The
Indians bowed the neck submissively before oppression. Abuse, cruelty,
outrage, accumulated on the heads of the poor Aleuts. They had reached
the fine point where it is better for the weak to die trying to
overthrow strength, than to live under the iron heel of brute
oppression.
The immediate cause of revolt is a type of all that preceded it.[1]
Running out for a thousand miles from the coast of Alaska is the long
chain of Aleutian Islands linking across the Pacific toward Asia.
Oonalaska, the most important and middle of these, is as far from
Oregon as Oregon is from New York. Near Oonalaska were the finest
sea-otter fields in the world; and the Aleutians numbered twenty
thousand hunters--men, women, children--born to the light skin boat as
plainsmen were born to the saddle. On Oonalaska and its next-door
neighbor westward were at least ten thousand of these Indian otter
hunters, when Russia first sent her ships to America. Bassof came
soonest after Bering's discovery; and he carried back {83} on each of
three trips to the Commander Islands a cargo of furs worth from
seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand dollars in modern money.
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