north of the Kvichpak, which is a mere surface of slightly thawed swale, swampy tundra, lakes and pools, sloughs and sluggish rivers, in the summer solstice, while the wildest storms of frigid winds, laden with snow and sleet, career in unchecked fury over them during winter. Such an extreme climate is the full secret of its marked paucity of human life. But that desolation of winter does not prevent an immense migration of animal life to this repellant section every summer from the south. Myriads of water-fowl, such as geese, ducks, and the smaller forms, breed and moult here then in all security, and free from molestation, while great herds of reindeer troop over the lichen-bearing ridges. The musk-ox, however, has never been known to range here or anywhere in Alaska within the memory of man. Its fossil remains have been disinterred from the banks of the Yukon, at several places (just as those of the mammoth have), but that, with a few bleached skulls, is the only record of this animal we can find which we would most naturally anticipate meet- ing with on such ground, apparently so well adapted for it.
* François Mercier, according to whom "Ingaleek " signifies " incompre- hensible."
| Lieutenant H. T. Allen, Engineer Corps, United States Army.
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There is some difference of opinion as to whether the Yukon or the Mississippi is the larger river, with respect to the volume of their currents. The variation in this regard can hardly be very great, either one way or the other. The Tannanah is the Missouri of the Kvichpak, and swells the flood of that river very perceptibly below its junction.
Michaelovsky has been, and will continue to be, the chief ren- dezvous of a small white residency of the Alaskan North. It is an irregularly built omnium of old Russian dwellings, warehouses, and a few of our own structure. The stockade which onee encir- cled it has long ago been dispensed with, though the antique bas-
Hallo
Michaelovsky. [Extreme northern settlement of white Americans.]
tions and old brass cannon still stand at one or two corners as they stood in early times, well placed to overawe and intimidate a bold and hostile savage people then surrounding them. The buildings are clustered together on a small peninsula of an island, about twenty- five or thirty feet above high-water mark ; littered all around them are the small outbuildings and the summer tents of Innuit and Indian tourists who are loitering about for the double purpose of gratifying a little curiosity, and of trading. An abundance of drift- wood from the Yukon lies stranded on the beaches, and a large pile of picked, straight logs have been hauled from the water and stacked upon one side of a slope. The whole country, hill and plain, in every direction from this post is a flat and alternately rolling moor- land, or tundra, the covering of which is composed principally of
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mosses and lichens, and a sphagnous combination which produces in the short growing season a yellowish-green carpet, with patches of pale lavender gray where the lichens are most abundant. At sparse and irregular intervals bunches of coarse sedge grasses rise, and the entire surface of moor is crossed at various angles with lines of dwarf birches and an occasional clump of alders and stunted willows. The most attractive feature in such an arctic land- scape, when summer has draped it as we now behold it, is the nod- ding seed-plumes of the equisetum grasses-they are tufts of a pure, fleecy white that, ruffled in the breeze, light up the sombre rus- set swales with an almost electrical beauty. Everywhere here, in less than eighteen inches or two feet beneath this blossoming flora, will be found a solid foundation of perpetual frost and ice-it never thaws lower. The flowers of that tundra embrace a list of over forty beautiful species, chief among them being phloxes, a pale- blue iris, white and yellow poppies, several varieties of the red- flowered saxifrages, the broad-leaved archangelica, and many deli- cately fronded ferns.
Twittering, darting flocks of barn-swallows hover and glide over the old faded roofs and walls of Michaelovsky, and the bells of a red-painted church, just beyond, come jangling sweetly across the water, mingled with that homelike chattering of these swallows. But a pious mission here is a practical failure in so far as any effect upon the Innuit mind is concerned. During summer-time, in the Upper Yukon country, thunder-showers are very common ; down here, on the coast, they are never experienced. The glory, how- ever, of an auroral display is divided equally between them, when from September until March luminous waves and radii of pulsating rose, purple, green, and blue flames light up and dance about the heavens-gorgeous arches of yellow bands and pencil-points of crimson fire are hung and glitter in the zenith. These exhibitions beggar description ; they are weirdly and surpassingly beautiful, far beyond all comparison with anything else of a spectacular nature on earth.
In the autumn and in the early days of December, a low de- clination of the sun tints up the clouds at sunrise and sunset into beautiful masses of colors that rapidly come and go in their orig- ination and fading. Twilight is a lovely interval of the day in this latitude, and is even enjoyed by the hard-headed traders themselves. Winter is a weary drag here-about seven months-lasting from
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October until well into May ; but, in spite of its intense cold, there are many long periods of its endurance characterized by clear, lovely weather, while the warmer summer is rendered disagreeable by a large number of cold misty days, rain, and gloomy palls of overhanging clouds which shut down upon everything like a leaden cover.
We are accustomed to associate an occurrence of a real mirage with dry, arid, desert countries, where the thirsty and sun-burned traveller is mocked by illusions of clear lakes and a green oasis just ahead. In truth, the mirage of an Alaskan tundra in midwinter is fully as remarkable, and quite as tantalizing. When the trader starts out with his dog-team, on an intensely still, cold day, the vi- brations of the air are so energetic that those blades of grass which stick out from the snow, just ahead, seem to him like thickets of wil- low- and birch-trees, around which he must make a painful detour. Then, again, the ravines and valleys are transformed into vast lakes, with the loftiest and most precipitous shores. On the coast here, during cool, clear days in March, hills, which are thirty or seventy- five miles away from the windows of Michaelovsky, are lifted up and transported to the very beach of the island itself, contorted and fantastic changes constantly taking place in the picture, until sud- denly a slight something, or a change perhaps in an observer's position, causes the singular delusion to vanishi.
St. Michael's is all by itself to-day ; yet it, at one time, was not the only settlement on the island ; for, close by the fort, there were two Mahlemoot villages, Tahcik and Agahliak, whose inhabitants were first to cordially invite the Russians to locate here in 1835. But in 1842 the ravages of small-pox absolutely depopulated these native towns, and a few survivors fled in dismay from the place- they never came back, nor have their descendants returned. For some reason or other the Russians made the most persistent and energetic attempt to develop a successful vegetable garden in this region and to keep cattle. But, beyond a small exhibit of eatable cabbages, good radishes and turnips, and a few inferior potatoes, grown in the warm sand-dunes of Oonalakleet, nothing more, sub- stantially, ever resulted from it.
Generally the snow falls, at Michaelovsky, as the beginning of its hyemal season, about October 1st, and by October 20th ice has formed, and has firmly locked up the Yukon by November 1st to 5th. These icy fetters break away by June 5th, and in a week or
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ten days the great river is entirely clear. The sea is usually cov- ered by sludgy floes as early as the middle or end of every Octo- ber, which remain opening and closing irregularly until next June. The months of July and August are the warmest, ranging from 48° to 54° Falır. during daytime .*
From St. Michael's to the westward a low basaltic chain of hills borders the coast, and, parallel to it some thirty miles inland, a few peaks attain an elevation of one thousand to fifteen hundred feet. Jutting out at a sharp angle from this volcanic range stands that low peninsula, tipped with the granitic headland named (by Cook more than a century ago) Cape Denbigh. This point forms the southern wall for that snug, tightly enclosed Bay of Norton, thus partitioned off from a sound of the same title. The Oona- lakleet River empties into Norton's Sound, at a point about mid- way between Michaelovsky and Denbigh. The debouchure of this stream is marked by the richest vegetation to be found anywhere in all of this entire region north of Bristol Bay. It is due to the warm sand-dune flats which are located here ; and here is one of the liveliest Mahlemoöt villages of that north. That river is an exclu- sive gateway to the Yukon during the winter season, from and to Michaelovsky, and these Innuits are the chief commission mer- chants of Alaska. In a village, now called Kegohtowik, near by, Zagoskin received his first initiation into the wild life which he led up here as an explorer, since it was the first campt he ever made among the Innuits after he had started out from Michaelovsky. This young Russian was kindly received by the wondering natives, who unharnessed his dogs and hung up his sleds on the cache scaf- folds as a token of their hospitality. Into their kashga he was taken with every demonstration of regard and curiosity. He hap- pened to have arrived just as these people were preparing for and celebrating a great festival of homage to an Eskimo sea-god who rules the icy waters of Bering and the Arctic Ocean. He quaintly records their proceeding in this language :
* An average temperature prevails in this region for the year as follows:
January, -. 5º April, 22.1° July, 53.1° October, 28.0° February, -. 6 May, 32.8 August, 52.1° November, 18.3' March, 9.5 June, 45.23 September, 43.3º December. 8.9'
+ December 5, 1842. The refreshing honesty and frankness of this ex- plorer's thorough work on the Yukon and Kuskokvim deserve to be better known.
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"I had an opportunity of observing the natives preparing for a great festival called by them 'drowning little bladders in the sea.' In the front part of the kashga, on a strip of moose or other skin, there were suspended about a hundred bladders taken from animals killed by arrows only. On these bladders are painted vari- ous fantastic figures. At one end of the trap hangs an owl with a man's head and a gull carved from wood ; at the other end are two partridges. By means of threads running to the crop-beam these images are made to move in imitation of life. Below the bladders is placed a stick six feet in height, bound about with straw. After dancing in front of the bladders a native takes from the stick a small wisp of straw, and lighting it, passes it under the bladders and birds so that the smoke rises around them. He then takes the stick and straw outside. This custom of 'drowning little bladders in the sea' is in honor of the sea-spirit called ' Ug-iak ;' but I cannot discover," says Lieutenant Zagoskin, "how the custom originated, or why they use bladders from animals killed by arrows in preference to those killed by other means. To all questions upon the subject the na- tives answered : 'It is a custom which we took from our fathers and our grandfathers.' It seems to be of great antiquity, as the natives can give no information as to its origin or the reasons for its adop- tion. * Before these bladders they dance all day in their holiday dress, which consists of light parka, warm boots, and short under- dress for the men ; and parkas, reindeer-trousers, colored in Innuit style, for women, and ornamented with glass beads and rings."
And again, in this connection, the pleasures of a dog-sled jour- ney overland to the Yukon are graphically narrated by the same traveller, who resumed his trip, after spending the night as above related, on snow-shoes and dog-sleds laden with his provisions and instruments. On the morning of December 9, 1842, he struck the Oonalakleet River and started up its frozen channel. He says :
" The weather was at first favorable, but it soon changed, and a driving snow-storm set in, blinding our eyes so that we could not distinguish the path. A blade of grass seventy feet distant had the appearance of a shrub, and sloping valleys looked like lakes with high banks, the illusion vanishing upon nearer approach.
" It is the same reply that is honestly given to any query made as to the reason of almost every one of these Innuit mummeries. Too many attempts have been made to attach serious meaning to such idle ceremonies.
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On December 9th, at midnight, a terrible snow-storm began, and in the short space of ten minutes covered men, dogs, and sledges, forming a perfect hill above them. We sat at the foot of a hill, with the wind from the opposite side, and our feet drawn under us to prevent them from freezing, and covered with our parkas. When we were covered by the snow, we made holes with sticks through to the open air. In a short time the warmth of the breath and per- spiration melted the snow so that a man-like cave was formed about each individual. In these circumstances our travellers passed five hours, calling to one another at intervals to keep awake, it being certain death to sleep in that intense cold. If we had been on the other side of the hill, exposed to the full fury of the wind, we would have been buried in the snow and suffocated."
Such are the experiences of all travelling traders on the Yukon, who encounter these wintry "poorgas " in the pursuit of their call- ing every year of their lives spent in that great Alaskan moorland. Familiarity with this subject never breeds contempt for it in the minds of those hardy men-that pain and privation to which these characteristic storms subject all human beings who are caught and chained on a tundra, or in the mountains, by their wild rushing and bitterly cold breath, is never forgotten.
On the shores of Norton's Sound are many low clayey bluffs, which, as they are annually undermined by the surf and chiselled by frost, fall in heavy crumbled masses upon the beach. This exposes their long-concealed deposit of the tusks and bones of those pre- glacial elephants, the mammoth and the mastodon. Such fossil ivory has been used by all Innuits from time immemorial in making their sleds and in tipping their spears, lances, and arrows.
A party of Americans spent the summer of 1881 exploring the country at the head of that deep indentation in the north shore of Norton's Sound called Golovin Bay. They were miners, and en- gaged in locating the sources from which the Innuits had been bringing large masses of lead-ore with a micaceous sparkle. The hope of a silver-mine had allured these hardy prospectors, who had not reckoned, however, on what they would have to face during the long winter, on the ice that was always left in the soil. Still, in the summer this bay of Golovin is an attractive anchorage-the most agreeable landscape presented anywhere on our Arctic coast. Sev- eral rivers empty into it, and on the slopes of the uplands of the northwest side is a growth of white pines that reach a height of fif-
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teen or twenty feet. These small rounded conifers, scattered in clumps over the green and russet tundra, an absence of under- brush, and the dark-green lines of stunted willows and birches that fill the ravines on the sloping sides of gently rising hills, suggest the parking of an old-country place where the orchards are sepa- rated by hedges.
The beaches everywhere are profusely littered with drift-logs from the Yukon, twenty to forty feet in length, thickly strewn. They are pushed high above tides by the ice-floes in winter. What the result would be of failure to gain that abundant supply of fuel, now so easy of attainment, upon the natives of this entire region, is not difficult to determine. As they live to-day they are steadily, rapidly diminishing in number. The whalemen have substantially exterminated their chief sources of life-the whale and the walrus. Seals are not as abundant as on the Greenland coasts, and if, in addition to their extra labor of securing food-supply, they were obliged to do without wood, a practical depopulation of the Alas- kan coast of Bering Straits and the Aretie Ocean would be effected soon.
As the trader shapes his course from St. Michael's for Port Clarence and Kotzebue Sound, his little vessel skirts the low north shore of Norton's Sound very closely. He may stop for an hour or two, if the weather permits, at Sledge Islet, standing "off and on " while the Innuits come out to the schooner in their skin "oomi- aks" or bidarrahs. This barren rock was so named by Captain Cook, who, when he landed on it, found nothing but a native's hand-sled. Its inhabitants were all sojourning on the mainland, berrying. It is only about a mile in its greatest length, less than half a mile wide, and raised almost perpendicularly from the sea to a height of five or six hundred feet. When the modicum of walrus- oil and ivory which these natives have to barter has been hoisted on board, the schooner shapes her course for another islet-the curious "Ookivok," or King's Island-which stands, a mere rock as it were, in the flood that sweeps through Bering Straits. It is rugged, and strewn with immense quantities of basaltic fragments, scoriæ, and rises so precipitately from the sea that no place for a beach-landing can be found.
Here on the south side, clinging like nests of barn-swallows, are the summer houses of the Ookivok walrus-hunters. They are from fifty to one hundred feet above the brawling surf that breaks in-
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cessantly beneath them, and secured to the perpendicular cliffs by lashings and guys of walrus-thongs. The wooden poles thus fast- ened to the rocks are covered with walrus-hides. On these unique brackets those hardy Innuits spend the warmer weather. Their winter residences are mere holes excavated in the interstices and fissures of the same bluff to which their flimsy summer dwell- ings are attached, the entrances to most of them being directly un- der the frail platforms upon which these Mahlemoot families are perched with all of their rude household belongings. The naked- ness of the island is so great as to forbid life to even a spear of grass or moss-nothing but close, leathery lichens, that grow so tightly to its weathered rocks that they appear to be part and par-
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