Alaska (64 page)

When the Erebus

moved along to the village of Sevak at the eastern end of the island, the sailors came upon a people who loved to dance, so when they were introduced to rum and the fascinating secret of how to manufacture it, the village echoed with the sound of Eskimos singing old songs as they engaged in one of the world's most curious dance forms: men and women stood with their feet solidly planted on the floor, as if set in frozen lava, while their knees, middle, torso, arms and head twisted rhythmically in contortions that no ordinary human would imagine. If to the rest of the world the word

dance meant to leap or skip about in an artistic manner, to these Eskimos it meant something quite the opposite: keep your feet firm but move your body artistically.

At first the sailors found the Sevak dancing monotonous, but after they had watched it for several nights, some of the more adventurous took to the floor, listened to the beat of the

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chanting, and stood with their feet firmly planted while they contorted their bodies in ways never tried before as some old women of lively spirit danced beside them.

Toward dawn this glorious summer, the dancers fell drunk while walruses and whales passed the island unmolested.

A feature of all the celebrations on St. Lawrence that surreal summer was the tall austere figure of Captain Schransky standing off to one side as he watched the debauchery, taking a perverse delight in following the steps of the islanders' degradation: now that girl is going off with Adams; now that old woman is beginning to stagger; now the man with the missing teeth is about to collapse. Like an uninvolved Norse god, he watched the frolicking of his earthlings and found sardonic amusement in their destruction of themselves.

At the third village, Chibukak at the extreme western end of the island, he used a minimum of rum to acquire a maximum of pelts, for in the waters off this point seal and walrus were easiest to capture, and the villagers had accumulated a substantial store of furs that they would normally have traded with adventurous ships setting out from Siberia, but since Russians had been forbidden over the past century from taking alcohol to any part of Alaska, they could not bring to Chibukak the exciting goods that Captain Schransky offered.

Here the devastation was even more tragic than at the first two villages, for the riches of the sea were so abundant that prudent fishermen could lay in a rich store of food with a few weeks' work in late July and August, but this year the precious days were spent in revelry and song and concupiscence. Here no sage older woman warned the men of the dangerous track they were following, for the women, too, stayed drunk from one festivity to the next, and when the Erebus

finally sailed, the grinning people of Chibukak lined the shore to bid their good friends farewell, as pelts of seals and walruses accompanied the ship southward.

When the dark Erebus

was about to leave St. Lawrence, Captain Schransky spotted on the southern coast the tiny village of Powooiliak, and he judged that because of its isolation, it might never have been visited by Siberian traders. If so, it would probably have an accumulated store of ivory, and he was about to put in to investigate when a sudden shift in the weather warned him that ice was not far off, so he surrendered the ivory of Powooiliak and headed south toward the southern limits of the Bering Sea.

There, on a day in early autumn, he found himself drifting in the midst of a large movement of seals that had left the Pribilofs and were heading for the warmer waters in which

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they would winter, and although he knew that taking seals under such circumstances was forbidden, the temptation to fill his hold to the limit with pelts for trade in Canton was too great to resist, and he ordered his men to attack the seals, who in midocean were especially vulnerable. This was not true pelagic sealing, for it was occurring in autumn when the females were not pregnant, but it was outlawed by all nations bordering on the seal routes; however, since it was unlikely that any patrol ships would be in these waters at this time, the cruel harvest continued.

There was, however, by accident and not design, a slow, inadequate ship, the revenue cutter Rush,

limping home from a mishap which had deterred it in the Pribilofs, and when its captain saw the

Erebus

slaughtering the seals, he fired a warning shot to alert the trespasser of his presence, but even as he did so he realized that beyond warning the poacher, there was not much he could do. When the Rush came slowly up to the sealing area, the Erebus insolently eased off at about the same speed, and for most of one morning the charade continued.

Finally, with all sails spread, the Erebus put on a burst of speed, maneuvered insultingly close to the impotent Rush,

and hurried toward China with its riches. It was the dominator of these seas and it would comport itself as Captain Schransky determined, not some pusillanimous captain of an American patrol boat.

DURING THE LAST DAYS OF SPRING 1877 THE TLINGIT Indians, who clustered outside the palisade protecting Sitka, kept close watch upon happenings in the capital, and saw with amazement that the steamer California

had anchored in the sound for the purpose of removing the entire army garrison, whose troops boarded the ship on the fourteenth of June and left Alaska forever on the morning of the fifteenth.

'Who will take their place?' one Tlingit watcher asked his companions, but no one knew, and it was as a result of this confusion that three thoughtful Tlingits, who would have been termed warriors in the old days, sequestered a canoe where the Americans in command, whoever they might be, could not observe it, and on a silvery night, when the sun disappeared only for a few hours, left Sitka, paddled due north to that maze of enchanting narrows which led to Peril Strait, and from there into noble Chatham Strait, which bisected this part of Alaska. At the northern tip of Admiralty Island, which lay to the east, they turned south through the lovely passage on which the future capital of Juneau would

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one day sit, and then, with a left turn toward Canada, they entered one of the choice small waterways of the region, Taku Inlet, from whose left bank, hidden amidst glaciers, debouched a beautiful mountain stream, Pleiades River, and there at the mouth of the river stood a cabin erected many years ago. It was to the redoubtable occupant of this rude dwelling that they had come seeking counsel.

'Halloo, Bigears!' they shouted as they approached the cabin, for they knew from experience that he was prone to shoot at intruders. 'Ivan Bigears, we come from Sitka!' And when the calls were repeated, a tall, big-boned Tlingit in his sixties, with white hair and erect posture, came to the cabin door, stared toward the riverbank, and saw men he had known forty years earlier when they fought the Russians in repeated battles that the Tlingits usually lost.

Striding down to the bank, he greeted his onetime companions, then asked them bluntly: 'What brings you here?' and his nostrils widened when he heard their reply: 'The Americans in Sitka. They grow weaker every day. The time's at hand, Bigears ...”

'Come! Let us talk,' and as they told him of the chaos in which the American occupation foundered, he listened grim lipped, and by the time their mournful litany was finished, his mind was made up: 'It's time to strike,' but one of the messengers warned: 'I've thought so, too. We can surely defeat the fools who hold the hill now, but I'm worried about the rush of new soldiers who might be brought in,' and Bigears had a sage response: 'Not a big battle with war cries. Slow pressure, day by day, until their spirit is broken and we regain our ancient rights.'

Like a Kot-le-an of a later day, he spoke as a wise man of his tribe, one who had spent his life brooding upon the unjust way in which his people had lost their glorious land at Sitka, and this report of degenerating American control inflamed his ardor but did not confuse his generalship: 'A big battle would produce big news, and ships filled with soldiers would speed up from the south, but each day more pressure, more advantage to us, and there will be no alarms.'

He was fortified in this strategy by an act of folly committed by the incompetent Treasury official who had assumed command at Sitka. A Tlingit living in a village on Douglas Island came hurrying up Taku Inlet in his canoe, with distressing news: 'Trouble in our village. Four white miners tried to abuse our women. We fought them.

Now the warship is coming from Sitka to punish us, because they claim we attacked them.' The word in Tlingit for warship carried no implications of size: the approaching vessel could be either a 396

huge man-of-war or a corvette, but the impression created was one of military power, and Ivan Bigears, who had been forced to take a Russian first name in 1861 when he knew the tsar's power to be already fading, wanted to see for himself what American power was in the waning days of its control, so he and his visitors set forth in two canoes, moving quietly along the shore so as not to be seen by the approaching warship.

Accompanied by the messenger from the village about to be attacked, they slipped out of Taku Inlet, hid in the mouth of the strait that led to the settlement, and were concealed there when a small American ship steamed into the quiet waters, located the wrong village, and began shelling it so ineffectively that at the first salvo, which missed completely, the occupants fled to the surrounding forest, from where they watched as the fourth salvo finally struck their empty shacks, battering them to pieces. Triumphantly the ship patrolled the shoreline for about an hour, with no soldier brave enough to go ashore to assess the damage, and then, with a final salvo that merely ricocheted among the trees, it retired to report another American victory.

When it was safely gone, Bigears and his companions, including the messenger from the village that should have been the target, paddled across the strait to the wreckage and explained to the bewildered villagers as they came out of the forest: 'They fired on the wrong place,' and from that settlement as well as the other, Bigears enlisted Tlingit warriors, who agreed that the time had come to move against the incompetents who occupied Sitka, and in succeeding weeks men from the Taku Inlet area began quietly infiltrating the capital.

Had Arkady Voronov still been in residence at Sitka, he would have known of-the increased Tlingit pressure within a week, but the Americans now in charge of the place drifted amiably on, unaware that they were surrounded by an enemy that grew stronger each passing month.

NOW CAME THE DARKEST PERIOD OF THE AMERICAN OCcupancy of Alaska. The presence of the army, inadequate though it had been and preposterous as its commander, General Davis, had seemed to the citizens who were ruled by him, had nevertheless provided a semblance of government, and of a hundred typical acts it performed in the post-1867 period, some ninety were either constructive or neutral, and now to have even this inadequate symbol of government removed was to invite disaster.

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First the outward signs of control disappeared from the streets of Sitka. Police, even the few who were present, exercised no authority. Port facilities deteriorated so badly that the few ships which did put in left quickly, with vows never to return to such poorly administered facilities, which meant that customs revenues declined month by month. Smuggling became endemic, and rum, whiskey and molasses flowed unimpeded into the settlements. Miners and fishermen did as they wished, evaded such laws as there were, and decimated the supplies that used to flourish near Sitka. Foreign ships trespassed on seal rookeries that were supposed to be protected, and threatened to exterminate walruses, whales and the frolicsome sea otters who had begun to make a comeback.

But the most ominous development surfaced when Tlingits like Ivan Bigears started drifting in from outlying districts, joining up with local dissidents and indulging in pressure behavior that terrified the white citizens. There were no murders, no burnings, simply the reappearance of Tlingits into areas from which they had been expelled by Baranov. And to the average white man unfamiliar with the old days, the sudden appearance of a tall, powerful Indian like Ivan Bigears could be both terrifying and a premonition that dreadful things were about to happen.

What the Tlingits wanted was well represented by Bigears. 'We must be free,' he told his fellow conspirators, 'to live where we wish according to our ancient ways, to have the new government respect our tribal laws and customs.1 Since there was no resident authority to which he could make these reasonable demands, he was forced to further them by insinuating his people into the daily life of Sitka, and when he did this, the locals felt that they must resist.

There was a family from Oregon living in Sitka at this time, the Caldwells husband, wife, son Tom aged seventeen, daughter Betts aged fifteen and they had come north through Seattle with the understanding that Mr. Caldwell could open a lawyer's office in the capital, and he came well prepared for such service to the frontier community.

He brought with him three crates of law books, especially those dealing with territories and new states, both of which he assumed Alaska-would become in the near future.

He was most disappointed to learn that law and courts were not major concerns of the little capital, and as for an office from which to practice, there was no legal way by which he could acquire land on which to build one, nor were there any spare buildings that one could buy with assurance of obtaining a title.

'What can I do?' he asked in growing frustration, and a man who had been living in Sitka since the Russian days said: 398

'I think your wife might be able to get a job teaching at the new school,' and in disgust Mr. Caldwell said: 'If there's a job open, I'll take it,' but then his problem became: 'But where will I find a place to live?' and the same adviser told him: 'There's a big house down the street. Used to be lived in by a Russian family. Great people, went back to Siberia.'

Mr. Caldwell said: 'I don't think we want to buy a big house,' and the man said: 'Good, because it ain't for sale. But a very nice Aleut woman married to a Tlingit fisherman runs it, and she takes in boarders.'