In
1785 Cook's Inlet yielded three thousand; in 1812, only one hundred.
Yakutat gave two thousand in 1794, only three hundred, six years later.
Fifteen thousand were gathered at Sitka in 1804, only one hundred and
fifty thirty years later. Of course the Russians obtained such results
only by a system of musket, bludgeon, and outrage, that are repellent
to the modern mind. Women were seized as hostages for a big hunt.
Women were even murdered as a punishment for small returns. Men were
sacrificed like dogs by the "promyshleniki"--riffraff blackguard
Russian hunters from the Siberian exile population; but this is a story
of outrageous wrong followed by its own terrible and unshunnable
Nemesis which shall be told by itself.
[1] The price of the sea-otter varied, falling in seasons when the
market was glutted to $40 a pelt, selling as high, in cases of rare
beauty, as $1000 a pelt.
[2] See John Burroughs's account of birds observed during the Harriman
Expedition. Elliott and Stejenger have remarked on the same phenomenon.
{80}
CHAPTER IV
1760-1770
THE OUTLAW HUNTERS
The American Coast becomes the Great Rendezvous for Siberian Criminals
and Political Exiles--Beyond Reach of Law, Cossacks and Criminals
perpetrate Outrages on the Indians--The Indians' Revenge wipes out
Russian Forts in America--The Pursuit of Four Refugee Russians from
Cave to Cave over the Sea at Night--How they escape after a Year's Chase
"_God was high in the Heavens, and the Czar was far away_," as the
Russians say, and the Siberian exiles--coureurs of the sea--who flocked
to the west coast of America to hunt the sea-otter after Bering's
discoveries in 1741 took small thought and recked no consequences of
God or the Czar.
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