Chapter VIII: The Great Aleutian Chain (2)

A diminutive cast-iron stove is now very generally used by the Aleutes. It commonly stands right in the centre of the room, and upon it the cooking can be done, instead of being driven to the hallway fireplace, or “povarnik,” of the olden time, when the smoke then stifled them from the burning of that fat of seals, fish and birds, which was used very largely for fuel Therefore, they were obliged to stew and broil on a special fireplace constructed outside of the living-room. A great many old-style “peechka” stoves of the Russians are still in use, but no new ones are being made any more, since the introduction of our little iron stoves. This living-room of the hut is usually curtained or partitioned into two sections, one of which is the bedchamber, or “spalniah.” They have a great variety of beds and bedsteads, or bunks rather. They are proud of a well-stuffed couch of feathers, and take more real, solid comfort in sleeping thereon than in anything else that transpires of an enjoyable nature in their lives. The dealers sell a series of the most gaudily printed spreads for these beds, and sometimes you will be much surprised to see a white counterpane and fluted pillow-shams spread over an Aleutian couch. Those beds are always raised well up from the floor, and sometimes a curtain is specially hung around them—a borrowed Russian idea, unquestionably. A rude table, two or three empty cracker-boxes from the trader’s store for chairs, and a rough bench or two, is about all the furniture ever seen in a barrabkie. The table-ware and household utensils do not require a large cupboard for their reception. Cups and saucers of white crockery, highly decorated in flaring blue and red floral designs, plates to match, a few pewter teaspoons, will usually be found in sufficient quantity for the daily use of the family; and these are loaned out to a neighbor also, on occasions of festivity, when an entire circle of chosen friends join under the roof of some one barrabora in tea-drinking and “praznik” feasting.

The traders say that recently a great desire has come upon the natives to possess granite ware cooking utensils and drinking cups, or those porcelain or silicon-plated iron vessels which we designate by that name; they do not require washing, and can be easily wiped out and never rust. Tin-ware is at a great discount among them—it rusts. The odor of coal-oil will be noticed among many others in the barraboras of the Aleutians and Kadiaks in these days, for the general use of this fluid has been established. The glass lamps and the smell suggestive of that illuminant can be plainly detected by any stranger who goes into a village up there now, in spite of the fishy and other indigenous strong aromas, which are in themselves equally odious and penetrating. However, an old Aleutian fogy will occasionally insist upon using a primitive stone lamp, with a wicking of moss or strips of cotton cloth.

A marked fondness for pictures, old engravings, chromos, in fact anything that goes in the line of caricature or illustration, is manifested by the Aleutes. They paste all sorts of scraps from newspapers, magazines, and theatrical posters, which the traders give them, upon the walls of the barrabora. The Russians early took notice of this trait, and the priests of the Greek Church made good use of it by distributing richly-colored and gilded portraits of holy men and women, the Imperial family, and mythological church groups.

As the Aleut, his wife and children, and a relative or two, perhaps, are living in the barrabora, he enjoys a warm and comfortable shelter as long as he keeps it in good repair. He does not place what he has of surplus supply in a cellar—such fish, fowl, or meat as he may have in excess of immediate consumption is hung up outside of his door on a wooden frame, or “laabaas.” Here it is beyond the reach of dogs, and is quite secure, inasmuch as he lives in no danger or dread of theft from the hands of his neighbors.

He is a fish-eater, like a vast majority of the rest of native Alaskans. He has cod, halibut, salmon, trout, and herrings in overflowing abundance, and all swim close to his door. He hooks and nets his piscine food-supply all the year round as it rotates with the seasons. He varies this steady diet with all the tea, sugar, and hard bread, or flour, that he can purchase from the trader’s store; some other little articles in the grocery line, such as canned California fruits, are especially agreeable to his palate. These natives call on the trader for biscuits, or sea-crackers, not because they like this hard bread best, but on account of the scarcity of fuel wherewith to properly bake up flour.

While fish is the staff of Aleutian daily life, yet nature has vouchsafed many simple luxuries to those people: these are sea-urchins, or echinoderms, and the eggs and flesh of the several species of water-fowl peculiar to and abundant in such latitudes. Then, in August and September, the valleys, hillsides, and margins of the sea are resorted to by the natives for the huckleberries, the “moroshkies,” the crowberries, and giant umbelliferous stalks of the _Archangelica_, found ripe and ripening there. The Aleutian huckleberries are much better than those of the Sitkan district, and are really the only good indigenous fruit, according to the evidence of our palates.

An Aleutian Fisherman and Bidarka hooking “Treesca” in Oolachta Harbor, Oonalashka Island]

Another peculiarity of an Aleutian village, which strikes a stranger’s eye, is the irregular but frequent coming and going of a number of old women, and younger ones, to and from the mountains; they always return with a burden of what appears to be coarse grass upon their backs, in such huge bundles that the bearers are quite hidden from view. These females, while not literally hewers of wood, are really working as hard. They are gathering the only natural resource which is afforded them for fuel. When long and tedious journeys along the coast fail to reward a search for drift-logs, which are found here and there in scant number at the best, then the women repair to those spots on the mountain sides where the slender strawberry-like runners of the crowberry[79] have grown and intergrown into thick masses. These they pull from the earth, as we would gather dried grasses. A large bundle is made for each woman in the party, and then, assisting each other to load up, they stagger down the hillside trails, under these heavy burdens, back to their respective barraboras. This “sheeksa” is then air-dried, or weathered several weeks, so as to get it ready and fit for use in those odd Russian ovens or “peechka” stoves. It is twisted into short wisps, two or three of which at one time are ignited, and thrust as they blaze, into the oven; then the door of the peechka is closed tightly and promptly. This makes a hot fire for a few moments; every particle of the heat is absorbed by the thick, brick walls of the oven, so that, as it radiates slowly, the small apartment within the earthen walls of the barrabora is kept at a tropical temperature, for several hours at a time, without a renewal of this fire. To-day, however, at Oonalashka, and at three or four other central sea-otter villages, the natives are buying cord-wood and coal from the traders. The wood is brought from Kadiak, while the coal comes up as ballast from San Francisco in the traders’ vessels.

Housed and fed in this manner, the entire Aleutian population have been, and are living; as their children grow up and inherit the parental homes, or branch out, after marrying, to erect barraboras of their own, they repeat the same methods of their ancestry. In a normal condition the Aleut is a quiet, peaceful parent, affectionate but yet not demonstrative; he is kind to his wife and imposes no real burden upon her which he does not fully share himself. The children grow up without harsh discipline; still they are not the recipients of marked attention. The family life, when the head or the hunter is at home, is one of very simple routine; he is in bed most of the time, striving to balance that account of the very many sleepless nights he has passed in his bidarka scouring sea-otter reefs during his recent three months’ trip, to Saanak or the Chernaboors. The others rise at broad daylight, light their blubber-fire in the outside kitchen, and prepare a slight breakfast of crackers, tea, and boiled fresh fish. This meal is carried into the living-room, where the “peechka” has been started up, so as to thoroughly warm that apartment. If this native is the possessor of a little iron stove, of our own make, then all heating and cooking is done on the one fire made in it and the smoke of that burning fat and oil with which so much of their fuel of drift-wood and sheeksa is mixed, goes up the pipe and leaves no annoying trace behind. Between the members of the household there is never much conversation—the topics are few, indeed, beyond the ordinary routine of irregular meals, and the desultory rising and retiring of a family. This monotony of their lives is very much enlivened by exercises of the church, to which they are constantly going and coming from. But when they meet in a neighboring barrabkie, or receive friends in their own, then tongues are loosened, and conversation flows freely, especially over cups of tea between the old men and women; the latter are incessant talkers under such genial encouragement.

Although the Aleut does not give you, at first, the least idea that he has ever had any severe training of a heroic order, yet it is a fact that most of the young men, ere they become recognized hunters, had to “win their spurs,” as it were. The old men always impress upon the native youth that great importance of strictly observing the customs of their forefathers in conducting the chase, and that neglect in this respect will surely bring upon them disaster and punishment; therefore the young men are encouraged to go to sea in gales of wind, and make difficult landings with their bidarkas at surf-washed places. Before the advent of Russian priests, every village had one or two old men at least, who considered it their especial business to educate the children; thereupon, in the morning or the evening when all were at home, these aged teachers would seat themselves in the centre of one of the largest village yourts or “oolagamuh:” the young folks surrounded them, and listened attentively to what they said—sometimes failing memory would cause the old preceptors to repeat over and over again the same advice or legend in the course of a lecture. The respect of the children, however, never allowed or occasioned an interruption of such a senile oration.

But to-day their education, in so far as the strict sense of the term goes, is received from the priests and deacons of the Greek Church. They seem to have abandoned all the shamanism, the mummery and savagery of their primitive lives eagerly and willingly for those practices and precepts of the Christian faith; in this strange accord the Kadiakers also joined. No recourse to violent measures was ever resorted to by the Russian missionaries, who were always met more than half-way by these singular heathen. An Aleut is the better Christian when fairly compared with the Kaniag—the latter is not half as sincere or faithful.

Stepan Glottov, in 1759, wintered, first of all white men, at Oomnak Island, and he lived there then in perfect peace and quiet with the natives; so amicable were his relations with these people, that he persuaded their chief to be baptized, and to allow a little son to go with Glottov to Kamchatka, where the youth lived several years, then returned, well versed in the Russian language, and assumed the title of supreme chief of the Aleutians; this is the earliest record made of the conversion of these people. In 1796 the first priest or missionary came among them; and never, from that time to the present moment, has a representative of that church ever been treated otherwise than well by these islanders.

The Aleutian brain has streaks of genuine philosophy and a keen sense of humor. A priest once reproached an aged sire for allowing a worthless son to worry and vex the household. “Why, Ivan,” said he, “do you, who are so good, and Natalie, your wife, also most excellent, permit this rude child to so deport himself?” “Ah, father,” replied the old man with great emotion, “not out of every sweet root grows a sweet plant!”

This inherent religious disposition of the Aleut is the reason why we find a Greek church or a chapel in every little hamlet where his people live. The exclusion of all other sects, however, is natural, since the character of the ornate service and frequent “prazniks,” or festivals of that chosen denomination, suits him best. The Greek Catholic Bishop of the Alaskan diocese now resides in Oonalashka. He used to make Sitka his headquarters, but the depopulation of the whites there after the transfer of the country made that spot too lonely for him, and he soon removed to San Francisco. A few years ago a final transfer was made to Illoolook. As far as possible the natives support their own respective chapels, erect the church structures, keep them in repair, and make an annual contribution sufficient to support a reader, or “deacon,” so that the order of daily services shall be constantly in operation. When a community is too poor, however, to do this, then the bishop has money supplied to him by the Russian Home Church Fund, which he uses to maintain the proper conduct of those chapels situated at impecunious settlements. Of course these outlying and far-distant hamlets of the Aleutian archipelago are unable to secure and pay, each one, for the services of a regularly ordained resident priest. Therefore a parish priest, either from Oonalashka, Belcovsky, Sitka, or even San Francisco, is in the habit of making a tour of the entire Alaskan circuit once in every year or two, so as to administer the higher offices of the church, such as baptism, marriage, etc.

Most amusing is that intense outward piety of these grimy people—they greet you with a blessing and a prayer for your good health in the same breath, and they part from you murmuring a benediction. They never sit down to their rude meals without asking the blessing of God; never enter a neighbor’s house without crossing themselves at the threshold; and in most of the barraboras a little image-picture of a patron saint will be found in one corner, high up on a shelf, to which the face of every member of the family is always turned when they rise and retire—the head bowed and the cross sign made before this “eikon,” in humility and silence. These people also carry the precepts and phraseology of the church upon their lips, constantly repeating them during holy weeks and pious festivals.

The fact that among all the savage races found on the northwest coast by Christian pioneers and teachers, the Aleutians are the only practical converts to Christianity, goes far, in my opinion, to set them apart as very differently constituted in mind and disposition from our Indians and our Eskimo of Alaska. To the latter, however, they seem to be intimately allied, though they do not mingle in the slightest degree. They adopted the Christian faith with very little opposition, readily exchanging their barbarous customs and wild superstitions for the rites of the Greek Catholic Church and its more refined myths and legends.

At the time of their first discovery, they were living as savages in every sense of the word, bold and hardy, throughout the Aleutian chain, but now they respond, on these islands, to all outward signs of Christianity, as sincerely as our own church-going people. The question as to the derivation of those natives is still a mooted one among ethnologists, for in all points of personal bearing, intelligence, character, as well as physical structure, they seem to form a perfect link of gradation between the Japanese and Eskimo, notwithstanding their traditions and their language are entirely distinct and peculiar to themselves; not one word or numeral of their nomenclature resembles the dialect of either. They claim, however, to have come first to the Aleutian Islands from a “big land in the westward,” and that when they came there first they found the land uninhabited, and that they did not meet with any people, until their ancestors had pushed on to the eastward as far as the peninsula and Kadiak. Confirmatory of this legend, or rather highly suggestive of it, is the fact that repeated instances have occurred within our day where Japanese junks have been, in the stress of hurricanes and typhoons, dismantled, and have drifted clear over and on to the reefs and coasts of the Aleutian Islands. Only a short time ago, in the summer of 1871, such a craft was so stranded, helpless and at the mercy of the sea, upon the rocky coast of Adak Island, in this chain; the few surviving sailors, Japanese, five in number, were rescued by a party of Aleutian sea-otter hunters, who took care of them until the vessel of a trader carried them back, by way of Oonalashka, to San Francisco, and thence they returned to their native land.

A number of the males in every Aleutian village will be found who can read and write with the Russian alphabet. This education they get in the line of church exercises, inasmuch as they are all conducted in the Russian language, though the responses for the congregation usually are made by Aleutian accents. An Aleut grammar and phonetic alphabet, adapted to the expression of the Russian language, is used in all of these hamlets. It was prepared by that remarkable man, Veniaminov, in 1831: a large number of the books were printed, and they have been in use ever since. The young men and boys are taught as they grow up, by the church deacon usually, to read, first in the Aleut dialect, then in the Russian. The traders take advantage of this understanding among these people, and facilitate their bartering very materially. They give every hunter a pass, or grocer’s book, in which he keeps a regular account, charging what he may need, in advance of payment, so enabling his family to get what it requires during his long absence on the hunting-grounds. In short, that book is a regular letter of credit at the store, and the traders have found it the best way of influencing the natives in their favor, and also of aiding the superior hunters.

This method of credit has developed, and made manifest the truth of a strong statement in which Veniaminov declared his belief that these people were really honest at heart, totally unlike all other savages in Alaska, or elsewhere on the American continent, for that matter. Many of the hunters, when they are about to depart for a long four or five months’ sea-otter chase, and consequent absence for such length of time from home, go to the trader and tell him to restrict their wives from overdrawing a certain pecuniary limit, which they fix of their own idea as to what they can afford. This action, however, is the purpose of true honesty only, for those same hunters, when they get back, after first religiously settling every indebtedness in full, make at once a heavy draft upon any surplus that they may have, going so far in the line of extravagance and singular improvidence, in some instances, as to purchase, on the spur of the moment, music-boxes worth two hundred dollars each, or whole bolts of silk and costly packages of handkerchiefs, neckties, and white linen, and many other things of a like nature, wholly unwarranted by the means of the hunter, or of any real service to him or his family.

The church “prazniks,” or festivals, are very quiet affairs, but when the Aleut determines to celebrate his birthday or “eman nimik,” he goes about it in full resolution to have a stirring and vociferous time. Therefore he brews a potential beer by putting a quantity of sugar, flour, rice, and dried apples (if he can get the latter) into a ten or twenty-gallon barrel, which is filled with water. He sends invitations out to his friends so dated as to bring them to the barrabkie when a right degree of fermentation in the kvass-barrel shall have arrived; sometimes the odor of that barrel itself is sufficient to gather them in all on time. Some one of the natives who is famous for natural and cultivated skill in playing the accordion or concertina, is given the post of honor and the best of the beer; he or she, as the case may be, soon starts the most hilarious dancing, because Aleutes are exceedingly fond of this amusement, especially so when stimulated by beer. If the apartment is large enough, the figures of an old Russian quadrille are gone through with, accompanied by indescribable grimaces and grotesque side-shuffles of the dancers, the old women and young men being the most demonstrative. Usually, however, a single waltzing couple has the floor at one time, whirling around with the liveliest hop-waltz steps, and as it settles down out of breath, a fresh pair springs up from the waiting and watching circle. The guests rapidly pass from their normal sedateness into the varying stages that rotate between slight and intense drunkenness.

These kvass orgies, on such occasions, are the only exhibitions of disorder that the people of the Aleutian Islands and Kadiak ever afford. At Belcovsky, and at every point where the sea-otter industry is most remunerative to the native hunter, there you will find the greatest misery, due wholly to those beery birthday celebrations as sketched above.

Some traders often give entertainments to the natives, in which they wisely offer plenty of strong tea, with white sugar-lumps, and nothing else; these parties are quite reputable and highly enjoyed by all concerned. The floor of the warehouse, or the living-rooms of the trader himself, are cleared, and this allows ample space for a full-figured cotillon or quadrille, or a dozen or two of dancing couples. The ball-room of the chief trading-firm at Oonalashka is a very animated and extensive prospect when an evening-party of this sort is in fine motion. The familiar strains of “Pinafore,” the “Lancers,” “John Brown,” and “Marching through Georgia,” rise in piercing strength from the vigorous men and women who are squeezing the accordions, and every now and then a few of the young Aleutes break out into a short singing refrain, using English words to suit the music, as they caper in the high-tide of this festivity. It is the young men, however, only, who thus vocalize; the women, when sober, old and young, are always silent, with downcast eyes, and are very abject in demeanor.

The great feminine solace in a well-to-do native hut is recourse to a concertina or accordion, as the case may be. These instruments are especially adapted to the people. Their plaintive, slow measure, when fingered in response to native tunes and old Slavonian ballads, always rise upon the air in every Aleutian hamlet, from early morning until far into night. An appreciation of good music is keen: many of the women can easily pick up strains from our own operas, and repeat them correctly after listening a short while to the trader or his wife play and sing. They are most pleased with sad, wailing tunes, such as “Lorena,” the “Old Cabin Home,” and the like.

Thus we note those salient characteristics of Aleutians, who are the most interesting and praiseworthy inhabitants of Alaska. There are not a great many of them, however, when contrasted numerically with the Indians and the Eskimo of this region; but they come closer, far nearer to us in good fellowship and human sympathy. We turn, therefore, from them again to resume our contemplation of the country in which they live. The sun is burning through a gray-blue bank of sea-swept fog, ever and anon shining down brilliantly upon the beautiful, vividly green mountains, and glancing from the clear waters of Oonalashka’s harbor. It tempts us to walk, to stroll, when the trader tells us that we can easily cross over to Beaver Bay, where Captain Cook anchored and refitted in 1778. So we go, and a patient, good-humored native trots ahead to keep us on the road and bring us back safely, lest the fog descend and shut all in darkness which is now so light and bright. A narrow foot-trail that is deeply worn by the pigeon-toed Aleutes into moss and sphagnum, or fairly choked by rank-growing grasses and annuals in low warm spots, winds around and over the divide between Oonalashka village and Borka. As we reach the rippling, rocky strand of Beaver Bay, a cascade arrests our attention on account of its exceeding beauty. Tumbling down from the brow of a lofty bluff of brown and reddish rocks, a rivulet falls in a line of snowy spray, which reflects prismatic colors from the rocks and sunlight as it drops into the cold embrace of the sea. While we, resting on the grassy margin of the beach, enjoy this charming picture, our native turns his face to the bay, and he points out to us the pebbly shore where Captain Cook “hove down” his vessel, more than a century ago, and then scraped those barnacles and sea-weed growths from that ship’s bottom. Here the English discoverer first came in contact with the natives of Oonalashka, and there are people over on Spirkin or “Borka” Island, just across the bay from us, who will recite the legend of this early visit of that Englishman with great earnestness, circumspection, and detail, so faithfully has the story been transmitted from father to son. Their own name of Samahgaanooda was changed voluntarily to English Bay, or “Anglieeski Bookhta,” by which designation they themselves call the harbor to-day.

A broad expanse of this bay lies directly between us on the north side and the village of Borka, which is perched on a narrow beach-level shelf of an island that rises bold and abruptly, high from the sea. This hamlet is the most remarkable native settlement in all Alaska with respect to a strange and unwonted cleanliness which is exhibited in this community of one hundred and forty Aleutes, who are living here to-day in twenty-eight frame houses, barraboras, and a chapel. What makes it still more remarkable is the fact that these people are in close communication with their kindred of Oonalashka, who are distant only a few hours’ journey by canoe and portage, and who are not especially cleanly to the slightest noteworthy degree. Those people of Borka are living in the cleanest and neatest of domiciles. They are living so without an exceptional instance, every hut being as tidy and as orderly as its neighbor. They have large windows in the small frame houses and barraboras, scrub and sand the floors, and keep their simple furniture, their beds, and window-panes polished and bright. Glass tumblers, earthen pots, and wooden firkins filled with transplanted wild-flowers stand on the tables and deep window-sills to bloom fresh and sweet all the year round. A modest, unassuming old Russian Creole trader, who has lived there all his life, and who was living recently, is credited with this influence for the better with the natives. Certainly he is the only one who has ever succeeded in working such a revolution in the slovenly, untidy household habits of these amiable but shiftless people.

As we retrace our steps to Oonalashka village we become fully impressed with the size of this island. It bears so many mountain spurs, with a singularly rugged, cut-up coast, in which the deep indentations or gulf-fiörds nearly sever the island in twain as they run in to almost meet from the north and south sides. Beautiful mats of wild poppies are nodding their yellow heads as the gusts sweep over them on the hillsides, and a rank, rich growth of tall grasses by the creek-margins and the sea-shore in sheltered places shimmers and sways like so many fields of uncut green grain do at home. Vegetation everywhere, except on the summits of the highest peaks and ridges and the mural faces of the bluffs! Even there some tiny lichens grow, however, and give rich tones of golden ochre and purplish-bronzed reflections from the cold, moist rocks, whereto they cling.

We pause in that little cemetery, just outside of the village of Illoolook. It is on a small knoll, under higher hills that rear themselves over it. Its disorder and neglect is a fair reminder of what we see in most of our own rural graveyards. The practice of all these natives is to inter by digging a shallow grave. The body is prepared in its best clothes, and coffined in a plain wooden box. A small mound and a larger or smaller wooden Greek cross is the only monument. Tiny oil-portraits of their patron saints, painted on tin or sheet-iron, especially made for these purposes, and furnished by the Church, are tacked to the crosses, with now and then a rude Russian inscription carved or painted thereon in addition. During certain periods of the summer, when the weather is pleasant, little squads of relatives will come out here from the village and pass a whole day in tea-drinking and renovating the crosses, sitting on the mounds as they chat, work, and boil their samovar. The Illoolook church-bells ring—they arouse us to resume the walk thus interrupted in this small city of Aleutian dead. As we enter the town, we see the occupants of turfy barraboras and frame cottages hastening from every quarter and trooping to the door of a yellow-walled and red-roofed house of worship. Perched on that three-barred cross which crowns the cupola of this chapel are half a dozen big black ravens, all croaking most lugubriously, as the clanging chimes peal out below them. That is their favorite roosting-place. The natives take no notice of those ill-omened birds, which as feathered scavengers, hop around the barraboras in perfect security, since no one ever disturbs them, unless it be some graceless trader who is anxious to test the killing power of a new shotgun. They breed in high chinks of the bluffs, and find abundant food cast upon the beaches by the sea. A few domestic fowls, some with broods of newly-hatched chicks, are running about or scratching around the place. The priest’s shaggy little bull and cow stand in front of a small stable or “scoatnik,” lazily chewing their cud. There is no other live-stock in the hamlet, except a few dogs and cats; not a great many of the latter, however.

West of this Island of Oonalashka is a narrow-lined stretch of more than eight hundred miles of rapidly-succeeding islets and islands, until the extreme limit of the Alaskan border is reached at Attoo. In all this dreary wilderness of land and water only three small human settlements are to be found to-day, with a population of less than five hundred natives and six or seven white men. Attoo, Atkha, and Oomnak are the only villages, the last closely adjoins Oonalashka, on a large island of the same name.

This Settlement is the extreme Western Town of North America: it is three thousand miles West of San Francisco]

Attoo is the extreme western town which is or can be located on the North American continent. It is the first land made and discovered by the Russians, as they became acquainted with the Aleutian chain. Michael Novodiskov, a sailor who had survived Bering and the wreck of the _St. Peter_ in 1741, took command of a small shallop in 1745, and sailed from Lower Kamchatka. He reached Attoo, and also landed on its sister island of Aggatoo, in the same season. The Aleutes were then numerous, bold, and richly supplied with sea-otter skins. Now, nothing but the ruined sites of once populous villages remain behind to attest the truth of that early Russian narrative; and the descendants, who number but a little more than one hundred souls, are living in a small hamlet that nestles in the shelter of that beautiful harbor on the north side of Attoo Island, at the rear of which abrupt hills and high mountains suddenly rise. A sand-beach before the village is fringed by a most luxurious growth of rank grass, that wild wheat of the north, the tasselled seed-plumes of which are waving as high as the waists, and even the heads of the natives themselves.

Sea-otters have been virtually exterminated or driven from the coast here, so that the residents of Attoo are, in worldly goods, poor indeed; and a small trader’s store is stationed here, more for the sake of charity than of commercial gain. But they have an abundance of sea-lion meat, of eggs and water-fowl; a profusion of fish—cod, halibut, algæ mackerel, and a few salmon. They have a liberal supply of drift-wood landed by currents upon the shores of this and the contiguous rugged islets. Several times during the last ten years have traders endeavored to coax these inhabitants to abandon Attoo and go with them to better situations for sea-otter hunting. But, although pinched by poverty, yet so strongly attached are they to this lonely island of their birth, that they have obstinately declined. Though they are poor, yet the contrast between their cheerful, healthy faces and those debauched countenances which we observed at the wealthy villages of Protassov and Belcovsky is a delightful one, and preaches an eloquent sermon in its own reflection. Naturally the people of Attoo do not enjoy much sugar, tea, cloth, and other little articles which they have learned to covet from the trader’s store; so we find them living nearer the primitive style of Aleutian ancestry than elsewhere in the archipelago, being dressed largely in tanned seal and bird-skins, of the fashion made and worn by their forefathers who welcomed Novodiskov long, long ago.

The necessity of doing something in order to gain from the trader a few of the simplest articles, such as the natural resources of Attoo utterly failed to supply, has driven the natives to the care and conservation of blue foxes, which they introduced here many years past, and of which they secure, in traps, two or three hundred every season. The common red fox[80] of the whole Aleutian chain became extinct here in prior time; so, taking advantage of this fact, those blue foxes, so abundant and so valuable on the Seal Islands, were imported, and have ranged without deterioration, since ice-floes never bridge the straits that isolate this island from the nearest adjacent land, and upon which the common breed might cross over to ruin the quality of the fur of that transported _Vulpes lagopus_. They have also domesticated the wild goose, and rear flocks of them around their barraboras, being the only people in Alaska who have ever done so.

It hardly seems credible, at first thought, but the village of Attoo makes San Francisco practically the half-way town as we go from Calais, Me., to it, our westernmost settlement! It is really but slightly short of being just midway, since Attoo stands almost three thousand miles west of the Golden Gate.[81] A strict geographical centre of the American Union is that point at sea forty miles off the Columbia River mouth, on the coast of Oregon.

The nearest neighbors of the Attoo villagers are not of their own kith and kin—they are the Atkhan and Kamchadale Creoles and natives of the Russian Seal Islands, some two hundred miles west; but on our side they are separated by more than four hundred and thirty miles of stormy water from the first inhabited island, which is Atkha, where a much larger and a much more fortunately situated settlement exists on its east coast, at Nazan Bay. Here is a community of over two hundred and thirty souls, being all the people gathered together who previously lived in small scattered hamlets on the many large and small islands between Atkha and Attoo. They secure a comparatively good number of sea-otters, and are relatively well-to-do, being able to excite and sustain much activity in the trader’s store.

General agreement among those who have visited the Atkhans, as traders and agents of the Government, is that these natives are the finest body of sea-otter hunters in all respects known to the business. They make long journeys from their homes, carried to the outlying islands of Semeisopochnoi, Amchitka, Tanaga, Kanaga, Adahk and Nitalikh, Siguam and Amookhta, some of them far distant, on which they establish camps and search the reefs and rocks awash, as they learn by experience where the chosen haunts of the shy sea-otter are. Here they remain engaged in the chase over extended periods of months at a time, when, in accord with a preconcerted date arranged with the traders, those schooners which carried them out from Atkha, return, pick them up, and take them back. Then the trader’s store is made a grand rendezvous for the village; the hunters tally their skins, settle their debts, make their donations to the church, and then promptly invest their surplus in every imaginable purchase which the goods displayed will warrant.

The women of Atkha employ long intervals, in which their husbands and sons are absent, by making the most beautifully woven grass baskets and mats. The finest samples of this weaving ever produced by a savage or semi-civilized people are those which come from Atkha. The girls and women gather grasses at the proper season, and prepare them with exceeding care for their primitive methods of weaving; and they spare no amount of labor and pains in the execution of their designs, which are now almost entirely those suggested by the traders, such as fancy sewing-baskets, cigar-holders, table-mats, and special forms that are eagerly accepted in trade, for they find a ready sale in San Francisco.

A peculiar and valuable food-fish is found in the Atkhan waters which has been attracting a great deal of attention as a substitute for the mackerel of our east coast, inasmuch as there is no such fish found oil the Alaskan coasts. Among the sea-weed that floats in immense rafts everywhere throughout the Aleutian passes, the “yellow-fish,” or “Atkha mackerel,”[82] is very abundant; it is also plentiful off the Shoomagin Islands. It is a good substitute for the real mackerel,[83] resembling it in taste after salting, as well as in size and movements.

During early days of Russian order and control, the people of Atkha lived altogether on the north side of the island, and it was then the grand central depot of the old Russian American Company. A chief factor was in charge, who had exclusive jurisdiction over all that country embraced in the Kurile archipelago, and the Commander group of Kamchatka, and the Aleutian chain as far east as Oomnak. It was a very important place then, and this territory of its jurisdiction was styled the “Atkhan Division.” But within the last ten or twelve years, fish and drift-wood became very scarce on the Bering Sea coast, so the inhabitants made a sweeping removal of everything from the ancient site on Korovinsky Bay to that of Nazan, where the little hamlet now stands, overtopped by lofty peaks and hills on every side, except where it looks out over the straits to the bold headlands of Seguam. So thorough were they in this “nova-sailnah,” that they even disinterred the remains of their first priest and re-buried them in front of their new chapel—a delightful exhibition of fond memory and respect where we might, perhaps, have least thought to have found them manifested.

The curious Island of Amlia shuts out the heavy swell of the Pacific Ocean from Nazan Harbor, and gives that little bay great peace and protection. This island is thirty miles in length, and nowhere has it a breadth of over four miles; most of its entire extent is only some two miles from ocean to ocean. It consists of a string of sharp, conical peaks, which once were active volcanoes, but now cold and silent as the tomb. So abruptly do they rise from the oceans which they divide, that there is but one small spot on the south side where a vessel can lie at anchor and effect a landing.

Atkha is a large island, and it has very slight resemblance to that of Oonalashka in shape; its indented fiörds are, however, less deep and not near so commodious and accessible. The snowy, smoking crater of Korovinsky Sopka stands like a grim sentinel overlooking the north end of the island, a sheer five thousand feet above the sea-beach at its feet. A few miles to the south another rises to almost as great an elevation, from the flanks of which a number of hot springs pour out a steady boiling flood; then, at the northeast extremity, and handsomely visible from the village, is a silent, snowy crater which they call Sarichev. Korovinsky is the only disturber of the peace that rightfully belongs to Atkha. It is constantly emitting smoke and ashes, while earthquakes and subterranean noises are felt and heard all over the island at frequent though irregular periods during the entire year. In the ravines and cañons of this volcano and its satellites are the only glaciers which the geologist has ever been able to find on any of these peaked, lofty islands west of Oonalashka, though a hundred eternal snow-clad summits and a thousand snow-filled gorges are easily discerned. The natives here also describe a series of mud-volcanoes, or “mud-pots,” that exist on the island, in which this stuff is constantly boiling up with all the colors of the rainbow, about as they seethe and puff in the Geyser Basin of the Yellowstone Park.

There are a dozen or so small, mountainous, uninhabited islands between Atkha and the larger island of Adakh in the west. Very little is known of them, since they endanger life if a landing is made. The most imposing one is Sitkhin, a round, mountainous, lofty mass which culminates in a snow-covered peak over five thousand feet in height. The crater is dead, however, and no sign of ancient volcanic energy is now displayed, beyond the emission of hot springs from fissures in its rocky flanks. Adakh itself is quite a large island, rough and hilly to an excessive degree. A grand cone, which rises up directly in the centre high above all the rest, is called the “white crater.” It is also a dead volcano like Sitkhin; but steamy vapors from outpouring hot waters rise in many valleys and from the uplands. A succession of volcanic peaks reared from the sea, a few of them still smoking and muttering, constitute the islands of Tanaga and Kanaga in the vicinity of Adakh. No place is feasible for a boat to land on either of these wild islets, except on the west shore of Tanaga in Slava Rossia Bay.

A single immense peak, rising all by itself, solitary and alone, from the girdle of surf that encircles it—a band of foaming breakers eighteen miles in circumference, is the islet of Goreloi. It is a formidable rival of the majestic volcano of Shishaldin, on Oonimak. Though nearly as high, yet it is not so symmetrical a cone. Wreaths and solid banks of fog are pressed against its volcanic sides, and hang around its glittering white head, so that the full impression of its grandeur cannot strike us as we gaze at its defiant presence, where, unsupported, it alone beats back the swell of a vast ocean.

That cluster of islands which stand between Goreloi and Attoo is an aggregate of cold volcanic peaks—Amchitka and Kyska being the largest—the Seven Peaks, or Semiseisopochnoi, smoking a little, all the rest entirely quiet. They offer no hospitality to a traveller, and the natives have done wisely in abandoning these savage island-solitudes to reside at Nazan Bay, where the country has a most genial aspect, and many stretches of warm sand-dune tracts are found, upon which vegetation springs into luxuriant life. Here, also, quite a herd of Kamchatkan cattle were cared for when the Russian régime was in vogue. This stock-raising effort was not a practical success, however, and the last of the bovine race disappeared very shortly after the country changed ownership. Goats were also introduced here, as well as elsewhere throughout the fur-trading posts of the old company in Alaska; but the morbid propensity of those pugnacious little animals to feed upon the grasses which grow over roofs of the barraboras, and thus break in and otherwise damage such earthen tenements, made them so unpopular that their propagation was energetically and successfully discouraged by the suffering Aleutes.

Two hundred miles of uninhabited waste extends between the natives of Atkha and their nearest neighbors, the villagers of Nikolsky, who live in a small, sheltered bight of the southwest shore of Oomnak. This is one of the largest islands of the whole Aleutian group, very mountainous, with three commanding, overlooking peaks that are most imposing in their rugged elevation. Several large lakes nestle in their hilly arms, and feed salmon rivulets that rush in giddy rapids and cascades down to the ocean. Everything grows at Oomnak which we have noticed on its sister island of Oonalashka, except the willow; while cross and red foxes are much more abundant here than at any other place in the whole archipelago. A great many hot springs boil up on the north side, and only as recently as 1878 a decided volcanic shock was experienced, which resulted in the upheaval of a small mud-crater between the village and Toolieskoi Sopka, a huge fire-mountain of the middle interior. Subterranean noises and tremors of the earth are chronic phenomena here, but the natives pay no attention to them. They complain, however, of inability to find fish where they usually found them in abundance prior to these earthquakes. Redoubled attention, however, is paid to the salmon when they run, and thus the deficiency is made up.

[_Unrolled from its cerements._]]

Before the coming of the Russians, Oomnak was one of the most populous islands; then there were over twenty villages, some of them quite large. One was so big that “the inhabitants of it were able to eat the carcass of an enormous whale in a single day!” The most stubborn and independent spirit displayed by the Aleutes prior to their subjugation was exhibited by the inhabitants of this island. The four or five thousand hardy savages which the promishlyniks met here in 1757-59 have dwindled to a microscopic number of less than one hundred and thirty souls, who reside at Nikolsky to-day. They enjoy a somewhat better climate, for a good deal less snow falls here than at Oonalashka, and the small vegetable-garden does much better than elsewhere, except at Attoo. They raise domestic fowls, and have a very fair sea-otter catch every winter, when they scour the south coast, and reside for months at Samalga, hunting that animal. Furious gales which prevail during certain seasons drive kahlans out upon the south beach, there to rest from the pelting of storms: then they are speedily apprehended and clubbed by the watchful Oomnak hunter.

That curious group, the “Cheetiery Sopochnie,” or Islands of the Four Mountains, stands right across the straits, opposite Oomnak. From Kaygamilak, which lies nearest, eleven mummies were taken as they were found in a warm cave on the northeast side of this island. These bodies were placed there in 1724, or some twenty-five or thirty years before the Russians first appeared. The mummies[84] were in fine preservation, and were the remains of a noted chief and his family, who in that time ruled with an iron hand over a large number of his people. The Island of Kayamil is a mere volcanic series of fire-chimneys, the walls of which are not yet cool. The southeast shore in olden times was the site of several large settlements, where the people lived well upon an abundance of sea-lions, hair-seals, and water-fowl, which still repair to its borders. Now that it is desolate and uninhabitable, large flocks of tundra geese spend the summers here, as they shed their feathers and rear their young, not a fox to vex or destroy them having been left by those prehistoric Aleutian hunters.

But on Tahnak, which is the largest of the group, plenty of red foxes are reported. The loftiest summits are also on this one of the four islets, and on the south side once lived a race of the most warlike and ferocious of all Aleutes. They were destroyed to a man by Glottov, and their few descendants have long since been merged with those of Oomnak, where they now live. Several small, high, bluffy islands stand around Tahnak, and between it and its sister, Oonaska, which is nearly as large, equally rugged and precipitous. Amootoyon is a quite small islet, and completes the quartet of “Cheetiery Sopochnie.”

A most interesting volcanic phenomenon of recent record is afforded by the study of that small Bogaslov islet which now stands hot and smoking twenty miles north of Oomnak, and which, two years ago, raised a great commotion by firing up anew. In the autumn of 1796 the natives of Oomnak and Oonalashka were startled by a series of loud reports like parks of artillery, followed by tremblings of the earth upon which they stood. Then a dense dark cloud, full of gas and ashes, came down upon them from Bering Sea, swept by a northerly wind, and it hung over their astonished heads for a week or ten days, accompanied by earthquakes and subterranean thunder; then when an interval of clearing occurred by a change of winds, they saw distinctly to the northward a bright light burning over the sea. The boldest launched their bidarkas, and, after a close inspection, saw that a small island had been elevated about one hundred feet above the level of the surrounding waters; that it had been forced up from some fissure of the bottom to the sea, and was still rising, while liquid streams of lava and scoriæ made it impossible for them to land. This plutonic action did not cease here until 1825, when it left above the green waters of Bering Sea an isolated oval peak with a serrated crest, almost inaccessible, some two hundred and eighty feet high, and two or three miles in circumference. The Russians landed here then for the first time, and the rocks were so hot that they passed but a few moments ashore. It has, however, cooled off enough now to be occupied by large herds of sea-lions, and is resorted to by flocks of sea-fowl. In this fashion of the making of Bogaslov was our vast chain of the Aleutian archipelago cast up from that line of least resistance in the earth’s crust which is now marked by the position of these islands, as they alternately face the billows of the immense wastes of the Pacific, and those storm-tossed waves of the shoal sea of Bering.

FOOTNOTES:

[69] Bishop Veniaminov, who witnessed one of these eruptions in 1825, describes the occurrence: “On the 10th March, 1825, after a prolonged subterranean noise resembling a heavy cannonade, that was plainly heard on the islands of Oonalashka, Akoon, and the southern end of the Alaska Peninsula, a low ridge at the northwestern end of Oonimak opened in five places with violent emissions of flames and great masses of black ashes, covering the country for miles around; the ice and snow on the mountain tops melted and descended in a terrific torrent five to ten miles in width, on the eastern side of the island. The Shishaldin crater, which up to that time had also emitted flames, continued to smoke only.”

[70] A flat, flinty rock—upon it a layer of dried moss or eider-down was spread, then a sprinkling of powdered sulphur was cast over the moss or feathers, then a large quartzite stone was grasped in the native’s hand, who struck it down with all his force upon this preparation. The concussion produced fire, and, when feathers were used, a terrible smell.