USA > Alaska > Our northern domain: Alaska, picturesque, historic and commercial > Part 11
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is removed so that a little ventilation may enter and the men sit around on the platform as if they had had a Turkish bath.
When a native is ill the medicine man is called to drive out the evil spirit. The process is thus described : -
" In one of the dwellings sits the patient, suffering from fever and rheumatic pains; before him are placed two lighted oil lamps, and a parka is drawn over his head, while two shamans or tungaks, one standing on each side, alternately sing and beat the drum. Behind them, faintly visible in the semidarkness, is the head of an old woman who, while imitating the croaking of a raven, rubs and pounds the back of the patient. If the pain does not cease the old woman changes her tactics and also her voice, imitating successively the chattering of mag- pies, the barking of dogs, and the howling of wolves, and if all this be in vain she throws herself upon the sufferer, cuffing and beating him until she makes him forget one pain in another, while the tungaks sing louder and louder and the drums give forth a deafening noise. At last she snatches the parka from the patient's head, yells repeatedly, and points to the roof; the cover of the smoke-hole is removed and the evil spirit which has caused the sickness escapes amid the beating of drums and the triumphant cry, ' He is gone! He is gone ! Ugh! Ugh!' and the old woman, her task accomplished, collapses into a mass of rags upon the floor. It is the third spirit driven out of this patient - how many more dwell within him nobody can tell; if it was the last he will soon mend, but, on the other hand, if not the last there will be more chanting, more drumming, more cuffing and more payments to the cunning tungaks, until the sick man either dies or can pay no more. The tungaks claim that their scheme and skill consist in dis- covering what spirit infests the sick man, and to drive it out they do not consider difficult at all."
CHAPTER XV.
ST. MICHAEL'S AND NOME.
T HE steamships plying the Yukon, unless they get stuck on some sandbar at its mouth, land passengers about sixty miles north of the Afun or Aphoon branch of the river at Fort St. Michael's, which was founded by the Russians in 1833, and still boasts the re- doubt and storehouse built by Mikhail Tebenkof in 1833. The Russian fort was attacked in 1836 by hostile Unaligmutes, who occupied the coast of North Sound as far down as the Yukon and up into the coun- try as far as the mountains. It was successfully defended, however. A Russian church was built here and is still maintained. St. Michael's is a United States Military Reservation and is situated on an island twenty-five miles long and six or seven wide and rising to volcanic heights called the Shaman Mountains. Commercial and transporta- tion companies have been permitted to establish themselves there, and travellers are accommodated at a good hotel, but no liquor is permitted to be sold. The Eskimos bring here their beautiful carved walrus tusks, toy models of their kayaks and bidarkas, furs and basket ware.
A small tug or steamer sails from here the hundred and eleven miles across Norton Sound to Nome, where we may have the exciting experience of being landed in the surf, perhaps getting thoroughly wet in the icy waters of the roadstead. Few of the early gold-seekers escaped that baptism of the north. At the present time when pas- sengers are desirous of landing at Nome they are transferred to a stout flat-bottomed barge which is hauled in by a cable till it grounds. Then a cage is let down from a heavy projecting beam and when filled is carried over the surf to a high platform on the land.
Mr. John Scudder McLain, who accompanied the Senatorial " Chi-
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Cha-Kos " on their memorable trip to Alaska in 1903, thus gives his impression of Nome: -
" Take a low sandy beach, one without a tree within fifty miles; show a white line where the waves break into foam along the shore; stretch along the water's edge for a mile or more a double row of frame buildings, most of them two stories high and facing each other; cover the street between with boards laid on the sand; don't be very par- ticular about making the street lines straight, nor insist that the street shall have uniform width; let the elevation and width of the sidewalks be determined by chance, it produces more variety and claims closer attention from the pedestrian; fill the lower floors of the buildings along the street with business undertakings of various kinds, and the upper floors reserve for living purposes; throw in a liberal portion of places devoted to the gratification of highly developed thirsts; fill the air at frequent intervals with the sounds of ragtime music; gather on the sidewalk and in the narrow street groups of men who seem to have nothing particular to do and are doing it; then go back from the first street and locate a church or two, a school house, a federal court- house and custom house, sprinkle around a few small buildings for residence purposes; fill the air with a cold drizzle and you have the materials out of which were obtained my first impressions of Nome, on the morning of July 29."
Nome stretches along the beach almost due east and west for the distance of twenty-five or more city blocks from Snake River, where the two cemeteries are laid out. At first it consisted of a single street which was the beach itself, but as it grew one parallel street after an- other was added until now it lies on the tundra half a dozen or more streets back. The buildings, especially along the front, are a curious and picturesque jumble of residences, apartment houses, shops, saloons, banks, millinery establishments, churches, dance-halls, government buildings, steamship and transportation offices, hospitals, and schools. Here one finds great heaps of coal worth almost its weight in gold, here an Eskimo tent. The buildings next the sea project out over the
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water. The streets, though nominally laid out four square, have in some cases got juggled and cross at angles ; buildings have been erected with slight attention to what might be called registration; one may be a couple of feet in front of another, while still another faces a different point of the compass.
There are board sidewalks not quite so well kept as the one at At- lantic City. In some places it is wide, then it narrows, then it curves and straightens itself; it is above the street; it is below the street; here it is well kept, here, possibly at a crossing, it is badly wrecked. Nome has all the conveniences of a modern city in the way of amuse- ments, educational and otherwise. It is connected with Seattle by cable and wireless and a system of long-distance telephone puts it into com- munication with the other mining centres of the peninsula, which may be reached, in summer by automobiles or stages, and in winter by reindeer or dog teams and sledges. There are excellent schools serving a permanent population of four thousand and more. There are three newspapers; a water system which is kept open in winter by a parallel system of steam pipes has been established. The town is brilliantly lighted with electricity, though owing to the price of coal the light comes high. The summer traffic in freight is said to amount to a hun- dred thousand tons. One lumber firm at Nome imports stock by the million feet from Puget Sound. A railway, known as the Wild Goose, runs north from Nome fifty miles through the river valley and, crossing to the headwaters of the Kruzgamepa, has its terminus at Lane's Land- ing on the Kuzitrin.
One may go by boat to Tin City, three miles west of Teller, at the Cape Prince of Wales, where valuable tin mines have been discovered. This was the region where the early miners found sluicing for gold impossible owing to the presence of heavy gravel. They did not recog- nize in this enemy a masked and secret friend. It was really stream tin and the probabilities are that in time a good part of the twenty million dollars' worth of tin used in the United States will be supplied from the Seward Peninsula.
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The Congregational Church established a mission at Cape Prince of Wales in 1890; four years later the minister in charge was mur- dered by some renegade Eskimos. The murderers were promptly exe- cuted by the authorities of their own village. This was one of the few known instances of the natives of this part of Alaska ever showing any unprovoked lawlessness toward the whites.
From the highest part of the Cape Prince of Wales on a clear day the mountains of Kamchatka can be seen, and one can not help won- dering how it was that the corresponding glimpses of Alaska from the high hills back of East Cape, rising as they do to a height of a mile, did not long before cause it to be surmised that the Bering Strait sep- arated two continents.
From Nome one may sail directly to Seattle, a distance of nearly twenty-seven hundred and fifty miles. One passes not far from the great St. Lawrence Island, which lies about one hundred and fifty miles south of Bering Sea and within sight of Indian Point in Siberia, forty miles or so away. It is about a hundred miles long and forty miles wide. Its coast is lined with high cliffs which sweep up into consid- erable mountains in the interior, where there are a number of lakes connected with salmon streams. There is only one good harbor. The inhabitants, though they deny the fact, are descendants of Siberian natives, who frequently abuse them and even massacre them. Disease and famine in recent years have reduced the population considerably. It is now an interesting station for the reindeer which, with the in- struction of the mission school, are helping the people to be self-sup- porting.
Lieutenant Maynard of the United States Navy, who visited this island in 1874, thus describes it: -
" The surface is irregular and broken, consisting of hills connected by low flat plains, which are but a few feet above the level of the sea. Both the ranges of hills and the lowlands extend entirely across the island from north to south; hence, when approached from either direc- tion, the latter are not seen at first, and the land has the appearance
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of being several separate islands. Captain Cook, who discovered it in 1778, was thus deceived, and as he did not sail near enough afterwards to discover his mistake gave the supposed group the name of Cleaks Islands. There are no harbors, but good anchorage can be found at several points, with from six to eleven fathoms of water, in light weather or when the wind is from the land. It is covered in summer with grass, moss and flowers and in places a creeping willow grows, but neither trees nor shrubs of any kind. There are several lagoons and numerous fresh-water ponds, fed by small streams from the hills, are distributed over the plains. The greater part of the shore is a low sand beach, but at the southwestern end of the island and at sev- eral points on the northern shore, it rises into almost perpendicular cliffs, from one hundred to three hundred feet high. Those at the south- western end present a singular appearance when viewed from the water. The beating of the surf and the action of the water have broken up and worn away the material of which they are composed (talcose slate), leaving needles or spires, some of them one hundred feet in height, standing out several yards from the cliff. Deep cracks or fis- sures, extending from top to bottom, have also been formed in the cliffs, which are filled from the water's edge with solid masses of snow (although it was in the month of August we saw them) beautifully colored in many places by bird guano and reddish substance in the rock."
The same writer thus describes the appearance of the natives: -
" The men are tall and straight, without hair upon their faces except a slight mustache and a few scattered hairs upon the chins of the old men. They have black hair and eyes, and their complexion is of a very light copper color. Their dress consists of a kind of shirt reaching half way to the knee, made in some cases of tanned reindeer skin, and in others of bird skins (feathers outside). It fits closely around the neck and has a hood that can be drawn over the head, lined with the fur of dogs and foxes or with bird skins. It is confined at the waist by a belt, from which hang a sheath knife and a skin tobacco pouch.
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Their breeches are made of tanned hair-seal skin, fitting the legs closely, and tied at the ankle with leather strings. They wear on their feet a kind of moccasin made of seal skin, with a sole of walrus hide.
" The dress of the women is somewhat different. Their upper gar- ment is made of the intestines of the walrus, neatly sewed together, and is similar in shape to that of the men, but longer and worn without a belt. Beneath this they wear short drawers, reaching only to the knee, made of tanned seal skins. Instead of moccasins they wear a sort of boot, the legs of which are made of either the throat or intes- tines of the walrus, and the sole of walrus hide. Most of the men shave the crown of their heads, leaving only a rim of their hair, about an inch wide entirely around the head. The women do not cut their hair, but part it in the middle, and wear it in two braids with strings of beads intermixed. Their foreheads, cheeks, chins and arms are tat- tooed in various devices with a light blue pigment of some kind, and the ears of some have little notches cut in them. None of the men are tattooed, but many wear little strings of beads in their ears. Their countenances are bright and rather intelligent and both men and women are lively and talkative."
A little less than half way between St. Lawrence Island and the Pribilofs stands the lonely island of St. Matthew. It was discovered and named by Bering, and rediscovered by Captain Cook, who gave it another name that did not live. His name for the queer promontory at the southeastern end was Cape Upright. This is a perpendicular crag fifteen hundred feet high. On the northwestern end is another bluff that rises to a height of sixteen hundred and seventy feet. Here also are clear streams and ponds filled with trout. Its only inhab- itants are enormous white bears, some of them as much as eight feet long, and innumerable birds - shags, gulls, sea-parrots, murries, chul- skies, eider ducks, Canada geese, plovers, and great blue cranes.
CHAPTER XVI.
SEALS, SEA - LIONS AND WALRUS.
T HE one hundred and seventieth degree west from Greenwich passes through the East Cape of Siberia, cuts through the very centre of St. Lawrence Island and divides the Pribilof Islands. Here it is interesting to make a pause and observe the habits of the fur-bearing seal, or, as it should properly be called, the sea-bear. The discovery of the islands has already been mentioned. They are now under the protection of the United States Government, which main- tains a guard over them to see that poachers do not land for the pur- pose of killing the few seals that are left. The cause of the tremendous reduction in the number of seals resorting to these islands is now uni- versally recognized to be pelagic fishing. As Canadian sealers were engaged in the destructive pursuit of the seals, as the skins were dressed in London and formed an important industry there, an inter- national conference was held in Paris in 1893; the testimony seemed conflicting, and the two countries agreed to limit pelagic sealing by pro- hibiting it at any time within sixty miles of the Pribilof Islands and permitting it to be followed in the rest of Bering Sea for ninety days following May 1. Two years later it was estimated that the herds of seals which numbered fully two milions - some extravagantly put it at five millions - in 1867 had been reduced to about 200,000. Indeed it was gravely suggested by Professor Huxley that it would not be such a very serious loss to mankind if the seals were all extirpated. He said, very cynically : -
" Mankind will not suffer much if the ladies are obliged to do with- out seal-skin jackets, and the fraction of the English, Canadian and
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American population which lives on the seal-skin industry will be no worse off than the vastly greater multitude who have had to suffer for the vagaries of fashion times out of number. Certainly if the seals are to be the source of constant bickering between two nations, the sooner they are abolished the better."
But President Jordan, criticising the same proposal which was put forward by treasury agent Joseph B. Crowley, utterly condemns it, de- claring that it " would necessarily involve all this inhuman waste on a wholesale scale and lodge the odium for it for all time on the Government of the United States. Besides," he adds, " it would not be possible totally to exterminate the race without keeping up the slaughter for many years, as not all the animals are present at one time a season." He says: " A hunted remnant must remain, which, if left unmolested, would restock the rookeries and reopen the whole ques- tion."
The English Government, in spite of the able arguments of James G. Blaine, then Secretary of State, were convinced of the comparative harmlessness of pelagic sealing; thus the fate of the wonderful rooker- ies was sealed. Once before they had been threatened with extinction, just as those in the South Pacific were exterminated by a treatment utterly cruel, selfish and blind. The number of seals killed on the Pri- bilof Islands was carefully regulated and the Aleuts who were colonized on them were the only person allowed to do the driving. Although one competent observer had reported to the Russian Government that he had seen a school of fur seals covering the surface of the ocean for two nautical miles, the determined onslaught of pelagic fishermen did not begin to take serious proportions until the early seventies. Then the reckless way in which they were pursued had its full and fell effect. It was universally admitted by those engaged in the business that not one out of ten seals killed or wounded was obtained before they sank, and as it is impossible to tell the sex of the creatures when they are in the water a large proportion of the catch, as well as those lost, con- sisted of the cows and their unborn young.
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It has been claimed by the opponents of the seals that the damage they did to the fishing interest by the enormous amount of fish they consumed more than offset the advantage of keeping their rookeries intact. But on the other hand it was argued that the seals never went into the great depths where cod and such fish live, but subsist on dog- fish and similar surface fish, thus doing immense good in keeping down the insatiate horde of those harriers of the deep. It has been estimated that when the rookeries were at their prime the seals consumed six million tons of fish per year.
Of late years the Japanese sealing fleet which was not bound by the convention between England and America has largely increased. They have refused to observe any close season and in some instances they have even attempted to plunder the rookeries on St. Paul Island. Every year their boldness increases. In 1907 they secured more than thirteen thousand skins in Alaskan waters. Properly conserved the seal islands would afford a legitimate traffic of more than one million dollars a year for centuries to come.
The two principal islands of the Pribilof group are thirty miles apart. St. Paul has an area of about twenty-five hundred acres or thirty-five square miles; its highest elevation, Bogoslov, an extinct volcano, is six hundred feet and its population of transplanted Aleuts, most of them formerly quite prosperous, is reckoned as not far from three hundred. It has forty-two miles of shore line, almost half of which was formerly occupied by seals.
St. George is twenty-seven square miles in area and the top of its mountain is nine hundred and thirty feet above the sea. It has a smaller population, both of seals and drivers. The only trees are creep- ing willows; there are a few bushes. The natives with care raise let- tuce, radishes, and turnips, but the multitude of flowers makes them beautiful in summer. The summer climate is rainy and foggy - far more disagreeable than that of Sitka, which is on the same parallel of latitude. Owing to the difference of height, five times as much rain falls on St. George as on St. Paul, though they are such near neighbors.
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The winter climate is rather cold, the thermometer sometimes regis- tering as much as fifteen degrees below zero.
The islands are the haunts of innumerable birds. Mr. Henry W. Elliott describes not less than forty different species, many of them, to be sure, like the robin, temporary visitants, stragglers brought from the mainland evidently against their will. He says of the great bird rookeries on the bluffs of St. George: - " After the dead silence of a long ice-bound winter, the arrival of large flocks of those sparrows of the north, the ' choochkies ' is most cheerful and interesting. Those plump little auks are bright, fearless, vivacious birds with bodies round and fat. They come usually in chattering flocks on or immediately after the first of May and are caught by the people with hand scoops or dip nets to any number that may be required for the day's con- sumption; their tiny rotund forms making pies of rare savory virtue, and being also baked and roasted and stewed in every conceivable shape by the Russian cooks; indeed they are equal to the reed-birds of the South.
" These welcome visitors are succeeded along about the twentieth of July by large flocks of fat, red-legged turnstones, which come in suddenly from the west or north where they have been breeding and stop on the islands for a month or six weeks, as the case may be, to feed luxuriantly on the flesh flies and their eggs. Those handsome birds go in among the seals familiarly chasing the flies, gnats, etc. They are followed, as they leave, in September, by several species of jacksnipe and a plover; these, however, soon depart as early as the end of October and the beginning of November - and then winter fairly closes in upon the islands : the loud roaring, incessant seal din, together with the screams and darkening flight of innumerable water- fowl, is replaced in turn again by absolute silence, marking out, as it were, in lines of sharp and vivid contrast, summer's life and win- ter's death."
Wonderful as the bird life is on the large inhabited islands, it can- not compare with the so-called Walrus Island, which lies sixty miles.
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from the Northeast Point of St. Paul's - a mere lava ledge often awash with surf and occasionally haunted by male walrus. Mr. Elliott calls this little islet the most interesting single spot known to the nat- uralist to study the habits of bird life. " Here without exertion or risk," he says, " he can observe and walk among tens upon tens of thousands of screaming waterfowl, and as he sits down upon the pol- ished lava rock, he becomes literally ignored and environed by these feathered friends as they reassume their varied positions of incubation which he disturbed them from by his arrival. Generation after gen- eration of their kind have resorted to this rock unmolested, and to-day, when you get among them, all doubt and distrust seem to have been eliminated from their natures.
" The island itself is rather unusual in those formations which we find peculiar to Alaskan waters. It is almost flat, with slight irregular undulations on top, spreading over an area of five acres perhaps. It rises abruptly, though low, from the sea, and it has no safe beach upon which a person can land from a boat; not a stick of timber or twig of shrubbery ever grew upon it, though the scant presence of low crawl- ing grasses, in the central portion, prevents the statement that all vegetation is absent. Were it not for the frequent rains and dissolving fog, characteristic of summer weather here, the guano accumulation would be something wonderful to contemplate - Peru would have a rival. As it is, however, the birds when they return, year after year, find their nesting-floor swept as clean as if they had never sojourned there before.
" The scene of confusion and uproar that presented itself to my astonished senses when I aproached this place in search of eggs, one threatening July morning, may be better imagined than described, for as the clumsy bidarka came under the lee of the low cliffs, swarm upon swarm of murres or 'arries ' dropped in fright from their nesting shelves, and before they had control of their flight they struck to the right and the left of me, like so many cannon balls. I was forced, in self-protection, instantly to crouch for a few moments under the gun-
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