The Aleutian Islands.—A Great Volcanic Chain.—Symmetrical Beauty of Shishaldin Cone.—The Banked Fires in Oonimak.—Once most Densely Populated of all the Aleutians; now Without a Single Inhabitant.—Sharp Contrast in the Scenery of the Aleutian and Sitkan Archipelagoes.—Fog, Fog, Fog, Everywhere Veiling and Unveiling the Chain Incessantly.—Schools of Hump-back Whales.—The Aleutian Whalers.—Odd and Reckless Chase.—The Whale-backed Volcano of Akootan.—Striking Outlines of Kahlecta Point and the “Bishop.”—Lovely Bay of Oonalashka.—No Wolf e’er Howled from its Shore.—Illoolook Village.—The “Curved Beach.”—The Landscape a Fascinating Picture to the Ship-weary Traveller.—Flurries of Snow in August—Winds that Riot over this Aleutian Chain.—The Massacre of Drooshinnin and One Hundred and Fifty of his Siberian Hunters here in 1762-63.—This the Only Desperate and Fatal Blow ever Struck by the Docile Aleutes.—The Rugged Crown and Noisy Crater of Makooshin.—The Village at its Feet.—The Aleutian People the Best Natives of Alaska.—All Christians.—Quiet and Respectful.—Fashions and Manners among Them.—The “Barrabkie.”—Quaint Exterior and Interior.—These Natives Love Music and Dancing.—Women on the Wood and Water Trails.—Simple Cuisine.—Their Remarkable Willingness to be Christians.—A Greek Church or Chapel in every Settlement.—General Intelligence.—Keeping Accounts with the Trader’s Store.—They are thus Proved to be Honest at Heart.—The Festivals, or “Prazniks.”—The Phenomena of Borka Village.—It is Clean.—Little Cemeteries.—Faded Pictures of the Saints.—Attoo, the Extreme Western Settlement of the North American Continent.—Three Thousand Miles West of San Francisco!—The Mummies of the “Cheetiery Sopochnie.”—The Birth of a New Island.—The Rising of Boga Slov.

After “lying-to” in a fierce southwester for three whole days and nights, in which time the fury of the gale never abated for an hour, our captain had so husbanded his resources that, when the weather moderated, he was able to clap on sail and get under swift headway; then we quickly left the watery area of our detention and soon opened up a splendid vista of Oonimak Island, in the early dawning of a clear June day. This is the largest one of that longextended archipelago which stretches as an outreaching arm for Asia from America; it presents to our delighted gaze a sweep of richly-colored, rolling uplands, which either slope down gently to the coast at intervals, or else terminate in chocolate-brown and reddish cliffs abruptly stopped to face the sea breaking at their feet. Very high ridges, with summits entirely bare of vegetation, traverse the centre of the island from east to west, while the towering snowy cone of Shishaldin and the lower, yet lofty, head of Pogromnia—two volcanoes—rear themselves over all in turn.

There are a multitude of huge and cloud-compelling mountains in Alaska, but it is wholly safe to say that Shishaldin is the most beautiful peak of vast altitude known upon the North American continent; it rears its perfectly symmetrical apex over eight thousand feet in sheer height above those breakers which thunder and incessantly roll against its flanks, as these precipitous slopes fall into the great Pacific Ocean on the south, and Bering Sea to the north. A steamy jet of vapor curls up lazily from its extreme summit, but it has not been eruptive or noisy at any time within the memory of the Russians. No foothills, that crowd up against and dwarf the presence of most high mountains, embarrass your view of Shishaldin; from every point of the compass it presents the same perfect cone-shape; rising directly from the water and lowlands of Oonimak, it holds and continues long to charm your senses with its rare magnificence; the distance of our vessel, ten or twelve miles away, serves to soften down its lines of numerous seared and blackened paths of prehistoric lava overflow, so that they now softly blend their purplish tones into those of the rich-hued mantle of golden-green mosses and sphagnum which cover the rolling lower lands.

As we draw into Oonimak Pass—it is the gateway for all sailing vessels bound to Bering Sea from American ports, we, in closing up with the land, almost lose sight of Shishaldin, and come into the shadow of the rougher and less attractive volcano of Pogromnia. It shows ample evidence of its origin by the streams of blackened frost-riven basalt and breccia which are ribbed upon its rugged sides; great masses of eruptive rock and pumice lie here and there scattered all over the broad-stubbed head of the mountain; tons and tons of this material have rolled from thence in lavish profusion and disorder, clear down for miles to the very waters of the sea and straits, strewing that entire route with huge débris. Seams of snow and ice lacquer, in white, thread the bold black crown of this, the “booming” or “noisy” volcano of the Russians. It has not been in action since 1820, when it then threw showers of ashes and pumice; but those fires in its furnace are only banked, as it has been smoking in inky brown and black clouds at irregular and frequent intervals ever since; loud mutterings, deep rumblings and wide-felt tremors of land and sea are aroused by it constantly. This Island of Oonimak has been always regarded by the Russians as the roof of a subterranean smelting furnace with many chimneys through which telluric forces ascended from the molten masses beneath. It has been, and is still, the theatre of the greatest plutonic activity in Alaska. Russian eye-witnesses have described violent earthquakes here where whole ridges of the interior and coast have been rent asunder, cleft open, from which torrents of lava poured and columns of flame and clouds of ashes, steam and smoke, have risen so as to be viewed and noticed for a circuit of hundreds of miles around. These manifestations were always accompanied by violent earthquakes, and tidal-waves which often submerged adjacent villages on the sea-level, and also whole native settlements were swept away in mountain floods caused by the sudden melting of those big banks of ice and snow on such volcanic summits and their foothills, upon which the hot breccia from a vomiting crater fell.[69]

This great island in olden times was the one most densely populated by the Aleutes. The excesses and terrible outrages of Russian promishlyniks, followed by the wholesale work of death wrought by small-pox, have utterly eliminated every human settlement from the length and breadth of Oonimak, upon which no one has resided since 1847. Ruins on the north shore show the abandoned sites of numerous large hamlets; one was over four thousand two hundred feet in its frontage on the beach. The fear and superstition which those tragedies of early Russian intercourse produced in the simple minds of the natives, who belonged by birth to this great island, became at length so potent as to cause the entire and permanent abandonment of their desolated villages, which were once so populous and well satisfied.

The craters, and outflow therefrom, on Oonimak have been, from time immemorial, resorted to by the natives as their store-houses for sulphur, and that shining obsidian with which they tipped their bone-spear and arrow-heads; of it, also, they made their primitive knives, and traded the surplus stock to those Aleutes living elsewhere. They used the sulphur with dried moss in making fires, which they started with the fire-stick and by rocky concussions.[70]

Before entering the straits of Oonimak, we had a fine view of the entire sweep of the Krenitzin group, that presents a succession of the wildest and most irregular peaks and bluffs, everywhere seeming to jut up and fall into the sea, without a gentle slope for a human landing, as they face the Pacific billows dashing so incessantly upon their basaltic bases; the extreme eastern islet of the group is Oogamok, and it forms the opposite land from Cape Heethook on Oonimak, directly across the straits. A swarm of sea-parrots fly out from its rocky bluffs on the south shore, stirred into unwonted activity and curiosity by the near approach of our vessel, while a dozing herd of sea-lions suspiciously stretch their long necks into the air, smell us, then simultaneously and precipitately plump themselves into the foaming breakers just below their basking-place above the surf-wash.

It is very difficult to adequately define or express those varying impressions which are inspired by a panorama of these Aleutian Islands, such as unfolds itself to your eye when rapidly sailing along under their lee on a clear day. The scene is one of rare beauty. The water is blue and dancing until it strikes in heavy waves upon the rocky curbing of the islands, dashing up clouds of spray in white, fleecy masses against the dark-brown and reddish cliff-walls rising over all. The slopes and the summits of everything on land, save the very highest peaks, are clothed in an indescribably rich green and golden carpet of circumpolar sphagnum; exquisitely-colored lichens[71] adorn the stony sea-bluffs and precipices inland. Every minute of the ship’s progress in a free, fair wind shifts the fascinating scene—a new peak, another bold headland, a narrow pass, unfolds now between two islets that just before apparently were solid and as united as one island could be; a steamy jet of hot-spring vapor rises from a deeper, richer mass of green and gold than that surrounding it, and a dark-brownish column of smoke that issues from a lofty, cloud-encircled summit in the distance is the burning crater of Akootan.

Everything is so open here, is so plain to see, that when you try to find some points of resemblance to that picture which has challenged your admiration in the Sitkan archipelago, you find nothing—absolutely nothing—in common effect. It is, nevertheless, just as attractive, just as grand; but how different! All is laid perfectly bare to inspection here—no dense forests and tangled thickets to conceal the surface of the diversified uplands and mountain slopes, or to hide the innermost recesses of the deep ravines and narrow valleys. While there is a vast variation in the islands, yet there is, to the mind of him who views them for the first time, the most helpless inability on his part to distinguish or even recognize them apart when he happens to revisit them. They are seldom ever clearly defined, being more or less obscured in fog and heavy rifts of cloud. The top of a headland peeps aloft, sharply outlined, while all below is lost in the mists and banks of fog that roll up there from the sea. Then, in remarkable contrast, only a few miles beyond, the rocks at sea-level and foothills of the next island will be entirely plain to your sight; while everything above is concealed, in turn, by a curtain of the same moist and vanishing misty fog. Fog, fog, fog everywhere, rising and descending with the force of wind-currents that bear it—now veiling, now revealing the startling and impressive beauties of this vast sea-girt chain of the Aleutian archipelago. These majestic blue swells of the great Pacific join with those cold green waves of that lesser, shallower ocean of the North in holding with firm embrace the most impressive range of fire-eaten mountains known to the geographer. This cordon of smoking, grumbling, quaking hills and peaks, when once surveyed, leaves an enduring image, grand and superb, on the retina of that eye which has been so fortunate as to behold it.

As the little schooner bears up to the westward for our port of Oonalashka, after we have well passed the Straits of Oonimak, we sail into the shorter, choppy waters of Bering Sea—into its characteristic light gray-green hue of soundings. The precipitous walls of Akoon Island, rising like so much Titanic sandstone masonry everywhere abruptly from the surf, carry a broad green plateau, that rolls and extends high above the surrounding tide-level. Here, under their lee, on the north shore, we encounter one of those large schools of humpback whales[72] which are so common and so frequently met with in the Aleutian straits and passages. These animals rise and sink alongside of the vessel, in utter disregard of its presence; and even volleys and bullets of our breech-loading rifles rapidly fired into their broad, glistening, gray-black backs and sides do not seem to arouse or alarm them in the least. Down they lazily go, to soon rise again with a sonorous whistle as they “blow.” A cloud of whale-birds hover over and settle on the watery area occupied by the feeding whales, ever and anon rising, to alight again as the cetacean fleet leaves its feathered convoy tossing behind on the wavelets of the sea.

Our skipper, who has been a whaler in his youth, tells us, with a quaint air of contempt for what we so much admire, that these fish-like monsters are of no consequence in the eyes of a wise whaling captain, for though they are large enough, it is true, yet they are the wrong breed of whales—they are lean, fighting humpbacks, which, if struck with a harpoon, will run like an express engine for fifty miles or more, carrying a boat and crew of our species, either down in its rapid rush, or else diving in the shoals, over which it feeds, it rolls the death-dealing iron out or breaks it off on the bottom.

A stiff head-wind causes the course of the vessel to frequently lie close in to the shore where the massive bluffs of Akoon and Akootan rise in grim defiance, and from the shelves and interstices of which flocks of sea-parrots and little auks fly out in circling flights of curiosity and inspection around the schooner. As we watch the lazy motions of the whales, we recall the fact that on the summits of these bluffs and headlands now before us, the natives of Oonimak, as well as those to the country born, were in the habit of standing through long vigils of daily and nightly watch, as they went whale-fishing long ago after their own primitive fashion.

Nothing fit to eat is, or was, so highly prized by the Aleutes or Kaniags, as the blubber and gristle of a whale. To secure this luxury these savages were in the habit of subjecting themselves to infinite hardship and repeated bitter disappointment. The chase of the “ahgashitnak”[73] and the little “akhoaks”[74] was the important business of their lives in times of peace. The native hunter used, as his sole weapon of destruction, a spear-handle of wood about six feet in length; to the head of this he lashed a neatly-polished socket of walrus ivory, in which he inserted a tip of serrated slate that resembled a gigantic arrow-point, twelve or fourteen inches long and four or five broad at the barbs, and upon the point of which he carved his own mark

In the months of June and July the whales begin to make their first inshore visits to the Aleutian bays, where they follow up schools of herring and shoals of Amphipoda, or sea-fleas, upon which they love to feed. These bays of Akootan and Akoon were and are always resorted to more freely by those cetaceans than are any others in Alaska, and here the hunt is continued as late as August. When a calm, clear day occurs the natives ascend the bluffs and locate a school of whales; then the best men launch their skin-canoes, or bidarkas, and start for the fields. “Two-holed” bidarkas only are used. The hunter himself sits forward with nothing but his whale-spear in his grasp; his companion, in the after hatch, swiftly urges the light boat over the water in obedience to his order. Carefully looking the whales over, the hunter finally recognizes that yearling, or the calf, which he wishes to strike; for it is not his desire to attack an old bull or angry cow-whale. He calculates to a nice range where the “akhoak” will rise again from its last point of disappearance, and directs the course of the bidarka accordingly. If he is fortunate he will be within ten or twenty feet of the rising calf or yearling, and as it rounds its glistening back slowly and lazily out from its cover of the wavelets the Aleut throws his spear with all his physical power, so as to bury the head of it just under the stubby dorsal fin of that marine monster; the wooden shaft is at once detached, but the contortions of the stricken whale only assist to drive and urge the barbed slate-point deeper and deeper into its vitals. Meanwhile the canoe is paddled away as alertly as possible, before the plunging flukes of the tortured animal can destroy it or drown its human occupants.

As soon as the whale is thus wounded it makes for the open sea, where “it goes to sleep” for three days, as the natives believe; then death intervenes, and the gases of decomposition cause its carcass to float, and, if the waves and currents are favorable, it will be so drifted as to lodge on a beach at some locality not so very remote from the place where it was struck by the hunter. The business of watching for these expected carcasses then became the great object of everyone’s life in that hunters’ village; dusky sentinels and pickets were ranged over long intervals of coast-line, stationed on the brows of the most prominent headlands, where they commanded an extensive range of watery vision. But the caprices of wind and tides are such in these highways and byways of the Aleutian Islands, that on an average not more than one whale in twenty, struck in this manner by native hunters, was ever secured; nevertheless, that one alone (when cast ashore) amply repaid the labor and the exposure incurred chiefly by watching day after day, in storm and fog, from the bluffs of Akoon and Akootan. The lucky hunter who successfully claimed, by his spear-head mark, the credit of slaying such a stranded calf or yearling, was then an object of the highest respect among his fellow-men, and it was remembered well of him even long after death.[75] Also, the greatest expression of respect for the size and ability of a native village and its people was the statement that it was so populous as to be able to eat all the meat and blubber of a large whale’s carcass in a single day!

As we “put about” under the frowning walls at Cape North, of Akootan, our captain says that the next tack will carry us into Oonalashka Harbor. Meanwhile, as we stand out into the waters of Bering Sea, we have a superb vista of the rugged, seared, and smoking summit of Akootan itself, which rears its hot head high above the rough, rocky island that bears its name. The beaches are few and far between, and there is but little land upon this island to invite a pedestrian, since masses of dark basalt, vesicular and olivine, are scattered in wild profusion everywhere. Over the northeast side steamy clouds arise from the path of a hot spring, which gushes out of the mountain, so hot that meat and fish are cooked in its scalding flood by the natives. On the very crest, as it were, of this whale-backed volcano, are two small, deep lakes that once were the vent-holes of subterranean fires. In olden times seven settlements, with a population of more than six hundred Aleutes, lived on the coast of this island, which, with Akoon, was then the whale-hunter’s paradise. To-day we find it utterly desolate, inhabited by a poverty-stricken hamlet of sixty-five natives, who are located on the southwest shore. The able-bodied men of this place spend the greater part of their time, however, far away from home on the sea-otter grounds of Saanak, being carried, like their brethren of Akoon and Avatanak, to and from that spot by a trader’s vessel.

Closely joined to them is the village of Akoon, in which fifty-five or sixty of their countrymen live on the northwest shore, who hunt and deport themselves as do those of Akootan. The Akoonites, however, enjoy the satisfaction of being nearer than their neighbors to that small, rugged islet of Oogamak, which stands in the path, as it were, of the great Pass of Oonimak; here on the low rocks a comparatively large number of sea-lions repair, and the little hair-seal also. For some reason or other, more of these last-named seals are found here than elsewhere in the entire large extent of this gigantic island chain. Akoon used to boast of many mighty whalers among its prehistoric population of five or six hundred natives, who, in fading away, have left the ruins only of eight settlements to attest their previous proud existence.

While we have noticed the poverty of the Akootans, yet, as we contemplate the wretched little village on Avatanak, close by and facing the straits, we must call this the most abject human settlement, perhaps, that we shall or can find throughout the archipelago—only nineteen souls living here in the most abandoned squalor and apathy, principally upon the sea-castings of the beach and mussels. Yet this island in olden days was the happy home for a busy little fishing community which then had three settlements on the banks of a beautiful stream that empties its clear waters into the sea on its north side. The most revolting chapter in all the long story of Russian outrage and oppression of Aleutian natives is devoted to a recital of the savage brutality of Solovaiyah and Notoorbin, who lived here during the winter of 1763.

Steam-vessels usually make the jagged headlands and peaks of Tigalda Island as their first land-fall en route from San Francisco to Oonalashka and Bering Sea. They then shape their course into Akootan Straits very easily and safely. The currents and winds, which always cause a variation of the ship’s course, never carry the vessel much to the right of Tigalda, or to the left of Avatanak, so that an experienced Alaskan mariner has but little difficulty—even though dense fog prevails, which only gives him fitful gleams of the rude landscape—in recognizing some one of the characteristic peaks or bluffs of these Krenitzin islands; then, with a known point of departure, he can literally feel his way into Oonalashka Harbor. He almost always has to do so, for seldom indeed does he enjoy as fair a sweep of these coasts of Avatanak and Tigalda as that viewed by the author, who scanned this rocky group in a calm, clear September afternoon of 1876.

To-day, Tigalda is an utterly abandoned island, given over during the summer to the undisturbed possession of foxes and those flocks of “tundra” geese which settle on the uplands to breed and preen in safety. When moulting here, they have the shelter of several lakes, upon which they swim in mocking security, even if crafty, lurking Reynard attempts to capture them. Near the largest lake on this island a settlement once throve. The inhabitants had control of a mine of red and golden-yellow chalk, which formed the base of a pigment highly prized by all Aleutes, far and near, for painting their ancient grass, and wooden hats, and other work of the same materials. On the north side of this island is a singular cluster of needle rocks which rise, as twenty-eight points, abruptly from the sea. On them, in positive security, the big burgomaster gull breeds, and the eagle-like pinions of this bird bear thousands of heavy bodies in stately flight over and around these nesting-places. The shrill, hawk-like screams of those “chikies” can be heard far out at sea, over the noise of the surf.

Oogalgan rock, which stands up boldly, and defies that fury of an ocean in the mouth of Oonalga Straits, is another striking headland which the mariner should be well acquainted with, for in times of arrival, when fog prevails, it is often the first land-fall made after leaving California or Oregon, when bound in for Oonalashka. It is a bleak, tempest-swept islet, presenting to the Pacific a black, reddish front of abrupt precipitous cliffs, without a sign of vegetation in the crevices; but, from the inside passages of Akootan and Oonalga, it exhibits two or three saddle-backed slopes covered with green mosses and lichens. Flocks of those comical shovel-billed sea-parrots breed upon it, and skurry in their rapid, noiseless manner all around.

At last our little schooner “comes about,” to make that “reach” which is to take us into the peace and quiet of a beautiful harbor, and, with every sail drawing hard, she fills away, and we glide swiftly ahead. That richly banded waterfall bluff on our right, and the striking outline of Kahlecta Point, over the “Bishop” rock under it, on our left, are eagerly scanned as we dash through the heavy roll of Akootan Straits and its violent tide-rips, the surf breaking on the “Bishop” and the point beyond it most grandly. A short hour, and the rough water is passed. We have entered Captain’s Harbor, and are “fanning” along over a glassy surface up to our anchorage off from, but close by, the village of Oonalashka.[76]

What San Francisco is to California, so is Oonalashka to all Alaska west of Kadiak. It is the point of all arrivals and all departures for and from this vast area. It is most fitly chosen, and beautifully located. From earliest time, an Aleutian legend never failed in its rendition to the dusky people then living in their yourts and kazarmies to vividly impress upon the native mind a full sense of those pleasures of life and hope at Illoolook; not, however, as expressed so sadly by our own bard, whose inimitable poem declares that the wolf howled long and dismally from this lovely shore of Illoolook.

If Campbell had only substituted “Akoon” for “Oonalashka” in this much-admired verse descriptive of savage desolation, he would not have marred a famous passage by the slightest error—but, at Oonalashka, never, never was a wolf ever known to be. In 1830, however, two of these animals got over from Oonimak as far west as Akoon—on drifting ice-floes, most likely. They were speedily noticed by the natives, who killed them at once, so Veniaminov says, for they were cordially hated by the Aleutes, since these beasts “kill foxes and spoil the traps.”

The panorama of land and water here in summer is an exceedingly attractive one—in its effect fully as charming as is the lovely spread of Sitka Sound; but its character is widely opposed. If we chance to view Oonalashka in clear sunshine during a day in the summer months, we will recall this picture to our mind’s eye often with positive pleasure. Here, strung along for half a mile just back of a curved and pebbly beach, is an irregular row of frame, single-story cottages, a large Greek church, and a fine parsonage, three or four big wooden warehouses with a wharf running well into the harbor, two or more trading-stores, one of them quite imposing in its size, and fifty or sixty barraboras—these constitute the abiding-places of the four hundred residents of Illoolook. They are placed upon a narrow spit of alluvium that divides the sea from the waters of a small creek which runs just back of the village right under these hills that abruptly rise there, to rise again, farther inland, to higher peaks in turn. A rich, dark, vivid green covers and clothes the mountain slopes, the valleys, and the hills, even to the loftiest summits, where only a light patch of glistening snow is now and then seen relieved thereon by the grayish-brown rocky shingle. These hills and mountains, rising on every hand above us from the land-locked shores of Captain’s Harbor, bear no timber whatsoever, but the mantle of circumpolar sphagnum, interspersed with grasses and a large flora, makes ample amends for that deficiency and hide their nakedness completely—in their narrow defiles and over the bottom-land patches grass grows with tropical luxuriance, waist-high, with small clumps of stunted willow-bushes clinging to the banks of little water-courses and rivulets. This is the only growing timber found anywhere on the Aleutian chain. It never becomes stouter than the thickness of a man’s wrist, and the tallest bushes in scattered thickets are never over six or seven feet high, rapidly dwindling in growth as they ascend the hillsides.

Especially gratifying is the landscape, thus adorned, to the senses of any ship-worn traveller, who literally feasts his eyes upon it. But if he should go ashore and step upon what appeared to him, from the vessel’s deck, to be a firm greensward, he will find instead a quaking, tremulous bog, or he will slide over a moss-grown shingle, painted and concealed by cryptogamic life, where he fondly anticipated a free and ready path. The thick, dense carpet of crowberry[77] plants that is spread everywhere over the hillsides, into which the pedestrian sinks ankle-deep at every step, makes a stroll very laborious when undertaken at any distance from the sea-beach.

If a wide survey is accomplished here of Oonalashka Island, the studies made will give a perfect understanding of every other island to the westward in this great archipelago, which is enveloped during the major portion of each year in fogs, and swept over by frequent gales. Such a combination of the elements, with mists and hidden sea-currents, make it a region dreaded by mariners; yet there is enough sunshine now and then to make the life of our landsmen very comfortable, even though they cannot engage in any other profitable calling than that of sea-otter trading with the natives.

Summers are mild, foggy, and humid. The average temperature is about 50° Fahrenheit. Winters are also mild, foggy, and humid, with a slightly colder average of 30°. The thermometer nowhere in the Aleutian chain ever went much below zero at sea-level. There is no record even of a consecutive three or four weeks in winter lower than 3° or 5° above zero. The mercury seldom ever falls as low as 10°. There is no nice distinction of the four seasons here. We can notice only two. Winter begins in October and ends by May 1st to 5th, when summer suddenly asserts herself for the rest of the year not thus appropriated.

Flurries of snow sometimes fall in August and often in September. It never stays long on the ground or even on the hilltops then, and generally melts as fast as it comes, away into December; but on the highest peaks it is seen all the year round. From January to May 1st or 5th, as a rule, snow covers everything in a spotless shroud from two to five feet deep. The high, blustering wintry gales make this snow intensely disagreeable to us, driving into and through air-tight crevices, and literally making the inmates of the village huts prisoners for weeks at a time. The dogs and sleds so common and characteristic elsewhere in the vast expanse of Alaska are never seen here. They would be a mere nuisance to these people, since the rugged inequalities of the Aleutian country simply prohibit their use.

This is, however, the chosen land for lingering fogs. The foggy cloudiness of the Aleutian Islands is most remarkable. There are not a dozen fogless days in the whole year at Oonalashka, though the sun may be seen half the time. Fifty sunshiny days in the year is a handsome average. Thunder is never heard, or seldom ever, while lightning is never seen, although the dark swelling clouds seem to constantly suggest it; also the northern lights—these auroral displays are almost unknown, and when seen are very, very faint.

But the wind—ah, the winds that riot over this range of rocky islands! They are always stirring. A perfect calm has never been recorded at Oonalashka. They are strong and come from all points of the compass; they are freshest and most violent in October and November, December, and March. Gales follow each other in quick succession during these months every year, lasting usually about three days each.

All sides of Oonalashka Island are deeply indented by bays and fiörds; but the points on the southern coast are avoided and not well known. They are not safe to approach on account of reefs and rocks, awash and sunken, which extend out to sea a long distance, and upon them the heavy billows of the Pacific Ocean break incessantly, as well as against the cliff-beaches of this forbidding shore. But around the northern and eastern margins of the island more good harbors are located than can be found on all of the other islands of the Aleutian archipelago put together. They call the bay which we entered, as we sailed in from Akootan Pass, “Captain’s Harbor.” It is the same place where the natives first gazed upon a white man and his ship after the frightful massacres of 1762 and 1763. Here in 1769 Layvashava, with a crew of those Siberian promishlyniks, anchored during the whole of one autumn and engaged the astonished inhabitants in active trade; but it was a guarded and tedious barter, since the Aleutes had a lively recollection of the terrible past, so recent and so bloody.

The island of Oonalashka chanced to be the scene of that only real desperate and fatal blow ever struck by the simple natives of the Aleutian chain at their Cossack oppressors. By 1761 the Russians had advanced to the eastward as far as Oonimak, and up to this time the relations between the natives and the white invaders had been altogether of an outwardly friendly character, the former submitting, as a rule, patiently to the demands of the newcomers, but the Cossack Tartars, encouraged by their easy conquests, rapidly proceeded from bad to worse, committing outrages of every kind, so that in 1762 they had reduced the Aleutes to the verge of absolute slavery, and continued to act in this manner until the patience and the timidity of the simple race were exhausted. The arrival of a brutal, domineering, lustful party of over one hundred and fifty of these Cossack Russians at Chernovsky, on the northwest coast of this island, in the summer of 1762, under the nominal command of a Siberian trader named Drooshinnin, proved to be “the last straw laid upon the camel’s back.” At a given signal the despoiled and ravished natives arose in every one of the then populous Oonalashkan settlements (twenty-four villages), flocked together, and unitedly fell upon their oppressors. They slaughtered every man except four, who happened, luckily for them, to have been absent from their vessels in Chernovsky Harbor, hunting grouse in the mountains. They were secreted in the recesses of a hot cave (that is still pointed out in the flanks of Makooshin Mountain), by the kindness of a charitable native, until they were able to escape and join the expedition of Solovaiyah, which appeared at the offing of Oomnak early in the following year. Fired by a recital of the Drooshinnin slaughter, this fierce Cossack turned his half-savage comrades, and worse yet, himself, loose upon the unhappy people of Oonalashka, and literally exterminated every male, old and young, that he could find, visiting each settlement in swift rotation of death and desolation. The men and boys fled to the fastnesses of the interior, followed by many of the women, and when the inclemencies of winter began to threaten their starvation, they humbly sued for peace, and became the abject and submissive vassals of the promishlyniks ever after.

A smoking volcano that rears its ragged crown high above all the surrounding hills and peaks is Makooshin; it juts, alone and unsupported, as a bold promontory, five thousand four hundred and seventy-five feet above, and into the green waters of Bering Sea. It is the chief point of scenic interest on Oonalashka Island, and the objective one in particular, if the day be clear, as the visitor sails up and into the harbor of Illoolook. While it is not near so majestic in elevation, or perfect of outline, as the Shishaldin Mountain, yet it is wild and striking. It can be easily ascended in July and August, when the winds do not blow their hardest, and when there is the least snow. No one remembers, nor is there any legend of any disturbance more serious than the shaking of the earth and loud noises which Makooshin is charged with. In 1818 it made the whole island tremble violently during a period of several days, emitting, however, nothing but dense columns of smoke, and fine ashes were sifted lightly everywhere with the winds. A resounding cannonade that then burst from its bowels sorely alarmed the people, however, who fled from their little hamlets clustered at its base.

Immediately under the steep slopes and large proportions of this quiescent volcano is a small settlement of sixty natives, housed in those typical Aleutian barraboras, with a small chapel, of course. Here, in 1880, lived the oldest inhabitant of the Oonalashka parish, an Aleut who had an undisputed age of eighty-three years. These simple souls have that same faith in the good behavior of Makooshin which distinguished the citizens of Herculaneum and Pompeii with reference to the dangers of Vesuvius. But the most amusing indignation is expressed by them in speaking of the bad behavior of an Oomnak crater, just across the straits from them, which in 1878 broke out into earthquakes, smoke, fire, and mud-showers, that so frightened the fish all about in these waters as to literally cause a famine at Makooshin. The finny tribes seem to be driven off by a trembling of the rocky bottom to the sea.

It was at Makooshin that the first Russians landed under Stepan Glottov in 1757. These traders in their reports declared that the natives here then “were very numerous and warlike,” and that they had a great deal of that peculiar trouble with them which we so thoroughly understand now in the light of their infamous record. Certain it is that a more innocent-looking, indolent group of Aleutes cannot be found in all this region to-day than are these descendants of the “blood-thirsty savages,” which Glottov saw in council here. They trap cross-foxes on the flanks of the great mountain which overshadows their settlement, and do but little else. They are not at all impressed by the volcano, and cannot understand why we should walk over a long portage of eight miles from Oonalashka Harbor just to ascend it: because, they say truly, that the chances are ten to one against our seeing anything when we shall get up there, inasmuch as fog will surely shut down over everything. In spite, however, of their argument we ascended, and they were right. We could not see a rod beyond our footing in any direction, and had it not been for their guidance, as the fog continued, we would have had a very difficult matter in regaining the lowlands at all that day.[78]

When Makooshin is seen from Bering Sea, in the early autumn, the snow rests upon its peculiar form so as to make a most striking suggestion of its being extended as a huge corpse, with a sheet thrown over the upper part only of the body. The natives have many folk-lore stories and legends which belong to the mountain; but these yarns are like the ballads of our sailor boys, they run on forever, ending in the same manner as they began. A hot spring sends a little rivulet of warm water across our path as we come down, and we notice that most of the boggy places are tinged with iron oxides.

In overlooking any of these islands from an interior view of high altitude, you are impressed by the large number of fresh-water lakes and ponds that nestle in the valleys, in the uplands, and even in the depressions on the loftiest summits. One of the prettiest pools of water which can be imagined is formed by the red, bowl-shaped walls of an extinct crater that makes the top of Paistrakov Mountain: this is a very prominent landmark just across the bay from Oonalashka village, looking west.

A superb survey of Oonalashka Island can be made by the ascent of Mount Wood, which rears its sharp, syenitic peak two thousand eight hundred feet behind and right over the village and harbor of Illoolook. The path to the summit is not difficult, and the panorama spread out under your eyes well repays the effort. It gives you a better idea of what a singularly mountainous region the island is, of the comparative absence of level or bottom-land areas—everything seems to spring from the surrounding ocean mirror, to hills—from hills, in turn, to mountains that end in sharp and rugged peaks. Upon the rocky, frost-riven shingle of these summits nothing can grow except those tiny polar lichens which we find existing, clinging to the earth and rocks of the uttermost limits of the North as far as we have knowledge.

If the fog lifts its gray-blue curtain from the unruffled, clear surface of Captain’s Harbor, and rolls back and away from the red and brown head of the cold crater of Paistrakov on the left, and from the black, jagged outlines of the “Prince” on your right, you will then have at your feet a picture of surpassing scenic beauty, both of contour and color, before and under your delighted vision. The rougher waters of Bering Sea have power no farther inland than their foaming at the feet of Waterfall Head and the dark bases of the Prince, for they rapidly fade into a smooth, still peace as the queer, hook-like sand-spit of Oolachta Harbor is reached, and the anchorage of Illoolook village is attained; its houses and barraboras just peep out from the obscuring foothills of the mountain upon which we stand, and we can faintly discern a delicate fringe of sea-foam along the border of a long-curved beach in front. Two schooners and a steamer lie motionless upon the glassy bay, like so many microscopic water insects.

Turning right about and looking south, our eyes fall upon a radically different landscape—a bewildering, labyrinthian maze of Oonalashkan mountain peaks and ranges, rising in defiance to all law and order of position, with that lovely island-studded water of the head to Captain’s Harbor in the foreground. Ridge after ridge, summit after summit, fades out one behind the other into the oblivion of distance, where the suggestion of a continuance to this same wild interior is vividly made, in spite of wreaths of fog and lines of snowy sheen, relieved so brightly by that greenish-blue of the mosses and sphagnum in which they are set. A few pretty snow-buntings flutter over the rocks to the leeward of our position; their white, restless forms are the only evidence or indication of animal life in our rugged vista of an Oonalashkan interior. Yet, could we see better, we might notice a lurking red fox, and flush a bevy or two of summer-dressed ptarmigan, feeding as they do on the crowberries, the sphagnum, willow-buds and insect-life.

While gazing into the endless succession of valleys, and scanning the varied peaks, a puff of moist wind suddenly strikes our cheeks—we turn to its direction and behold it bearing in and up from Bering Sea—a thick and darkening bank of fog which rapidly envelopes and conceals everything that it meets. It ends our sightseeing, and peremptorily orders a return to the village below from which we came.

When we look at the Aleutes we are impressed at once with their remarkable non-resemblance to the Sitkans. They constantly remind us of Japanese faces and forms in another costume. The average Aleut is not a large man; he is below our medium standard—being about five feet six inches in stature, though, of course, there are a few exceptions to this rule, when examples will be found six feet tall, and many that are mere dwarfs. The women are in turn proportionately smaller. The hair is coarse, straight, and black; the beard scanty; cheek-bones are broad, high, and very prominent; the nose very insignificant and almost flattened out at the bridge—the nostrils thick and fleshy; the eyes very wide-set—very small, too, with a jet-black pupil and iris; the eyebrows very faintly marked; the lips are thick; the mouth large; the lower jaw is very square and prognathous; the ears are small, set close to the head, and almost always pierced for brass or silver rings. The complexion is a light yellowish-brown; in youth it is often fair, almost white, with a faint blush in the cheeks; in middle age and to senility the skin always becomes very strongly wrinkled and seamed, with a leathery harshness. They all have full even sets of teeth, but never take the least care of them whatever. They have small, well-shaped hands and feet, but the finger-nails are exceedingly thin and brittle, bitten off, and never trimmed neatly. They walk in a clumsy, shambling manner, with none of that lithe, springy stepping so characteristic of the Rocky Mountain Indians. When we meet them as we saunter through the settlement, men, women, and children alike drop their eyes to the ground, and pass by in stupid humility, or indifference, as the case may be.

As we see these people at Oonalashka, so they are seen in every respect elsewhere, as they exist between Attoo and Bristol Bay and the Shoomagin Islands. They spend most of their time, men and women, in their skin-canoes, hunting the sea-lion and sea-otter—in codfishing and travelling to and from their favorite salmon-runs and berrying-grounds. Therefore, they have not enabled a symmetrical figure to develop—their legs are always sprung at the knees, some badly bowed, and all are unsteady in walking. While there is nothing about the countenances of the women or girls which will warrant the term of handsome, yet they are not so ugly as the squaws of the Sitkan archipelago. Many of them have very kindly expressions, and a gleam of true womanly instinct far above their surroundings.

No people are more amiable or docile than are these natives of the Aleutian Islands to-day. They are quiet and respectful in their intercourse with the traders, and are all duly baptized members of the Greek Catholic Church. A chapel is never absent from their villages. They hunt sea-otters and trap foxes for their means of trading for those simple luxuries and necessaries of their life which they cannot find in their own country. There are no other fur-bearing animals here, and no other industries whatever in which they can engage.

As they live here to-day, they are married and sustain very faithfully the relation of husband and wife. Each family, as a rule, has its own hut or barrabora. They have long, long ago ceased to dress in skins; but they still retain and wear the primitive water-proof coat or “kamlayka” and boots or tarbosars, which are made from seal and sea-lion intestines. In the poverty-smitten stations of Akoon and Avatanak the early bird-skin “parkas” will probably be most commonly worn; (but it is because these natives are so miserably poor in furs that they do so). They get from the trader’s store at every village a full assortment of our own shop-made clothes, and, on Sunday in especial, many shiny broadcloth suits will be displayed by the luckier hunters. The women are all attired in cotton dresses and gowns, made up pretty closely in imitation of the prevailing fashions among our own people. They wear the boots and shoes which are regularly brought up from San Francisco. But whenever they go out fox-trapping, or enter their bidarkas, they wear the “tarbosar” or water-proof boot of primitive use—the uppers to it are made from the intestines or the gullets of marine mammalia, and it is soled with the tough flipper palms of a sea-lion.

They have the same weakness for our conventional high stovepipe hats which we display; but the prevalence of those boisterous gales and winds peculiar to these latitudes prevents that use of the cherished “beaver” that they otherwise would make of it. Instead, they universally wear low-crowned, leather-peaked caps, to which they love to add a gay red-ribbon band, suggested most likely by the recollection which they have of that gorgeous regalia of the Russian army and naval officers, who were wont to appear in full dress very often when among them in olden time.

The Aleutian men dress very plainly, young and old alike, little or no attention being given by them to details of color or ornamentation, as is the common usage and practice of most semi-civilized races; but they do lavish a great deal of care and skill in the decoration of their antique “kamlaykas,” “tarbosars,” and their bidarkas: the seams of these garments and the boats are frequently embellished with gay tufts of gaily colored sea-bird feathers and lines of goose-quill embroidery.

True feminine desire for all the bright ribbons and cheap jewelry that a trader spreads before her consumes the heart of the Aleutian woman, especially if she be young and admired by her people. The women are, therefore, only limited by their means, when it comes to bedecking themselves with all of these trinkets and gewgaws of the kind which the artful trader exhibits for that purpose. They braid their hair up in two queues usually and let them hang down behind upon their backs. They never wear bonnets, or hats, for that matter; but as they go to church or from hut to hut they tie cotton handkerchiefs over their heads. When hasty little errands out of doors, or sudden gossiping trips are undertaken, a shawl is thrown over the woman’s head and held there, with the gathered ends together, under her chin by one hand. The shawls are of bright colors, and supply the place of woollen garments, though ready-made cloaks and dolmans are not uncommon at those points where the sea-otter-hunting harvest is the best: her skirts, overskirts, waists, and stockings are all of cotton.

As these people have really but one idea and no variation of occupation, they all live alike, in the same general manner. The difference between the families is only that of relative cleanliness and thrift. The most important and serious business of their shore-life is that embodied in the construction and repair of their huts, or barrabkies. If it is well built it makes a warm, dry shelter, and answers every requirement of a comfortable domicile. An excavation is made in the earth on the spot selected in the village site, ten or twelve feet square, and three or four feet deep. A wooden frame and lining is then put into this sub-cellar, and the excavated earth is then thrown back against and over it, with an outer wall of carefully-cut sod and boggy peat, being laid up two and three feet thick, sloping down to which is a well-thatched roof of grass and sedge, that abounds everywhere on the sandy margins of the sea-shore. Some of these huts are made very much larger than this pattern just defined, having regularly spread wings, like a Maltese cross, on the floor. The entrance to the barrabkie is usually through a low doorway that is made to a small annex or storm hallway, also built of sod and peat. This shields another little door, which opens into the living-room that the architect steps down into as he enters. A single window is put at the opposite end of the room from the door, in which a small glazed sash is usually employed. The floor is either covered with boards which the native has purchased from the trader, or else it is the hard-trodden earth itself, upon which the women strew grass and spread mats of the same texture.

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

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

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

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

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

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