USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 9
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The rains caught in the ship's sails filled the casks of the Saint Paul, since Tschericov, deprived of his boats and thoroughly alarmed, made no further attempts to land ; but he had not the faintest idea of the presence, at that moment, of his superior officer in the same waters, and only a few leagues to the northward, who also, like himself was eagerly looking for his storm-parted consort. What a most remarkable voyage, this voyage of the discovery of
* That point, most likely, was Kruzov Island, and the bay into which the nnhappy Russians were decoyed was Klokachev Gulf. This island forms the western shore of Sitka Sound.
+ He reached Kamchatka on the 9th October following, with only forty- nine survivors out of his original crew of seventy. Bering never did ; he was shipwrecked and died on a bleak island, of the Commander group, December 8, 1741. They seem to have really sailed over this course of six thousand miles almost together, anxiously searching for each other, yet unconscious of their proximity.
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THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELIAS.
the Alaskan region-what a chapter of disappointment, of hardship, and of death !
That bluffy sea-wall which forms a face to the low coast pla- · tean at the feet of the St. Elias Alps is cut by no great river, nor indented by any noteworthy gulf or inlet, except at Yakootat Bay. Here a succession of precipitous glaciers sweep down from the lofty cradles of their birth to the waters of the sea, making an icy cliff of more than fifteen miles in breadth, where it breaks in constant rever- beration and repetition. At the month of Copper River all silt car- ried down from old eroded glacial paths has been deposited for thon- sands and thousands of years, until a big deltoid chart of sea-water channels in muddy relief of bank and shoal has been formed, and through which the flood of an ice-chilled river takes its rapid course.
The gloomy, savage wildness of this region of supreme moun- tainons elevation, with its vast gelid sheets and precipitous cañons, its sombre forests and eternal snows, all as yet wholly unexplored, and only faintly appreciated as we can from the remote distance of shipboard observation-this region cannot remain much longer untrodden by the geologist and the naturalist, while the artist must accompany them if an adequate presentation is ever to be given of its weird, titanic realities.
The Mount St. Elias shore-line is made up of small projecting points, awash. These alternate with low cliffy or else white sandy beaches, which border a flat, rolling woodland country that extends back from the sea ten to thirty miles, where it suddenly laps and rises upon the lofty flanks of the Elias Alps. Into the ocean many rocky shoals and long sandy bars stretch for miles, and streams of white muddy glacial or snow waters rush into the surf at frequent intervals-hundreds of them.
There are sand-beaches and silt-shoals which extend from Cape Suckling, up seventy-five miles to Hinchinbrook Island, that stands as a gate-post to the entrance of Prince William's Sound : here is a long sand-ridge which is more than sixty miles in length and from three to seven miles broad, lying between the ocean and the mainland, which in turn is composed of low wooded uplands and of steep abrupt cliffs and hills that are quickly lost in the lofty snowy range of the Choogatch Alps. Through a section of this dreary sand-wall the impetuous flood of the Copper or Atna River forces its way, carrying its heavy load of glacial mud and silt far
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into the ocean. How the winds do blow here ! How the trader dreads to tarry " off and on " this coast !
There are a few lonely places in this world, and the wastes of the great Alaskan interior are the loneliest of them all. Those of Sibe- ria are traversed occasionally by wandering bands, but those of Alaska, never. The severe exigencies of climate there are such as to substantially eliminate savage life, and to rear an impregnable barrier to that of civilization.
When Alaska was first transferred, an estimate of many thou- sands of Indians inhabiting its vast interior was gravely made and as gravely accepted by us ; but a thorough investigation made by our traders and officers of our Government during the last fifteen years has exposed that error. Hundreds only live where thousands were declared to exist. The Indians who live on the banks of the Copper River are, perhaps, the most poverty-stricken of all their kind in Alaska. Their shiftless spruce-bark rancheries and rude 'be- longings are certainly the most primitive of their race, and render that weird Russian legend of the massacre of Seribniekov in 1848, which declared them so numerous and savage, absolutely grotesque. They are perfectly safe as they live in their wild habitat. The cu- pidity of savage or civilized man never has and never will molest them. But if half is true as to what they relate of huge glaciers which empty into their river, then those that have been described in Cross Sound have formidable rivals, which may yet prove to be superiors, perhaps, although it seems incredible.
The Suchnito or Copper River has long been a bugbear, for the Russians * years ago have returned from several unsuccessful at-
* When the surveying parties of the War Department were ascending Cop- per River last summer, certain Indians, who had been instrumental in slaying the Russian party of Seribniekov in 1848, were very much alarmed. They were sure that the fates had come for them at last. One of these natives, an aged man, now wholly blind, was reported as saying that he was ready to die, and knew what the white men wanted. This old fellow, Lieutenant Allen says, was one of the finest-looking savages that he ever saw. The face of the blind man was one of remarkable character-a large, massive head, high aquiline nose, with a full, thin-lipped mouth and broad forehead. He was » totally blind and his hair white as snow.
The Russian party were sleeping in their sledges, which they compelled the natives to draw while ascending the river. At a preconcerted signal the unwilling Indians turned and brained their taskmasters with hatchets. These natives had welcomed the Russians ; but when they were made to perform
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Elliott
from & field sketch by I H. T. Allea.
MT. WRANGEL : 20,000 FEET
In the Forks of Copper River : it is the loftiest Mountain on the North American Continent
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THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELIAS.
tempts to ascend it, and gave the excuse of being driven out of the valley by savage and warlike natives. Recently it has been thor- oughly explored, and the "savages " are found to be less than two hundred inoffensive natives, who constitute the whole population of this mysterious Atna or Maidnevskie region. But navigating the river is terrific labor, inasmuch as it is a continuous, swift rapid throughout its entire course.
This river is a short, turbulent, brawling stream, less than two hundred and fifty miles in length, but rising in the heart of a lofty and mighty mass of volcanic mountains. It receives a score of im- posing glaciers, which almost rival those of Icy Bay in Cross Sound. The silt that these gelid rivers pour into its channel has given it a deltoid mouth of extended and most intricate area.
Triangulations made by an officer* of the Army last year de- clare that Mount Wrangel is the loftiest peak on the North Ameri- can continent. The feet of this magnificent volcanic dome are washed by the forks of Copper River, which is eighteen thousand six hundred and forty feet below the apex of its smoking cap. Then the river at this point is more than two thousand feet above sea-level, so the vast altitude of more than twenty thousand feet for Mount Wrangel seems to be truthfully claimed.
The soil which borders the abrupt banks of the Copper River is entirely composed of glacial silt and gravel. It is moist and boggy in the driest seasons, covered with rank growing grasses and dense thickets of poplars, birches, and willows, that line the margins of the stream. The higher lands, as they rise from the narrow valley, are in turn clothed with a dense growth of spruce-forest, which gradually fades out into russet-colored areas of rock-sphagnum as the altitude increases to that point where nothing but the cold and frost-defying lichen can cling alive to the weather-splintered sum- mits of alpine heights above.
Fish (salmon) are the chief reliance of these natives of Cop- per River ; they depend almost wholly upon the annual running of those creatures. The difficulty of hunting is so great that the
the labor of dogs they turned upon their white oppressors, naturally. The massacre of Seribniekov and his party in this manner made the Indians very restless and determined in their opposition to further intercourse with the Russians. The memory of hostility has, however, died out, and nothing of the kind was shown to our people last year as they charted the valley and river.
Lieutenant H. T. Allen.
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savage is content with shooting a few mountain sheep, a wandering moose or two, and, perhaps, a stray bear in the course of the year. Also, huckleberries and salmon berries are abundant on the sun- shiny slopes of the high glacial river-terraces during August and September.
West of the Copper River mighty masses of the Choogatch Mountains rise directly from the sea without any intervening low- land, save at three tiny points upon which savage man has hastened to fix liis abode. Many crests to this range on the north side of Prince William's Sound must have a mean elevation of over ten thousand feet, densely wooded with semper-virent coniferous for- ests up to a height of one thousand feet above sea-level, and covered with everlasting snowy blankets to within three or four thousand feet of the ocean at their bases. The body of Prince William's Sound is so forbidding in its dark grandeur that even the stolid Russians never tired of narrating its stirring impression upon their senses. Although the interior of this gulf is completely landlocked, being sheltered from the south by the islands of Noochek and Mon- tague, yet it is by no means a safe or pleasant sheet of water to navigate, inasmuch as furious gales and " woollies " sweep down upon it from the steep mountain sides and cañons, so that, without even a moment's warning, the traveller's craft is suddenly stricken, and compelled to instantly run for shelter under the lee of some one of the hundreds of islands and capes which stud its waters or point its coast. Immense glaciers are descending from the cavern- ous inlets of the northern and eastern shores, and shedded frag- ments of ice, large and small, are cemented by the tide into large sheets, which are finally swept out and lost in the ocean.
The shores of these canals are formed of high, stupendous moun- tains that rise abruptly from the water's edge perpendicularly, and often overhanging. The dissolving snow upon their summits gives rise to thousands upon thousands of little cataracts, which fall with great impetuosity down their seamed sides and over sheer and rug- ged precipices. This fresh water, clear as crystal and cold as win- ter, thus descending into the green and blue salt sea, changes that tone to one of a strange whitish hue in its vicinity, as it also does in many fiords of the Sitkan region. This peculiar flood always arrests attention and excites the liveliest curiosity in the mind of him who beholds it for the first time. Everywhere, save to the southward, mountains can be seen looming up in the background
M
VALDES GLACIER
View at the head of Valdes Inlet, Prince William's Sound : typical study of hundreds of such gelid rivers which discharge into the waters of this gloomy sound. A September sketch, made at low-tide
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THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELIAS.
with snowy peaks and guttered ridges, and they attest the will legends of their sullen grandeur which the first white men related who ever beheld them. These hardy sailors, when sent out in the ship Three Saints from Kadiak, in 1788, arrived in the Gulf of Choogatchi, or this Sound of Prince William, during the month of May. They anchored in a little bay of Noochek Island, and there established a trading-station. This is the only post, Fort Constan- tine, or "Noochek," that has ever been located by our people in all this section of a vast wilderness ; to-day it is but little changed-a couple of trading-stores standing on the foundations of Ismailoy's * erection, in which the only three white men now known to reside in all that region of alpine wonder are living, surrounded by a small village of sixty natives.
The large size of those spruce-trees on the southern slopes of Kenai Peninsula, Montague, and Noochek Islands of Prince Will- iam's Sound, so impressed the Russians that they established a shipyard at Resurrection Bay as early as 1794 ; by the close of that year they actually built and launched a double-decker, 73 feet long by 23 feet beam, of 180 tons burden-the first three-masted, full- rigged ship ever constructed on the west coast of the North Ameri- can continent ; she was named the Phoenix, and as she slid from her ways into the unruffled waters of this far-away place the exultation and delighted plaudits ; of her builders echoed in strange discord with the wild surrounding. Baranov had no paint or even tar, so that this pioneer ship was covered with a coat of spruce-gum, ochre, and whale-oil. A few small vessels only were built after this, inas- much as the company found it much more economical to purchase in European yards the sailing-craft and steamers which it was obliged to employ : but, to-day the traces of the Russian ship-carpenter's
* Ivan Ismailov and Gayorgi Bochorov ; they went in the dual capacity of explorers and traders, lured into the undertaking by rumors which had pre- vailed at Kadiak respecting great numbers of sea-otters in this bay.
+ Had these enthusiastic builders then been able to have foreseen the tragedy which this vessel precipitated, five years later, they would have scarcely thus expressed themselves, but rather have stood in silence, with bowed heads, as the work of their hands swept into the flood that embraced her. In 1799 she sailed from the Okotsk, bound for Sitka, with the newly-ordained Bishop Joasaph and twenty priests and deacons of the Greek Church; she was never seen or heard of afterward, nor was anything seen or heard of her passengers and crew-she took them with her to the bottom of the sea.
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axe can be still plainly recognized at many points of the western coast of the sound, and on Montague Island huge logs, as roughed out nearly a full century ago, are lying now, as they lay then, slightly decayed in many instances ; the anticipation which felled them was never realized, and they have never been disturbed con- sequently.
In these early colonial Alaskan days, Fort St. Constantine, or Noochek Island, was a very important trading-centre ; it was visited by all the tribes living on the Mount St. Elias sea-wall to the eastward as far as Yakootat, and also by the Copper Indians. Then the sea-otter was abundant, and in its ardent chase those Choogatch savages captured, incidentally, large numbers of black and brown bears, marten, and mink. Now, with the practical ex- termination of the sea-otter, we find a very poor lot of natives at this once flourishing post ; but, for the means of a simple phys- ical existence, they have no lack of an abundant supply of salmon, seal-blubber and flesh-meat of the marmot, porcupine, and bear, varied by the frequent Killing of mountain sheep, which are found all over this alpine range ; fine foxes are plentiful too.
These Indians live in houses partly underground, which we shall describe as we visit Kadiak, and in purely race-characteristics those people also closely resemble the Kadiak Eskimo. From the north of the Copper River, however, toward the Sitkan archipelago, the Koloshian or Thlinket is dominant in the form and features of those savages which we find in a few small and widely separated villages that exist on the narrow table-land between the high mountains and the unbroken swell of the ocean. These natives all, however, agree in describing their country as an excellent hunting- ground, well timbered, and traversed by numerous small streams which take their rise in the glaciers and eternal snows of the St. Elias Alps.
By some happy dispensation of the Creator every savage is so constituted that here in Alaska, at least, he believes in his own par- ticular area of existence as the very best realm of the earth-he becomes homesick and refuses to be comforted if taken to Cali- fornia or Oregon, enters into a slow decline, and soon dies if not returned to the dreary spot of his birth-a sad illustration of fatal nostalgia.
An Alaskan Indian or Innuit has very little of what may be styled true slavish superstition ; certainly he is credulous, but he
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THE ALPINE ZONE OF MOUNT ST. ELIAS.
rather encourages it for the sake of the romance. He gives slight attention to augurs or omens ; he ventures out in search of food alike under all sorts of varying conditions of health and weather ; he has a few charms or amulets, but does not surrender to them by any means. Shamans, or sorcerers, never have had the influence with him that they have exerted in the barbarism of our own ances- try, and which they possess among the savages of Central and South America and Africa to-day. It is no solution of this difference in disposition to call him stupid, for it is not true ; he is far more alert, mentally, than the ghost-ridden Australian, or fetich-slave of Africa ; and, again, the sun-worshipping and intensely superstitious Incas were far superior, intellectually, to him.
Most of the Innuits give hardly a thought to the subject, yet they are exceedingly vivacious and social among themselves ; much more so than the Indians. They relate a great many supernatural stories, but it is only in amusement, and it seldom ever provokes serious attention.
CHAPTER V.
COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE.
Cook's "Great River."-The Tide-rips, and their Power in Cook's Inlet. - The Impressive Mountains of the Inlet. - The Glaciers of Turnagain Canal. -Old Russian Settlements .- Kenai Shore of the Inlet, the Garden-spot of Alaska .- Its Climate best Suited to Civilized Settlement .- The Old " Colonial Citizens " of the Russian Company .- Small Shaggy Siberian Cattle .- Burning Volcano of Ilyamna .- The Kenaitze Indians .- Their Primitive, Simple Lives .- They are the Only Native Land-animal Hunt- ers of Alaska .- Bears and Bear Roads .- Wild Animals seek Shelter in Volcanic Districts .- Natives Afraid to Follow Them .- Kenaitze Archi- tecture .- Sunshine in Cook's Inlet .- Splendid Salmon .- Waste of Fish as Food by Natives. - The Pious Fishermen of Neelshik. - Russian Gold- mining Enterprise on the Kaknoo, 1848-55 .- Failure of our Miners to Discover Paying Mines in this Section.
THAT volcanic energy and amazing natural variation of the region known as Cook's Inlet, and the Peninsula of Alaska, endow it with a certain fascination which it is hard to adequately define in words, and difficult to portray. The rugged, uninviting bold- ness of the Kenai Mountains turn us abruptly, after our departure at Noochek, to the southward, where, in an unbroken frowning cordon of one hundred and fifty miles in length, they bar us out from the waters of that striking estuary-the greatest on the north- west coast, which is so well exhibited by the map to everybody as Cook's Inlet. But it is known only in name-not by the faintest appreciation, even, of its real character and of its strange belong- ings.
Two and three hundred miles still farther north than Sitka it does not in itself present that increased wintry aspect at any season of the year which would be most naturally looked for-but it does offer, in physical contour and phenomena, a most marked contrast to the Alexander archipelago and its people. It is an exceedingly dangerous and difficult arm of the sea to navigate, and prompts an
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COOK'S INLET AND ITS PEOPLE.
involuntary thought of admiration for the nautical genius, skill, and courage of Captain Cook, who sailed up to the very head of this entirely unknown gulf, in 1778, seeking that mythical northwest passage round the continent-his dauntless exploration to the utter limit of Turnagain Canal-his extraordinary retreat in his clumsy ships, and safe threading of his way out and through the hundreds of then absolutely nameless and chartless islets and reefs to the shoals of Bering Sea-all this, viewed to-day, seems simply marvel- lous, that he should have escaped all these dangers which the best sailor now hesitates to undertake, even with excellent courses laid down and determined for him.
The ship's entrance to this great land-locked gulf, which the Russians named, for many years, the Bay of Kenai, lies between the extreme end of that peninsula called Cape Elizabeth, and Cape Douglas, which is a bold promontory jutting out from the Alaskan mainland. Nearly half-way between the two points is a group of bleak, naked islets, the Barren Islands : around them the tide-rips of this channel, which they obstruct, boil in savage fury, and are the dread of every navigator, civilized or Innuit, who is brought near to them ; these violent and irregular tidal currents here, even in perfectly calm weather, will toss the waters so that the wildest fury of a tempest elsewhere cannot raise so great a disturbance over the sea, or one which will so quickly wash a vessel under.
When your ship, bound in, passes this Alaskan "Hell Gate," she enters into a broad and ample expanse of water caused by the. widening effect of two large bays which are just opposed to each other on the opposite shores. The coast of the Kenai Peninsula is low, the mountains contiguous are not high, though toward the interior the ridges become much loftier ; but everywhere between them and this coast-line is that characteristic marshy tundra of the Arctic-a low, flat, broad strip, varying in width from forty to fifty miles, through which sluggishly flow a multitude of streams and brooks, wooded with birch, poplar, and spruce everywhere on the banks, but bare of timber over the great bulk of its expanse. As the inlet contracts still further, especially at the point between the two headlands of East and West Foreland, the tide again in- creases in velocity and violence of action until it attains a speed of eight and nine knots an hour, with an average vertical rise and fall of twenty-four to twenty-six feet. The northeastern extremity of this large arm of the sea, which Cook entered with the confident
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hope of finding a watery circuit of a continent, and, being disap- pointed, applied to it the name of "Turnagain," presents a tidal phenomena equal to that so well recognized in the Bay of Fundy. Here the tide comes in with a thundering roar, raising a " bore " wave that advances like an express train in rapidity, carrying every- thing before it in its resistless onward, upward sweep. High banks of clay and gravel, which at low-tide seem as though they were far removed from submersion, are flooded instantly, to remain so until the ebb takes place. The natives never fail to remember the angry warning of this incoming tide ; they always hurriedly rush out of their huts, scan quickly everything surrounding, lest some utensil, some canoe, or basket-weir be thoughitlessly left within the remorseless rush of that swift-coming flood.
Those glacial sheets which fill countless ravines and canons in the mountain ridges at the head of Cook's Inlet, especially of Turnagain Canal, and avalanches of snow, from their lofty cradles thereon, all sweep down together upon the wooded flanks below, and are thus destroying great belts of forest and piling up innumerable heaps of rocky débris to such an extent as to often change the superficial aspect of an entire section of country from season to season ; mean- while the tide rushing up and down over this drift of avalanches and glaciers, carries the débris hither and thither, so as to con- stantly alter the channels, and the very outlines of the coast itself.
One of the oldest and best of Russian posts was early estab- lished on the Kenai Peninsula, a few miles to the southward of that narrowing of Cook's Inlet, caused by the two Forelands. On the low banks of the Kinik River, and facing the gulf, the ruins of the "Redoubt St. Nicholas " are still to be plainly seen, though at the time of the transfer of the Territory, this old post was yet fortified with a high stockade and octagonal bastions. But both stockade and bastions have disappeared since then ; a number of new frame buildings have been erected close by, and quite a colony of Russian half-breeds are living here now, trading, and growing, to better ad- vantage than anywhere else in Alaska, fair crops of potatoes and turnips. They keep a few hardy cattle, and it is said that as much as ten or twelve acres of ground are under cultivation by them.
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