An Expedition to Mount St. Elias, AlaskaRussell, Israel C. (Cook)
History
An Expedition to Mount St. Elias, Alaska
Russell, Israel C. (Cook)
Alaska -- Description and travel; Saint Elias, Mount (Alaska and Yukon)
"Her countenance had all the cheerful glow of an English milk maid,
and the healthy red which flushed her cheeks was even _beautifully_
contrasted with the whiteness of her neck; her eyes were black and
sparkling; her eyebrows the same color, and most beautifully arched;
her forehead so remarkably clear that the transparent veins were seen
meandering even in their minutest branches--in short, she was what
would be reckoned as handsome even in England. The symmetry of her
features, however, was marred, at least in the eyes of her English
admirer, by the habit of wearing a labret in the slit of her lower
lip."
During our recent visit to Port Mulgrave we did not find the native
women answering to the glowing description of the voyager who
discovered the harbor; but this may be owing to the fact that we did
not prevail upon any of them to wash their faces.
One other discrepancy must be noted between the records of Dixon's
voyage and my own observations, made one hundred {62} years later. The
houses of the natives are described in the narrative just cited as--
"The most wretched hovels that can possibly be conceived: a few poles
stuck in the ground, without order or regularity, recrossed and
covered with loose boards, ... quite insufficient to keep out the snow
and rain."
While this description would apply to the temporary shelters now used
by the Yakutat Indians when on their summer hunting and fishing
expeditions, it by no means describes the houses in which they pass
the winter. These are large and substantially built of planks hewn
from spruce trees, and in some instances supported from the inside by
four huge posts, carved and painted to represent grotesque figures. In
the center of the roof there is a large opening through which the
smoke escapes from the fire kindled in an open space in the floor. But
few of the Indian villages of Alaska, excepting perhaps the homes of
the Thlinkets in the Alexandrian archipelago, are better built or more
comfortable than those at Port Mulgrave.
On the map of Port Mulgrave already referred to, "Point Turner" and
"Point Carrew" appear. The former was named for the second mate of the
_Queen Charlotte_, who was the first of her officers to land; the
second name was probably designed to honor another officer of the
expedition, but of this I am not positive.
DOUGLAS, 1788.[5]
[Footnote 5: Voyage of the _Iphigenia_; Captain Douglas: in Voyages
made in the years 1788-1789 from China to the Northwest Coast of
America. John Meares, 4°, London, 1790.]
In 1788, another trading vessel, the ship _Iphigenia_, in command of
Captain Douglas, visited the southern shore of Alaska and anchored in
Yakutat bay; but no special account of the country or the inhabitants
is recorded in the narrative of the voyage.
MALASPINA, 1792.[6]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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