Chapter III
Wrangell Island and Alaska Summers
Wrangell Island is about fourteen miles long, separated from the
mainland by a narrow channel or fiord, and trending in the direction of
the flow of the ancient ice-sheet. Like all its neighbors, it is
densely forested down to the water’s edge with trees that never seem to
have suffered from thirst or fire or the axe of the lumberman in all
their long century lives. Beneath soft, shady clouds, with abundance of
rain, they flourish in wonderful strength and beauty to a good old age,
while the many warm days, half cloudy, half clear, and the little
groups of pure sun-days enable them to ripen their cones and send
myriads of seeds flying every autumn to insure the permanence of the
forests and feed the multitude of animals.
The Wrangell village was a rough place. No mining hamlet in the placer
gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw, approached
it in picturesque, devil-may-care _abandon_. It was a lawless draggle
of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines, wrangling around the
boggy shore of the island for a mile or so in the general form of the
letter S, without the slightest subordination to the points of the
compass or to building laws of any kind. Stumps and logs, like precious
monuments, adorned its two streets, each stump and log, on account of
the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted with grass and bushes, but
muddy on the sides below the limit of the bog-line. The ground in
general was an oozy, mossy bog on a foundation of jagged rocks, full of
concealed pit-holes. These picturesque rock, bog, and stump
obstructions, however, were not so very much in the way, for there were
no wagons or carriages there. There was not a horse on the island. The
domestic animals were represented by chickens, a lonely cow, a few
sheep, and hogs of a breed well calculated to deepen and complicate the
mud of the streets.
Most of the permanent residents of Wrangell were engaged in trade. Some
little trade was carried on in fish and furs, but most of the
quickening business of the place was derived from the Cassiar
gold-mines, some two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles inland,
by way of the Stickeen River and Dease Lake. Two stern-wheel steamers
plied on the river between Wrangell and Telegraph Creek at the head of
navigation, a hundred and fifty miles from Wrangell, carrying freight
and passengers and connecting with pack-trains for the mines. These
placer mines, on tributaries of the Mackenzie River, were discovered in
the year 1874. About eighteen hundred miners and prospectors were said
to have passed through Wrangell that season of 1879, about half of them
being Chinamen. Nearly a third of this whole number set out from here
in the month of February, traveling on the Stickeen River, which
usually remains safely frozen until toward the end of April. The main
body of the miners, however, went up on the steamers in May and June.
On account of the severe winters they were all compelled to leave the
mines the end of September. Perhaps about two thirds of them passed the
winter in Portland and Victoria and the towns of Puget Sound. The rest
remained here in Wrangell, dozing away the long winter as best they
could.
Indians, mostly of the Stickeen tribe, occupied the two ends of the
town, the whites, of whom there were about forty or fifty, the middle
portion; but there was no determinate line of demarcation, the
dwellings of the Indians being mostly as large and solidly built of
logs and planks as those of the whites. Some of them were adorned with
tall totem poles.
The fort was a quadrangular stockade with a dozen block and frame
buildings located upon rising ground just back of the business part of
the town. It was built by our Government shortly after the purchase of
Alaska, and was abandoned in 1872, reoccupied by the military in 1875,
and finally abandoned and sold to private parties in 1877. In the fort
and about it there were a few good, clean homes, which shone all the
more brightly in their sombre surroundings. The ground occupied by the
fort, by being carefully leveled and drained, was dry, though formerly
a portion of the general swamp, showing how easily the whole town could
have been improved. But in spite of disorder and squalor, shaded with
clouds, washed and wiped by rain and sea winds, it was triumphantly
salubrious through all the seasons. And though the houses seemed to
rest uneasily among the miry rocks and stumps, squirming at all angles
as if they had been tossed and twisted by earthquake shocks, and
showing but little more relation to one another than may be observed
among moraine boulders, Wrangell was a tranquil place. I never heard a
noisy brawl in the streets, or a clap of thunder, and the waves seldom
spoke much above a whisper along the beach. In summer the rain comes
straight down, steamy and tepid. The clouds are usually united, filling
the sky, not racing along in threatening ranks suggesting energy of an
overbearing destructive kind, but forming a bland, mild, laving bath.
The cloudless days are calm, pearl-gray, and brooding in tone,
inclining to rest and peace; the islands seem to drowse and float on
the glassy water, and in the woods scarce a leaf stirs.
The very brightest of Wrangell days are not what Californians would
call bright. The tempered sunshine sifting through the moist atmosphere
makes no dazzling glare, and the town, like the landscape, rests
beneath a hazy, hushing, Indian-summerish spell. On the longest days
the sun rises about three o’clock, but it is daybreak at midnight. The
cocks crowed when they woke, without reference to the dawn, for it is
never quite dark; there were only a few full-grown roosters in
Wrangell, half a dozen or so, to awaken the town and give it a
civilized character. After sunrise a few languid smoke-columns might be
seen, telling the first stir of the people. Soon an Indian or two might
be noticed here and there at the doors of their barnlike cabins, and a
merchant getting ready for trade; but scarcely a sound was heard, only
a dull, muffled stir gradually deepening. There were only two white
babies in the town, so far as I saw, and as for Indian babies, they
woke and ate and made no crying sound. Later you might hear the
croaking of ravens, and the strokes of an axe on firewood. About eight
or nine o’clock the town was awake. Indians, mostly women and children,
began to gather on the front platforms of the half-dozen stores,
sitting carelessly on their blankets, every other face hideously
blackened, a naked circle around the eyes, and perhaps a spot on the
cheek-bone and the nose where the smut has been rubbed off. Some of the
little children were also blackened, and none were over-clad, their
light and airy costume consisting of a calico shirt reaching only to
the waist. Boys eight or ten years old sometimes had an additional
garment,—a pair of castaway miner’s overalls wide enough and ragged
enough for extravagant ventilation. The larger girls and young women
were arrayed in showy calico, and wore jaunty straw hats, gorgeously
ribboned, and glowed among the blackened and blanketed old crones like
scarlet tanagers in a flock of blackbirds. The women, seated on the
steps and platform of the traders’ shops, could hardly be called
loafers, for they had berries to sell, basketfuls of huckleberries,
large yellow salmon-berries, and bog raspberries that looked wondrous
fresh and clean amid the surrounding squalor. After patiently waiting
for purchasers until hungry, they ate what they could not sell, and
went away to gather more.
Yonder you see a canoe gliding out from the shore, containing perhaps a
man, a woman, and a child or two, all paddling together in natural,
easy rhythm. They are going to catch a fish, no difficult matter, and
when this is done their day’s work is done. Another party puts out to
capture bits of driftwood, for it is easier to procure fuel in this way
than to drag it down from the outskirts of the woods through rocks and
bushes. As the day advances, a fleet of canoes may be seen along the
shore, all fashioned alike, high and long beak-like prows and sterns,
with lines as fine as those of the breast of a duck. What the mustang
is to the Mexican _vaquero_, the canoe is to these coast Indians. They
skim along the shores to fish and hunt and trade, or merely to visit
their neighbors, for they are sociable, and have family pride
remarkably well developed, meeting often to inquire after each other’s
health, attend potlatches and dances, and gossip concerning coming
marriages, births, deaths, etc. Others seem to sail for the pure
pleasure of the thing, their canoes decorated with handfuls of the tall
purple epilobium.
