Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
The hostile Kolosh made hunting and fishing dangerous. In the autumn there was but flour enough for an allowance of a pound a week for one month for the 200 men in the fort. For other food supply they were dependent on the fish caught in the bay, the dried yukali and sealion meat from Kodiak, and the dried seal meat from the Seal Islands.
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.
Between this lofty rock and the forest was the walled settlement of New Archangel, that Baranhov, the dauntless, had wrested from the bloodthirsty Kolosh but a short time since and purposed to hold in the interest of the Russian-American Company.
In retaliation, about 1855, the Wrangell Kolosh made an attack on the Hot Springs settlement, burned the buildings, stripped the inhabitants of property and clothing and left them to make their way over the mountains around the head of Silver Bay to Sitka, where they arrived more dead than alive from hunger and exhaustion.
After his departure the discipline grew more lax and the Kolosh became more bold. The watchful savages at last saw an opportunity to rid themselves of their new neighbors. On a June day of 1802, the exact date is not recorded, a horde of painted savages burst from the forest, clad in all the paraphernalia of war masks and barbaric armour.
In front of this is the stairway leading to the top of the hill on which is situated the building of the Agricultural Department, on the site of the former residence of the chief manager of the Russian American Company. Around this hill were the batteries of the Russians, commanding the Kolosh village and the harbor.
Whether the renegade American sailors living in the forests with the Kolosh betrayed all the inner plans of the fort, or the squaws daily passing in and out with berries kept their countrymen informed of Russian movements, the blow was struck when the whites were off guard. It was a holiday. Half the Russians were outside the palisades unarmed, fishing.
Barely were the hunters asleep when the shout of Kolosh Indians from the forests behind told of ambush. The mainland hostiles resenting this invasion of their hunting-fields, had watched the storm drive the canoes to land. On one side was the tempest, on the other the forest thronged with warriors. The Aleuts lost their heads and dashed for hiding in the woods, only to find certain death.
Anyway, the twenty captives were not restored till two other ships had entered port, and sent some Kolosh canoes to bottom with grape-shot. The savages were then set free, and hastening up to Kadiak, Barber levelled his cannon at the Russian fort and demanded thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars' salvage for the rescue of the captives and loot.
During the earlier years of the colony the Kolosh were implacable enemies. War parties of young men constantly haunted the islands of the bay, lying in wait for any unwary hunter or fisherman from the fort.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking