ALASKA. 55 



ill 1704, two thousand sea-otters were taken, l)ut the}- dimin- 

 islicd so rai)idly that in 1700 less than throe hundred were taken. 

 In 1708 a lar«;-e party of Russians and Aleuts captured in Sitka 

 Sound and nei«;lil)()rhood twelve hundred skins, besides those 

 for which they traded with the natives there, fully as many 

 more; and in the spriuf; of 1800 a few American and En«,dish 

 vessels came into Sitka Sound, anchored off the small Russian 

 settlement there, and traded with the natives for over two 

 thousand skins, getting; the trade of the Indians by giving fire- 

 arms and powder, ball, «S:c., which the Russians did not dare 

 to do, living then, as they were, in the country. In one of the 

 early years of the Kussian American Company, 1801, Baranov 

 went to the Okotsk from Alaska with fifteen thousand sea-otter 

 skins, that were worth as much then as they are now, viz, fully 

 $1,000,000. 



The result of this warfare upon the sea-otters, with ten hunt- 

 ers then where there is one to-day, was not long delayed. Eve- 

 rywhere throughout the whole coast-line frequented by them the 

 diminution set in, and it became difficult to get to places where 

 a thousand had once been as easily obtained as twenty-five or 

 thirty. A llussian chronicler says: "The numbers of several 

 kinds of animals are growing very much less in the present 

 as compared with past times ; for instance, the company here 

 (Ounalashka) reguhirly killed more than a thousand sea-otters 

 annually ; now^ (1835) from seventy to a hundred and fifty are 

 taken; and there was a time, in 182G, when the returns from the 

 whole Ounalashkau district (the Aleutian Islands) were ou]y fif- 

 teen skins." 



It is also a fact coincident with this diminution of the sea- 

 otters, that the population of the Aleutian Islands fell off almost 

 in the same proportion. The Eussians regarded the lives 

 of these people as they did those of dogs, and treated them ac- 

 cordingly ; they took, under Baranov and his subordinates, hunt- 

 ing-parties of five hundred to a thousand picked Aleuts, eleven 

 or twelve hundred miles to the eastward of their homes, in skin- 

 baidars and bidarkies, or kyacks, traversing one of the wildest 

 and roughest of coasts, and used them not only for the severe 

 drudgery of otter-hunting, but to fight the Koloshians and 

 other savages all the way up and down the coast; this soon 

 destroyed them, and few ever got back alive. 



When the Territory came into our possession the Bussians 

 were taking between four and five hundred sea-otters from the 



