Alaska Part 52

The rivers are all large and, with one exception,--Wood River,--drain the western slope of the Aleutian Chain which, beginning on the western sh.o.r.e of Cook Inlet, extends down the Aliaska Peninsula, crowning it with fire and snow.

There are several breaks in the range which afford easy portages from Bristol Bay to the North Pacific. The rivers flowing into Bristol Bay have lake sources and have been remarkably rich sp.a.w.ning-streams for salmon.

The present chain of islands known as the Aleutians is supposed to have once belonged to the peninsula and to have been separated by volcanic disturbances which are so common in the region.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright by F. H. Nowell, Seattle

FOUR BEAUTIES OF CAPE PRINCE OF WALES WITH SLED REINDEER OF THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY HERD]

The interior of the Bristol Bay country has not been explored. It is spa.r.s.ely populated by Innuit, or Eskimo, who live in primitive fashion in small settlements,--usually on high bluffs near a river. They make a poor living by hunting and fishing. Their food is largely salmon, fresh and dried; game, seal, and walrus are delicacies. The "higher" the food the greater delicacy is it considered. Decayed salmon-heads and the decaying carca.s.s of a whale that has been cast upon the beach, by their own abominable odors summon the natives for miles to a feast. Their food is all cooked with rancid oil.

Their dwellings are more primitive than those of the island natives, for they have clung to the barabaras and other ancient structures that were in use among the Aleutians when the Russians first discovered them. Near these dwellings are the drying-frames--so familiar along the Yukon--from which hang thousands of red-fleshed salmon drying in the sun. Little houses are erected on rude pole scaffoldings, high out of the reach of dogs, for the storing of this fish when it has become "ukala" and for other provisions. These are everywhere known as "caches."

The Innuit's summer home is very different from his winter home. It is erected above ground, of small pole frames, roofed with skins and open in front--somewhat like an Indian tepee. There is no opening in the roof, all cooking being done in the open air in summer.

These natives were once thrifty hunters and trappers of wild animals, from the reindeer down to the beaver and marten, but the cannery life has so debauched them that they have no strength left for this energetic work.

Formerly every Innuit settlement contained a "kashga," or town hall, which was built after the fashion of all winter houses, only larger.

There the men gathered to talk and manage the affairs of their small world. It was a kind of "corner grocery" or "back-room" of a village drug store. The men usually slept there, and in the mornings their wives arose, cooked their breakfast, and carried it to them in the kashga, turning their backs while their husbands ate--it being considered exceedingly bad form for a woman to look at a man when he is eating in public, although they think nothing of bathing together. The habits of the people are nauseatingly filthy, and the interiors of their dwellings must be seen to be appreciated.

Near the canneries the natives obtain work during the summer, but soon squander their wages in debauches and are left, when winter arrives, in a starving condition.

The season is very short in Bristol Bay, but the "run" of salmon is enormous. When this district is operating thirteen canneries, it packs each day two hundred and fifty thousand fish. In Nus.h.a.gak Bay the fish frequently run so heavily that they catch in the propellers of launches and stop the engines.

Bristol Bay has always been a dangerous locality to navigate. It is only by the greatest vigilance and the most careful use of the lead, upon approaching the sh.o.r.e, that disaster can be averted.

Nearly all the canneries in this region are operated by the Alaska Packers a.s.sociation, which also operates the greater number of canneries in Alaska.

In 1907 the value of food fishes taken from Alaskan waters was nearly ten millions of dollars; in the forty years since the purchase of that country, one hundred millions, although up to 1885 the pack was insignificant. At the present time it exceeds by more than half a million cases the entire pack of British Columbia, Puget Sound, Columbia River, and the Oregon and Washington coasts.

In 1907 forty-four canneries packed salmon in Alaska, and those on Bristol Bay were of the most importance.

The Nus.h.a.gak River rivals the Karluk as a salmon stream, but not in picturesque beauty. The Nus.h.a.gak and Wood rivers were both closed during the past season by order of the President, to protect the salmon industry of the future.

Cod is abundant in Behring Sea, Bristol Bay, and south of the Aleutian, Shumagin, and Kadiak islands, covering an area of thirty thousand miles.

Halibut is plentiful in all the waters of southeastern Alaska. This stupid-looking fish is wiser than it appears, and declines to swim into the parlor of a net. It is still caught by hook and line, is packed in ice, and sent, by regular steamer, to Seattle--whence it goes in refrigerator cars to the markets of the east.

Herring, black cod, candle-fish, smelt, tom-cod, whitefish, black ba.s.s, flounders, clams, crabs, mussels, shrimp, and five species of trout--steelhead, Dolly Varden, cutthroat, rainbow, and lake--are all found in abundance in Alaska.

Cook, entering Bristol Bay in 1778, named it for the Earl of Bristol, with difficulty avoiding its shoals. He saw the shoaled entrance to a river which he called Bristol River, but which must have been the Nus.h.a.gak. He saw many salmon leaping, and found them in the maws of cod.

The following day, seeing a high promontory, he sent Lieutenant Williamson ash.o.r.e. Possession of the country in his Majesty's name was taken, and a bottle was left containing the names of Cook's ships and the date of discovery. To the promontory was given the name which it retains of Cape Newenham.

Proceeding up the coast Cook met natives who were of a friendly disposition, but who seemed unfamiliar with the sight of white men and vessels; they were dressed somewhat like Aleutians, wearing, also, skin hoods and wooden bonnets.

The ships were caught in the shoals of Kuskokwim Bay, but Cook does not appear to have discovered this great river, which is the second in size of Alaskan rivers and whose length is nine hundred miles. In the bay the tides have a fifty-foot rise and fall, entering in a tremendous bore.

This vicinity formerly furnished exceedingly fine black bear skins.

Cook's surgeon died of consumption and was buried on an island which was named Anderson, in his memory. Upon an island about four leagues in circuit a rude sledge was found, and the name of Sledge Island was bestowed upon it. He entered Norton Sound, but only "suspected" the existence of a mighty river, completely missing the Yukon.

He named the extreme western point of North America, which plunges out into Behring Sea, almost meeting the East Cape of Siberia, Cape Prince of Wales. In the centre of the strait are the two Diomede Islands, between which the boundary line runs, one belonging to Russia, the other to the United States.

Cook sailed up into the Frozen Ocean and named Icy Cape, narrowly missing disaster in the ice pack. There he saw many herds of sea-horses, or walrus, lying upon the ice in companies numbering many hundreds. They huddled over one another like swine, roaring and braying; so that in the night or in a fog they gave warning of the nearness of ice. Some members of the herd kept watch; they aroused those nearest to them and warned them of the approach of enemies. Those, in turn, warned others, and so the word was pa.s.sed along in a kind of ripple until the entire herd was awake. When fired upon, they tumbled one over another into the sea, in the utmost confusion. The female defends her young to the very last, and at the sacrifice of her own life, if necessary, fighting ferociously.

The walrus does not in the least resemble a horse, and it is difficult to understand whence the name arose. It is somewhat like a seal, only much larger. Those found by Cook in the Arctic were from nine to twelve feet in length and weighed about a thousand pounds. Their tusks have always been valuable, and have greatly increased in value of recent years, as the walrus diminish in number.

Cook named Cape Denbigh and Cape Darby on either side of Norton Bay; and Besborough Island south of Cape Denbigh.

Going ash.o.r.e, he encountered a family of natives which he and Captain King describe in such wise that no one, having read the description, can ever enter Norton Sound without recalling it. The family consisted of a man, his wife, and a child; and a fourth person who bore the human shape, and that was all, for he was the most horribly, the most pitiably, deformed cripple ever seen, heard of, or imagined. The husband was blind; and all were extremely unpleasant in appearance. The underlips were bored.

These natives would have evidently sold their souls for iron. For four knives made out of old iron hoop, they traded four hundred pounds of fish--and Cook must have lost his conscience overboard with his anchor in Kuskokwim Bay. He recovered the anchor!

He gave the girl-child a few beads, "whereupon the mother burst into tears, then the father, then the cripple, and, at last, the girl herself."

Many different pa.s.sages, or sentences, have been called "the most pathetic ever written"; but, myself, I confess that I have never been so powerfully or so lastingly moved by any sentence as I was when I first read that one of Cook's. Almost equalling it, however, in pathos is the simple account of Captain King's of his meeting with the same family. He was on sh.o.r.e with a party obtaining wood when these people approached in a canoe. He beckoned to them to land, and the husband and wife came ash.o.r.e. He gave the woman a knife, saying that he would give her a larger one for some fish. She made signs for him to follow them.

"I had proceeded with them about a mile, when the man, in crossing a stony beach, fell down and cut his foot very much. This made me stop, upon which the woman pointed to the man's eyes, which, I observed, were covered with a thick, white film. He afterward kept close to his wife, who apprised him of the obstacles in his way. The woman had a little child on her back, covered with a hood, and which I took for a bundle until I heard it cry. At about two miles distant we came upon their open skin-boat, which was turned on its side, the convex part toward the wind, and served for their house. I was now made to perform a singular operation upon the man's eyes. First, I was directed to hold my breath; afterward, to breathe on the diseased eyes; and next, to spit on them.

The woman then took both my hands and, pressing them to his stomach, held them there while she related some calamitous history of her family, pointing sometimes to her husband, sometimes to a frightful cripple belonging to the family, and sometimes to her child."

Berries, birch, willow, alders, broom, and spruce were found. Beer was brewed of the spruce.

Cook now sailed past that divinely beautiful sh.o.r.e upon which St.

Michael's is situated, and named Stuart Island and Cape Stephens, but did not hear the Yukon calling him. He did find shoal water, very much discolored and muddy, and "inferred that a considerable river runs into the sea." If he had only guessed _how_ considerable! Pa.s.sing south, he named Clerk's, Gore's, and Pinnacle Islands, and returned to Unalaska.

CHAPTER XLI

A famous engineering feat was the building of the White Pa.s.s and Yukon Railway from Skaguay to White Horse. Work was commenced on this road in May, 1898, and finished in January, 1900.

Its completion opened the interior of Alaska and the Klondike to the world, and brought enduring fame to Mr. M. J. Heney, the builder, and Mr. E. C. Hawkins, the engineer.

In 1897 Mr. Heney went North to look for a pa.s.s through the Coast Range.

Up to that time travel to the Klondike had been about equally divided between the Dyea, Skaguay, and Jack Dalton trails; the route by way of the Stikine and Hootalinqua rivers; and the one to St. Michael's by ocean steamers and thence up the Yukon by small and, at that time, inferior steamers.

Mr. Heney and his engineers at once grasped the possibilities of the "Skaguay Trail." This pa.s.s was first explored and surveyed by Captain Moore, of Mr. Ogilvie's survey of June, 1887, who named it White Pa.s.s, for Honorable Thomas White, Canadian Minister of the Interior. It could not have been more appropriately named, even though named for a man, as there is never a day in the warmest weather that snow-peaks are not in view to the traveller over this pa.s.s; while from September to June the trains wind through sparkling and unbroken whiteness.

Mr. Heney, coming out to finance the road, faced serious difficulties and discouragements in America. Owing to the enormous cost of this short piece of road, as planned, as well as the daring nature of its conception, the boldest financiers of this country, upon investigation, declined to entertain the proposition.

Mr. Heney was a young man who, up to that time, although possessed of great ability, had made no marked success--his opportunity not having as yet presented itself.

Recovering from his first disappointment, he undauntedly voyaged to England, where some of the most conservative capitalists, moved and convinced by his enthusiasm and his clear descriptions of the northern country and its future, freely financed the railroad whose successful building was to become one of the most brilliant achievements of the century.

They were entirely unacquainted with Mr. Heney, and after this proof of confidence in him and his project, the word "fail" dropped out of the English language, so far as the intrepid young builder was concerned.

"After that," he said, "I _could not_ fail."