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Updated: June 15, 2025
Three years later Muravieff ordered 6000 Cossacks to migrate from these trans-Baikal settlements to the land newly acquired from China on the borders of Manchuria . In the same year the Russians established a station at the mouth of the Amur, and in 1853 gained control over part of the Island of Saghalien. For the present, then, everything seemed to favour Russia's forward policy.
As they sweep toward the south these clouds hourly become less and their last drops are wrung from them as they strike the slopes of the mountains and settle about their crests. The winter clouds from the Indian Ocean and Caspian Sea rarely pass the desert of Gobi, and thus the country of the Trans-Baikal has a climate peculiar to itself.
In company with a friend, who was interested in a Ural mining concern, he had made a trip across Eastern Europe at a moment when the great Russian railway strike was developing from a threat to a reality; its outbreak caught him on the return journey, somewhere on the further side of Perm, and it was while waiting for a couple of days at a wayside station in a state of suspended locomotion that he made the acquaintance of a dealer in harness and metalware, who profitably whiled away the tedium of the long halt by initiating his English travelling companion in a fragmentary system of folk-lore that he had picked up from Trans-Baikal traders and natives.
A large quantity of wheat and rye, I was told fifty thousand bushels, was taken to the Trans-Baikal and sold there. On the whole the Amoor country is very good for agriculture, and will sustain itself in time. The import trade is chiefly in American and German hands, and comprises miscellaneous goods, of which they told me at least fifty per cent. were wines and intoxicating liquors!
Some were taking it very leisurely and moved as if endeavoring to do as little as possible in their hours of work. I was told that they were employed on the eight hour system. Their dress was coarse and rough, like that of the peasants, but had no marks to show that its wearer was a prisoner. There were between three and four thousand prisoners in the province of the Trans-Baikal.
What I mean is that Captain Kharkov, who is in command of the convict train from here, has had instructions to convey her as comfortably as possible, and with no more fatigue than is necessary, to Tchit, in the Trans-Baikal, and that he is also charged with a letter from the Governor of Perm to the Governor of Tchit.
From the Pillar of Farewells to Tiumen, from thence to Tomsk, where they met the first of the released political exiles returning in a joyous band to their beloved Russia, and thence to Irkutsk, and then over the ice of Lake Baikal, and through the awful frozen desert of the Trans-Baikal Provinces, they had been driven like cattle until the remnant that had survived the horrors of the awful journey reached the desolate valley of the Kara and were finally halted at the Lower Diggings.
The lower Amoor is remarkable for its large quantities of snow, and at Nicolayevsk it remains on the ground till the end of May. South of the lower Amoor are the Shanalin mountains, which arrest the progress of birds. On the upper Amoor and in Trans-Baikal very little snow falls, and there are no mountains of great height.
A gentleman in Irkutsk told me he had a gold mine of this frozen character, and intimated that he found it profitable. The richest gold mines thus far worked in Siberia are in the government of Yeneseisk, but it is thought that some of the newly opened placers in the Trans-Baikal province and along the Amoor will rival them in productiveness.
Around Chetah and in most of the Trans-Baikal province there is not snow enough for good sleighing, and the winter roads generally follow the frozen rivers. Horses, cattle, and sheep subsist on the dead and dry grass from October to April, but they do not fare sumptuously every day.
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