The Russians had first heard about the Lena from Tungus who also told them about the Yakuts, or “horse people,” who inhabited its shores. Originally pastoral nomads from regions farther south, the Yakuts had fled northward during the upheavals accompanying the rise of Genghis Khan, and had eventually settled along the middle Lena, where they continued to practice cattle and horse breeding in spite of the severe climate, sheltering the animals in their own dwellings during winter months. Westward affluents of the Lena were quickly reached from eastward branches of the Yenisey as expeditions from Yeniseysk and Mangazeya raced across short portages of low rolling hills and penetrated the river basin from both north and south. Soon rival exploring parties from Tomsk and Tobolsk also showed up, but it was not until the government despatched the Cossack Pyotr Beketov – renowned for his subjugation of the Buryats and Tungus along the Angara – from Yeniseysk that the conquest of the Lena really began. In 1631, he portaged from Ilimsk (founded the previous year) to the Lena with about thirty men, proceeded up the river, built a fortified camp of fallen trees, and imposed tribute on the local Yakuts. In 1632, he founded Yakutsk, later a base for expeditions to the Arctic and Pacific, on a big bend of the river, and Zhigansk to the north. Amginsk, Vilyuysk, and other outposts quickly followed on tributary streams, and Olekminsk was started at the junction of the Olekma and Lena rivers in 1635.
Meanwhile, Cossack bands from the different towns had begun to fight among themselves for a share of the spoils. Infatuated with a kind of hometown pride, some of them even became involved in intertribal wars on opposing sides. Elsewhere, tribute was collected from some of the natives two and even three times, provoking uprisings where at first peoples had been easily subdued. Such clashes led to a decline of revenue for the Treasury, prompting Moscow to designate Yakutsk in 1638 as the headquarters of a separate administrative district from which servicemen from other districts were banned.
This measure had only partial success. Whereas the conquest of Western Siberia had been methodically planned, to the east a new and more rugged country had begun, with frontier fortresses constituting tiny islands of domination in a gigantic land. On the Lena, the Russians were 2,500 miles from the Urals, and so remote from Kremlin directives that the initiative inevitably passed to the local authorities, and even to individual groups. Most Cossack or exploring parties amounted to no more than twenty or thirty men, and sometimes to less than ten. These promyshlenniks (hunters and trappers) led the way, with the state, which had taken the lead in Western Siberia, following after them, constructing forts to command rivers and portages and to supervise the collection they had already begun to tap.
The lack of an organized military force seemed at times to give the natives a fighting chance. The Buryats, for example, continued to resist Russian incursions fiercely, and mountainous terrain enabled them to use guerrilla tactics to telling effect. It was not until 1648 that the Russians succeeded in ascending the Angara River as far as Lake Baikal, when the Cossack Kurbat Ivanov, who first discovered the lake, also crossed it, and after fierce fighting imposed yasak, or fur tribute, on the Buryats inhabiting its eastern shores. In the following year, Ivan Pokhabov, a commandant from Yeniseysk, renovated and strengthened the Angara fort of Bratsk (founded 1631) with parapets and moats, and led another party across the lake to the mouth of the Selenga River. He thus found himself on the Mongolian frontier. Ascertaining that the local Buryats obtained silver, silk, and other objects from Outer Mongolia in return for furs, he sought out the warlord or khan of the eastern Mongols (known as Altyn-Khan), who professed to have no silk or silver of his own except what he obtained from the Chinese. Meanwhile, new forts were erected at Verkholensk (1641), Verkhneangarsk (1646), Verkhneudinsk (1648), and Barguzin (1648) on either side of Lake Baikal, and then at Irkutsk (at the junction of the Angara and Irkut rivers) in 1652. As part of the Russian pacification program, many natives were forcibly baptized, and “those who did not willingly consent were driven into the Stream, and when they came back, a Cross was hung around their Necks.”59 In one still more crude procedure, two or three Buryats at a time were tied to a long pole and plunged into freezing water through a hole in the ice. Not surprisingly, this convinced them that the new faith had little of solace to offer them, and in suicidal fury they attacked the garrison at Bratsk.
In 1652, Pyotr Beketov was sent to restore the tsar’s authority. In the course of the following year he explored the Selenga, Ingoda, and Shilka rivers on rafts, founded Irgensk, and in the spring of 1653 Nerchinsk, across from the mouth of the Nercha River.
While the Yenisey was being brought under control, progress was also made on the Lena, as the conquest from Yakutsk proceeded in three directions – northeast to Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, and Kamchatka; eastward to the Sea of Okhotsk; and southward to the Amur River Valley. Indeed, just two years after reaching the Lena, the Russians had followed up the Aldan River to its source in the Stanovoy Mountains, and in 1639 a detachment of twenty men under the command of Ivan Moskvitin went in search of what the natives called “the great sea-ocean.” Proceeding up the Maya and Yudoma rivers, they made their way through a mountain pass, and descended the Ulya River to the Sea of Okhotsk, part of the North Pacific Ocean. One hundred and twenty-five years after the Spaniards had discovered the Pacific from the east, the Russians had discovered it from the west; and in just fifty-five years, while American colonists were still east of the Appalachians, they had crossed the whole of northern Asia.
In advancing from one river basin to the next, the Russians had followed the tributary headwaters of the three great river systems, which, spreading out east and west, “almost interlocked like the arching branches of a row of trees.”60 But the principal rivers themselves – the Ob, Yenisey, and Lena – also rolled inexorably northward to the Arctic, and by following these arteries as well the Russians were soon brought to different sections of the Arctic shore.
One of the great pioneers in this exploration was the Cossack Yelisey Buza. Setting out from Yakutsk in 1617, he sailed north along the Lena to the coast, east to the mouth of the Olenek River, where he wintered in a secluded bay, and then continued overland on sledges to the Yana. Along that river he explored the valleys of the Verkhoyansk Range, the coldest inhabited region on earth, collecting yasak from the local Yakuts. In the following year he pushed farther east along the coast to the Indigirka River, where he encountered a new tribe, the Yukaghirs, wedged between the Yakuts in the interior and the Tungus on the coast. Returning to Yakutsk in 1642 after a five-year odyssey, he reported the discovery of three new rivers, each of considerable size, and created additional excitement by passing on rumors of a fourth where there was said to be silver ore. The prospect of silver as well as new hunting grounds whetted appetites, and several Cossack expeditions hurriedly prepared to embark.
In Buza’s absence, others had made corroborative finds. In the summer of 1640, a detachment of fifteen men under another Cossack, Dmitry Zyrian, after collecting yasak from the Yukaghirs on the Indigirka, sailed eastward along the Arctic coast to the Alazeya, where he encountered not only Yukaghirs, but a new people, the Chukchi. From them he learned of still another river to the east, the Kolyma, the last of the major Siberian rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean. One thousand miles east of the Lena, this river was discovered in 1644 by Mikhail Stadukhin, who founded the settlement of Srednekolymsk near its mouth. Two years later, a company of promyshlenniks picked their way through the ice toward the Chukchi Peninsula, entered a small bay, and there tentatively engaged in “dumb trade” with a local Chukchi clan. The Russians spread out their goods at the water’s edge, and the natives took what pleased them, leaving walrus tusks or ivory objects in their place.