THE GREAT ISLAND OF KADIAK. 



119 



the Pacific surf, disappear entirely and suddenly here. At Oogash- 

 ik, where we find a small settlement of Aleutes from Oonalashka, 

 hunting walrus and sea-lions, reindeer and bears, the first rocks 

 of granite and quartz-porphyries appear, every evidence of that 

 character to the westward being purely and essentially igneous. 



Belcovsky is the metropolis of the Alaskan Peninsula. It is the 

 chief settlement of the sea-otter hunters, and the seat of the great- 

 est rivalry and traffic in that fur-trade, based wholly upon the costly 

 skins of the " bobear," * and which constitutes the only traffic 

 worthy of mention in which the inhabitants of the entire Aleutian 

 and Kadiak districts can engage. Here we observe from our an- 



The Walrus-hunting Village of Oogashik. 



chorage a little town perched upon the summit of a bluff and 

 clinging to the flanks of a precipitous mountain that looms up be- 

 hind it, usually so wreathed in fog that its summit is seldom seen. 

 Some two hundred and sixty or seventy Aleutian sea-otter hunters 

 and their families are living here in an oddly contrasted hamlet 

 of frame houses and earthen barraboras ; the freshly painted red 

 roof and yellow walls of a large, new church, in the tower of which 

 a pleasing chime of bells (but rudely struck, however), arrests the 

 ear and the eye as the most attractive single object within the lim- 

 its of the place, f The rival traders have run up their flags very 



* Literally "beaver." The Russians always called this animal the "sea- 

 beaver," but shortened from "morskie-bobear '' to the simple name. 



f This church was finished in 1882 begun in 1880, it cost $7,000, every 

 cent being freely contributed by the natives. 



