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Updated: June 18, 2025
In 1885, when these mud huts or yurts were examined, they were seen to have walls of peat three feet thick. To each man was given a pound of flour. For the rest, their food must be what they caught or clubbed mainly, at first, the sea-otter, whose flesh was unpalatable to the taste and tough as leather.
Most of the inhabitants were Mongols from the city who had pitched their yurts in the valley for the summer. Although the wealthiest natives seem to feel that for the reception of guests their "position" demands a foreign house, they seldom live in it. Duke Loobitsan Yangsen had completed his mansion the previous winter.
We were off at sunrise, and soon we entered a beautiful valley flanked on either hand by respectable hills, their upper slopes clothed with real forests of pine. These were the first trees I had seen, except three dwarfed elms in Gobi, since I left behind the poplars and willows of China. Yurts, herds, men were everywhere.
Sometimes we bivouacked at night in a wild mountain gorge and lighted up the snow-laden forest with the red glare of a mighty camp-fire; sometimes we shovelled the drifted snow out of one of the empty yurts, or earth-covered cabins, built by the government along the route to shelter its postilions, and took refuge therein from a howling blizzard.
Among the yurts it was as if someone had ripped up a rotten log to reveal an ants' nest and sent the alarmed insects into a frenzy. Men boiled out of the domes, the majority of them running for the horse pasture. One or two were mounted on ponies that must have been staked out in the settlement. The main war party of Apaches skimmed silently through the grass on their way to the ship.
The lama, a well-appearing, elderly man, seemed completely fitted out with wife and children and yurts and herds. He was plainly a person of substance, and the head of quite a settlement. The yurt where I was received was very spacious, and was furnished precisely as Huc described sixty years ago.
For two miles the road is bordered by Russian cottages; then it debouches into a wide square which loses its distinctive character and becomes an indescribable mixture of Russia, Mongolia, and China. Palisaded compounds, gay with fluttering prayer flags, ornate houses, felt-covered yurts, and Chinese shops mingle in a dizzying chaos of conflicting personalities.
Poor-looking women and boys from some yurts crept over to our camp, and sought eagerly through the grass for any finds in the way of tins or bottles. They were quite the most miserable natives that I saw on my trip. As for me, I sat on the ground, comforting Jack and longing for a Chinese or a Mongol or anything that had learned to obey.
In the former, which is generally situated under the shelter of timbered hills, several miles from the seacoast, they reside from September until June. The letovie is always built near the mouth of an adjacent river or stream, and consists of a few yurts or earth-covered huts, eight or ten conical balagáns mounted on stilts, and a great number of wooden frames on which fish are hung to dry.
Only when the installations it contained were destroyed, might the Apaches hope for any assistance from the Mongols, either the outlaw pack waiting well back on the prairie or the people in the yurts. The grass rippled and Naginlta poked out a nose, parting stems before Travis. The Apache beamed an order, sending the coyotes with the horse-raiding party.
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