Our Arctic province

It has already been mentioned that many individuals give away all their property on such occasions. If it happens that during such a memorial feast a visitor arrives from a distant village who bears the same name with the subject of a celebration, he is at once overwhelmed with gifts, clothed anew from head to foot with the most expensive garments, and returns to his home a wealthy man.

The country in which the Innuit lives is one that taxes the utmost hardihood of man when it is traversed by land or by sea. It is not likely that it will ever be much frequented by white men—it will remain to us as it has been to the Russians, an immense area of desolate sameness, almost unknown to us, or to its savage occupants, for that matter. The general contour of the great Alaskan mainland interior is that of a vast undulating plain with high rounded granitic hills and ridges scattered in all lines of projection; on the flanks of which, and by its countless lakes and water-courses, a growth, more or less abundant, of spruce, birch, willows, poplars, and a large number of hardy shrubs, will be encountered. Its summers are short, warm, and pleasant; its winters are long, and bitterly cold and inclement.

The tundra, however, which fronts the whole of that extensive coast-line of Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, is indeed cheerless and repellant at any season. In the summer it is a great flat swale, full of bog-holes, shiny and decaying peat, innumerable sloughs, shallow and stagnant, and from which swarms of malignant mosquitoes rise to fairly torture and destroy a traveller unless he be clad in a coat of mail. In the winter and early spring fierce gales of wind at zero-temperature sweep over these steppes of Alaska in constant succession, making travel exceedingly dangerous, and as painful even as it is in the warmer months. During this period of the year all approach to the coast is barred in Bering Sea by a system of shoals and banks which extend so far seaward that a vessel drawing only ten feet of water will be hard aground, beyond the sight of land, sixty miles off the Yukon mouth.

At the head of the Bay of Bristol a small but deep and rapid river empties a flood of pure, clear water into an intricate series of sand and mud channels which belong there. The Kvichak is the name of this stream, and it rises less than forty miles away in the largest fresh-water lake known to Alaska—that inland sea of Ilyamna, over ninety miles in its greatest length, varying in width from fifteen to thirty. Those gusts and gales that sweep over its blue waters raise a heavy surf which beats sonorously upon its pebbly shores and under its cliffs, while the loud wailing cry of a great northern loon[149] echoes from one lonely shore to the other when disturbed by the unwonted passage of a native’s canoe. Against the eastern horizon there springs from its bosom an abrupt and mighty wall of Alpine peaks, which stand as an eternal barrier between its pure sweet waters and the salt surges of the Pacific.

The ruins of an old Russian trading-post stand in the midst of a small native village at the outlet of, and on the slope of, a lovely grassy upland which rises from the lake. Its people are all living in log houses like those we noticed in Cook’s Inlet; but nevertheless they are true Innuits. The two other small hamlets on these Ilyamna shores are all that exist. Their inhabitants live in the greatest peace and solitary comfort that savages can understand. Two trails over the divide are travelled by these natives, who trade with the Cook’s Inlet people, and who range over the mountain sides in pursuit of reindeer and of bears. A most noteworthy family of Russian Creoles lived here on the first portage. The father was a man of gigantic stature, and he reared four Anak-like sons, who are, as he was, mighty hunters, and of great physical power. This family lives all to itself in that beautiful wilderness of Ilyamna, a little way back from the lake on a hillside, where they command passes over to Cook’s Inlet. They control the trade of this entire region and rule without a shadow of disputation.

A tragedy occurred in one of these small villages of Ilyamna, which has been fitly memorized by the Russian Church. In 1796 a priest of the Greek faith came over from Kadiak, and, enchanted by the scenery and pleased by a warm, kindly welcome received from the natives, he determined to tarry here with them and save their souls. He[150] was a man of the most handsome presence and the sweetest address, and for a moment prevailed. Then, as the heathenish rites and festivals were postponed at his bidding, surly shamans fomented seeds of hate and fear. Finally an hour arrived when, at a preconcerted signal, the slumbering wrath of the savages was aroused, and they fell upon and slew this unsuspecting missionary and destroyed every vestige of his existence among them. The cause of Father Juvenal’s death was his strong opposition to polygamy. It is said that when he was attacked by savages he neither fled nor did he defend himself, either of which he might have successfully done; but he delivered himself unresistingly into the hands of his murderers, asking only for the safety of his subordinates, which was granted. The natives say, in their recitation of the event, that after the monk had been struck down and left by the mob as dead, he “rose up once more, walked towards them, and spoke.” They fell upon him again, and again, and again, for he repeated this miracle several times, until at last, in bewildered fury, they literally cut him into pieces.

Reindeer cross and recross the Kvichak River in large herds during the month of September, as they range over to and from the Peninsula of Alaska, feeding, and also to escape from mosquitoes. At the mouth of this stream is one of the broadest deer-roads in the country. The natives run along the banks of the river when reindeer are swimming across, easily and rapidly spearing those unfortunate animals as they rise from the water, securing in this way any number that fancy or want may dictate. At one time a trader counted seven hundred deer-carcasses as they lay here on the sands of the river’s margin, untouched save by a removal of the hides; not a pound of that meat out of the thousands putrefying had been saved by these lazy Innuits; who, improvident wretches as they are, would be living, less than five months later, in a state of starvation! But all this misery of famine in March will have been forgotten again next September, when the same surplus of food is within their reach, for they will not store up against the morrow—the labor is too great—the shiftless sentiment of a savage forbids that exertion.

There is a curious distinction drawn by nature between the Siberian and Alaskan reindeer. Everybody is familiar with the fact that on the Asiatic side these animals are domesticated and serve as a mainstay and support of large tribes, both savage and civilized. But the spirit of the Alaskan deer is such that it will not live under the control of man, or even within his presence. If confined, it refuses food, and then perishes of self-imposed starvation. The most patient and extended trials have been made at Nooshagak by imported Kamschadales, who were raised to the life of deer-driving over there; yet, in no instance whatsoever were these experts able to overcome the difficulty and accustom those timid animals to the sight, sound, and smell of man. The Alaskan species is much larger than its Asiatic cousin, but otherwise resembles it closely, being, if anything, more uniformly gray in tint and less spotted with white over the back and head.

Reindeer have a most extended range in Alaska, where an immense area of tundra and upland moors yield an abundance of those mosses and lichens which they most affect. Innumerable sloughs and lakes afford these deer a harbor of refuge from cruel torments of mosquitoes, when the wind does not blow briskly in summer; the wooded interior gives them shelter from the driving fury of wintry snow-storms. Big brown bears follow in the wake of travelling herds, and feed fat upon all sickly or weaker members and imprudent fawns of the drove; so do wolves and wolverines; and the lop-eared lynx is not missing.

Nooshagak is a trading centre for that entire Bristol Bay district, which comprises the coast of Bering Sea from Cape Newenham, in the north, to the peninsular extremity at Oonimak, in the south—an immense expanse in which some four thousand Innuits abide, and live largely upon fish and deer-meat. The Oogashik, Igageek, Nakneek, Kvichak, Nooshagak, Igoosheek, and Togiak Rivers all empty into this great shallow gulf. Up their swollen channels, after an opening of the ice during the last half of May, salmon run from the sea in irregular but constant travel until the end of August. Inferior salmon run even as late as November, while the various kinds of salmon-trout and white-fish exist under the ice of deep streams and lakes all winter. By the middle of September hard frosts in the mountains congeal all sources of innumerable rivulets which have helped to swell the volume and raise the level of a river’s summer flood, and then these streams which we have just named begin to fall rapidly in their channels. If we chance to travel anywhere along their banks at this time, we will find them covered with windrows and heaps of dead salmon two and three feet in height. The gravelly beaches of the lakes, the bars and shoals of every stream, are then lined with decaying and putrid bodies of these fish, while every overhanging bough and projecting rock is festooned with their rotting forms—ah! the stench arising absolutely forbids the pangs of hunger, even though we have no provision. These are the salmon that have died from exhaustion and from bruises received in struggling with swift and impetuous currents, and the rocks and snags that beset their paths of annual reproduction.

North of the Togiak River are several small, rocky islets which, having a nucleus of solid granite, are the cause of a large series of sand and mud reefs. Upon those shoals the huge walrus of Bering Sea is wont to crawl and lazily sun himself in herds of thousands. He is practically secure here from attack, since the varying shifts of the tide and its furious rush in ebb and flood make a trip to the islets one of positive danger, even to a most hardy and well-acquainted hunter. Stragglers, however, are frequently surprised on the mainland shore opposite, and the southern coast of Hagenmeister Island toward Cape Newenham to the westward.

The muskrat catch of Alaska is secured almost wholly in the Nooshagak region—an immense number of these water-rodents are annually taken by Innuits here. Traders, however, do not prize them very highly, but to secure the natives’ custom they are obliged to appear satisfied with all that these people bring in to the post. These skins are, however, not sold in this country; they are all shipped to France and Germany, where they meet with a ready sale, since the poor people there are not above wearing them. Also, most of the good Alaskan beaver peltries are from this district, where they have the best fur and are consequently prized above all other catches outside of that region. Land-otter is also in large quantity and fine quality, but the mink and martens and foxes are inferior. During summer seasons, on many lakes, flocks of big, white, trumpeting swans will be found frequenting nearly every one of those bodies of water. The natives hunt them at night, and capture unsuspecting birds as they sleep upon the water, by paddling noiselessly upon them. The traders encourage this industry for the sake of the swan’s down which it produces. The most favored spot by swans is Lake Walker, which lies on the Nakneek portage over to Cook’s Inlet. Perhaps its rare, unique beauty charms these giant natatores as it does ourselves, for, without question, it is incomparably the most lovely sheet of water, set in a frame of glorious mountains, which the fancy of an artist could possibly devise. It is an exceedingly fascinating spot, and language is utterly inadequate to portray its vistas, which alternate from absolute grandeur to that of quiet loveliness, as you sail around its pebbly shores and yellow sands.

The immediate banks of the Nakneek River, through which Lake Walker empties its surplus water into Bristol Bay, are low and flat, and covered with a luxuriant growth of bushes, grasses, and amphibious plants, semi-tropical in their verdant vigor of life. The timber on hill-slopes that rise from the plain is principally clumps of birch and poplar, quickly passing to solid masses of spruce as a higher ascent is made to the rolling uplands and mountain sides. An old, deserted settlement—ruins of Paugwik, marked by the decayed outlines of its cemetery, still is visible at the debouchure of the Nakneek. With a strange disrespect for the departed, those natives who live at an adjoining village come over here to excavate salmon-holes in that ancient graveyard, wherein they place their fish-heads, so that a process of moist rotting shall take place prior to eating them! The Innuits of Kenigayat have no fear of the “witching hour of night” in this burial site of their ancestors.

The seal and walrus hunters of the Nooshagak district are those hardy Innuits who live at Kulluk and Ooallikh Bays, in plain sight of these walrus islets and shoals which we were taking notice of a short time ago. The large mahklok and a smaller, but quaintly marked “saddle-backed” seal are taken by these people in large numbers every year. The oil is their great stock-in-trade, for those fur-bearing animals that belong to the land here are away below par when brought to a trader. The coast between their villages and the mouth of the Togiak River is one of a most remarkable series of bluffy headlands, seven of them, being all of sandstone which has weathered into queer, fantastic pinnacles and towers, and is washed at the sea-level into hundreds of huge caverns wherein the surf beats with a noise like the distant roar of artillery. Screaming flocks of water-fowl are breeding on their mural faces, and troops of foxes lurk in the interstices, and roam incessantly for eggs and unwary birds.

The Togiak River never was ascended by a white man until the summer of 1880.[151] It is a very remarkable region with respect to its people. Though the course of the river is only one hundred miles in length, yet we find upon it seven villages (one of them very large), having an aggregate population of 1,826 souls. No other one section of Alaska has so dense a population with reference to its inhabited area. The river is, however, a broad one, being a mile and a half in width, shoal and shallow, with deep pools and eddies here and there. Its banks are low, and the valley through which it runs is low and flat, with extensive bottom-lands that widen out at places to a distance of fifteen miles between the ridges and hills which direct its short course. Upon these flats grow most luxuriant and lofty grasses, high as the heads of natives—literally concealing, as it were, the dense human occupation of its extent.

The Togiaks are the Quakers of Alaska; they are the simplest and the most unpretending of all her people; they seem to live entirely to themselves, wholly indifferent as to what other folks have and they have not. They seldom ever view a white man, and then it is only when they go down to the river’s mouth and visit a trader in his sloop or schooner. He never goes up to see them, for the best of reasons to him—they never have anything fit for barter save a few inferior mink and ground-squirrel skins to trade. They have no chiefs; each family is a law unto itself, and it comes and goes with a sort of free and easy abandon that must resemble the life and habit of primeval time. What little these people want and cannot get from each other, they do not go farther in search of, but do without, unless it be small supplies of tobacco which they procure through other Innuits, second or third hand.

Entire families of them, during the summer, leave their winter huts and go out into the valley at such points as their fancy may indicate, where they pass two and three months with absolutely no shelter whatever erected during that entire lapse of time. When it rains hard they simply turn their skin boats bottom side up, stick their heads under, and consider themselves fully settled for protection from tempestuous wind and sleet-storms, or any other climatic unpleasantness. How insensible to extremes of weather do these bodies of the Innuits become—their whole external form is as insensible to heat or cold as their stolid features are! Were they living under Italian skies, they could not affect a greater disregard for the varying moods of that mild climate than they do for the chilly, boisterous weather of Alaska. The Togiakers never go far from the river upon which they build their rude winter villages, and never venture out from its mouth; hence they are not so happy in making the skin canoe or kayak, as their hardier brethren are: these boats on the Togiak are clumsy, broad of beam in proportion to length, and the hatch, or hole, so large that two persons can sit in it back to back. When a family concludes to go out for the summer camp, the man gets into his “kayak,” takes the children who are under four or five years in with him, then pulls and paddles his way up against the current, or floats down, as the case may be; the women—wife, mother, and daughters—are turned ashore and obliged to find their way up or down through long grass and over quaking bogs—to toil in this manner from camp to camp, and as they plod along they shout and sing at the top of their voices to apprise any bear or bears, which may be in their path, of such coming, and thus stampede them; otherwise they would be in continual danger of silently stepping upon bruin as he lurked or slept in dense grassy jungles. When a bear first takes notice of the approach of a human being it invariably slinks away, rarely ever displaying, by the faintest sound, its departure; but that same animal, if surprised suddenly at close quarters, will turn and fight desperately, even unto death.

The bold, far-projected headland of Cape Newenham forms the southern pier of that remarkable funnel-like sea-opening to the Kuskokvim River—a river upon which the human ichthyophagi of the north do most congregate: three thousand savages are living here in a string of scattered hamlets that closely adjoin each other, and are nearly all located on the right-hand bank of the river as we ascend it. They are more like muskrat villages than human habitations—water, water all around and everywhere: situated on little patches, or narrow dikes, at the rim of the high tides, on the edge of the river proper, which is here, and for a long distance up, bordered by a strikingly desolate and forlorn country. A glance at our map will show to the reader that great funnel-fashioned mouth of the Kuskokvim, through which its strong and turbid, clay-white current is discharged into Bering Sea. The tides, in this enormous estuary, run with a rise and fall that simply beggars description—reaching an amazing vertical flow and ebb of fifty feet at the entrance! Such extraordinary change in tide-level is carried up, but much modified as it progresses, until lost at Mumtrekhlagamute; the entire physical aspect of that region, in which this sweeping daily change in a level of the water prevails, is most repellant and discouraging.

From the high-tide bank-rims of the Kuskokvim, as we go up, across to the hills and to their rear in the east, extends a dreary expanse of swale and watered moors forty to sixty miles in width, flat and low as the surface of the sea itself. At high tide it appears to be nearly all submerged. It shimmers then like an inland ocean studded with myriads of small mossy islets. Again, when the tide in turn runs out, great far-expanded flats of mud and ooze supplant the waters everywhere, giving in this abrupt manner a striking shift of scenic effect. The eastern river bank is a queer, natural dike, formed by a rank and vigorous growth of coarse sedges, bulrushes, and little sapling fringes of alders, willows, with birch and poplars interspersed. Upon this natural dike these native villages range in close continuity, each occupying all the dry land in its own immediate limits, and occupying it so thoroughly that a traveller cannot, without great difficulty, find bare land enough outside of their sites upon which to pitch his tent. Mud, mud everywhere—a whitish-clay silt, through which, at low tide, it is almost a physical impossibility to walk from a stranded bidarka up to the villages. Indeed, if you are unfortunate enough to reach a settlement here when coming down or going up the river as the tide is out, you are a wise man if you simply fold your arms, sit quietly in your cramped position until the rising, roaring flood returns and carries you forward and over to your destination.

On the Lower Kuskokvim the river width of itself is so great that the people living on its eastern banks never can see an opposite shore to the westward, for it is even more submerged there and swampy, if anything, than where they reside; hence we find them located here on the east bank, to a practical exclusion of all settlement over on those occidental swales and bogs. The current of this singular stream flows quite rapidly. It discharges a great volume of water, which is colored a peculiar whitish tone by the contribution of a roiled tributary that heads in the Nooshagak divide. At its source and down to this muddy junction it is clear. It is a rapid stream in the narrows, and dull and sluggish in flow through wide openings.

The density of aboriginal population so remarkably manifested as we observe it on the Lower Kuskokvim does not, however, give all the testimony, inasmuch as during every summer two thousand or more natives from the Yukon delta come over here to fish with the Kuskokvims, making a sum-total of six or seven thousand fish-eaters, who catch, consume, and waste an astonishing quantity of salmon, which would, if properly handled, be sufficient to handsomely feed the entire number of native inhabitants of Alaska, four times over, every year!

Snow lies deeply upon all this region, driven and packed in vast drifts and fields by the wrath of furious wintry gales, and the hunting of land animals is thus made impossible. Then a native of the Kuskokvim Valley turns his attention to trapping white-fish[152] just as soon as the ice becomes firmly established, usually early in November. The traps are made of willow and alder wicker-work, and nearly all in the same pattern as those employed for salmon, but of somewhat smaller dimensions, so as to be easier to handle, since they are not required to catch the huge “chowichie.” Every morning at dawn on the river the men of its many villages can be seen making their way out to these fish-traps, when it is not bitterly inclement, and even then, sometimes. They carry curiously shaped ice-picks, made or fashioned from walrus-teeth or deer-antlers, because every night’s freezing covers the trap anew with a solid cap of ice, which must be broken up and removed ere a savage can get at it, haul it out, and empty its “pot.” Think of the physical hardihood required of a man who goes out from his hut to visit such a trap when the wind, away below zero, is blowing over an icy plain of the broad river at the rate of sixty miles an hour, whirling snowy spiculæ, like hot shot, into the faintest exposure which he dares to make of his face or eyes! He does not often go when a “poorga” prevails in this boisterous manner. Sometimes he feels as though he must, since a storm may have raged in wild, bitter fury for a week without sign of abatement. His children or his wife may be sick and half-starved; then, only then, does he venture out to dare and endure the greatest hardship of savage life in Alaska.

It frequently happens after an unusually cold night that a trap, including its contents, is frozen solid. This is another dreaded accident, for it involves great labor, since the trap itself must be picked to pieces and built anew. In spite of all these difficulties, the natives get enough fresh fish during each winter by such method to eke out their scanty store of dried salmon and save themselves from starvation. On the lower river course, within the influence of that tremendous tidal action which has been described, a solid covering of ice never envelops the surface of the Kuskokvim. Here the natives hunt seals, the mahklok, and also the white whale or beluga, which furnishes them a full supply of oil[153] and blubber. A school of belugas puff and snort, like a fleet of tug-boats, as they push between and under tide-broken masses of ice in hot pursuit of fish that abound all over the broad estuary.

There is one particularly distressing and hideous feature that belongs to this entire area of the Alaskan coast tundra and marshy moors of the interior and its forests, its river-margins, and, in fact, to every place except those spots where the wind blows hard. It is the curse of mosquitoes—the incessant stinging of swarms of these blood-thirsty insects, which come out from their watery pupæ by May 1st (with the earliest growing of spring vegetation), and remain in perfect clouds until withered and destroyed by severe frosts in September and October. The Indians themselves do not dare to go into the woods at Kolmakovsky during the summer, and the very dogs themselves frequently die from effects of mere mosquito-biting about their eyes and paws only, for that thick woolly hair of these canines effectually shields all other portions of their bodies. Close-haired beasts, like cattle or horses, would perish here in a single fortnight at the longest, if not protected by man.

Universal agreement in Alaska credits the Kuskokvim mosquito as being the worst. They do not appear elsewhere in the same number or ferocity, but they are quite unendurable at the best and most-favored stations. Breeding here, as they do, in these vast extents of tundra sloughs and woodland swamps, they are able to rally around and embarrass an explorer beyond all reasonable description. Language is simply inadequate to portray that misery and annoyance which the Alaskan mosquito-swarms inflict upon us in the summer, whenever we venture out from the shelter of trading-posts, where mosquito-bars envelop our couches and cross the doors and windows to our living-room. Naturally, it will be asked, What do the natives do? They, too, are annoyed and suffer; but it must be remembered that their bodies are daily anointed with rancid oil, and certain ammoniacal vapors constantly arise from their garments which even the mosquito, venomous and cruel as it is, can scarcely withstand the repellant power of. When the natives travel in this season, they gladly avail themselves, however, of any small piece of mosquito-netting that they can secure, no matter how small. Usually they have to wrap cloths and skins about their heads, and they always wear mittens in midsummer. The traveller who exposes his bare face at this time of the year on the Kuskokvim tundra or woodlands will speedily lose his natural appearance; his eyelids swell up and close; his neck expands in fiery pimples, so that no collar that he ever wore before can now be fastened around it, while his hands simply become as two carbuncled balls. Bear and deer are driven into the water by these mosquitoes. They are a scourge and the greatest curse of Alaska.

Two hundred miles up from the Kuskokvim mouth is a focal centre of the trade in this district. It is Kolmakovsky, established by the Russians in 1839. It consists of seven large, roughly built frame dwellings and log warehouses, and a chapel, which stand on a flat, timbered mesa well above the river, on its right or southern shore. Here the current of the stream has narrowed, and flows between high banks over a gravelly bed. These terraces, which rise from the water, are flat-topped, and covered with a tall growth of spruce. Mossy tundras and grassy meadows roll in between forest patches. The timber is much larger here than it is anywhere else in the great Alaskan interior, and that scenery along this river is far wilder and more agreeable than any which is so monotonous and characteristic of the Upper Yukon. The desolate flatness and muddy wastes of the Lower Kuskokvim are now replaced by this pleasing change, which we have just mentioned, a short distance below Kolmakovsky.

Back of that post, and clearly defined against the horizon, are the snowy-capped summits of those mountains that form a Nooshagak divide. One of them rises in an oval-pointed crest to a very considerable elevation[154] above all the rest, and is the landmark of every traveller who comes over the Yukon divide to Kolmakov. The river here, as it brawls swiftly in its course, is about seven hundred feet in width, with bends above and below where it expands to fully twice that distance.

While the Kuskokvim is the only considerable rival of the Yukon in this whole Alaskan country, yet when seriously contrasted with the great Kvichpak[155] itself, then the Kuskokvim bears about the same resemblance to it that the Ohio River does to the Mississippi.

Kolmakovsky marks the limit of inland migration allotted to the Innuit race on its banks, who are not permitted by those Tinneh tribes of the interior to advance farther up the river. It is also removed from that disagreeable influence of Bering Sea, where the prevalence of rain and of furious protracted gales of wind make life a burden to a white man on the Lower Kuskokvim. Its environing forests break the force of these storms, and there is also less fog, so that the sun usually shines out clear and hot, especially in July and August.

In the winter season, when frost has locked up miry swales and swamps, and snow lies in deep, limitless drifts, a white hunter at Kolmakov can join the Kuskokvamoots in trailing and shooting giant moose which come down from the mountains of the Nooshagak divide. This animal is quickly apprehended by the native dogs, so that whenever winter weather will permit, a native Innuit spends most of his time, not employed by ice-fishing on the Kuskokvim, in this sport.

The fur-trade at Kolmakovsky is quite active, but it is almost exclusively transacted with a few Indians up the river, and not with the numerous Innuits below. The latter are, commercially speaking, very poor, having not much of anything but little stores of “mahklok” seal-oil. These big phocaceans are almost as great fishermen as the Innuits are themselves, and find the mouth of the Kuskokvim as attractive as it is to their human foes. In this frame of mind the mahklok ventures on to those tidal banks of the estuary below, and this rash habit enables the natives to capture a great many of them there every year. Those Innuits below Kolmakovsky have no land-furs whatever, save a few inferior mink-skins; but they trade their surplus seal-oil with the Indians above and on the Yukon for that ground-squirrel parka and tanned moose-skin shirt which they universally wear. There is an exceeding rankness to an odor of rancid fish-oil, but the aroma from a bag of putrescent seal-oil is simply abominable and stifling to a Caucasian nose—an acrid funk, which pervades everything, and hangs to it for an indefinite length of time afterward in spite of every effort made to disinfect.

The Indians of the Upper Kuskokvim were once said to be a very numerous tribe; but the severity of successive cold winters has so destroyed them, as a people, that to-day they exist there as a feeble remnant only of what they once were. An intelligent trader, Sipari, who has traversed their entire country, in 1872-76, declares that “forty tents,” or one hundred souls is an ample enumeration of their number.

The Innuits of the Lower Kuskokvim are much better physical specimens of humanity than are those of their race living on the Lower Yukon. These latter are called by all traders the most clumsy and degraded of Alaskan savages. The portage from Kolmakovsky to the Kvichpak is only three days’ journey in winter, or five days by water in canoes, during summer. It is a trip made by large numbers of the natives of both streams, in the progress of their natural barter and moose-hunting.

The forests of the Kuskokvim and the Nooshagak mountains and uplands are frequently swept by terrible conflagrations, which utterly destroy whole areas of timber as far as the eye can reach. This ruin of fire, of course, absolutely extinguishes all trapping for any fur-bearing animal hitherto found in those brulé tracts, and entails much privation upon the natives who have been accustomed to gain their best livelihood largely by hunting in those sections. A burnt district presents a desolate front for years after; the fire does not, in its swift passage, do more, at first, than burn the foliage and smaller limbs of trees in a dense spruce forest; but it roasts the bark and kills a trunk, so that all sap-circulation is forever at an end in it. As the years roll by, these trunks gradually bleach out to almost a grayish white, the charred, blackened bark is all weathered off, and gradually such trees fall, as they decay at the stump, in every conceivable direction upon the ground, across one another, like so many jack-straws, making a perfectly impassable barricade to human travel without tedious labor. A brisk growth of small poplars, birch, and willow springs up in place of the original spruce forest, but none of these trees and shrubs ever grow to any great size. At rare intervals a young evergreen is seen to rise in sharp relief, towering over all deciduous shrubbery, and in the lapse of long years it will succeed in supplanting every growing thing around with its own kind again.

The traders at Kolmakovsky make up their furs into snug bales and descend the river in wooden and skin boats, every June, to a point below, about one hundred and fifty miles, where they meet their respective schooners, or go still lower to an anchorage of larger vessels, and renew their annual supplies. These river-boats are then poled and rope-walked up the river back to the post. The principal trade here is beaver, red foxes, mink, marten, land-otter, and brown and black bears.

The traders say it is exceedingly seldom that a white man ever comes in contact with the natives of the Lower Kuskokvim, and that there is nothing to call them there; also, that the labors of the Russian missionaries of the Yukon never extended to this region, though their registers and reports show quite a number of Christians on the Kuskokvim River. The only trace of Christianity among this tribe, outside of the immediate vicinity of a trading-station with its chapel, consists of a few scattered crosses in burial-places adjoining the settlement. At the village of Kaltkhagamute, within three days’ travel of the Russian mission on the Yukon, a graveyard there contains a remarkable collection of grotesquely carved monuments and memorial posts, indicating very clearly the predominance of old pagan traditions over such faint ideas of Christianity as may have been introduced for these people. Among monuments in this place the most remarkable is that of a female figure with four arms and hands, resembling closely a Hindoo goddess, even to its almond eyes and a general cast of features. Natural hair is attached to its head, falling over the shoulders. The legs of this figure are crossed in true oriental style, and two of the hands, the lower pair, hold rusty tin plates, upon which offerings of tobacco and scraps of cotton prints have been deposited. The whole is protected by a small roof set upon posts.

Other burial posts are scarcely less remarkable in variety of feature and coloring, and the whole collection would afford a rich harvest of specimens to any museum. Nearly all these figures are human effigies, though grotesque and misshapen, and drawn out of proportion. No images of animals or birds, which would have indicated the existence of totems and clans in the tribe, were to be seen; but here and there, over apparently neglected graves, a stick, surmounted by a very rude carving of a fish, a deer, or a beluga, indicative of the calling of the deceased hunter, could be discovered.

Petroff, who has made the only hand-to-hand examination ever conducted, by a white man, of the people of the Lower Kuskokvim, says that they resemble in outward appearance their Eskimo neighbors in the north and west, but their complexion is perhaps a little darker. The men are distinguished from those of other Innuit tribes by having more hair on the faces; mustaches being quite common, even with youths of from twenty to twenty-five, while in other tribes this hirsute appendage does not make its appearance until the age of thirty-five or forty. Their hands and feet are small, but both sexes are muscular and well developed, inclined rather to embonpoint. In their garments they differ but little from their neighbors hitherto described, with an exception of the male upper garment, or parka, which reaches down to the feet, even dragging a little upon the ground, making it necessary to gird it up for purposes of walking. The female parkas are a little shorter. Both garments are made of the skins of ground-squirrels, ornamented with pieces of red cloth and bits of tails of that rodent. The women wear no head-covering except in the depth of winter, when they pull the hoods of reindeer parkas over their heads. The men wear caps, made of the skin of an Arctic marmot, resembling in shape those famous Scotch “bonnets,” so commonly worn by Canadians.

Many young men wear a small band of fur around the head, into which they insert eagle and hawk-feathers on festive occasions. A former custom of this tribe, of inserting thin strips of bone or the quills of porcupines through an aperture cut in the septum, seems to have become obsolete, though the nasal slit can still be seen on all grown male individuals. Their ears are also universally pierced for an insertion of pendants, but these seem at present to be worn by children only, who discard them as they grow up. In fact, all ornamentation in the shape of beads, shells, etc., appears to be lavished upon their little ones, who toddle about with pendants rattling from ears, nose, and lower lip, and attired in frocks stiff with embroidery of beads or porcupine-quills, while the older girls and boys run almost naked, and the parents themselves are imperfectly protected against cold and weather by a single fur garment.

The use of the true Eskimo kayak is universal among the Kuskokvagmute, but in timbered regions of the upper river, in the vicinity of Kolmakovsky, the birch-bark canoe also is quite common. The latter, however, is not used for extended voyages or for hunting, but is reserved chiefly for attending to fish-traps, for the use of women in their berrying and fishing expeditions, and for crossing rivers and streams.

The only indigenous fruit which this large population of the Lower Kuskokvim can enjoy is that of the pretty little “moroshkie,” or red raspberry,[156] which grows in great abundance on its short, tiny stalks throughout all swales and over rolling tundra. These berries are saturated in rancid oil, however, before they are eaten to any great extent, being air-dried first and pressed into thin cakes; then, as wanted, they are pounded up in mortars and boiled, or simply thrown into a wooden basin (or kantag) of oil. Then the fingers, or rude horn spoons, are dipped in by happy feeders, who apparently relish this ill-savored combination just as keenly as one of our Gothamitic gourmands appreciates the flavor of a Chesapeake terrapin stewed in champagne.