10 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 192 



slaves, in return for which the Yakutat traded their magnificent 

 baskets, copper from the Copper River, and furs obtained locally or 

 from their relatives in the interior or farther west along the Gulf 

 Coast. 



CONTACT WITH EUROPEANS 



According to the natives, their first contact with Europeans occurred 

 some time before the Russians established themselves at Yakutat. A 

 ship was wrecked on the shore near Malaspina Glacier. Two men 

 and a woman survived, but the men fell down a crevasse and only 

 the woman was ahve when the Indians found the wreck. The latter, 

 through ignorance, spoiled most of the treasures they took from the 

 ship. Thus, they put the guns into a fire and pounded up the barrels 

 with stones to make spears. They could work iron because they 

 already knew how to shape copper. At that time an iron spear point 

 was worth a slave, and so the men became rich. One of them married 

 the White wom.an, who lived to old age. 



From written sources we may infer that the first direct contact 

 between the Gulf of Alaska Indians and the Russians was in 1783 when 

 Potap Zaikov led an exploring party into Prince William Sound and 

 Controller Bay. Other hunting parties, consisting of several hundred 

 Aleuts and four or five Russians, apparently went down the coast, 

 perhaps as far as Lituya Bay, but of these we have no details. Lituya 

 Bay was visited by LaPerouse in 1786, where he met natives who 

 may be taken as typical of the expanding northern Tlingit. The 

 Indians there had iron tools and beads. One of our informants told 

 about the coming of the first ship to Lituya Bay, and a fuller version 

 was obtained by Emmons (1911) from a chief at Douglas or Juneau. 



Dixon visited Yakutat in 1787, and the following year Ismailov 

 and Bocharov explored Controller, Yakutat, and Lituya Bays, as 

 reported by Shelikhov, and Colnett also traded with the natives in 

 Controller and Yakutat Bays and in inlets farther southeast. In 

 1788, Douglass anchored off the Ahrnklin and Dangerous Rivers, 

 or off Dry Bay, where he traded with the natives, but he failed to 

 discover an anchorage in Yakutat Bay. Malaspina's more thorough 

 exploration of Yakutat Bay was made in 1791. Brown traded in this 

 area in 1792, 1793, and 1794. In 1793 a war party from Yakutat went 

 to attack the Chugach in Prince Wniiam Sound, but, to their mis- 

 fortune, fell in with Baranov and were defeated. That same year the 

 Russians sent a party of Aleuts to Yakutat under the leadership of 

 Shields, and in 1794 a large flotilla of bidarkas under Purtov and 

 Kulikalov. This party met Lieutenant Puget with one of Van- 

 couver's ships (the Chatham) at Yakutat, and also the English trader, 

 Brown, in the Jackall. 



