Our Arctic province

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 Hunters of Alaska.—Bears and Bear Roads.—Wild Animals seek Shelter in Volcanic Districts.—Natives Afraid to Follow Them.—Kenaitze Architecture.—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 boldness 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 northwest 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 belongings.

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 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 marvellous, 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 increases 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 hope of finding a watery circuit of a continent, and, being disappointed, 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 everything 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 thoughtlessly left within the remorseless rush of that swift-coming flood.

Those glacial sheets which fill countless ravines and cañons 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; meanwhile the tide rushing up and down over this drift of avalanches and glaciers, carries the débris hither and thither, so as to constantly alter the channels, and the very outlines of the coast itself.

One of the oldest and best of Russian posts was early established 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 advantage 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.

The aspect of the country surrounding this settlement is much more suggestive of farming and cattle-raising than is that presented anywhere else in the Alaskan Territory. The land is rolling and hilly, the higher eminences being covered with thick spruce forests; but as you advance into the interior, great swamps of tangled heather, fir, jungle, and sphagnum are prevalent. The soil everywhere, not covered with grass and forest, is mossy, with a little grass and many bushes. The trees are large, fifty to sixty feet high, and eighteen inches to twenty-four in diameter, mostly spruce—no cedar or hemlock. That district adjoining the East Foreland Head is, perhaps, the best with reference to dry, fertile soil, for, in its vicinity, there are broad plains where wild timothy and red-top grasses grow to the height of your waist and shoulders. An extended experience of the Russians taught them to locate their agricultural operations here; that the coast-line belt of the Kenai Peninsula, between the Forelands and Kooshiemak Bay, a belt of low and semi-prairie uplands some eighty miles in length, and varying in depth from ten to twenty, was the most eligible base of agricultural effort afforded anywhere in Alaska, the quality of the crops always being best near the coast, the soil being drier, and the danger of little nipping summer-frosts wholly abated.

The several small settlements which we find upon this pastoral strip to-day have a curious history, as to the origin of their inhabitants. About the period of 1836-38, the expenses of the Russian American Company in maintaining their trading stations in Alaska were increasing to an alarming degree, while the receipts remained stationary, or fell off. An enquiry into its cause revealed it. The fact was, that hundreds of superannuated employés were drawing their salaries and subsistence, rendering no adequate return for the same. These persons had grown old, and had lost their health in serving the company; were, nearly all of them, infirm survivors of Shellikov and Baranov’s parties, whose daring and energy had established the company. It would be inhuman to discharge these aged and crippled Russians, and throw them upon their own resources in such a region. After much deliberation the company was authorized by the Crown to make the following terms of settlement and relief, and thus locate them as permanent pensioners and settlers in the country. Therefore all of the old employés who had married or lived with native or half-breed women, and who were unable to successfully engage in the trading avocations of the company, by reason of age and other infirmities, were, upon their written or witnessed request, after being stricken from the pay-rolls, provided for in this manner.

The company was obliged to select and donate a piece of ground, build a comfortable dwelling, furnish agricultural tools, seeds, cattle and fowls, and supply the pensioner receiving all this with provisions enough to support him and his wife for one year. These “old colonial citizens” (as they were called), thus established, were then exempted from all taxation, military duty, or molestation whatsoever, and a list of their names was annually forwarded in the reports of the company. The children of those settlers were at liberty to enter or not, as they pleased, the service of the company at stated salaries. The company, furthermore, was commanded to purchase all the surplus produce of these pensioners, furs, and dried fish, etc. This order of the Crown, thus fixing the status of those old servants, also included the half-breeds who were equally infirm by reason of such service. Such whites, or Russians, were officially designated “colonial citizens,” the half-breeds were styled “colonial settlers.”

The descendants of these pensioned servants of the Russian Company are the men and women you observe to-day in those little hamlets scattered along the east coast of Cook’s Inlet, or the Kenai Peninsula. They are bright, clean, and, though very, very poor, still appear wholly independent. They are engaged in small trading with the Kenaitze savages and in their limited agricultural efforts, whereby they have potatoes, turnips, and other hardy vegetables. The cattle, of which they have a few in each settlement, are of the small, shaggy Siberian breed, not much larger than Shetland ponies, and capable of living in the rigors of a winter which would destroy or permanently injure our breeds of neat cattle. These people make butter by laboriously shaking the milk in bottles.

They are obliged to shelter their cattle during winters from the driving fury of heavy snow-storms, and when the herd ranges in the grass-season, the boys and old men always have to guard it from the deadly attention of the big brown bears which infest the entire region. They have a regular “round-up” in each hamlet every night.

Everywhere on the west coast of Cook’s Inlet the mountains rise steeply and rugged from the sea, a wild and uninviting contrast with the park-like terraces of the Kenai coast just opposite. Here are the same lofty ridges and smoking peaks which startled and oppressed the brave heart of Captain Cook, as they muttered and trembled in volcanic throes when he sailed by. The two cones which rise dominant are the summits of Mount Ilyamna and the “Rédoute,” from which columns of brownish smoke ascend by day and ruddy fire-glowings by night. So precipitous is this mainland shore of Cook’s Inlet that at only two small points of the most limited area is there any low land to be found, and these spots have been promptly utilized by the Kenaitze Indians as sites for their villages of Toyonok and Kustatan. The dense, sombre coniferous forest which we have become so familiar with, clothes the flanks of those grim mountain walls with the thickest of all coverings to a height of one thousand feet above the beaches below. Here and there we glance into the recesses of a cañon or a gorge where the naked, mossy surface of immense rocky declivities arrests and fixes the eye, while the glittering caps of ice and snow far away above fit down snugly upon long, rough, treeless intervals, covered with heather, lichens, and varied arctic sphagnum.

The upper waters of Cook’s Inlet are said to be quite remarkable for their barrenness of fish—salmon only being plenty in the running season, ascending all the numerous rivers and rivulets; the reason most likely is due to the turbid upheaval of the bottoms everywhere by that violent tidal bore which prevails, recurring twice every twenty-four hours. The Indians here employ a curious trestle or staging of poles, which they use in spearing salmon, and netting them from its support.

An extensive spread of the largest fresh-water lake in Alaska just over the divide from Cook’s Inlet, early led the Russians to explore it, and to find a portage via its waters to the sea of Bering. But, though this barrier can be passed by an active man in a single day, yet it has divided, and continues to absolutely separate, two distinct races of savages—the Innuits from the Indians; for the Kenaitze are Indians, as we understand them, based upon our types of the great plains and foothills of the Rocky Mountains; and, living here as they do on the shores of Cook’s Inlet, they live, perhaps, in the most romantic and picturesque region of Alaska. Burning volcanoes, smoking and grumbling, a large inland sea rolling for miles and miles therein, and lay at their feet; wide watery moors, tundra, timber and lakes, and rivers rising in the snow-white peaks everywhere visible, all combine to make the most striking lights and shades of natural scenery that human thought can realize in fancy.

These natives of Cook’s Inlet are strongly defined from those of Kadiak as a separate people, both in language (which no white man has ever been able to repeat), in appearance, and in disposition. They are true Athabascans, or exactly like the meat-eating Indians of our great North American interior. An average man here is an Indian of medium height, say five feet seven or nine inches, well built and symmetrical, lithe and sinewy. The cold glint of his small, jet-black eyes is not relieved by any expression of good humor in his taciturn features and physical bearing. His nose will present, as a rule, the full aquiline or Julius Cæsar outline. Their skin is darker than that of the Innuit, though now and then a comely young person will show perceptible blood-mantlings to the cheeks. The mouth is large—lips rather full; beardless faces are the rule. Their women are much better-looking than either the Siwash squaws of the Sitkan region, or the females of the Aleutian and Innuit races. Their hair is worn in clubbed bunches and braids, hanging upon their backs, thickly larded over with grease, and often powdered with feathers and geese-down.

In the immediate vicinity of the shores of Cook’s Inlet the primitive habits of these savages have been very much changed by their daily intercourse with the Creoles; but at the head of the gulf, especially in the Sooshetno and Keknoo valleys, they are still dressed in their deer-skin shirts and trousers, men and women alike. They work those garments with a great variety of beads, porcupine quills stained in bright colors, and grass plaitings.

These Kenaitze are the only real hunters in all Alaska. They place little or no dependence on fish like the other tribes, unless we except the walrus-eating Eskimo, who hunt, however, in water-craft entirely. And were they not natural Nimrods, the abundance of game which abounds in their district would stimulate such ambition alone in itself. The brown bear[41] of Alaska is found almost everywhere; but it seems to prefer an open, swampy country to that dense timber most favored by its ursine relative, the black bear. It attains its greatest size, and exhibits the most ferocity, on the Kenai Peninsula. It should be called the grizzly, because it is frequently shot here fully as large, if not larger,[42] than those examples recorded in Oregon and California.

This wide-ranging brute is found away up beyond the Arctic Circle, though never coming down to the coast of the icy ocean except at Kotzebue Sound. It is a most expert fisherman, and a terror to the reindeer and cariboo of those hyperborean solitudes. It frequents, during the salmon season, all the Alaskan rivers and their tributaries which empty into Bering Sea and the North Pacific, as far as the fish can ascend. When the run for the year is over, then the animal retires into the thick recesses of semi-timbered uplands and tundra, where berries and small game, deer especially, are most abundant.

Everywhere throughout this large extent of Alaska the footpaths, or roads, of that omnipresent ursine traveller arrest your attention. The banks of all streams are lined by the well-trodden trails of these heavy brutes, and offer far better facilities for progress than those afforded by the paths of men. Not only are the swampy plains intersected by such well-worn routes of travel, but the mountains themselves and ridges, to the very summits thereof, are thus laid out; and the judgment of a bear in traversing a rough, mountainous divide is always of the best—his track over is sure to be the most practicable route. On the steep, volcanic uplands of the mountainous coast of the west shore in Cook’s Inlet, groups of twenty, and even thirty, of these huge bears can be seen together feeding upon the berries and roots which are found there in season. Their skins are not valuable, however, being “patched” and harsh-haired. Then they are very fierce, so that they are not commonly hunted anywhere except by the Kenaitze, who, like all other aboriginal hunters, respect them profoundly, and invariably address a few eulogistic words of praise to a bear before killing or attempting to kill it.[43]

A peculiar dread which all the natives of this region have, of visiting those areas where volcanic energy manifests itself, is taken advantage of by those dumb beasts upon which the savage wages relentless warfare; the immediate vicinity of craters, of steaming hot springs and solfataras, will always be a rendezvous for game, especially bears, which seem to fully understand that in staying there they will never be disturbed. But the Kenaitze are ardent hunters, nevertheless, and spend most of their time and energy in the chase of land animals—making long journeys into the interior, and gloomy recesses of mountainous cañons and defiles, to follow and find the fur-bearing quarry peculiar to their country.

They have regular tracks of main travel, where, like stage stations on our frontier post-roads, at intervals they have erected shelter-huts, in which they often live with their families for months of the year at a time; they make birch-bark canoes for their river and lake transit, but in navigating Cook’s Inlet, they buy skin bidarkas of the Kadiak model and use them altogether. They are fairly independent of salt water, and seldom pass many hours upon it, except in travelling and trading one with another, and the Creoles; they are, however, very expert at fresh-water fishing through holes in the ice for trout in the thousand and one lakes, large and small, which are so common in their country.[44]

As these natives live in their permanent settlements, we find them distinguished by a peculiar architecture. Their houses are fashioned out of logs, and set above ground resting upon its surface; the logs are hollowed out on one side so as to fit one upon the other in true spoon-fashion, and make a really air and water-tight wall; an enclosure of these walls will hardly ever be larger than 20 feet square, and most of them never go over 12 or 15 feet; they have regularly laid cross-rafters, with a low, or half-pitch, over which spruce-bark shells are so spread as to shed rain and drifting snow; these shingle slabs are kept in place by a number of heavy poles, lashed transversely across; a fireplace is always in the centre with a very small smoke-hole opened in the roof just above it; the door is a square aperture cut through the logs at the least exposed front, about large enough to easily admit the ingress and egress of a crouching Indian. It is stopped in stormy weather by a bear-skin, hung so as to fall directly over it from the inside. When the door is thus closed the naturally dark interior becomes almost wholly so; but the howling of a tempest, laden with rain, sleet or snow, as the case may be, renders this gloomy indoor perfectly radiant to the senses of its sheltered inmates, and they loll in robes and blankets and doze away the time on the rude wooden platform which surrounds the walls and keeps their bodies from the cold damp earth. Upon this staging they spread grass mats and skins, and, in fact, it is a catchall for everything.

An odd feature seen in some of the most pretentious houses of those inlet savages, is the presence of a little kennel-like bedroom annex, which many of the most wealthy or important have built up against the main walls. These boxlike additions are tightly framed and joined to the houses, the only entrance being from the inside of the main structure by a small hole cut directly through the logs of the wall; they are sleeping chambers, and are furnished with a rough plank floor, and sometimes a window made of a piece of translucent bladder-gut. They are also reserved and special apartments during the occasion of those visits of ceremony which Indians often pay, one to each other. But the main idea is to have these tight little dormitories so snug and warm that they will insure the comfortable rest of the owner therein without much burdensome bed-clothing—in many cases the Kenaitze can sleep here in the coldest weather without any covering at all, and do. Such a bed is a great and priceless luxury to them.

No furniture annoys the Kenai housekeeper, unless the small square blocks of wood used occasionally as stools or seats can be so styled; the grease and fire-boxes which we have seen in Sitkan households are also duplicated here, but though made of wood they are not so neatly put together. The traders recently have introduced a very novel feature to the interior of nearly every Kenaitze house; it is the common, cheap, box-imitation, in miniature, of a Saratoga trunk with lock and key. Those oddly contrasted articles will be found everywhere among these people, who keep in them all their valuables, such as charms, and toys for the children, flashy handkerchiefs, small tools fashioned out of bits of iron and steel, bags of thread and stripped sinews, needles, ammunition, and their percussion-caps, which are to them as pearls without price—nothing so precious. Outside of this trunk-craze, and their odd sleeping-rooms, these Indians do not live together or act differently from the usual habit and manner of savages proper, so familiar to us by reason of repeated descriptions published of our own meat-eaters who live near by. They crave nothing from the white trader save powder, lead, good rifles, percussion-caps, tobacco, calico, and the sham trunks alluded to.

The sun shines out over Cook’s Inlet much more than it does in the Sitkan region and the Aleutian Islands. The proportion of fair, bright weather is larger than that experienced anywhere else in all Alaska or its coast. The winter months here are not excessively cold; snow falls in December—sometimes as late as 3d of January before the first flakes of the season arrive. By the first to middle of May it has usually melted away on the lowlands, and the grass springs up anew, green and luxuriant. Summer, and even winter storms, are drawn along the lofty ranges of the Kenai Peninsula when all is serene and pleasant at the same time on the moors and lowlands of the inlet shores. Often, too, the people of that coast can look up to a continued falling of heavy rain and snow on the mountain summits of the steep ridges across the inlet, while they bask in unclouded sunshine, and have no interruption of its comfort.

We ourselves have as yet made but slight use of the natural resources and advantages of Cook’s Inlet. A party of San Francisco merchants have established at the mouth of the Kassilov River a salmon cannery, which has been worked to the full limit of demand; and a smaller, similar factory is located at the head of this inlet, in the Kaknoo estuary.

The finest salmon known to man, savage or civilized, both in flavor and size combined, is that giant fish which runs in especial good form and number into Cook’s Inlet, and which the Russians called the “chowichah;”[45] they are most abundant during the summer neap-tides, but they are not as numerous as are the several other varieties of smaller and far less palatable salmonidæ, which also run up here with them. The average length of these superb chowichah fish is four feet, and a weight of fifty pounds is a low medium. They appear regularly on the 20th and 22d of every May, running in pairs, refusing the hook, though hugging the shore lines. Our people catch them in floating gill-nets, and in weirs of brush and saplings of wicker-work woven with spruce-roots and bark, which are erected on the mud-flats at the river mouth, during low tide.

The king salmon, however, is erratic in running to any one spawning spot, and in this respect differs from all the rest of its family, which is remarkably constant in annually returning to the same spawning ground. But the abundance of salmon which we see in their reproductive periods of each year, ascending every river and possible rivulet that communicates with the sea in Alaska south of Bering’s Straits, is a never-failing source of wonder and delight to the white visitor and a measure of infinite creature-comfort to his physical being while sojourning here. Also, the pleasant thought constantly arises that when we shall have a populous empire on the Pacific slope, as we have now in the Mississippi Valley and east of the Alleghanies, what a handsome use we will make of this waste of fish-food wealth[46] which we now observe in the vast realm of its indulgence throughout Alaska. Also in another, but wholly correct sense, the natives themselves shamefully waste the flesh of those fine salmon. To illustrate the extraordinary nature of this suggestion, let the following statements of fact be recalled: The native population of Cook’s Inlet is not large—it is embraced in about one hundred and sixty-eight families, averaging four souls to each household; everyone of these families prepares at least seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred pounds of dried salmon for its own specific consumption during the winter months. That amount of cured fish, therefore, is about one hundred and twenty-six thousand pounds, and as every pound weight of dried meat is equal to an original weight of at least eight or nine pounds of fresh, or undried, then this cured total gives us an immense aggregate of 1,000,000 pounds of fresh salmon; this, figured down, shows that a single Indian uses, during the winter solstice—five months—the enormous amount of 1,430 pounds of this rich-meated article of diet, or about ten pounds every day, in addition to the bear-meat, deer, and sheep-meat, seal and beluga oil, berries and roots which he is constantly consuming, at the same time, in the greatest freedom, and which are always in abundant supply. The full thought of my presentation will be better understood when it is remembered that a pound of fresh salmon has more nourishing and sustaining quality than the same amount dried. The salt-dried codfish with which we are so familiar is very different in its texture, and weighs many times more than it would if it were cured by the air and smoke-exposure to which the natives of Alaska are driven in preserving their fish.

An exceedingly happy illustration of the singular force of habit which the salmon have in returning every recurring season to the exact localities of their birth was afforded near the Creole settlement of Neelshik on the Kenai Inlet coast. A small stream runs down to the gulf from the mountains and moors of the interior. Its mouth had been closed by a barrier of surf-raised sand and gravel during storms in the winter of 1879-80, and through which the sluggish stream filtered in its course without overflowing. When the salmon, which had descended the year previously from the upper waters of the stream in the course of their reproductive circuit, again returned to renew such labors in the following season, this unexpected wall barred their ingress. They did not turn away, but actually leaped out upon this sandy spit, and many of them succeeded, by spasmodic springs and wriggling, while on the dry gravel, in getting across and into the river-water beyond! the Creoles, in the meantime, having nothing to do except to walk down from their houses and gather up the self-stranded salmon as they fancied their size and condition. Inasmuch as these “old colonial settlers” are very pious, as well as very indolent, they were profuse in giving thanks to their patron saints for this unexpected bounty.

The color of gold everywhere found by washing the sands of Cook’s Inlet on the Kenai shore early aroused the cupidity of the Russians. They made systematic examinations here under the lead of experienced men, between 1848 and 1855, and the Russian American Company spent a great deal of money in the same time by sustaining a large force of forty miners, directed by Lieutenant Doroshin, in active operations at the head of the inlet on the Kaknoo River, and in the Kenai Mountains and Prince William or Choogatch Alps. Gold was found, but in such small quantities, compared with the labor of getting it, that the ardor of the Russians soon cooled, and nothing as yet has resulted from the prospecting of our own miners in this district, who have been all over these Slavonian trails since the transfer.