Part 50 (2/2)
We finally went into the big store, and meeting the manager of the company, asked to be directed to the nearest restaurant.
He smiled.
”There isn't any,” he said.
”Is there no place where one may get _something_ to eat? Bread and milk?
We saw cows upon the hills.”
”You would not care to go to the native houses,” he replied, still smiling. ”But come with me.”
He led the way along a neat board walk to a residence that would attract attention in any town. It was large and of artistic design.
”It was designed by Molly Garfield,” the young man somewhat proudly informed us. ”Her husband was connected with the company for several years, and they built and lived in this house.”
The house was richly papered and furnished. It was past the luncheon hour, but we were excellently served by a perfectly trained Chinaman.
For more than a hundred years the great commercial companies--beginning with the Shelikoff Company--have dispensed the hospitality of Alaska, and have acted as hosts to the stranger within their gates. The managers are instructed to sell provisions at reasonable prices, and to supply any one who may be in distress and unable to pay for food.
They frequently entertain, as guests of the company they represent, travellers to these lonely places, not because the latter are in need, but merely as a courtesy; and their hospitality is as free and generous--but not as embarra.s.sing--as that of Baranoff.
That night I sat late alone upon the hills, on a tundra slope that was blue with violets. I could not put my hand down without crus.h.i.+ng them.
The lights moving across Unalaska were as poignantly interesting as the thoughts that come and go across a stranger's face when he does not know that one is observing.
All the lights and shadows of the vanis.h.i.+ng Aleutian race seemed to be moving across the hills, the village, the blue bay.
Scarcely a day has pa.s.sed that I have not gone back across the blue and emerald water-ways that stretch between, to that lovely place and that luminous hour.
Perhaps, I thought, Veniaminoff may have looked down upon this exquisite scene from this same violeted spot--Veniaminoff, the humble, devout, and devoted missionary, whom I should rather have been than any man or woman whose history I know; Veniaminoff, who _lived_--instead of _wrote_--a great, a sublime, poem.
Unalaska's commercial glory has faded. It was once port of entry for all vessels pa.s.sing in or out of Behring Sea; the s.h.i.+ps of the Arctic whaling fleet called here for water, coal, supplies, and mail; during the years that the _modus vivendi_ was in force it was headquarters of the United States and the British fleets patrolling Behring Sea, and lines of captured sealers often lay here at anchor.
During the early part of the present decade Unalaska saw its most prosperous times. Thousands of people waited here for transportation to the Klondike, via St. Michael and the Yukon. Many s.h.i.+ps were built here, and one still lies rotting upon the ways.
The Greek church is second in size and importance to the one at Sitka only, and the bishop once resided here. There is a Russian parish school, a government day-school, and a Methodist mission, the Jessie Lee Home. The only white women on the island reside at the Home. The bay has frequently presented the appearance of a naval parade, from the number of government and other vessels lying at anchor.
No traveller will weary soon of Unalaska. There are caves and waterfalls to visit, and unnumbered excursions to make to beautiful places among the hills. Especially interesting is Samghanooda, or English, Harbor, where Cook mended his s.h.i.+ps; while Makus.h.i.+n Harbor, on the western coast, where Glottoff and his Russians first landed in 1756, is only thirty miles away.
The great volcano itself is easy of ascent, and the view from its crest is one of the memories of a lifetime. Borka, a tiny village at Samghanooda, is as noted for its Dutch-like cleanliness as Belkoffski is for its filth.
The other islands of the Aleutian chain drift on to westward, lonely, unknown--almost, if not entirely, uninhabited. Now and then a small trading settlement is found, which is visited only by Captain Applegate,--the last remaining white deep-sea otter hunter,--and once a year by a government cutter, or the Russian priest from Unalaska, or a shrewd and wandering trader.
These green and unknown islands are the islands of my dreams--and dreams do ”come true” sometimes. This voyage out among the Aleutians is the most poetic and enchanting in the world to-day; and I shall never be entirely happy until I have drifted on out to the farthest island of Attu, lying within the eastern hemisphere, and watched those lonely, dark women, with the souls of poets and artists and the patience of angels, weaving _their_ dreams into ravis.h.i.+ng beauty and sending them out into the world as the farewell messages of a betrayed and vanis.h.i.+ng people. As we treat them for their few remaining years, so let us in the end be treated.
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