CHAPTER XII.SITKA—THE INDIAN RANCHERIE.
The doorway of the Greek church, and the dial on its tower, face toward the harbor, and command the main street. Beyond the houses at the right there is a little pine-crowned hill, with the broken and rusty ruins of a powder-magazine on its slope, and on a second hill beyond is the graveyard where the Russians buried their dead. An old block house, that commanded an angle of the stockade, stands sentry over the graves, and the headstones and tombs are overgrown with rank bushes, ferns, and grasses. Prince Maksoutoff’s first wife, who died at Sitka, was buried on the hill, and a costly, elaborately carved tombstone was sent from Russia to mark the spot. After the transfer and withdrawal of troops, the Indians, in their maraudings, defaced the stone, and attempted to carry it off. It was broken in the effort, and left in fragments on the ground. Lieutenant Gilman, in charge of the marines during the stay of theAdams, became interested in the matter, hunted for the grave in the underbrush, and undertook the work of replacing the tombstone. Beyond the Russian cemetery, on the same overgrown hillside, are the tombs of the chiefs and medicine-men of the Sitkakwan. The grotesque images and the queer littleburial boxes are nearly hidden in the tangle of bushes and vines, and their sides are covered with moss.
The Russians had a special chapel out on this hill for the Indians to worship in, as shown in old illustrations of Sitka, but the building has disappeared. There was a heavy stockade wall also, separating the Indian cemetery and village from the white settlement, but it has nearly all been torn down and carried off by the Indians during the years of license allowed them after the troops left, and only fragments of it remain in places.
Entering through the old stockade gate, the Indianrancheriepresents itself, as a double row of square houses fronting on the beach. Each house is numbered and whitewashed, and the ground surrounding it gravelled and drained. The same neatness marks the whole long stretch of the village, and amazement at this condition is only ended when one learns that the captain of the man-of-war fines each disorderly Indian in blankets, besides confining him in the guard-house, and that the forfeited blankets are duly exchanged for paint, whitewash, and disinfectants. Police and sanitary regulations both are enforced, and the Indians made to keep their village quiet and clean. When all the Indians are home from their fishing and trading trips, and congregated here in the winter, they number over a thousand, and all goes merry at therancherie. There are nototempoles, or carved, grotesquely-painted houses to lend outward interest to the village, and the Indians themselves are too much given to ready-made clothes and civilized ways to be really picturesque.
Annahootz, Sitka Jack, and other chiefs havepine doorplates over their lintels, to announce where greatness dwells, but the palace of Siwash Town is the residence of “Mrs. Tom,” a painted cabin with green blinds, and a green railing across the front porch. Mrs. Tom is a character, a celebrity, and a person of great authority among her Siwash neighbors, and wields a greater power and influence among her people, than all the war chiefs and medicine-men put together. Even savage people bow down to wealth, and Mrs. Tom is the reputed possessor of $10,000, accumulated by her own energy and shrewdness. We heard of Mrs. Tom long before we reached Sitka, and, realizing her to be such a potentate among her people, we were shocked to meet that lady by the roadside, Sunday morning, offering to sell bracelets to some of the passengers. The richest and greatest chiefs are so avaricious that they will sell anything they own.
Mrs. Tom invited us to come to her green-galleried chalet in Siwash town, “next door to No. 17,” at any time we pleased. On the rainiest morning in all the week we set our dripping umbrella points in that direction, and found the great Tyee lady at home. It was raw and chill as a New York November, but Mrs. Tom strolled about barefooted, wearing a single calico garment, and wrapping herself in a white blanket with red and blue stripes across the ends. Her black hair was brushed to satiny smoothness, braided and tied with coquettish blue ribbons, and her arms were covered with bracelets up to her elbows. She is a plump matron, fat, fair, and forty in fact, and her house is a model of neatness and order. On gala occasions she arrays herself in herbest velvet dress, her bonnet with the red feather, a prodigious necktie and breastpin, and then, with two silver rings on every finger, and nine silver bracelets on each arm, she is the envy of all the other ladies of Siwash town. When she came to the ship to be photographed by an admiring amateur, she had, besides her ordinary regalia, a dozen or more pairs of bracelets tied up in a handkerchief, and we began to believe her wealth as boundless as her neighbors say it is. Like all the Indians she puts her faith mostly in blankets, and her house is a magazine of such units of currency, while deep in her cedar boxes she has fur robes of the rarest quality.
Mrs. Tom has acquired her fortune by her own ability in legitimate trade, and each spring and fall she loads up her long canoe and goes off on a great journey through the islands, trading with her people. On her return she trades with the traders of Sitka, and always comes out with a fine profit. A romance once wove its meshes about her, and on one of her journeys it was said that Mrs. Tom bought a handsome young slave at a bargain. The slave was considerably her junior, but in time her fancy overlooked that discrepancy, and after a few sentimental journeys in the long canoe she duly made him Mr. Tom, thus proving that the human heart beats the same in Siwash town as in the Grand Duchy of Gerolstein.
This interesting bit of gossip, duly vouched for by some of the white residents, is opposed by others, who say that Mr. Tom is a chief of the Sitkakwanin his own right, and that he made themésalliancewhen he wedded his clever spouse, and that he owns a profitable potato-ranch further down Baranoff Island.Any one would prefer the first and more romantic biography, but, anyway, Mr. Tom is a smooth-faced, boyish-looking man, and evidently well trained and managed by his spouse. In consideration of their combined importance, he was made one of the delegated policemen of Siwash town, and he makes malefactors answer to him, as he has learned to answer to his exacting wife.
On the occasion of another morning call, Mrs. Tom was meditating a new dress, and the native dressmaker who was to assist in the creation was called in to examine the cut of our gowns, when we called upon her that time. There was a funny scene when Mrs. Tom discovered that what appeared to her as a velvet skirt on the person of one of her visitors, was merely a sham flounce that ended a few inches under a long, draped overskirt. Her bewildered look and the sorry shake of her head over this evidence of civilized pretence amused us, and in slow, disapproving tones she discussed the sham and swindle with her dressmaker. She showed us her accordeons, and gave us a rheumatic tune on one of them, and we were afterwards told that she gives dancing parties in winter to the upper ten of Siwash town, who dance quadrilles to the accordeon’s strains.
Sitka Jack’s house is a large square one fronting directly on the beach, and during his absence at Pyramid Harbor the square hearthstone in the middle was being kept warm by the relatives he had left behind him. When this house was built, in 1877, it was warmed by a grandpotlatch, or feast and gift distribution, that distanced all previous efforts of any rivals. An Alaska chief is considered rich in proportionas he gives away his possessions, and Sitka Jack rose an hundredfold in Siwash esteem when he gave his grandpotlatch. All his relatives assisted in building the house, and this same community idea entitles them to live in it. Over five hundred blankets were given away at hispotlatch, and the dance was followed by a great feast, in which much whiskey and nativehoochinoofigured. Ben Holladay, Sr., with a large yachting party, was in the harbor at the time, and lent interest to the occasion by offering prizes for canoe races and adding a water carnival to the other festivities. Sitka Jack nearly beggared himself by this great house-warming, but his fame was settled on a substantial basis, and he has since had time to partly recuperate. He has aged rapidly of late years, and now he delights to crouch by his fireside in winter evenings and relate the story of his greatpotlatchof seven years ago, which was such an event that even the white residents date by it. Another greatpotlatchmade the summer of 1882 historical, and the presence of theDakota, with General Miles and his regimental band aboard, stirred therancherieto redoubled efforts.
Jack and Kooska, the silversmiths of the Sitkakwan, are very skilful workmen, and one can sit beside their work benches and watch them fashion the bracelets that are in such demand. During the summer months they can sell their ornaments faster than they can make them, and in two hours after a steamer’s arrival their stock is exhausted, and they work night and day on special orders while the vessel is at the wharf. If you give them the order in the morning the bracelets are ready in the afternoon, as carefullyfinished and engraved as any of the others of their make. In one doorway we saw a woman crouching or lying face downwards, and slowly engraving a silver finger ring. She had a broken penknife for an engraver’s tool, and she held it in her closed hand, blade down, and drew it towards her as she worked. Her attitude, and the management of the steel, set the oriental theorists off into speculations again, and they decided that she herself must have come straight across from Japan, so identical were her proceedings with those of the embroiderers and art workers in the kingdom of Dai Nippon.
She was quite unconscious and self-possessed while we stood chattering about her, and continued to chew gum in the most nonchalant manner. Inside of this barred doorway, the other members of the family were sitting about the fire, taking their morning meal. For their ten o’clock breakfast they were enjoying smoked salmon with oil, and an unhealthy looking kind of dough, or bread, washed down by very bad tea, judging from the way in which the tin teapot was allowed to boil and thump away on the coals. They are none of them epicures, and even in the matter of salmon they make no distinction, and cure and eat the rank dog salmon almost in preference to the choicer varieties. Although they are expert hunters, and bring in all the venison and wild fowl for the Sitka market, they seldom eat game themselves. It takes away a civilized appetite to see them eat the cakes of black seaweed, the sticks and branches covered with the herring roe that they whip from the surface of the water at certain seasons, and the dried salmon eggs that they are so particularly fond of.They eat almost anything that lives in the sea, and the octopus, or devil-fish, is a dainty that ranks with seal flippers for a feast. Clams of enormous size, found on the beaches through the islands, and mussels are other staple dishes.
The Sitka Indians, we were assured by a resident, “are the sassiest and most rascally Siwashes to be found in the country,” but outwardly they differed very little from the other tribes that we had seen. They have the same broad, flat faces, and from generations of canoe-paddling ancestors have inherited a magnificent development of the shoulders, chests, and arms. This development is at the expense of the rest of the frame, and, from sitting cramped in their canoes, the lower limbs are dwarfed and crooked, and their bodies affect one with the unpleasant sense of deformity. They are stumbling and shambling in their gait, and toe in to exaggeration; and these amphibious, fish-eating natives are as different as possible from the wild horsemen of the plains, or the pastoral tribes of the southwest. The Sitkans have the same mythology and totemic system as the rest of the Thlinket tribes, and reverence the spirits of the raven, the wolf, the whale, bear, and eagle; and their worship of the spirits and ashes of their ancestors is quite equal to the Chinese. They cremate their dead, with the exception of the medicine men, who are laid away in state, and the poles and fluttering rags set up around the village indicate the sacred spots where the ashes lie. They worship the spirits of the earth, air, and water; and the spirits of the departed ones, now occupying the bodies of the ravens that fly overhead, exempt those huge croakers from shot and snare.They show some belief in a future state by saying that the flames of the aurora borealis are the spirits of dead warriors dancing overhead. When a chief dies his wives pass to his next heir, and unless these relicts purchase their freedom with blankets, they are united to their grandsons, or nephews, as a matter of course. High-strung young Siwashes sometimes scorn these legacies, and then there is war between the totems, all the widows’ clan resenting such an outrage of decency and established etiquette. Curiously with this subjection of the women, it is they who are the family autocrats and tyrants, giving the casting-vote in domestic councils, and overriding the male decisions in the most high-handed manner. Hen-pecking is too small a word to describe the way in which they bully their lords, and many times our bargain with the ostensible head of the family was broken up by the woman arriving on the scene, and insisting that he should not sell, or should charge us more. Woman’s rights, and her sphere and influence, have reached a development among the Sitkans, that would astonish the suffrage leaders of Wyoming and Washington Territory. They are all keen, sharp traders, and if the women object to the final price offered for their furs at the Sitka stores, they get into their canoes, and paddle up to Juneau, or down to Wrangell, and even across the border to the British trading posts. They take no account of time or travel, and a journey of a thousand miles is justified to them, if they only get another yard of calico in exchange for their furs. All the Thlinkets are great visitors, and canoe loads of visiting Indians can always be found at a village. The Sitka and theStikinekwansseem to affiliate most, but visits from members of all the tribes make the Sitkarancheriean aborigine metropolis. Busybodies and cosmopolitans, like Sitka Jack, live all over the archipelago, and it was this roaming propensity that gave the military forces so much trouble during garrison days at Sitka. The land forces could do nothing with the scornful Indians in their lightkanims, and when the order was given to let no Indian leave therancherie, they snapped their fingers at the challenging and forbidding sentries, and paddled away at their pleasure. They have a great respect for a gun-boat with its ceremony, pomp, and strict discipline, and its busy steam launches, that can follow their canoes to the most remote creeks and hiding-places in the islands. The Indians employed on theAdamswere diligent and faithful servitors, and were much pleased with their sailors’ caps and toggery, and the official state surrounding them.
Indian legends and traditions can be had by the score at Sitka, but it is hard to verify any of them, and the myths, rites, and folk-lore of the people are not to be gathered with exactness during the touch-and-go excitement of a summer cruise. Bishop Veniaminoff mastered their language, and translated books of the Testament, hymns, and catechism, and published several works on the Koloshians. Baron Wrangell also wrote a great deal concerning them, and abstracts from these two writers have been given by Dall and Petroff. No ethnologists have made studies among the Thlinkets since Veniaminoff and Wrangell, a half century ago, and the field lies ready for some northern Cushing.