USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 44
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Ookivok.
cel of the splintered basaltic cubes or olivine bluff's themselves. A more uninviting spot for human habitation could not be found in all the savage solitudes of the north. But the Innuit is here, not for the pleasure of location ; he is here for that command which this station gives him over all walrus-herds floating up and down on the ice-floes of Bering Sea at the sport of varying moods of wind and current.
From the rugged crests of King's Island the natives can appre- hend drifting sea-horses as they sleep heavily on broad ice-cakes, and make ample preparation for their capture. The violence of the wind is so great that the small, flat summit of this islet cannot be utilized as a place of residence -- the winds that howl over and around its rock-strewn head would hurl the Innuits, bag and bag- gage, into those angry waves which thunder incessantly below.
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Long experience at plunging through surf with their handsomely made kayaks, and returning to land on these perilous shores of King's Island, has made the Ookivok people the boldest and the best water- men in the north. Their little skin canoes are of the finest con- struction, and their surplus time is largely passed in carving walrus- ivory into all fashions of rude design for barter in the summer, when the ice shall disappear and the sails of whaling-ships and fur- trading schooners challenge their attention in the offing.
What a winter these people must witness ! What a succession of furious storms and snow-laden gales! When their summer comes it brings but little sunlight to their rocky retreat ; for, standing, as it does, in the full sweep of that warmer flood which flows up from the Japanese coast into the Arctic, cold, chilly fogs and obstinate clouds envelope them most of the time. But sympa- thy is utterly wasted ; were they to be transported to California, and surrounded with all the needs of a creature existence, they would soon entreat, beg, implore us to return them to the inhospit- able rock from which they were taken. The whalers have, at vari- ous intervals during the last twenty years, carried Innuits down to spend the winter with them at the Sandwich Islands, under an idea that these people would be delighted with the soft, warm cli- mate there, and such fruits and flowers, and be grateful for the trip. But in no instance did an individual of this hyperborean race fail to sigh for his home in Bering Sea, or the Arctic Ocean, soon after landing at Hawaii. Those Innuits who were without kith or kin became just as homesick and forlorn as any natives did who had relatives behind awaiting their return.
A few hours' sailing, with a free wind, to the north from King's Island, brings you into full view of a bold headland at the en- trance to Port Clarence. Cape York is a noted landmark in this well-travelled highway to the Arctic Ocean-well travelled by the whaling fleets of the whole world until recently ; now, an elimina- tion of cetacean life from these waters has caused their substantial abandonment by those vessels, and no others come, save a trading- schooner ever and anon at wide intervals. A roomy harbor, shel- tered from the south by a long pier of alluvium, is Port Clarence. Leading beyond it is an immense inner basin, walled in all about by steep slate precipices : this is Grantley Harbor. High hopes and great expectations were centred here in 1865-66, by the location of that short cable-end which, underrunning Bering Straits, was to
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unite an overland telegraph wire from St. Petersburg with that one we were to build, in the same fashion, from Portland, Ore., thus to span the Old and New Worlds by this short submarine link. Naturally, then, it made this point of its beginning a most interest- ing locality. In obedience to an order of a few wealthy, energetic capitalists, who did not then believe in the practicability of the At- lantic cable, many stately ships, freighted with men and goods, left San Francisco in the summer of 1865, and, again, in the succeeding season of 1866, for divers points in Alaska and Siberia. These men were to build the line overland. They were landed at St. Michael's and at Port Clarence, and at several harbors on the Asiatic coast. They had fairly got to work, when, late in 1866, the success of the submarine cable between Newfoundland and Ireland was assured. That success compelled an abandonment of the Collins Overland Telegraph, and these men were consequently recalled, and sailed back to California in those handsome vessels of the telegraph fleet. How the Innuits of Port Clarence marvelled when these smart, richly dressed men disembarked, and put up houses in which to store their treasures of food and telegraph materials, as well as to actually live in-to stay there with them, in their own rude country, where no such thing had ever been even dreamed of before. After the ships had squared their yards and filled away, without calling the Americans on board, then the Mahlemoot heart was filled with unknown and strange emotions of joy and curiosity-both of these passions were fully satisfied ere the white men left Grantley Harbor.
With Cape York just astern, you pass under the lee of those sheer and lofty walls of that shoulder to our continent, Cape Prince of Wales. Its bold front stands in full but silent recognition of an Asiatic coast westward, just thirty-six miles away, over the shallow flood of Bering Straits. What changes in a great northland and seas would have been wrought had a tithe of such volcanic energy which raised up the Aleutian archipelago been only exerted here in throwing a basaltic dike across from continent to continent ! Had the upheaval and power that elevated the large island of Oonimak alone been focused here, we should have no division of the Old World and the New. That ocean-river which flows steadily into the icy wastes of a known and unknown polar basin above Alaska and Siberia would not now give that life which it so freely grants both animals and vegetables in the wide reach of the North Pacific. A dam of adamantine rock or basalt across the Straits of Bering
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محمود
CAPE PRINCE OF WALES
That extreme narrowing of the American shore of Bering Straits : the Asiatic coast is only thirty-six miles to the Westward from this Point, which was located and named by Captain Cook, August 7, 1778
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would cause a startling revision of all the natural order of life in Bering Sea and our Arctic Ocean.
Cape Prince of Wales, which forms the extreme narrowing of Bering Straits, is a high, rugged promontory, with walls on the south side that are abrupt precipices of a full thousand feet, while the uplands rise, culminating in a snowy crown that is twenty-five hundred feet above the level of the sea. Deep gulches seam these vertical walls, and are the paths of numerous tiny rivulets that trickle and run in cascades down from the spongy moorlands above. When, however, you stand in to the straits, homeward bound from the Arctic Ocean, this cape on that side presents a wholly different outline. It slopes up gradually from the beaches, and presents the appearance of a tundra gently rising to a small ridge-like summit. This lowland on the north side is projected under the sea for a dis- tance of over eight miles in a northerly direction, making an ex- ceedingly dangerous shoal, and justly dreaded by the mariner.
The Siberian side and opposite headland is the bold and lofty East Cape, and is connected with the mainland by a low neck of rolling tundra, which is characteristic of Cape Prince of Wales also. Both of these outposts of two mighty continents present, at a small distance, the resemblance of islands.
On June 20th, two hundred and thirty-eight years ago (1648), Simeon Deschnev, a Cossack chief trader, sailed from the mouth of the Siberian river Kolyma, standing to the eastward, where he in- tended to cruise until the country of those Chookchie natives, who had ivory for trade, should be reached. His party sailed in three small " kotches," which were rude wooden shallops, decked over, about thirty feet long and twelve in beam, drawing but little wa- ter. They pushed on and on in that region to the eastward, from which direction the nomadic natives of the Kolyma had always re- turned laden with walrus-ivory. Fields of ice retarded them ; no populous trading-villages rewarded their scrutiny of the rugged coast as they advanced. The known waters behind them closed up with floes, so returning was impossible ; while the unknown waters ahead were open and invited exploration. In this manner, hug- ging the coast, Deschnev and his companions sailed through the straits, landing once there in September. He called it an "isthmus," and described the appearance of the Diomede Islands, which he plainly saw from the shore. Although no mention is made by any one of this party of having seen the American continent, yet it must
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have been observed by them, for the bold headland of Cape Prince of Wales can be easily descried on any clear day from the Asiatic side. Deschnev's vogage had been quite forgotten until Müller, in hunting over old records in 1764, found the narrative then, and at once published it in the " Morskoi Sbornik."
A long interregnum elapsed between the hardy voyage of Sim- eon Deschnev and the next or second passage of the straits by the keel of a white man's vessel. Not until August, 1728, did Bering sail through here. He went only a short distance above, into the Arctic Ocean, and returned without giving any sign thereafter of the importance of the pass or its nature, believing, most likely, that what land he saw on the eastern side was a mere island and not a great American continent. But that intrepid navigator, Cap-
The Diomedes.
"Fairway Rock," " Ignalook " (America).
"Noornabook " (Asia).
[Viewed from the Arctic Ocean ; looking S.S. W. 7 m.]
tain Cook, who comes third in this early initiation of our race, made no mistake : he fully realized that the division of two hemi- spheres was here effected, and so declared the fact, and then gave to these straits, in a most chivalric manner, the name of Bering, August, 1778.
Midway, stepping-stones as it were, across those straits are the Diomedes, two barren, rocky islets and a sheer rock. The largest and the most western is about three miles long and one in width ; it is seven or eight hundred feet in abrupt elevation from the water, and the line of division between the Siberian possessions and our own just takes it in. The sister island is somewhat smaller, less than half as large, but it is as bold and sheer in its rocky elevation, leaving a channel-width of two miles only in between. The first is named Ratmanov, or Noornabook ; the second, Kroozenstern, or
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Ignalook ; while that high isolated hay-cock mass, about seven miles south of Kroozenstern, is called Fairway Rock. Bering Straits has an average depth of only twenty-six fathoms, with a hard, regular bottom of sand, gravel, and silt.
This gateway to the Arctic Ocean is closed by ice-floes usually by the middle or end of October every year, and opened again in the following season by May 25th or June 1st, but the ice-fields do not allow much room for navigation north until the middle or end of June, sometimes not until the month of July has been well passed.
On that low, northern tundra slope of Cape Prince of Wales is the largest Innuit village in the Alaskan northland. Four hundred souls live there in a settlement which they style Kingigahmoot, and they bear unmistakable evidence of the vicious and degrading in- fluence which evil whalers and rum-traders have exerted. We are struck by their sancy flippancy, their restless, meddlesome, and im- pertinent bearing. It is because these people have been for a great many years thoroughly familiarized with and degraded by all the tricks and petty treacheries of dishonest and disreputable white men. They do not draw a line in favor of any decency in our race to-day, and hence their disagreeable manner. Otherwise, beyond shaving the crowns of their heads, they do not differ from the Innuits whom we have met heretofore. They are seamen in the full sense of the word-hardy, reckless navigators who boldly launch themselves into stormy waters and cross from land to land in tempest and in fogs, depending solely upon the frail support of their walrus-skin baidars, or oomiaks. These are very neatly made, however, the covering of seal- and walrus-hides being stretched and sewed tightly over wooden frames that are lashed at the joints with sinew and whalebone-thongs. They hoist a square sail of deer- skins or cotton drilling, and run before the wind in heavy gales ; or they employ paddles and oars, and urge their craft against head- winds and perverse currents. Their poverty is the only redemption which they have had from absolute destruction ; for were they pos- sessed of furs that would encourage the regular visits of traders, they would, with their disposition to debauchery, have been utterly exterminated long before this time. But they are poor, very poor, having nothing to tempt the cupidity of white traders-nothing but small stores of walrus-oil and teeth, and a few red and white foxes, perhaps. Therefore our people never stop long near them, just
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laying the vessel's sails aback for a few minutes, or an hour, while the dusky paddling crews of the oomiaks surrounding the schooner exhibit their slim stocks of oil and ivory.
These northern Innuits are not known anywhere to have a vil- lage located far back from the sea save at three places, where, on the Selawik, the Killiamoot, and the Kooak Rivers, are settlements of a few people who are at least fifty and one or two hundred miles inland ; but they are the exceptions only to their rule of living. Some thirty-five villages of these hyperborean Innuits of Alaska are scattered along the coast between St. Michael's and Point Bar- row ; they possess an aggregate (estimated) inhabitation of three thousand men, women, and children. The Diomede and Prince of Wales natives are the most active middlemen or commission mer- chants among their people ; they conduct all the trade between the Asiatic Chookchie savages and the American Innuits, chiefly with those of Kotzebue Sound. Before a wholesale destruction by our people, in 1849-57, of the whales that once were so abun- dant in these waters, the life of those natives was a comparatively easy struggle for existence, and they were far more numerous then than they are to-day ; but a fleet of four and five hundred whaling- ships, manned by the hardiest men of all nations, literally swept that cetacean life from the North Pacific and Bering Sea, and drove it so far into the Arctic Ocean that its remnant, which is still there, is practically safe and beyond Imman reach.
As you leave the Straits of Bering behind, your little vessel cuts the cold, green waves of the Arctic Ocean rapidly, especially if under the pressure of a warm southwester which funnels up stiffly through the pass. You find nothing to catch your eye in all that long reach from Cape Prince of Wales to the entrance of Kotzebue Sound, which is an objective point of all the traders who come into the Arctic. Here is the last safe Alaskan harbor for a sea-going vessel as we go north. It is a big one ; and it is a famous place for a geologist and Innuits alike. To the latter it is of especial signifi- cance, since the small rivers which empty there mark an extreme northern limit of salmon-running in America.
The shores which bound this large gulf rise as perpendicular bluffs, either directly from the water or from a shelving beach. In some places the land is remarkably low (as it always is when bor- dering the coast), and only so much raised above tide-level as to render the idea probable that it is of an alluvial formation, the re-
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sult of accumulated mud and sand, brought down in former times by the melting and running of large glacial rivers, and then thrown up later by recent ice-floes of the Arctic Sea. The cliffs are, in part, abrupt and rocky ; others are made up of falling masses of mud, sand, and ice. The rocky cliff's are dominant on the western and southern shores, while the diluvial bluffs and flats complete that remaining east and northeast circuit of the sound. Lowlands bor- der a major portion of the Bay of Good Hope, and form the land of Cape Espenberg and contiguous country.
A most striking natural feature of this final rendezvous of the salmon-loving Innuits is the Peninsula of Choris, which divides the inner waters of the Bay of Escholtz from those of Good Hope. It is a narrow, variously indented tongue ; its northern end is sepa- rated from the southern, and connected by a slender neck of very low land. This lower point assumes the shape of a round and some- what conical eminence, surmounted by a flat, hut-like peak, the sides of which rise a few feet perpendicularly above a surrounding sur- face, as though raised artificially by masonry. The whole height is about six hundred feet above sea-level. Both sides of that quaint headland terminate in rocky cliffs which, toward the west, are one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet high, stratified, unbroken, and dipping to the west at an angle of thirty degrees. They are composed of micaceous slate, with no included minerals. This slate is of a greenish hue, with a very considerable predominance of mica. In it are garnets, veins of feldspar enclosing crystals of schorl, and fissures filled with quartz. At one point, nearly midway between the southern end of this peninsula and its low neck, is a singular bed of pure milk-white quartz, that marks its locality from a long distance by the masses of large white blocks which have fallen down by natural processes of cleavage and frost-chiselling, and these re- main unaltered in their snowy color in spite of the corroding action of time and weather. Again, still nearer the neck, a narrow bed of limestone forms a distinct protrusion above some mica-schist, about thirty feet in length and five in depth. It reappears in such strength, however, at the southern end of the peninsula, that it forms most of the rock exposed, and produces four perpendicular and contiguous promontories, separated from each other by small, receding bays, that present curious walls striped a white and blue tint in beautifully blended stratification, most unique and attractive to the eye. The upper part of this limestone contains iron pyrites, 28
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and has cavities filled with chlorite. The lower strata are more abundantly mixed with micaceous schistus, containing compact actynolite, and flat prisms of a glassy shade of it, crystals of tour- maline, and those various concretions of iron pyrites. The quartz is, in some places, colored a real topaz tint. Such, in brief, is a faint description of those geological attractions which the Arctic rocks of Kotzebue Sound present to a student.
The country everywhere, that borders the Arctic Ocean and this sound, is low. The land rises by faint and gradual slopes; it is covered with clay soils and the characteristic vegetation of a tun- dra. The many low, projecting points of Kotzebue Sound are thickly strewn with large and smaller masses of vesicular and of compact lava, containing olivine. Some of these blocks extend into the sea ; others are embedded in the sandy soil of the beach ; but many are insulated and awash above the surf. They are honey- combed with empty cavities. The sands of this Arctic Ocean beach partake of the black and volcanic nature of those blocks. These large and numerous erratic blocks of basalt, collected chiefly on such jutting points, must have been conveyed there by ice-sheets from a very considerable distance, for no volcanic formation is to be seen in their vicinity.
A suggestive wreck lies half buried in the sand and drift of the north shore of Choris Peninsula-it is the scant and weathered remnants of a large whaling-bark, which was run ashore here and burned. Its own crew did so to prevent its capture by the Shenan- doah-that cruiser which, during our civil war, swooped down upon our Asio-Alaskan whaling-fleet, as a fish-hawk drops upon a flock of startled gulls. Again, on the south side of Good Hope Bay, in this same remarkable sound of Kotzebue, is a bluff of solid blue clay, from the face of which the frost-king annually strikes large masses. The weathered débris of these fallen sections reveal many fine specimens of well-preserved remains of huge pachyderms- mammoths-and their finding has given a fit name of "Elephant Point " to the place.
Across that peninsula, which Choris Point and its comical little tender of Chamisso Islet project from, lies the long and narrow est- uary of Hotham Inlet, where all Innuits, from Icy Cape to the far north and Bering Straits in the south, annually repair for salmon- fishing in August. Into the mouths of a half-dozen small streams which empty there, and that large one, of Kooak River, the hump-
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backed salmon runs, for a brief period, in great numbers : then the harvest of the Eskimo is at hand. Nowhere else above this point can a salmon ever be taken, and as it is the last chance of these natives, they improve it. Flocks of fat ducks and geese hover over and rest upon the smooth, shallow waters of this inlet, alternately feeding there and then alighting upon the tundra where crow- berries and insects abound. Our whalers have taught these Innuits how to make and use gill-nets, with which they now catch their fish almost exclusively ; and not unwisely have those natives made the change, for they have not got any slender willow brush and alder- saplings which their brethren use so effectually in making rude traps on the Yukon, Kuskokvim, and Nooshagak Rivers. They also stretch these gill-nets over certain narrow places, from shore to shore, of lagoons and lakes, where flocks of water-fowl are wont to fly (in early morning and late in the evening), and succeed in capt- uring a great many luckless birds by this simple method.
CHAPTER XIV.
MORSE AND MAHLEMOÖT.
The Monotonous Desolation of the Alaskan Arctic Coast. - Dreary Expanse of Low Moorlands .- Diversified by Saddle-backed Hills of Gray and Bronze Tints .- The Coal of Cape Beaufort in the Arctic .- A Narrow Vein .- Pure Carboniferous Formation. - Doubtful if these Alaskan " Black Dia- monds " can be Successfully Used .- Icy Cape, a Sand- and Gravel-spit .- Remarkable Land-locked Lagoons on the Beach. - The Arctic Innnits. - Point Barrow, Our Extreme Northern Land, a Low Gravel-spit .- The But- tercup and the Dandelion Bloom here, however, as at Home .- Back to Bering Sea. -- The Interesting Island and Natives of St. Lawrence .- The Sea-horse .- Its Uncouth Form and Clumsy Life. - Its Huge Bulk and Impo- tency on Land .- Lives entirely by Clam-digging .- Rank Flavor of its Flesh. -The Walrus is to the Innuit just as the Cocoa-palm is to the South Sea Islander .- Hunting the Morse .- The Jagged, Straggling Island of St. Matthew .- The Polar Bears' Carnival. - Hundreds of them here .- Their Fear of Man .- " Over the Hills and Far Away," whenever Approached. - Completion of the Alaskan Circuit.
AN Innuit village is in plain sight on the low shores of Cape Krooz- enstern, which forms a northern pier-head of Kotzebue Sound, and its inhabitants greet your vessel as it passes out and up the coast with the usual dress-parade-climbing upon the summits of their winter houses, and by running in light-hearted mirth along the beach. A most dreary expanse of low moorland borders the coast as the lit- tle schooner reviews it, swiftly heeling on her course to the north. Not until the bluffs of Cape Thompson are in sight does a note- worthy landmark occur. This is an abrupt headland capped by carboniferous limestone full of fossils, shells, corals and the like, which are peculiar to that age. It is also traversed by veins of a blackish chert varying in thickness from six inches to three feet or more, causing a decided network tracery to appear very plainly on its gray-white face. Half-way down from the top, the limestone is succeeded by blue, black, and gray argillaceous shades, the colors of which alternate in layers of horizontal strata, six or eight feet in
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thickness, nearly down to the base; it is then composed of black carboniferous shales alone, which abound in organic remains and are occasionally interstratified by limestone much deflected. This contortion is so great as to form two regularly banded arches. Sev- eral tiny snow-water cascades tumble down its ravines and boldly plunge over the bluffs, which are about four hundred feet high in their greatest elevation.
This chert is that which the Eskimo of the entire Alaskan arc- tic region (before the coming of white men) used for tipping their lance- and arrow-heads when ivory was not employed. They, aided with a small piece of bone, were able to " flake " it off in slices that were easily reduced to the desired forms. They still work a little of it up every year, in a desultory or perfunctory manner, however, more for amusement than anything else, since they have a profusion of iron and steel now in their possession. The fashion in which they chip it gives ample evidence of their full understanding of a flat con- choidal fracture peculiar to flint, and of which they take advantage.
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