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. The effect on the Siberian mind was the same as a gold find. All the riffraff adventurers of Siberia swarmed to the west coast of America.
We have only the Russian version of the story--not the Indians'--and may infer that we have the side most favorable to Russia. When booty of half a million was to be had for the taking, what Siberian exiles would permit an Indian village to stand between them and wealth? At first only children were seized as hostages of good conduct on the part of the Indians while the white hunters coasted the islands. Then daughters and wives were lured and held on the ships, only to be returned when the husbands and fathers came back with a big hunt for the white masters. Then the men were shot down; safer dead, thought the Russians; no fear of ambush or surprise; and the women were held as slaves to be knouted and done to death at their masters' pleasure.
In 1745--four years after Russia's discovery of western America--a whole village in Attoo was destroyed so that the Russians could seize the women and children fleeing for hiding to the hills. The next year Russians were caught putting poison in the food of another village: the men ate first among the Indians. The women would be left as slaves to the Russians; and these same Russians carried a pagan boy home to { 84} be baptized in the Christian faith; for the little convert could come back to the Aleutian Islands as interpreter. It was as thorough a scheme of subjugation as the wolf code of existence could have entailed.