Alaska by James A. Michener
When Corey stepped ashore and saw the enormous number of pelts assembled under duress, he realized that whereas the sea otter might be extinct in the Aleutians, the Pribilofs and Kodiak, it was still swimming vigorously in these southern waters, and at the end of two hours of close inspection, he saw that he could with great profit to his ship dispose of his entire dozen cases of guns. So the deal was struck: 'Tell Kot-le-an I will give him all the guns. You saw them, four hundred and thirty-two. But I want all these pelts and this many more.' Pulling aside nearly a third of the pelts, he indicated that this was the requirement, then stood back, allowing Kot-le-an time to digest this new demand.
As a warrior, the young chief did not relish bartering, he was more used to command, but his apprehensions about the future were so strong that he knew he must have those guns the Evening Star carried, so with a gesture which astonished Corey, in a low voice he issued orders to his men, who moved aside a beached boat to disclose a hidden cache of otter pelts half again as large as the additional demand being made by Corey. Showing his contempt, he started kicking the skins toward the pile already belonging to Corey, and when he had thus moved some dozen pelts he growled to Raven-heart: 'Tell him he can have them all.'
When the precious cargo was safely stowed upon the Evening Star, with a value many times the cost of the guns, Kot-le-an and Corey stood facing each other, and in a formality which the Tlingit had learned from English captains, he held out his right hand, and Corey took it. But the American was so surprised at the gesture and so pleased with the results of this barter that on the spur of the moment he told Raven-heart: 'Tell Kot-le-an that because he gave us extra fur, we shall give him extra lead and powder,' and he ordered his sailors to bring forth a substantial chunk of lead and nearly half a barrel of powder.
WITH WARM FEELINGS ON BOTH SIDES, THE DEAL WAS concluded, and two days after the Evening Star sailed from Sitka with a fortune in otter skins to be traded in Canton for twice what Corey had calculated, the prudence of Kot-le-an in making this lopsided deal was confirmed. A small armada of Russian ships and Aleut kayaks came into the bay, passed insolently beneath the hill where the local Tlingits kept their headquarters, and threaded its way eight miles to the north, where, in a spot which seemed to be completely surrounded by protecting mountains, they proceeded to unload the material required for the building of a major fort.
The armada, headed by Chief Administrator Aleksandr Baranov, was not a trivial one, for it brought one hundred Russian men, some wives and nine hundred Aleuts to Sitka with the avowed purpose of establishing here the capital of Russian America, from which the mainland north of California could be developed as a major Russian holding.
On 8 July 1799, Baranov led his people ashore, and his aide Kyril Zhdanko planted a Russian flag in the loamy soil beside a gently flowing river. Then Baranov asked Father Vasili Voronov, who had come with him to serve as spiritual mentor of the new capital, to offer thanks to God that although the long trip across the open ocean from Kodiak had experienced grave difficulties scores of Aleuts dying from poisoned fish, hundreds perishing at sea the Russians themselves had completed it safely, and that was what mattered. Prayers said, the chubby little master of Russian imperialism stood uncovered, wiped his bald head, and proclaimed: 'As the old century draws to a close and a bright new one, full of promise, is about to begin, let us apply all our energies to the building of a noble capital city for the greatness that is to be Russian America.'
With that, in a loud voice he christened the fort-that-was to-be 'Redoubt St. Michael,' and Sitka's Golden Age was under way.
WHEN KOT-LE-AN AND HIS AIDE RAVEN-HEART SAW THE Russian armada creep past their hill at the southern portion of the bay, their first impulse was to muster all the Tlingit troops and engage in whatever activities might prove necessary to repel the invaders and prevent them from landing, whatever their intentions. But when Kot-le-an took the first steps to put this plan into effect, a curious relationship, which would govern the rest of Raven-heart's life, came into operation. 'Tell me what to do,' he said to Kot-le-an, and by this statement he meant that whatever order was issued at any time, he was prepared to execute it regardless of danger to himself, because, as he said, 'I am already dead. The log is across my throat. I breathe only at your pleasure.'
'So be it,' the young chieftain said. 'What you must do first is scout out their positions and strength.'
So Raven-heart, keeping to the woods, crept up the eight miles to Redoubt St. Michael and set up an observation post, from which he took careful note of the Russian potential:
Three ships, not strong like Evening Star but many, many more men than the Americans. About a thousand men, but only one in ten are Russian. The others, what can they be? He studied the non-Russians with care, reasoning that they could not be Tlingits or from any clan associated with the Tlingits:
They're shorter, darker. They wear bones through their noses and some of them have that strange sloping hat. He noticed two favorable aspects: They know how to make boats and none of our people can handle paddles the way they do. He decided that in a fight on the water, these little men would be formidable, and that with eight or nine hundred such fighters in support of the three big ships, the Russians would give a strong account of themselves.
They're Koniags, he concluded, and rumor had swept through the islands in recent years that these men of Kodiak were able warriors, to be avoided if possible, but before he reported this to Kot-le-an he wanted to assure himself as to the facts, so one night when the moon was gone, he crept close to where the outlines of the fort had been dug and waited in the darkness till one of the workmen wandered out.
With a leap and a big hand about the man's face, he dragged the man back into the trees, where he gagged him with a handful of spruce needles and bound him with sinew thongs. Sitting on him till daylight, he then hefted him across his shoulders like a bundle of pelts and marched back to Sitka Hill with him. There, others who were familiar with the languages of the Bering Sea identified the workman as an Aleut, and when they interrogated him they learned that he had been born on Lapak Island and had been taken as a slave to Kodiak. He revealed further that all the non-Russians at the redoubt were Aleuts. When asked: 'Are your people happy to be working here?' he replied: 'It's better than the Seal Islands.'
Satisfied by further scouting that the cadre really was Aleut, Kot-le-an and Raven-heart decided that an attack in total force stood a good chance of driving off the Russians, for, as Kot-le-an pointed out, If the others were all from Kodiak, it might be difficult, but we know that in battle we can overpower Aleuts.' And an attack would have been mounted except that, to Kot-le-an's astonishment, the new toion, without adequate discussions among the warriors of his tribe, not only arranged a peace treaty with the Russians but actually sold them a portion of land at and around the growing fort.
Enraged by this supine surrender to what he properly perceived as a mortal threat to Tlingit aspirations, Kot-le-an assembled all who were disgruntled with this invitation to Russian interference in ancient ways, and harangued them:
'Once the Russians fix their fort on this bay, we Tlingits are doomed. I know them from what others say. They will never let go, and before we know it, they will demand this hill and this portion of the bay. They'll want the island there and the volcano and our hot baths and the shore beyond. All the otters will belong to them, not us, and for every American ship that comes here now to trade with us and bring us the things we need, six of theirs will come, and not for trade. With guns they'll steal everything we have.
'I am not happy with what I see as our fate if we let them stay unchallenged. Our totems will crumble. Our canoes will be driven from the bay. We will no longer be masters of our lands, for the Russians will smother us everywhere and in everything we want to do. I feel the terrible hand of the Russians pressing down upon us like the log that presses upon the throat of a condemned slave.
'I hear our children speaking not our language but theirs and
His words were so powerful, and so predictive of the future which many of his listeners were beginning to fear, that he might have enlisted hundreds in his drive to eliminate the Russians and their Aleut allies had not the leader of the Russians, this little man Baranov, anticipated such a ground swell. On a day in August, as summer was beginning to fade, this clever Russian, always attentive to the safety of his flanks, got in his biggest ship and had his sailors bring him down the bay to the Tlingit settlement, and as he approached the landing, where sailors carried him ashore through the waves, the sun came out in full radiance, so that he climbed the hill the first time on a day as beautiful as this part of Alaska provided.
It's an omen, he said to himself, as if he could foresee that he would spend the glory years of his life atop this fortuitous hill, and when he reached the lofty summit, with the new toion coming forth to greet him, he stopped, looked in all directions, and saw as if in a revelation the incredible majesty of this spot.
To the west swept the Pacific Ocean, visible beyond the hundred islands, the highway back to Kodiak, out to the far Aleutians and on to Kamchatka and the ramparts of Russia. To the south rose a squadron of mountains, marching backward in file to the end of the horizon, green then blue then misty gray, then almost white in the far distance. To the east, crowded close in, stood the glory of Sitka, the mountains that dipped their toes in the sea, big and powerful but also gentle in their green finery. They were mountains of infinite variety, of changing color, of surprising height to be so close to the sea. And to the north, where he was already building, he saw that splendid sound, island-dotted, ringed with its own mountains, some as sharp as needles carved from whalebone, others big and comfortable and rounded.
He was so enchanted by the rich variety of this scene from the hill that he was tempted to cry out at its wonder, but his Russian merchant's canniness warned him not to reveal how struck he was lest his Tlingit hosts fathom his interest in their paradise.
Dropping his head and keeping his arms folded across his belly, as was his custom, he merely said: 'Great and Powerful Toion, in appreciation for your many kindnesses in helping us to establish our little fort on your bay, I bring you a few humble gifts.' And motioning to the sailors who accompanied him, he had them unroll bundles which contained beads, brass, cloth and bottles. After these had been distributed he asked his men for the piece de resistance and he called it by just those words in French and they produced a somewhat rusty, out-of-date musket, which he handed gravely to the toion, asking one of the sailors to provide powder and ball plus an exhibition of how the old gun should be fired.
When the sailor had everything in order, he showed the toion how to handle the gun, apply his forefinger to the trigger, and discharge the ball. There was a flash of fire as the excess powder burned away, a feeble blast from the end of the gun, and a slight rustle of leaves as the ball bounced its way harmlessly through the treetops below the hill. The toion, who had never before fired a gun, was excited, but Kot-le-an and Raven-heart, who had nearly five hundred first-class new rifles hidden away, smiled indulgently.
'However, it was canny Baranov who seemed to triumph, for in response to these impressive gifts, offered with such voluntary good will, he was given the loan of fifteen Tlingits, who would move to the fort and supervise the Aleuts in catching and drying the multitude of salmon which had begun streaming into the small river to the north of the fort.
Kot-le-an, infuriated by this easy capitulation of his toion to the blandishments of the strangers, did gain one advantage: he insinuated into this group of temporary workers his man Raven-heart, so that when Baranov returned to the fort with the salmon experts, he took also a spy with unusual powers of observation and deduction.
At the fort, Raven-heart performed like the other Tlingits, standing knee-deep at the mouth of the river with a wicker scoop, which he dipped among the multitude of fat thirteen inch salmon as they returned to their natal stream to spawn and give rise to the new generation. They left the salt water like myrmidons, each fish in file behind another, fifty or sixty files across, so that at any one spot at the river mouth for these relatively few days, thousands of fish passed, driven only by their urge to return to the fresh water where they had been born years ago, and there to lay the eggs which would renew their species.
A blind man with a torn net could catch salmon at this spot, and when Raven-heart and his mates had thrown several thousand ashore, they showed the Russians how to spot females rich with roe and how to eviscerate the fish and prepare them for drying in the sun. Baranov, watching the stacking up of food in piles of unbelievable size, told his Russians: 'This winter nobody starves.'
In the evenings, when work was done and the Tlingits were left to themselves, Raven-heart utilized his time in memorizing details of the growing fort. He saw that the promontory was divided into two halves: one inland, consisting of a blockhouse that could be furiously defended from fixed gun emplacements and portholes through which rifles could be fired; the other half, a collection of small buildings outside the main blockhouse and not heavily defended. These sheds and barns, he concluded, were to be sacrificed in case of an attack, with all defenders withdrawing inside the fortress, which had to the rear, away from the seafront, a huge square yard with walls two feet thick. Invading and taking that fortress was not going to be easy.
But the more he studied the redoubt the more clearly he saw that a determined assault, which took first the outlying buildings without destroying them and then laid siege to the blockhouse, could succeed if some way were found to break into that huge enclosed yard at the rear, for then the attackers could nibble away at the central redoubt while enjoying protection from the very buildings provided by the Russians, and in time the latter would have to surrender. Redoubt St. Michael could be captured, provided the attackers were led by a man like Kot-le-an and staffed by determined aides like Raven-heart.
When the salmon season ended, in late September, the Tlingits were sent back to their hill, with the understanding that they would not be needed next year, since the Russians and Aleuts were now proficient in the business of catching and preserving the valuable fish. Fourteen of the Tlingits left the redoubt merely with memories of a reasonably pleasant stay, but Raven-heart departed with complete plans for capturing this fort, and as soon as he rejoined Kot-le-an, the two men drew up diagrams of the Russian installation and procedures for destroying it.
During the remainder of 1799 the impetuous young men were prevented from putting their scheme into operation by the hesitancy of their toion, who was awed by Russian power, and by the thoughtful leadership of Aleksandr Baranov, who anticipated and frustrated any Tlingit moves. Whenever it looked as if the Indians on their hill might be getting restive, he threw them off balance by offering them trades of surprising generosity, and once when several hundred of them threatened actual rebellion, he boldly marched among them, advising them to come to their senses. 'He's a brave one,' the Tlingits said, and in this manner Kot-le-an and Raven-heart were neutralized by Baranov's clever moves, even though they continued to regard him as their chief enemy.
In the summer of 1800, at the end of the first full year since the Russian arrival at Redoubt St. Michael, when Ravenheart's spying warned him that the fortress had been completed in good style and ahead of schedule, Baranov, to the surprise of all, loaded one of his ships with pelts from Sitka waters, hoisted sail, and set out for Kodiak, where his wife, Anna, and his son, Antipatr, waited in the big log house which served as the capitol of Russian America. He had gone to Kodiak expecting to load there with supplies forwarded from mainland Russia, but when he la
So his attention was diverted from his outpost at Sitka and directed to the problem which would assail him all his life in Alaska: How can I increase the power of this colony if I'm ignored and neglected by the homeland?
With Baranov tied down in Kodiak, no help from that quarter could be forwarded to the new establishment at Sitka, and in the summer of 1801, Kot-le-an and Raven-heart suspected that the Russians would be so weakened that they would not be able to defend themselves. But just as the Tlingits were preparing their attack, the Boston trader Evening Star put into the sound on a return trip from Canton, and whereas on all previous visits it had anchored near the hill to conduct trading with the Tlingits, this time it sailed right past, as if acknowledging that now it was the Russian fort that was important. Seething with anger, Kot-le-an suffered the indignity of having to get into a boat and trail along behind the trader as if hungry for its favors, and then wait in the sound until the Americans had completed details with the Russians. 'I have been made a stranger in my own land,' the young chieftain fumed to Raven-heart, who took advantage of the enforced idleness to coach his leader in the steps that would be required when the attack on the redoubt took place. That it would occur, neither man doubted.
But it did not happen in 1801 because supplies from the Evening Star strengthened the four hundred and fifty Russians who now operated the place, making an assault at this time inadvisable. However, on its way out of the bay, the Evening Star did stop at the Tlingit stronghold, where Captain Corey and First Mate Kane proved their basic friendship for the Indians by showing them a corner of the hold in which they had hidden from Russian eyes the trade goods that the Tlingits really sought, casks of rum and flat boxes filled with additional rifles made originally in England and shipped to China.