PERIL STRAIT
The Elder departed Skagway for Glacier Bay, from which it continued on to Sitka. Some people I wanted to meet near Glacier Bay were out of town for the week, so I headed to Sitka first. Since the southbound Marine Highway ferry wasn’t due back in Skagway for several days, I flew out on one of Alaska’s many small subregional carriers. Shortly after eight, I checked out of my hotel and walked five minutes to the airport. I rummaged through the collection of paperbacks that accumulates at every small transportation hub in Alaska. I waited for the pilot to come by, glance down at his clipboard, and ask for me by name. I climbed onto the wing of the four-seater after the other passenger, who was carrying a Jack Russell terrier, and squeezed into the copilot’s seat. I had a nice chat with the pilot about his days flying for the navy in Iraq while I took in the mountains and glaciers of Lynn Canal in reverse. By nine thirty I was sitting down to breakfast in Juneau, awaiting the twice-a-week ferry to Sitka.
The quickest water route from Juneau to Sitka, which lies about ninety miles southwest, is a crooked course via Peril Strait. Its treacherous channels are just a few hundred feet across between islands in some places. In 2004, the Alaska marine ferry MV LeConte grounded on a reef while making the run and nearly sank. The Harriman Expedition navigated Peril Strait at night, which is both impressive and a pity, because it is an exceptionally beautiful stretch of non-glaciated waterway in the Tongass National Forest. The proximity to the shoreline enhances the colors of everything—the whiteness of the snow on the peaks, the blue of the water, the green of the spruce trees, which were now near enough to see the eagles’ nests in their branches.
The MV Fairweather was a catamaran and seemed to float like a hovercraft. I must have zoned out staring at trees in the observation lounge, because I started when I heard the words “Do you mind if I sit here?” spoken about six inches away from my ear. A fellow with a kind face and torn jeans had sat down next to me. His hair was short, with a tiny braid in the back like a taproot. He appeared to be riding out a skull-cracking hangover. He was headed to Sitka hoping to find work.
“I’m gonna go down to the harbor, look for my friend who’s got a boat,” he said. “I’ll find something. And if not, there’s always the cannery. They’ll hire anybody.”
When I was in college, stories circulated every year about adventurous friends of friends who’d gone off to Alaska for the summer to work in a salmon cannery and returned with an ungodly pile of money. From what I could tell, the stories were probably true. Alaska is a very welcoming place for anyone who’s willing to bust ass. Every town I’d seen on the Alaska coast had a fish-processing plant, but most of the labor force was now coming from the Philippines or Central America. College kids had moved on to mining the tourism riches of Skagway and Ketchikan.
My seatmate pulled out a small spray bottle and spritzed his palms with citrusy-smelling liquid. “This is herbal stuff; my girlfriend from Australia sent it to me,” he said, rubbing his hands like a surgeon scrubbing for an operation. “That’s how I came up here in the first place, in ’91. Running away from a crazy lady in Oregon. It’s hard to have a relationship working on the boats. Once you leave town you gotta follow the fish, and if you catch some, you stop wherever’s closest to sell ’em. I might not get back to Sitka for two weeks.
“A lot of salmon have bites from other animals; you know, you can’t sell those. The good ones, you fillet ’em, cut out the gills. Use a spoon on the back of your knife to pull out the blood vessels, rinse, pack ’em in ice, head to tail, like this.” He stacked his hands in front of him. “Cover that with ice, make another layer. We might pick up four thousand pounds of ice when we’re in harbor. Gotta hose everything down first.”
“After that, can you still stand the taste of salmon?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. I love salmon. Baked, smoked, barbecued. It’s all good.”
He scanned the room. Sitka is the sort of town that frequently turns up on “Best Places to Live” lists. It has historic architecture and a classical music festival and a very good French restaurant. The Fairweather passengers were more upscale than what I’d seen on other ferries, with more L.L.Bean hiking boots in view than XtraTufs. “They used to have bars on these boats,” my new friend said. “I’d pull out my guitar and start playing and people would send over drinks. I’d get all tore up. One time I started playing ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ by Hank Williams, and about three notes in, some dude from Metlakatla starts playing along at the piano! Man, I miss those bars. This boat don’t even have a shower.”
Peril Strait has a lot of twists and turns. My seatmate knew them all and announced each a minute in advance, a little kid who couldn’t help spoiling the plot of a favorite movie. “I’m gonna step outside and have a look down,” he finally said. “Water might be fifty feet deep, but you can see straight to the bottom it’s so clear. Well, I’ll be talking to you my brother.”
The Fairweather squeezed between islands and snaked through a series of tight channels. The bank was now close enough that I could discern the personalities of individual spruce trees, the variation in their isosceles heights like those of people in a crowd. Some had crooked spines or missing limbs. A brown patch of dead trees sheltered shorter, younger trees within it. One passenger standing in the aisle pointed his camera toward the port side, and I turned to see porpoises turning cartwheels in the water.
“Yeah, this is the best part of the trip right here,” said a scratchy voice. A familiar scent, perhaps 90 percent Australian herbal spray and 10 percent metabolized ethyl alcohol, wafted from behind me. My friend with the taproot walked to the picture window at the front of the boat and pressed his nose against the glass. I wondered again how the Elder had ever managed this journey at night.
The deckhands gathered on the bow to perform their arrival rituals with the ropes. We made one final turn and were greeted by the bulk of Mount Edgecumbe, lurking over Sitka Sound.
In 1899, Sitka was the capital of the District of Alaska, home to a small population of cultured Americans. “People actually live in Sitka from choice, and seem to find life sweet,” wrote John Burroughs, who was growing a little weary of Alaska’s charming settlements but never tired of encountering people who’d read his books. “We met teachers from New England and people who keep in touch with current literature.” The town’s most striking buildings were left over from before the 1867 purchase, a time when Sitka had been the nexus of Russian economic and political activity in North America. The Harriman team toured the onion-domed Russian Orthodox church, filled with religious icons decorated in silver leaf. They showed more Byzantine Christian influence than Roman.
Following the church tour, Harriman hosted several of Sitka’s most prominent citizens for champagne and a lavish dinner aboard the Elder. Among the guests was the district governor, John Brady. Brady had been a street urchin wandering downtown Manhattan when Theodore Roosevelt Sr., father of the future president, spotted him and funded his foster care with a family in Indiana. Brady eventually graduated from Yale and became an ordained Presbyterian minister and a protégé of Sheldon Jackson. As with Muir, it was Jackson who had directed Brady to Alaska. Even today, people in Alaska say that their state is like a very large small town, in that any person is rarely separated from any other by more than two or three degrees. (I found this to be largely true.) For whites in 1899, Alaska must have seemed like an extremely small town.
What was evident to many expeditioners as they toured the capital was that Sitka’s prime had long since passed. During its heyday as a Russian port, it “was regarded as the most civilized town on the North American Pacific coast,” according to one historian. Buildings constructed by the Americans following the handover were shabby in comparison with the solid Russian ones. The spectacular three-story Russian governor’s residence overlooking the harbor, known as Baranov’s Castle, was in the years after 1867 “looted of every belonging, wantonly stripped, and debased,” according to guidebook author Eliza Scidmore. It burned to the ground in 1894.
With its quaint downtown, farmers’ market, and Pacific-facing view, Sitka is probably Haines’s top competitor for cutest town in Alaska. To get a sense of what life had been like during the Russian era, when it was still known as “the Paris of the Pacific,” I called local historian Harvey Brandt. We met in front of the Russian Bishop’s House, one of the two best-known buildings remaining from Sitka’s pre-American period, along with St. Michael’s Cathedral. (The cathedral burned down in 1966 and was rebuilt using the original plans. Then as now, one of the more striking things about the building was its placement in the middle of Lincoln Street, the city’s main avenue. Traffic divides around the church like a stream flowing around a rock.) In his crewneck sweater and ball cap, Harvey looked a lot like Paul Newman during his doting-grandfather years. He had worked at the Bishop’s House as a park ranger decades ago, and he retained a proprietary feeling about the building and grounds. “Here, smell this,” he said, reaching down to pluck one of the decorative plants in the well-manicured front yard and holding it under my nose. “It’s sweet cicely, used to make licorice. All this was a garden when the bishop was here.” Harvey was a big fan of the bishop.
“Seventy percent of this building is original,” Harvey said as we walked behind what had been the main residence. “When I arrived here in 1967, this was decrepit! Saint Michael’s Cathedral was started immediately after this building was completed and dedicated. Probably the same crew. Finns.” (Harvey was also a great admirer of Finns.) The chief manager of the Russian-American Company, a commercial arm of the government that oversaw its affairs in Alaska, was a Helsinki native who imported a team of Finnish master carpenters in the 1840s. The Bishop’s House was owned until 1969 by the Russian Orthodox Church, headquartered in Moscow, which must have been a little strange during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“How long are you in town?” Harvey asked. “I suppose you’ll need access to the Park Service library. They’ve got the best collection of materials on the Russian era here outside of Juneau. I know that because I put it together.”
We entered an NPS building next to the Bishop’s House, surprising the young ranger on duty, a tall fellow with auburn dreadlocks who had almost gotten to his feet when Harvey started to grill him. “What happened to the organizational system I set up here? How late are you open? This man has come all the way from New York City to use this library.” Sixty seconds earlier, I hadn’t known of the library’s existence.
“I, uh, don’t know. I’m kind of new here. I could call . . .”
Harvey was already taking books from a shelf, flipping through them and handing them to me. “You’ll want to look at this. And this. And especially this, by George Emmons. He lived right down the street here.” Emmons was a friend of Hart Merriam’s who had conducted extensive ethnological research among the Tlingit. While the Elder was in port, he gave Merriam and Grinnell a tour of the Tlingit village, where Merriam purchased a brown bear’s skull. “We need a map,” Harvey said. He turned to the ranger, who was mumbling nervously into the phone. “I assume you have copies of the 1845 map?”
“Um, I don’t think so,” the ranger said. “But your friend can use the library from two thirty to four thirty.”
“It’ll have to do,” Harvey said, disappointed. We walked around to the front door of the Bishop’s House and went inside. “I hope they’ll let us see the attic,” he said, eyeing a gate blocking the stairs. “Maybe we’ll just go up later.”
We walked through some rooms until we reached an enormous diorama of Sitka in 1845. This was, according to one nineteenth-century travel guide, the “golden age” of Sitka. Harvey had helped to design the miniature city, using old paintings as well as maps. Most of the tiny structures had been painted yellow with red roofs, bringing to mind William Dall’s description of Sitka just before the sale: “The warm colors of the buildings, above which rose the pale green spire and bulbous domes of the Greek church, seen against steep, snow-tipped mountains densely clothed with somber forests of spruce, produced a picturesque effect unique among American settlements.”
A four-way power struggle was under way in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the nineteenth century. Russia attempted to solidify its North American holdings by establishing a colony in Spain’s territory of Alta California, less than a hundred miles north of the Spanish mission at San Francisco. The hope was to use what eventually became known as Fort Ross as a base of operations for fur gathering and agriculture. Neither venture quite panned out. The difficulties of administering a territory that ran from Sonoma County to the Aleutians eventually forced Russia to sign treaties opening the area to trade with the United States and Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company. Spain’s presence in North America ended with Mexico’s independence, in 1821. Fort Ross was abandoned and sold in 1841 to John Sutter, who just a few years later would discover gold at his famous mill in the Sacramento Valley. By the mid-1840s, Russia was signaling to the United States that Alaska might be for sale, relatively cheap.
One outcome of this geopolitical jockeying is Alaska’s strange border, which looks like it was made by someone who started cutting a straight line with a jigsaw and then suffered an epileptic seizure. The cause was a territorial dispute between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Russian-American Company over whether Russia or Britain possessed trading rights in specific places along the Pacific coast. In 1825, a treaty fixed an international border at latitude fifty-four degrees forty minutes north—now the southernmost point of the Alaska panhandle. A much less specific line of demarcation was drawn parallel to the irregular coast by connecting the dots of mountain summits near the Pacific. Everything west of that imaginary crooked line was Russian. That vaguely defined boundary was still uncertain when the Harriman team saw the flags waving over White Pass City, where Canadian officials extracted duties from miners on land claimed by the United States. The dispute remained unresolved until an international tribunal established the international border in its current location in 1903. Canadian frustration with Britain’s weak negotiating on its behalf—frustration that was completely justified, incidentally—accelerated the movement toward independence from the British Crown.
Harvey pushed through a door marked EMPLOYEE EXIT ONLY, which opened onto a stairwell. He looked in both directions, then picked up what looked like a miniature bearskin rug. “You ever see a sea otter pelt? Feel this. A hundred thousand hairs per square centimeter!” The fur had the softness of cashmere and the silky density of Vaseline.
One of the house’s largest rooms had been converted into a gallery of major figures in Alaska and Sitka history. The first face we saw was a portrait labeled as Vitus Bering.
“That’s not actually Bering; that’s his uncle,” Harvey said, scowling at the chubby face. In 1991, a team of archaeologists had ventured to the treeless island where Bering died of scurvy to dig up the explorer’s grave. Forensic analysis of his remains showed that he was built more like a middleweight boxer than the oil-on-canvas fatso staring back at us. “Bering didn’t discover Alaska, either. That’s just stupid,” Harvey said. “The Tlingit had long since established themselves here. There’s an old story that the Tlingit were already here when Mount Edgecumbe was smoking.” Edgecumbe, the dormant volcano that looms over Sitka, last erupted between 2500 and 2000 B.C.E. “That would mean they were here at least four thousand to forty-five hundred years ago.”
By far the most gallery space had been dedicated to the namesake holy man for whom the Russian Bishop’s House was built. “Now this guy, Bishop Innocent, was a genius!” Harvey said, gazing admiringly at his portrait. “He grew up penniless in Siberia, but by the time he spent the winter of 1823 here in Sitka, he’d become a good writer, a good scientist, and a very good priest. He was gifted with languages!”
Of all the extraordinary characters who have come through Alaska during its recorded history, one could argue that Bishop Innocent is the most fascinating. After stopping in Sitka, when he was still known as Father Ivan Veniaminov, he moved on in 1824 to Unalaska, a town in the Aleutian Islands. To the surprise of the Aleuts who’d lived under decades of abuse from Russian fur traders, Veniaminov set to constructing his own house and church and taught the local residents basic building skills as they were completed. He was a huge man, often described as “Paul Bunyan in a cassock,” with a nimble mind. He built his own clocks and furniture, including a desk with an ingenious secret compartment that was still on display at his old home. Veniaminov quickly learned to speak the Aleut language, Unangan, then helped devise its first alphabet so that textbooks could be written and scriptures translated into the local tongue.
If the Aleuts were skeptical of Veniaminov’s intentions, the Tlingit who greeted him upon his 1834 promotion to serve in Sitka were downright hostile. Only thirty years before, the Russians had laid siege to the town and built a heavily fortified stockade. When Veniaminov arrived, Harvey said, “the Russians had their cannons trained on the Tlingit village just outside the walls.” Once again, Veniaminov showed unprecedented respect for the local culture and seems to have made a breakthrough after the inoculations he promoted spared lives during a deadly smallpox epidemic. “The Tlingits thought, ‘Hmm, we will read this guy’s Bible,’” Harvey said. In 1840, Veniaminov was named Bishop Innocent and put in charge of a diocese that stretched from Siberia to California.
What impressed me most about Bishop Innocent was his sea voyages. In the Aleutians he paddled from island to island in a baidarka, or Aleut kayak. While traveling, he took detailed scientific notes; one paddler I met later in Unalaska said that Innocent’s journals were still useful for locating sources of drinking water. In 1836, he sailed to Fort Ross, the southernmost outpost of his enormous parish. Upon returning to Sitka, he built two small pipe organs that he donated to Catholic missions he had visited in California. After his promotion to bishop in Sitka, the historian Walter R. Borneman writes, “Between 1842 and 1852 he made three major visitations of some 15,000 miles each to newly created parishes in Alaska and Kamchatka.”
While I was catching up on Bishop Innocent’s achievements, Harvey’s attention had been caught by a door with a sign that read MUSEUM STAFF ONLY, which he opened without hesitation.
“Because the Russians had trading agreements, like the one with the Hudson’s Bay Company, you could get almost anything here, even a great bottle of wine,” he shouted. I tiptoed in behind him. We were in somebody’s office. “They moved my filing cabinet,” he said, sounding displeased as he pulled a box off a shelf.
“You sure we’re supposed to be in here, Harvey?” I said, looking over my shoulder.
“Oh, it’s fine. I made this collection.” He opened a large box, inside of which was a large brown square object imprinted with something. It looked like a giant Chunky bar. “You ever see a tea brick? You know how a samovar works, right?” He reached up for a giant serving urn and I imagined the smell of 180-year-old tea wafting through the building and wondered if the police would be called. Did I know any lawyers in Alaska? But Harvey had changed his mind and was already walking toward the front door, pausing for a second to look intently up the stairs to the attic. I never did find out why he wanted to go up there.
The end of Russian America came swiftly. In 1854, a conflict with Turkey over Russia’s expansionism into the Black Sea region erupted into the Crimean War, which brought Britain and France in as allies on the Turkish side. Russia suffered a humiliating and costly defeat. Its Alaskan territory was expensive to maintain, and returns from furs had dropped. Wary of sea power Britain strengthening its position across the Bering Strait, Russia made clear to the United States that someone—anyone other than the British—would soon be purchasing Alaska.
Serious discussions between the two parties were delayed until 1865 because of the American Civil War. The process wasn’t helped when the United States’ primary negotiator, Secretary of State William Seward, was attacked and brutally stabbed, along with five other members of his household (plus one who was pistol-whipped), as part of the same assassination plot in which John Wilkes Booth shot and killed Abraham Lincoln. None of the victims at Seward’s house died. According to Harvey, the would-be assassin’s blade may have been thwarted by a neck brace. “If Seward hadn’t been run over by a carriage he wouldn’t have been covered in casts,” Harvey said. “That accident saved his life.”
Contrary to the myth of Seward’s Folly, the opportunity to purchase a massive piece of land rumored to be rich in resources for two cents an acre was popular from the start. The U.S. Senate approved the deal by a vote of 37 to 2. Seward is credited with choosing the name Alaska—“mainland” in Aleut—for the entire territory. The transfer of Alaska from Russia to the United States took place on October 18, 1867, in front of Baranov’s Castle.
Harvey and I walked up to Castle Hill, the spot where the signing had taken place and the Stars and Stripes were first raised over American Alaska. There was a nice view of the harbor and an old Russian cannon that kids liked to climb on, but not much else was left from the golden age. Under our feet, though, was a giant midden heap attesting to Sitka’s onetime role as the most cosmopolitan city on the West Coast. In the late 1990s, archaeologists had found thousands of artifacts including coconuts from Hawaii, Japanese coins, British buttons manufactured in Haiti, bits of French armaments, and tobacco pipes from the Ottoman Empire. “I suppose Sitka was a cultural stop when Harriman came in 1899, but they were really living on the reputation of the Russian era,” Harvey said.
Baranov’s Castle may have been gone by the time the Elder arrived, but its passengers were given a reception at Governor Brady’s residence. Frederick Dellenbaugh noted the strangeness of donning formal clothing in the middle of an expedition and running the “gauntlet” of a receiving line made up of Sitka’s elite. Harriman had asked Brady to invite the local Tlingit chief and several members of his tribe. He surprised them with a graphophone, with which he recorded the natives talking and singing. To their amazement, Harriman then played their voices back to them. Governor Brady volunteered to make what was presumably the first recorded speech by a politician in Alaska history.
As the Elder prepared to depart the next day, Harriman was showing off his machine to a group in front of Brady’s home when an all-Native brass band marched up the street. The steamship left the dock to the sounds of Sitka rain and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”