View in Sitka Sound, looking up towards the town: Mt. Verstova, in the middle distance, and the rugged granitic peaks of Indian River on the horizon. Sitkan Indians running down to Borka Islet for halibut. June, 1874] The shipyard of Sitka was as complete as any similar establishment in the Russian Empire. It was actively employed in boat and sail-vessel building, being provided with all sorts of workshops and materials. Experiments were also instituted and prosecuted, to some extent, in making bricks, so much prized in the construction of the big conventional Russian “stoves,” the turning of wooden-ware, the manufacture of woollen stuffs from the crude material brought up from California; but the great cost of importing skilled labor from far-distant Russia, and the relative expense of maintaining it here, caused the financial failure of all these undertakings. Much money was also wasted in attempting to make iron out of the different grades of ore found in many sections of the country. The only real advantage that the company ever reaped from the workshops at Sitka was that which accrued to it from the manufacture of agricultural implements, which it sold to the indolent rancheros of California and Mexico. Thousands of the primitive ploughshares and rude hoes and rakes used in those countries then were made here; also axes, hatchets, and knives were turned out by industrious Muscovites for Alaskan post-trading. The foundry was engaged most of the time in making the large iron and brazen bells which every church and mission from Bering’s Straits to Mexico called for. Most of these bells are still in use or existence, and give ample evidence of skilful workmanship, and of this early development of a unique industry on our northern coast. Naturally enough the contrast of what the Russian Sitka was, with what the American Sitka is to-day, is a striking one: then a force of six or eight hundred white men, with wives and families, busily engaged as above sketched, directed by a retinue of fifty or sixty subalterns of the governor, lived right under the windows of his castle and within the stockade; then the Greek-Catholic Bishop of all Alaska also resided there, with a staff of fifteen ordained priests and scores of deacons all around him, maintained regardless of expense, at this time, by the Imperial Government in that ecclesiastical pomp so peculiar to this Oriental Church—then a fleet of twelve to fifteen sailing-vessels, from ships in size to mere sloops, with two ocean-going steamers, made the waters of the bay their regular rendezvous, their hardy crews assisting to give life and stir to the town, shore, and streets—all this ordered by the concentration of the entire trade and commerce of Alaska at New Archangel.