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Soirées at the castle, tea-garden parties, picnics upon the thousand lovely isles that beautify the Sitkan Sea; strolls among the sylvan retreats in which the primeval forest, at the very edge of the town, abounds; fishing and hunting expeditions, music, dancing, lively conversation, strong punch, caviare and the steaming samovar, those were the chief diversions with which noble and serf alike sought to lighten the burden of the day.
Safe in the mountain fastnesses behind the fort, they refused to act as slaves. How they regarded this invasion of their hunting-ground by alien Indians Indians acting as slaves may be guessed. Whether rival traders, deserters from an American ship, living with the Sitkan Indians, instigated the conspiracy cannot be known.
He warned Baranof's hunters not to be led off inland bear hunting, for the bear hunt might be a Sitkan Indian in decoy to trap the hunters into an ambush. Such a decoy had almost trapped Cleveland's crew, when other Indians were noticed in ambush. The new fort was christened Archangel. All went well as long as Baranof was on the ground. Sea-otter were obtained for worthless trinkets.
From the midst of the crowd, thrust out by its own vividness, appeared the face of a wild-eyed squaw from the remote regions of the Upper Tana-naw; a strayed Sitkan from the coast stood side by side with a Stick from Lake Le Barge, and, beyond, a half-dozen French-Canadian voyageurs, grouped by themselves. From afar came the faint cries of myriads of wild-fowl on the nesting-grounds.
She bade him good-morning, blithely, in the Dyea tongue; but he shook his head, and laughed insultingly, and paused in his work to hurl shameful words after her. She did not understand, for this was not the old way, and when she passed a great and glowering Sitkan buck she kept her tongue between her teeth. At the fringe of the forest, the camp confronted her. And she was startled.
Scheffer, a German physician who made a sojourn in the place about 1815, claimed to have found a medical spring whose waters were equal to some of the famed watering places of Germany. Most of the Sitkan Kolosh kept aloof from the Russian settlement after the establishment of the new fort on Chatham Strait, near the entrance of Peril Strait.
The bidding began slowly. The Sitkan, who was a stranger in the land and who had arrived only half an hour before, offered one hundred dollars in a confident voice, and was surprised when Akoon turned threateningly upon him with the rifle. The bidding dragged.
In a stay of a month the "Caroline" spoke the ship "Hancock," the ship "Despatch," the ship "Ulysses," and the ship "Eliza," all of Boston; and the English ship "Cheerful," all trading for furs among the Sitkan Islands. The Russians, in their colony on Kodiak Island, were jealous of the intruders on what they considered as their domain.
He talked with Imber, haltingly, with throaty spasms. Jimmy was a Sitkan, possessed of no more than a passing knowledge of the interior dialects. "Him Whitefish man," he said to Emily Travis. "Me savve um talk no very much. Him want to look see chief white man." "The Governor," suggested Dickensen. Jimmy talked some more with the Whitefish man, and his face went grave and puzzled.
The Sitkan of to-day manages to till a kitchen-garden that suffices; but his wants are few, and then he can always fall back on canned provision if his fresh food fails. The stagnation of life in Alaska is all but inconceivable.
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