The monument to La Perouse was scarcely a tourist attraction. Inaccessibly set on a steep slope between the harbor and the bay, it was nothing but a frame of wood covered with sheet iron, painted black, and looked, wrote Kennan, “like the tombstone over the grave of a criminal.”501 Along the crest of a ridge dividing the inner and outer bays and commanding the western approaches to the town could still be seen traces of the fortifications which had repelled the allied attack. Yet the batteries were already overgrown with grass and flowers, and “only the form of the embrasures distinguished them from shapeless mounds of earth.”502 One hundred twenty-five years after the founding of Petropavlovsk as Russia’s major Pacific port, its whole population consisted of a few hundred natives and Russian peasants, along with a handful of merchants drawn there by the sable trade.
Although the economy of the coastal population had been devastated by the mass extermination by Americans of whales and walrus in adjacent seas, the overall failure of Russian settlement in the area had allowed American traders to become an increasing presence on the Asiatic coast. After the sale of the Aleutians to the United States, the traders instantly acquired a string of island ports that led inexorably back to Kamchatka, as they had once led to Alaska a century before. Settlements like Tigil and Gizhiga, which controlled the residual fur trade and other regional commerce, received annual visits from American captains, who landed large quantities of flour, tea, sugar, cloth, copper kettles, tobacco, vodka, and other goods.
After 1849, American whalers also showed up along the Chukchi Peninsula and found that for a gallon of rum (which cost them 40 cents) they could get a hundred dollars’ worth of bone or fur. This trade touched the Alaskan side of Bering Strait as well, but after it was curbed by Congressional legislation in 1873, American skippers redoubled their efforts to sell their alcohol on the Siberian coast. In the mercenary machinations of the trade, they dispensed diluted whiskey, adulterated tobacco, or defective goods. But they sometimes got as good as they gave. “It was relatively common,” one writer tells us, “to find fox tails sewn [by natives] on rabbit skins, or damaged fox skins cleverly patched with rabbit fur; broken walrus tusks riveted together with lead and the joints concealed by smeared reindeer fat; and stones set in the root canals of walrus tusks to increase their weight.”503 Natives even began to make their own moonshine to sell to visiting ships – and one American sailor swore that he obtained “the hottest stuff” he ever tasted from a Siberian Eskimo. “Wherefore,” he added, “there was, for a time, joy in the forecastle.”504 Later, on the beach, the crew found a little distillery, ingeniously devised:
The still itself was an old tin oil can; the worm, a twisted gun barrel; the flake-stand, a small powder keg. The mash used in making the liquor, we learned was a fermented mixture of flour and molasses obtained in trade from whale ships. It was boiled in the still, a twist of moss blazing in a pan of blubber oil doing duty as a furnace. The vapor from the boiling mash passed through the worm in the flake-stand and was condensed by ice-cold water with which the powder keg was kept constantly filled by hand. The liquor [called “kootch”] dripped from the worm into a battered old tomato can.505
Some of the Yankee trading vessels were “floating general stores,” stocked with guns, ammunition, cloth, sewing machines, thimbles, thread, tobacco, flour, chewing gum, dried apples and prunes, molasses, sugar, tea, clocks, scissors, mirrors, harmonicas, knives, hammers, saws, canned milk, compasses, opera glasses, spy glasses, and even phonographs and phonograph records, among other wares.506 For all intents and purposes, by the 1880s the economy of the region was largely run out of San Francisco and Seattle, not Bolsheretsk or Okhotsk. The quality of the American items was much higher on the whole (yet about half as expensive) as those the Russians could supply, and included a number of things in addition which the Russians themselves had never seen. As a result, coastal natives came to depend on the Americans for virtually all of their manufactured goods. One Russian visitor to Uelen reported that “nothing there was Russian, not even the language,” and that all the wares (from gramophones to assorted statuettes) in the local store were of American make.507 He even discovered a native sewing overalls with a sewing machine in his tent, while a less pragmatic companion, captivated by a typewriter, “enthusiastically tapped out symbols” that he couldn’t read.508
Not surprisingly, the Russian government began to feel that its sovereignty was being threatened, and sent more and more supply steamers into the area to try to wrest the commerce back.
Throughout Siberia, the fate of the natives had been mixed. Some had done well enough under the Russians, but epidemics of measles, smallpox, and other diseases prevented the smaller nomadic groups from gaining any ground. In 1876, for example, there were said to be only about 1,600 Yukaghirs left, roaming land between the Yana and Kolyma rivers – the pitiable remnant of a once-powerful tribe. Here and there their ancient burial mounds could still be seen, containing skeletons with bows, arrows, spears, and shamanistic drums, but the descendants of these mighty warriors had fallen into such indolence and addiction that their chief delight was a coarse Ukrainian tobacco stretched with dung. Children were taught to smoke as soon as they could toddle, out of a belief (fostered by the Russians) that it was good for the throat and lungs.
Natives drank with predictable abandon, too, and in a spirit of communal generosity even shared their brandy with babes-in-arms. One skipper who visited a small Chukchi settlement on the Asiatic shore found every person, including the smallest children, in such a state of drunkenness they were on the verge of insanity.
The Yukaghirs, Kamchadals, and other natives in the northeast had also discovered the narcotic delights of the fly-agaric mushroom, which made them “lightheaded, more lively and gay, more daring and bold.” When immoderately consumed, however, it produced convulsions, followed by fever and delirium. “A thousand chimeras, happy or sad, seize their imagination,” wrote one observer. “A small hole seems a great door to them; a spoonful of water, a sea.”509 Although such psychedelic illusions acquired a semi-religious cast, simple addiction to the drug was undeniable, especially among the Koryaks, who to conserve their supply (or stretch it to the utmost) went so far as to drink the urine of those intoxicated, and even to reingest what they threw up. The Russians tried to ban the mushroom’s consumption, but that only increased its black market rate of exchange.
In matters of hygiene, it must be said, the natives could not teach the Russians much. The Yukaghirs regarded lice as a sign of good health, and the Kamchadals methodically combed lice out of their hair and ate them. As part of their annual housecleaning, the Tungus dug up nests of ants and brought them into their huts. These killed off all the other vermin but intolerably infested the premises until the ants perished themselves with the first frost. With less ambiguous results, the Gilyaks domesticated ermine to rid their dwellings of rats and mice. Subsequently the Manchus supplied them, at a high price, with cats, castrated to keep the monopoly in their hands.
The half-Russified natives, however, adapted as best they could. Kamchadal women and girls began to dress in Russian styles, wearing camisoles, skirts, blouses, bonnets, and ribbons; and to better please their men, improvised cosmetics – rouge from a sea plant mixed in seal oil, powders from worm-eaten wood. They also began to live in log cabinlike houses and went through worshipful motions at the inevitable village church, which allured them with its green sheet-iron roof surmounted by onion-shaped sky blue domes of tin.