CHAPTER XVIII.

KILLISNOO AND THE LAND OF KAKES.

Around the point from Kootznahoo, a sharp turn leads through a veritable needle’s eye of a passage to Koteosok Harbor, made by the natural breakwater of a small island lying close to the Admiralty shore. This island was named by Captain Meade as Kenasnow, or “near the fort,” as the Kootznahoos designated it to him. It is a picturesque, fir-crowned little island, and its dark, slaty cliffs are seamed with veins of pure white marble. Its ragged shores hold hundreds of aquariums at low tide, and in the way of marine curios there are, besides the skeletons of whales, myriads of star fish and jelly fish and barnacles strewing the beach; the acres of barnacles giving off a chorus of faint little clicking sounds as they hastily shut their shells at the sound of any one approaching.

On this little island of Kenasnow, the Northwest Trading Company has its largest station, Killisnoo, where codfish are dried, herring and dogfish converted into oil, and the air weighted with the most horrible smells from the fish guano manufactured there. The company has extensive warehouses, works, and shops on Kenasnow, and around the buildings there are gathered quite a village of Kootznahoo Indians, who are employed at the fishery. This station represents an investment of over $100,000, the oil works alone having cost $70,000, and extravagant management having doubled all the necessary expenses of the first plant. As there was no water supply on the solid rock of Kenasnow, a reservoir with a storage capacity of 90,000 gallons of water was constructed; and, with cedar forests on every side, every bit of lumber used was brought by freight from below.

Killisnoo was first established as a whaling station, but many causes decided the company to abandon that branch of fishery. There is a tradition that the Indians once regarded their great totemic beast, the whale, with such veneration that they would never kill it, nor eat of its flesh and blubber. The Kootznahoos have grown skeptical in many ways, and they made no objections to harpooning the whale, until the bomb exploded in 1882; and after the troubles following upon that impious adventure, the company decided that whaling was not a profitable business, and began to fish for cod and smaller fry.

The codfish are caught in the deeper waters of Chatham Strait around the island, the Indians going out in the fleet of small boats to fish, and turning their catch into large scows, which are towed in by the two steam launches that are kept constantly busy. Connoisseurs pronounce this cod remarkably fine, firm, and white, and as neither hake nor haddock are ever found there, the Killisnoo codfish is not open to the same suspicions as rest on so many Eastern fish. They average in weight from three to five pounds, and the Indians are provided with boats and paid two cents apiece for every codfish caught. A difficulty in the way of drying in the open air in this moist climate has been solved by building a drying-house, where the process is accomplished artificially. There seems to be no limit to the quantity of fish that can be caught, and during one visit at Killisnoo a scow was towed in from Gardner Point loaded with eight thousand fine large cod, and 1,576 boxes of the dried fish were ready to be shipped south.

From the end of August into January, the waters of Chatham Strait are black with herring. The Indians used to catch them with primitive rakes, made by driving nails through the end of a piece of board, and with this rude implement they could quickly fill a canoe with herring, each nail catching two and three fish. Seines have supplanted the aborigine’s hand-rake, and a thousand barrels of silver herring have been taken at a single haul, although the average haul is about half as many barrels, and requiring eleven men to each net then. Each barrel of fish yields about three gallons of oil at the oil works, which are managed by men who have had charge of menhaden fisheries on the Atlantic coast. As the result of the first year’s work, 82,000 gallons of herring oil were shipped below in 1883, selling at the rate of thirty cents per gallon. Within the year an attempt was made towards supplying the cod-liver oil of pharmacy, and five cases of it sent below for trial received the highest indorsement from physicians.

More picturesque and less fragrant than the buildings of the company were the log and bark houses of the Indians, who have abandoned their old village and fort of Kootznahoo, and settled around the Killisnoo station. The local celebrity is the famous old head chief of the Kootznahoos, Kitchnatti or Saginaw Jake, who, for the iniquities of his tribe, was carried off as a hostage in the man-of-war _Saginaw_ in 1869. He was a prisoner for a long time on board that ship at the Mare Island Navy Yard in California, and when he was afterward returned to his people, he became an apostle of peace and the greatest friend of the white man. He is a crooked, bow-legged old fellow, and he superintended the tying up of the ship in a most energetic way. He lurched and tacked across the dock, waving his cane wildly to his underlings, and giving hoarse, guttural words of the fiercest command. He wore a derby hat with a gold band, and the uniform coat of a captain of the navy, while two immense silver stars on his breast gave his name and rank as the Killisnoo policeman, and a dangerous-looking billy was suspended from his shoulder by a variegated sash.

Besides being a hostage of war, Kitchnatti was once denounced by a terrible shaman, who had an incurable patient on hand. The chief was found bound and tied for torture, and barely rescued in time by naval friends. He has now no respect for his own medicine-men, and proved it once by telling one of the curio collectors that he knew where there was a shaman’s grave full of beautiful carvings and trophies. He was bidden to get them, and offered a price for his grave-robbing. In a few days Jake reappeared, looking sad and despondent. He mentioned the name of a sub-chief, and, with a tone of severe disapproval, said:—

“Heap bad Indian. He rob medicine-man’s grave. Sell curios to trader. Bad man.”

When Jake spied the photographers on shore, he made wild signals, ran off to his cabin, and reappeared clad in fuller regalia; then, drawing an old cutlass, braced himself up in a “present-arms” attitude before the camera, and nodded for the operator to go on. He then led them to his neatly whitewashed house, and showed them a cigar-box full of letters of credentials and testimonials of character given him by naval officers, ship captains, traders, and missionaries. All of these Indians have a great fancy for these letters. They beg them from every one in power, and carry them around tenderly wrapped in paper, to show them as certificates of their worth, character, and importance. Some of Jake’s letters were profusely sealed with great splotches of red wax, and there is a story that he for a long time innocently showed a testimonial, which ran: “The bearer of this paper is the biggest scoundrel in Alaska. Believe nothing that he says, and look out, or he will steal everything in sight.” These poor old men of letters have many funny jokes played on them in this way, and it is really touching to see the innocent pride with which they display these insignia.

Jake pointed with pleasure to a row of illuminated posters and portraits of theatrical celebrities that decorated one wall of his cabin, and explained that they were pictures of his friends. The faces were those of Nat Goodwin, Gus Williams, John McCullough, Thomas Keane, and others, and the high colors and grand attitudes much pleased the old chief. In quite another vein Jake pointed to a small box tomb on the other side of the channel, where he had buried his little daughter a few days before. A flag-pole, with a small United States flag at half-mast, gave mute testimony to Jake’s ideas of patriotism and mourning etiquette. His wife betrayed her state of grief by wandering about in a black dress, with a black umbrella held down closely over her head all of the time.

At Killisnoo blackened faces were almost the rule, and every other native woman had her face coated with a mixture of seal oil and soot. A group of these blackamoors made a picture, as they sat inside a cabin door weaving their pretty baskets of the fine inside bark and roots of the cedar. One younger woman wore a silver pin sticking out through her under lip, another had a large wooden labrette in her lip; and when the photographer tried to take the group, their neighbors ran up and joined in the tableau.

At Killisnoo, once, the anglers baited their lines and hung them overboard, as inducements to the codfish. The lunch-gong summoned them below, but they tied their lines and trusted to some fish swallowing the hooks while they were gone. When the first angler came up and touched his line, his face glowed, and he began pulling in the weighty prize. When the line left the water a bottle was dangling on the end of it, tied with a sailor’s knot, and hook and bait intact. The second angler drew up a dried codfish, and then, when they looked around for the captain of the ship, he was nowhere to be found.

There are a few Kake Indians among the fishermen and workmen at Killisnoo, and their old home or proper domain is on Kouiu Island, further down Chatham Straits. The Kakes are outcasts and renegades among the tribes, and, from early days, there has been reason for the bad name given them. They were hostile, treacherous, and revengeful, and were dealt with warily by the old traders. In 1857 a war party paddled a thousand miles down to Puget Sound, and at Whidby Island murdered Mr. Ebey, a former collector of customs at Port Townsend, in retaliation for an indignity put upon their men in the preceding year. They carried his head back with them, and great war dances followed the return of the avenging Kakes.

At the north end of Kouiu Island are the ruins of the three villages destroyed during the Kake war, in 1869. The origin and incidents of this war are thus sketched in a private letter by Captain R. W. Meade, U. S. N., who commanded the U. S. S. _Saginaw_, at that time in Alaskan waters:—

“The war was due originally to the killing of a Kake Indian at Sitka by the sentry on guard at the lower end of the town. There had been some trouble with the Indians outside the stockade, and General Jeff C. Davis, who commanded the department, with headquarters at Sitka, had given orders to prevent all Indians from leaving Sitka during the night—I think it was New Year’s night. He had asked me to co-operate with him, and my patrol-boats sent several canoes back to the Indian village. About daylight a canoe was discovered leaving the village. The soldier nearest the canoe hailed and ordered the canoe back, and as it did not go back after a third or fourth hail, fired, killing a Kake Indian. The canoe still continued to paddle off, and, though pursued by the boats of the _Saginaw_, that had seen the firing, escaped. Subsequently, in revenge for this, the Kake Indians murdered two Sitka traders, Messrs. Maugher and Walker, and General Davis determined to punish them by destroying their villages. I was asked to co-operate, and, although I think the trouble could have been avoided in the first place, yet, after the wanton murder of two innocent men, I felt it my duty to give the Kake tribe—a very ugly one—a lesson. We therefore took on board some twenty-five soldiers from the garrison at Sitka, and went to the Kake country. The Indians abandoned their villages on our approach, and three villages were destroyed by fire and shell. A stockaded fort was also destroyed by midshipman, now Lieutenant Bridges, of the _Saginaw_. The Indians were dismayed, and no further trouble, I believe, has occurred with them. There was no loss of life on either side—it was a bloodless war.”

The Kakes have never returned to these villages, and in diminished numbers they roam the archipelago, creating trouble and disturbances wherever they draw up their canoes. Their visits are dreaded equally by the natives and whites, and Captain Beardslee peremptorily ordered them out of Sitka when several war canoes, filled with a visiting party, came abreast of the _rancherie_, shouting and singing their peculiar songs. Their unpleasant reputation has, doubtless, kept settlers away from Kouiu Island, and there is not yet as much as a salmon cannery or packing house on its shores. The island is over sixty miles long, with an irregular, indented shore, and wherever the surveyors have followed its lines they have seen forests of yellow cedar. This timber will, in time, make Kouiu and the adjoining island of Kuprianoff the most valuable land sections in this part of the Territory. The yellow cedar is said to be the only good ship timber on the Pacific coast, and is the only wood that can resist the teredo, which eats up the pine piles under wharves in two years from the time they are driven. The trees are found five and seven feet in diameter, and attain the height of one hundred and fifty feet, and the fine, closely grained, hard, yellow wood was once exported to China in large quantities by the Russians. The Chinese valued it for its fine, hard texture, and they carved it into chests and small articles, and exported it as camphor wood. Its odor is by some said to resemble sandal wood, and, by others, garlic, but it takes a beautiful satiny polish, and will be as valuable as a cabinet wood as for ship timber. Some of it that has been sent to Portland has been sold at seventy-five dollars a thousand feet, and Mr. Seward prized very highly the fine cedar that he carried home with him. As there has always been complaint of the quality of the Oregon timber, and vessels built of its pine could not be insured as A 1 but for three years, it may seem strange that no attempts have been made to utilize the vast forests of cedar scattered through the archipelago. Seven years ago a bill was introduced in Congress asking that one hundred thousand acres of timber land on Kouiu Island should be sold to a company, that guaranteed to establish a shipyard and build a vessel of twelve hundred tons burthen within two years. The same inscrutable reasons that for a long time prevented anything being done for the development of Alaska prevented the bill from becoming a law. Even the present act establishing a form of civil government does not make the Territory a land district, and nothing could seem more perverse than this action. Timber lands can neither be bought nor leased, and as settlers can in no way acquire an acre, there are few saw mills in the Territory, and their owners are guilty of stealing government timber, and liable to prosecution if the new officials press things to the finest point. Want of lumber has been a serious hindrance and obstacle to settlers, and the miners at Juneau had to pay freight on, and await the monthly consignments of, Oregon pine that were shipped to a country crowded with better timber.