Our Arctic province

The same ill-favored and heartily-hated “dog-fish”[24] of our Cape Cod fishermen is also very abundant in these far-away waters. Recently, the demand created for its oil by the tanneries of Oregon and California has made its capture by the Indians an important source of revenue to them; the oil rendered from its liver is readily sold by them to the white traders, who also have established a fishery for the purpose on Prince of Wales Island. These traders also are making good use of herring-oil, which is to be secured here in unfailing, abundant supply, to any quantity required.

The most grateful condiment to the Sitkan palate is rancid fish-oil, or oolachan “butter”—a semi-solid grease, with a fetid smell and taste; into this they always dip or rub their flakes of dried fish, their berries, in fact everything that they eat. A little wooden trencher or tub, grotesquely carved, always is to be seen (and smelled), placed alongside of the monotonous kettle of stewed fish, or pile of dried fish, which constitutes the regular spread for a full meal. And again, a very curious, soap-like use of this oil is made by the younger and more comely savages. An Indian never washes in water up in this wet and watery wilderness. I never have seen an attempt made to wash the face or hands with water, but they do rub oil vigorously over, and scrub it off bright and dry with a towel, or mop, of cedar-bark shreds or dry sedge-grass. The constant presence of this strong-flavored oil renders it a physical impossibility for a white man, not long-accustomed to its odor, to enter a rancherie and eat with the inmates, unless the pangs of starvation make him ravenous.

Whether from taste itself, or sheer indolence, the culinary art of these people is confined to the incessant simmering and boiling of everything which is not eaten raw, or ripe; copper, sheet-iron, and brass kettles being now universally used, are the only decided innovation made by contact with ourselves in their aboriginal cooking outfit, though the introduction of tin and cheap earthenware dishes is growing more general every day. Most of the Indian household utensils are made of wood; they are fashioned in several forms or types, which appear to have been faithfully copied from early time. The berry and the food-trays are cut out of solid pieces of wood, the length being about one and one-third times as great as the width, while the depth is relatively small. In some of the large rancheries these trays, or troughs, are six to ten feet long; the outer ends of those receptacles are generally carved richly in all sorts of fancy relief; and, sometimes, the sides are grotesquely painted. A common form, and smaller in size, and a great favorite with the family, is boat-shaped, the hollow of the dish being oval; the ends are provided with odd prow-shaped projections that serve as handles—one of these ends being usually carved into the head and fore-feet of some animal or bird, the other to represent its hind-feet and tail. These dishes are seldom more than eight or ten inches in length, and curve upward from the middle each way, like the “sheer,” or the gunwale, of a clipper ship.

Water-dippers, pot-spoons and ladles are made from horns of the mountain sheep. They are steamed, bent, and pared down thin, carved and shaped so as to be exceedingly symmetrical, and well finished. The stew and berry-spoons in ordinary use are made from the stiff, short black horns of the mountain goat, the handles often carved to represent a human form, animal, or bird. Knives of all sorts are now in use. Much ingenuity is often exhibited by the adaptation of old blades to new handles—in converting the large, flat blacksmithing files into keen weapons, and making fish-cleaning knives out of pieces of iron; thin, square or oblong sheets of this metal are so fitted into oblong wooden handles as to resemble the small hash-knives used in our kitchens.

But the Sitkan housekeeper glories in her boxes—great chests and little ones—in which she stores everything of value belonging to the family, except the dogs and the canoes. The big boxes, corded up with bark ropes, are her blanket and fur treasuries; the smaller ones contain her oolachan “butter” and dried fish and meat. The larger chests are from two and a half to four feet square; the lesser are between a foot to two feet. The sides of such a box are made of a single piece of thinly shaven cedar board, which by steaming is bent three times at a right angle, and pegged tightly and very neatly up to the fourth corner. The bottom is a separate solid plank, keyed in with little pegs very solidly, and water-tight; the cover is cut out of a thick slab, and fits over and sets down heavily on the upper edge of the chest. Those boxes are all decorated in designs of the peculiar type so common among these savages, painted in black and white. The next desideratum of the squaw is a full supply of cedar-bark mats, which she plaits from strips of this material, and which are always spread out on the ground or rude plank floor when the Indian prepares to roll up in his blanket for slumber. Such mats are the pride of all Thlinket squaws, and vary much in texture and in pattern.

But the daily routine of the dusky housekeeper is a very different one indeed from that characteristic of woman’s labor in caring for our homes. No sweeping or dusting in the Indian rancherie; no bed-chambers to change the linen in and tidy up; no kitchen or servants to look after; nothing whatever of the kind. Yet the Indian matron is always busy. She has to hew the firewood and drag it in; she has to carry water and attend to all of the rude cooking and filling of the trenchers; she looks after the mats and the sewing of the children’s fur and other garments—not much to be sure in the way of dressmaking—she has to make all of the tedious berry-trips, picking and drying of the fruit, as well as attending to the preservation, in the same manner, of the fish and game which the man brings in. She has an infinite amount of drudgery to do in the line of gathering certain herbs, bark, and shell-fish. Many small roots indigenous to the country, containing more or less starch, are eagerly sought after, dried, and stored away by the women. The inner sap-layer of the spruce and also that of the hemlock—the cambium layer—is collected by cutting the trees down and then barking the trunks for that object. It is shaved off in ribbons and eaten in great quantities, both fresh and dried, and is considered very wholesome. It is sweet, mucilaginous, but distinctly resinous in flavor. The rank-growing seeds, shoots, and leaf-stalks of the Epilobium heracleum, and many others, are plucked and carried by the squaws in huge bundles to the family fire, and there eaten by all hands, the stalks being dipped, mouthful after mouthful, in oil.

She has, however, no washing whatever of clothes to do for anybody, except what little she may see fit to do for herself; she never treats the dishes even to that ordeal. With all this, however, it seems rather strange that the clothes of the Indians, consisting of dresses, shirts and blankets for the men; and for women, petticoats, chemises, dresses (sometimes), and blankets also—that these articles usually appear neat and tolerably clean—the children excepted, as they are always dirty beyond all adequate description. Every individual attends to his or her own washing—if the husband wants a clean shirt, he washes it himself.

Before the introduction of the potato through early white fur-traders, the only plant cultivated by the Alaskan savages was a potent weed which they grew as a substitute for tobacco—the importation of the latter, however, has taken its place entirely to-day, because the Virginian weed is far more pleasant. But the old stone mortars and pestles that are still to be found knocking around the most venerable town-sites, bear evidence to the industry of making native tobacco here ages ago. This plant was prepared for use by drying over a fire on a little frame stretcher, then bruised to a powder in the stone mortars, then moistened and pressed into cakes. It was not smoked in a pipe, but, mixed with a little clamshell lime (burnt for the purpose), it was chewed or held in the cheek, just as the Peruvian Indians use coca.[25] Everybody knows how fond Indians are of tobacco—there is no exception to the rule in Alaska, and no excuse for attempting to recite in these pages the well-worn story anew.

No domesticated animals, except dogs, are to be found with the Alaskan Indians—no cats or fowls. The original breed of curs has been very much disguised by imported strains; the present natives are gray and black, shaggy, wolfish beasts, about the size of a large spitz dog. These cowardly, treacherous animals alone make a white man’s stay in an Indian village a burden to his existence.

The work bestowed by several of the Sitkan clans upon their so-called potato gardens is hardly to be designated as the “cultivation” of that tuber. It forms to-day, this vegetable does, a very important part of the food-supply, and where a white man takes hold of such a garden the result, in a small way, is very satisfactory; but the Siwash finds that the greater part of the low, flat, rich soil in this country is so thickly wooded that the task of clearing the ground is altogether too much for him to even consider, much less undertake. But when he can find a place where an old settlement once existed, though long abandoned—there the sites of decayed rancheries are sure to be of rich, warm soil—such are the spots which the Siwash calls his garden, and where his potatoes are rudely planted, little or no attention being paid to the hoeing and drilling which we deem essential, therefore the variety in use has been run down so that the size and yield is very small, and the quality watery and poor.

While we observe the very general possession of firearms in every rancherie, and we hardly ever see a canoe-load of savages unless the barrels of several muskets or rifles project over the gunwale, yet these Sitkan Indians are not great hunters; but the potent fact that there is no place in all this region where foot travel is practicable into the interior, or even along the coast margin itself, affords an excellent reason; they do, however, kill a very considerable number of black bears every year, at two special seasons therein, i.e., when these brutes are found prowling upon the sea-beach. But they never follow bruin into the mountainous recesses, where he invariably retreats.

In the early spring, during that brief period when the weeds and grasses first grow green along the outskirts of the timber in warm sheltered nooks down by the tide-level, black bears come below from the cold, gloomy cañons above and feed upon the sprouting skunk-cabbage[26] and other succulent shoots, browsing here and rooting up there, these tender growths, just as hogs do in our orchards and clover-fields. Again, late in autumn, when the salmon rush up into the estuaries and through the shallows by countless myriads, bruin is once more tempted down to the sea-beaches, and again gets into trouble. In the same manner the Indians secure the beautiful little mule-deer,[27] which also loves tender vegetation, and in this love falls an easy prey to the silent approach of a canoe with its skulking crew. Geese and ducks, during winter months, spend much time on the quiet fiörds in large flocks, and constitute the chief gunning of the Siwashes, who shoot them from their canoes with the same old flint-lock trade-muskets first used by the whites a hundred years ago. The Indian admires this pattern still above all other patterns—despises the percussion-cap, which in this damp region often fails him, and the trader, knowing this weakness of the savage, always has a stock of these flint-lock muskets, newly made, on hand. A supply is steadily furnished by the Hudson’s Bay Company at Victoria.

But the one thing of joy, of delight, and of infinite use to the native of the Sitkan archipelago is his canoe. Life, indeed, would be a sad problem for him were it not for this adjunct of his own creation. Upon its construction he lavishes the best of his thought, the height of his manual skill, and his infinite patience. The result of this attention is to fashion from a single cedar log a little vessel which challenges our admiration invariably, for its fine outline and its seaworthiness and strength.

All the canoes of this region have a common model, and are similar in type, though they differ much in details of shape and size. They are all made from the indigenous pine[28] and giant cedar,[29] the wood of which is light, durable, and worked very readily; but it is apt to split parallel to its grain. This constitutes the only solicitude of the Indian’s mind. He keeps the canoe covered with mats and brush whenever it is hauled out, even for a few days, to avoid this danger, for whenever a canoe is heavily laden, and working, as it will do, in a rough channel, it is in constant danger of splitting at the cleavage lines of its grain, and thus jeopardizing its living as well as dead freight.

With an exception of the bow and stern-pieces, each canoe, no matter how large or how small, is made in the same manner and from a single log, which is roughed out in the forest, then towed around to the permanent village, where it is hauled up in front of the architect’s house. Here he works upon it during winter months, usually in odd hours, employing nothing but his little adze-like hatchet and fire to assist in giving it shape and fine lines. The requisite expansion amidships, to afford that beam required, is effected by steaming with water and hot stones and the insertion of several thwart sticks. Canoes are smoothed outside and painted black, with a red or white streak under the gunwale in most cases; inside they bear the regular fine tooth-marks of the excavating adze, and are smeared with red-ochre. The paddles are usually made of yellow cypress, and a great variety of small wooden baling dippers are also provided, one or two for each canoe, because the water often slops over the gunwales in bad weather. The canoe itself is never suffered to leak. The average size is one of fifteen to twenty feet in length, which will carry from eight to ten savages, with baggage. One having a length of from thirty to thirty-five feet carries as many men. The smaller canoes of from twelve to thirteen feet are usually used by one or two savages in their quick, irregular trips to and from the village, and are easily launched and hauled out by one man.

It is very doubtful, indeed, whether the Sitkan ever took or takes any real enjoyment in hunting or fishing. If he does, it is never exhibited on his countenance or evidenced by his language. It is, in fact, the serious business of his life, and the steady routine of its prosecution has robbed him of every enjoyable sporting sensation which we love to experience when after fish or game. Perhaps, however, he may recall the thrill of that feeling which he felt when, as a boy, he was first taken out in his father’s canoe to the halibut banks, and there permitted to bait a huge wooden hook and haul away upon the taut kelp-line when the “kambala” had swallowed it; but the necessity of going out to this shoal in all sorts of disagreeable weather every summer and winter of his subsequent existence, at very frequent intervals, soon destroyed pleasurable emotions. Therefore, he fashions his acute-angled wooden hooks, his iron-tipped fish and seal spears, and polishes up his musket with none of those enjoyable anticipations which possess the soul of a white sportsman.

In 1841-42 the best understanding of the Russian and English traders agreed in reporting a population of over twenty thousand Indians within the limits of the Alexander archipelago; to-day the same country can show no more than a scant seven thousand. The inroads that small-pox and measles have made, by which these savages were destroyed even as fire sweeps through and burns drought-withered thickets, leave little doubt as to the great numerical superiority of earlier days as compared with the present. This decay and abandonment is everywhere exhibited now even in the permanent villages, where houses have been deserted completely: some are shut up, mouldering, and rotting away upon their foundations; others, large and fit for the shelter of fifty or sixty natives, will be found tenanted by only two or three Siwashes. All the standing carved posts in this entire region, with rare exceptions, are, as a rule, more or less advanced into decay. A rank growth of weeds, dark and undisturbed in some cases, presses up close to inhabited houses, the traffic not being sufficient to keep them down. The original features of these settlements, in a few years more of this unchecked neglect and decay, will have entirely disappeared as they have already at Sitka. At the present hour, however, we can go among them, and readily call up to our minds what they once were when they were swarming with occupants who were dressed in tanned-leather shirts and sea-otter cloaks, as they thronged about the ships of Cook and Vancouver.

Slavery, which was originally firmly interwoven with the social fabric of these people, has been about abolished—slaves themselves to-day are very scarce, and are not much more so than in name. They were the captives taken in savage warfare between opposing clans, and were most horribly tortured and cruelly treated by their masters.

As a rule the young people marry young, after the stolid fashion of Indians. They approve of polygamy, but seldom do you find a man with more than one squaw, simply because the women do not contribute materially and primarily to the support of the family, and attend only to the accessory duties of it; thus it becomes an increased tax upon the dull energies of the savage whenever he adds an extra woman to his household. The squaws are all well treated everywhere up here; they have just as much to say as their lords and masters whenever the occasion of buying, selling, or hiring arises; as to the children (we will not see many of them to-day), they are always kindly cared for by both parents, and the whole tribe is as indulgent, since they are constantly roaming about the village, after the custom of youngsters universally.

A candid verdict will result, in view of the surroundings of the Koloshian, that the only vice which can be legitimately charged up against him, or his kind, is the sin of gambling. To this dissipation the Alaskan savage is desperately prone; the monotonous chant of the stick-shuffling players is ever on the air in the villages. These worthies sit on the ground, in a circle usually, in the centre of which a mat is spread; six or seven small wooden pins about as large as the little finger of your hand, upon which various values are marked or carved, are taken into the hands of the first gambler, who thrusts them into a ball of soft teased cedar bark, or holds them under his blanket, then shuffles them rapidly, meanwhile shouting a deep guttural hah-hah-ee-nah-hah! the others watch him with lynx-like eyes for a few moments, when one of the players suddenly orders the shuffler to show his hands, in which the sticks are firmly clinched, and at the same time endeavors to guess the value of these sticks in either one hand or the other, which have been held up—he pauses a moment, then makes his decision, the clinched hand designated is opened, the little sticks fall to the mat, and the caller wins or loses just as he happens to hit the value expressed by the markings on these pins: if he guesses correctly he wins everything in the pot or pool, and takes up the wooden dice in turn, to shuffle, shout, and repeat for the rest of the circle. This game is usually sustained night and day, until some one of the party remains the winner of everything that the others started in with.

That wretched debauchery which an introduction of rum into the rancheries of these natives has caused, cannot be justly laid at the Indian’s door; this intense morbid craving for liquor among the Alaskan savages of this region is most likely due to the climate—it is not near so strong in the appetite of the natives who live east of the coast range. Although Congress has legislated, and our officials have endeavored to carry out the prohibition statutes, yet the matter thus far is wholly beyond control—the savage cannot only smuggle successfully within these intricate watery channels, but he now thoroughly understands the distillation of rum itself from sugar and molasses.

There is something in this atmosphere which enables a white man to drink a great deal more with impunity than he can in any other section of the United States or Territories—the quantities of strong tea, the nips of brandy, wine, and cordials which he will swallow with perfect physical indifference, in the course of every day of his life, at Sitka for instance, would drive him to delirium in an exceedingly short time if repeated at San Francisco. Naturally enough, we find that the same craving for stimulants is reflected by Indian stomachs; and now that they have fully grasped the understanding of how to successfully satisfy that aching, no valid reason can be presented why the Thlinket will not continue to gratify a burning desire in this fatal direction to the ultimate extinction of his race. This fault of our civilization is far more potent to effect his worldly degeneration, than any one or all of our combined virtues are to regenerate his earthly existence.