CHAPTER XX.HOWKAN OR KAIGAHNEE.
Thus in its commercial mission the steamer wandered among the islands, touching at infant settlements and trading posts, and anchoring before Indian villages with traditions andtotempoles centuries old. Rounding the southern end of the Prince of Wales Island to Dixon Entrance, the fog and mist crept upon us as we neared the ocean. It was a wet and gloomy afternoon when theIdahoanchored in the little American Bay on Dall Island, not more than a mile from Howkan, an ancient settlement of the Kaigahnee Haidas and a place of note in the archipelago. Howkan has moretotempoles than any other village, and is one of the most interesting places on the route; but as Kaigahnee Strait before the village is thickly set with reefs, and swift currents and strong winds sweep through the narrow channel, it is dangerous for vessels to go near. The fur traders used always to anchor in the little bays on the opposite shore, and to one of them, American Bay, the Northwest Trading Company was about to move its stores. Only a small clearing had been made, and two buildings put up, at the time of that first visit, and it looked a very dreary and forlornplace, as we picked our way about in the rain, climbing over logs and sinking in the wet moss.
After the cargo had been discharged, the captain obligingly took the ship over to the nearest safe anchorage off the village, and we had a warm welcome on shore from the five white residents. For two years the missionary’s wife and sister had met but one white woman, until the boatload of ladies went ashore from theIdaho, and overwhelmed them with a superfluity. We all gathered in the trader’s house and store at first, and these two white residents of Howkan were none other than the Russian Count Z—— and his pretty black-haired Countess, a couple interesting in themselves and their history, and all the more extraordinary in their being found in this remote end of the world. The Count is a man of fascinating address and appearance, polished manners and cultivated tastes, and, being exiled for Nihilistic tendencies, he chose Alaska in preference to Siberia, and made his way across the friendly chain of islands to “the home of the free and the land of the brave.” He married a charming Russian lady at Sitka, and, with the calm of a philosophic mind and the patience of a patriotic heart, he waits the time when amnesty or anarchy shall permit his return to holy Russia. Adversity and years in the savage wilderness have not robbed these people of their ease and grace of manner, and the handsome Count had all the charm and spirit that must have distinguished him in the gay world of his native capital. The little Countess was unfeignedly glad to see a few fellow creatures, and in the dusk of that dreary, wet night welcomed us to her simple home, and showed us her treasures, from thebig blue-eyed baby to a wonderfully painted dance blanket. When we expressed curiosity at the latter, the pretty Russian seized the great piece of fringed and painted deerskin, and, wrapping it about her shoulders, threw her head back with fine pose, and stood as an animated tableau in the dusk and firelight of her Alaska chalet. “This was acultus potlatch,” she said, with a dainty accent, as she explained the way it came into her possession, and we all laughed at the way the Chinook jargon interprets thatdilettanteword as meaning “worthless.” The Countess told us a better one about her asking a trader what had become of a man who used to live at Sitka, and the trader answering her that he was “cultusingaround here somewhere.” This Russian family was most interesting to us, and, setting aside all traditions of his rank, the Nihilist Count talked business with the captain in a most American manner, and, but for the inherent accent and air, a listener might have taken him for the most practical of business men, whose whole life had been spent in commercial marts, or as agent for a great trading company.
All of these kind people helped to show us about the place, and give us bits of local history on the way, and from them we learned that the Indian name Howkan means a fallen stone, and this village was called so on account of a peculiar boulder that lay on the beach. Like other places in Alaska, it has several names, and several ways of spelling each of them. The traders call it oftener Kaigahnee than Howkan, although old Kaigahnee, the original village of that name, is many miles distant from this place of thefallen stone. The missionaries named it “Jackson” in honor of the Rev. Sheldon Jackson, the projector and manager of Presbyterian missions in Alaska, and the Post Office Department recognized it as “Haida Mission” when the blanks and cancelling stamps were sent out for the small post-office. A request was made by the mission people to have the place put down as Jackson on the new charts, since issued by the Coast Survey, but the commander of the surveying steamer opposed it as an act of vandalism, and on the maps it still retains the harsh old Indian name by which it has been known for centuries.
The village fronts on two crescent beaches, and a long, rocky point running out into the water fairly divides it into two villages, so separate are their water fronts. A fleet of graceful Haida canoes was drawn up on the first and larger beach, all of them carefully filled with grass and covered over, and their owners joined in receiving the visitors, and accompanied us on our sight-seeing tour. The houses at Howkan are large and well built, and the village is remarkably clean. Some of the chiefs have weatherboarded their houses and put in glass windows and hinged doors, but before or beside nearly every house rises the tall, ancestraltotempoles that constitute the glory of the place.
TOTEM POLES AT KAIGAN OR HOWKAN.
TOTEM POLES AT KAIGAN OR HOWKAN.
TOTEM POLES AT KAIGAN OR HOWKAN.
Skolka, one of the great chiefs, has a large house guarded by twototempoles, and at his offer the house had been occupied for two years as a school-room by the mission teacher. A flagstaff and a skeleton bell-tower were added to the exterior decorations of his house in consequence, and Skolka was the envy of all the Kaigahnees. Skolka is a wise andliberal chieftain, and a member of the Eagle family. Effigies of that totemic bird surmount the poles before his house, and on one pole appears the whiskered face of a white man, capped by an eagle, and finished with the images of two children wearing the steeple-crowned mandarin hats of the Tyees. Skolka explains these images as telling the story of one of his ancestors, who was a famous woman of the Eagle clan. She went out for salmon eggs one day, and when she drew up her canoe on the beach upon her return, she had several baskets filled. Not seeing her two little children, she called to them, but they ran and hid. Later she called them again, and they answered her from the woods with the voices of crows. Her worst fears were realized when she found that a white man, “a Boston man,” had carried them off in a ship. These two orphans never returned to their people. Such is the simple kidnapping story that has been handed down in Skolka’s family for generations, andthis whiskered face on thetotempole is said to be almost the only instance of a Boston man attaining immortality in these picture-writings.
THE CHIEF’S RESIDENCE AT KAIGAN, SHOWING TOTEM POLES.
THE CHIEF’S RESIDENCE AT KAIGAN, SHOWING TOTEM POLES.
THE CHIEF’S RESIDENCE AT KAIGAN, SHOWING TOTEM POLES.
“Mr. John” is another fine-looking chief, who dresses in civilized style, and is rather proud of his advanced ways of living and thinking. He lives in a large house near Skolka, and has a grand oldtotempole before his doorway. In his queer idiom he tells one, “I am a Crow, but my wife is a Whale;” and as Mrs. John is of generous build, there is lurking sarcasm in his statement.
The deceased chief, Mr. Jim, left some finetotempoles behind him, and on the second beach of the village there is a semicircle of ancient moss-growntotempoles standing guard over ruined and deserted houses. The mosses, the lichens, and the vines cling tenderly to these strange old monuments of the people, and, in the crevices of the carvings, grasses,ferns, and even young trees have taken root and thrive. Back in the dense undergrowth rise the mortuary poles, the carvedtotemsand emblems that mark the graves of dead and gone Haidas. Skolka’s father and uncles have fine images over their burial boxes, and from the head of the Eagle on one of these mortuary columns, a small fir-tree, taking root, has grown to a height of eight or ten feet. In this burying ground there are large boxes filled with the bones and ashes of those said to have died when the great epidemics raged among the islands a half century ago.
We found the Howkan ship-yard under a large shed, and the canoe builder showed us two cedar canoes that were nearly completed. The high-beaked Haida canoes are slender and graceful as Venetian gondolas, and the small, light canoes that they use in hunting sea otter are marvels of boat-building. The shapely skiffs that the boat builder showed us had been hewn from single logs of red cedar, and were ready to be braced and steamed into their graceful curving lines. Our admiration of the work caused him to offer a light, otter-hunter’s canoe for fifty dollars, but not one of the company made a purchase. In one house we found a paralyzed man lying on a couch in the middle of the one great room, and the relatives gathered about him soon brought out their treasures and offered them for sale.
HALIBUT HOOK.
HALIBUT HOOK.
HALIBUT HOOK.
Like all of their tribe, these Kaigahnee Haidas are an intelligent and superior people, skilled in the arts of war and the crafts of peace, and their carvers have wrought matchlesstotempoles, canoes, bowls, spoons, halibut clubs and hooks, from time immemorial.These carvings show finer work and better ideas than the art relics of the other tribes, and in silver work they quite surpass the rest of the Thlinkets; although it is now claimed that they are not Thlinkets, differing from them materially in their language and traditions, while they have the same totemic system, familiar spirits, and customs. The Haida women were all adorned with beautifully made bracelets, and the superiority of Haida workmanship and designs is proven by the way that the Indians, even at Sitka, boast of their bracelets being Haida work. Kenowin is the chief silversmith, and his daughter wore a pair of broad gold bracelets carved with the Eagletotem. Gold is very rarely worn by the Indians, and they hardy seem to value the yellow metal, although some Haida silversmiths have worked in jewellers’stores in Victoria successfully, and learned the processes of acid treatments. The Haida rules of art, by which they conventionalize any animal they depict, are very exact, and on the large bracelet, shown in a previous illustration, the cinnamon bears represented as advancing in profile are joined in one full, grinning face which is recognized as the Haida crest. Their totemic Eagle has now degenerated into a base copy of the bird on American coins, but otherwise their art rules and traditions are unperverted. The key and original idea in many of their designs is the strange marking like a peacock’s eye found on the back of the skate fish or sculpin, and besides carving it on all their solid belongings, they tattoo the emblem on their bodies.
These Kaigahnees have a curious tradition, related to us by the resident teacher, that quite resembles the biblical story of the ark and the flood. One old Indian now claims to have the bark rope which held the anchor of the big canoe when it rested on the high mountain back of Howkan. They have also a story resembling that of Lot’s wife, only Sodom and Gomorrah were on Forrester Island, and a brother and sister, fleeing from a pestilence, were turned to stone, because the woman looked back while crossing the river. Their houses were petrified as well, and the petrified bodies of the disobedient ones still stand in the river to tell the tale.
When Wiggin’s storms were being promised to the whole North American continent, in March, 1882, a white man at Kasa-an Bay read the prophecies, and explained them to the Indians. The warning spread rapidly from island to island, and at Howkan thenatives began moving their things to the high ground, and were carrying up water and provisions for one whole afternoon. They believed that the promised tidal wave was coming, and at the time set for the storm, began to say, “Victoria all gone.” There was a heavy storm outside that March night, and the agent of the trading company, returning from the Klinquan fishery in a whale-boat, was drowned by a wave upsetting the boat as he let go the tiller to furl the sail.
It was at Port Bazan, across Dall Island, that one of the Kaigahnees, whom we saw, found the remains of Paymaster Walker, who was lost with the steamerGeorge S. Wright, in February, 1873. The loss of theWrightwas one of the tragedies of the sea, and is still a current topic in Alaska. The steamer left Sitka on its return trip to Portland with several army officers and their families and residents on board. It was last seen at Cordova Bay, on the south end of Prince of Wales Island, and, in the face of warnings, the captain put out to sea in a heavy storm,—as he was hurrying to Portland for his wedding. It is supposed that the ship foundered, or struck a rock in Queen Charlotte Sound. The most terrible anxiety prevailed as week after week went by, with no tidings of theWright, and the feeling was intensified when the rumor was started that it had been wrecked near a village of Kuergefath Indians, and that the survivors had been tortured and put to death. Two years after the disappearance of theWright, the body of Major Walker was found in Port Bazan, recognizable only by fragments of his uniform, that had been held to him by a life-preserver. Other remainsand fragments of the wreck were then found in the recesses of the ocean shores of the island, and the mystery of theWrightwas at last solved.
Further up this coast, beyond the Klawock cannery, the mission has a branch station and a saw-mill, and, in time, will establish a school in this Shakan Island.
On my second visit to Kaigahnee Straits, theAncondropped anchor at two o’clock in the morning, and it was up and off again before five o’clock. A few enthusiasts did manage to row over to Howkan and back, but the rest of us were contented with one sleepy glance at the little settlement that, in a year’s time, had surrounded the Northwest Trading Company’s stores in American Bay. It was with great regret that we woke again to find the ship sailing over the most placid of waters, as it coursed up Dixon Entrance. It touched at Cape Fox, where we enjoyed the last of our delights and experiences on Alaska shores, stopped in a twilight rain at Tongass, and then slipped across the boundary line at night, and gave us all over again those enchanting days along the British Columbia coast.