SLATOUST-VIATKA. 413 



1721. Thanks to its convenient situation, it has since then advanced rapidly, and 

 is now the terminus of the railway opened across the Urals in 1879, and traversing 

 some of the mineral districts in the Ural, Volga, and Ob basins. In 1863 a 

 cannon foundry was established in the neighbouring town of Motorilinshy, and 

 copper mines have here been worked for over a hundred years, the produce of 

 which is sent to the Ekaterinenburg mint. Yet the rich coal-fields of the Upper 

 Kama basin, in some places 40 feet thick, are still neglected, although the English 

 coal imported for the Perm arsenal costs £5 per ton. 



The old fortress of Knngur, raised against the Bashkirs, on a tributary of 

 the Chusovaya, south-east of Perm, has also acquired a certain manufacturing 

 importance for the mining districts, which it supplies with boots and shoes and 

 hardware. At Sarapùl, its rival in the boot trade, and one of the chief places on 

 the Kama, there are some extensive boat-building yards, besides machinery and 

 small-arms factories. The Government small-arms establishment at IJovhIc also 

 employs several thousand hands. 



A large portion of Perm belonged formerly to the Strogonov family, originally 

 from ]N^ovgorod, who in the seventeenth century had a domain a» large as Bohemia, 

 with 120,000 serfs, mostly descended of Novgorod settlers. 



The largest tributary of the Kama is the Bielaya, or " White " River, which 

 traverses nearly the whole of the government of Ufa, the richest mineral region on 

 the west side of the Urals. S/afoùst, or the " Golden Mouth " (Zoloto-Ust), lying 

 at an elevation of 1,300 feet above sea-level in a pleasant valley watered by the 

 Aï, a tributary of the Ufa, has also a large manufacture of small arms, guns, and 

 rifles, besides several métallurgie works supplied by the neighbouring iron and 

 coal mines. Miners and workmen from Solingen and Klingenthal have here 

 founded a numerous German colony, Ufa, at the junction of the Ufa and Bielaya, 

 formerly a Bashkir village, is now a flourishing town, doing a large trade with the 

 surrounding mineral districts, and especially with Blagoveshchemk, near which 

 are some copper mines yielding annually about 25,000 tons of ore. Ufa, the 

 capital of a province with more Moslem than Christian inhabitants, is the seat of 

 the Chief Mufti of the Russian Mohammedans. Sterlitama];, lying to the south 

 of Ufa on a head-stream of the Bielaya, is an important salt and mineral depot, and 

 3fc)izcl/mk, on a small southern affluent of the Kama, has a large fair, at which 

 the yearly sales have averaged about £800,000 since 1864. 



Viafka, capital of the government of like name, is one of the oldest places in 

 the Kama basin, having been founded in 1181 by Novgorod colonists on an 

 eminence overlooking the junction of the Viatka and Khlinovitza Rivers. For 

 nearly three centuries it maintained its republican independence, and the houses 

 built for defensive purposes are still so disposed as to form a continuous outer 

 circuit. The neighbouring town of Slobodskdi has numerous distilleries and 

 tanneries, and prepares fur cloaks and gloves, hundreds of thousands of which 

 articles are forwarded to Archangel and Nijni-Novgorod. 



