The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet

by Henry Fountain

  In his journals Cook described encountering natives, about twenty of them, who approached his ships in two skinboats. “They were unwilling, however, to venture along-side,” he wrote, “but kept at a little distance, shouting aloud, and clasping and extending their arms alternately.” One of the natives then stood up in his boat, naked as the day he was born, with his arms out like a cross, and remained motionless for a quarter hour. Cook and his men took this and other behaviors as signs of friendship and returned them with “most expressive gestures,” but the natives refused to come any closer. By the time Cook weighed anchor the next day, however, the natives had become more than just standoffish: with most of Cook’s men occupied with repairs to the Resolution, at some point the natives attempted, unsuccessfully, to plunder his other ship, the Discovery, and steal some of the expedition’s small boats.

  Less than a decade later, when Russian sailors tried to barter for luxurious pelts of sea otter and other marine mammals, the natives of Prince William Sound largely spurned them, in some cases running their ships off. When they finally did trade with the Russians, the natives had little use for the items they received—they thought hardtack biscuits, for instance, were wood chips, and tossed them away in disgust. They viewed the Russian interlopers as aliens who had hooved legs (their boots), bandaged heads (their caps) and suckers on their bodies (the buttons on their jackets). Worst of all was what the natives made of their visitors’ tobacco habit: these strange creatures breathed smoke.

  The Russians and Britons—soon joined by Spaniards and Frenchmen in a free-for-all of exploration and exploitation—had come upon the Chugach, a subgroup of the Alutiiq natives who populated southern coastal Alaska from the eastern edge of Prince William Sound across to the Kenai Peninsula, Kodiak and neighboring islands and the Alaska Peninsula. The Chugach, of whom there were likely only a thousand or so at the time of European contact, were considered more aggressive than Alutiiq people elsewhere. One Russian captain wrote that this was probably because they were subject to frequent raids by other nearby groups, including the Eyak of the Copper River area and the Tlingit, to the southeast, along what is now the Alaskan Panhandle.

  If the Chugach were fiercely protective of their territory they could be forgiven, because that territory had sustained them for thousands of years. Anthropologists are not sure precisely how long: the ice sheets that once covered the region retreated about 8,000 years ago, but the earliest archaeological evidence of human settlement discovered so far dates back only about 4,500 years, and the most elaborate diggings, near Hinchinbrook, date to about 500 BC. Whatever the archaeological record, it’s fair to say that when Captain Cook arrived the Chugach were doing what they had been doing for generations: living off the bounty of the land and, especially, the sea.

  The Chugach themselves divided the sound into eight territories, each centered on a village and politically independent. The westernmost one, bordered by Knight Island and Montague Strait, was called Tyanirmiut. And at least since the eighteenth century, the territory’s main village was what other Chugach called Ingim-atya, meaning “under the mountain.” Locals referred to it as Caniqaq, or “along the side” in Sugcestun, the regional dialect of the Alutiiq language. In English it was called Chenega.

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  Kaj Birket-Smith, a Danish ethnographer and anthropologist, visited Chenega and other parts of the sound in 1933 on an expedition to learn all he could about what were then known as the Chugach Eskimo. He talked to a couple of old-timers, including an octogenarian named Makari Chimovitski, who was thought to be the oldest native in the region. Makari, who spoke mostly Sugcestun, though he also knew a little Russian, told Birket-Smith of activities and practices that seemed to have gone on unchanged for centuries.

  “The whole existence of the Chugach was based upon hunting and fishing,” Birket-Smith wrote. And among the Chugach, the people of Chenega were considered more tied to the sea than others. There was a saying that the Chenegans were darker-skinned because they ate more marine mammals and fewer land animals and thus were “soaked in grease.”

  The subsistence life in Prince William Sound moved to the rhythm of the seasons. Halibut fishing began in late winter, and seal hunting started in earnest in May. Salmon, a main part of the natives’ diet, began running in the early summer: Chinook, followed like clockwork by sockeye, chum, pink and, in August, coho. The herring fishery lasted late into the fall, when hunting for sea lions began. Sea otters, with their fabulous pelts, were hunted nearly year-round, and shellfish was harvested most of the year as well, especially when bad weather kept the natives out of deeper waters. Mountain goat was the chief prey of land hunters.

  For sea hunting and fishing, as well as for general travel, the Chugach relied on baidarkas, or kayaks, fashioned of a light spruce frame, up to twenty-one feet long, which were covered in sealskins. (A small kayak might require the skins of six spotted seals, which were prepared by being buried for a time and allowed to ferment, making it easier to scrape off the fur.) For fishing, a one-hole baidarka would usually do, but for hunting larger sea mammals, two-hole baidarkas, and, later, three-hole versions, were the norm.

  The biggest hunts of all, especially for Chenegans, were for whale. These usually took place in the winter and involved teams of four or six hunters in two or three baidarkas. As Birket-Smith described it, the hunt always took place in a bay or other quiet water, not in the open sea. A baidarka would quietly approach a whale, and the hunter in front would spear it with a lance, which consisted of a slate blade attached to a pole of spruce or hemlock. The blade would break off and, by Birket-Smith’s account, all the kayakers would furiously paddle to the mouth of the bay and spread a poison—made, it was said, from the fat of dead whale hunters—on the surface that would prevent the whale from reaching open water. Other accounts suggest a more likely method of whale killing: the blade itself was dipped in a toxin obtained from monkshood or other plants. Either way, the injured beast might survive for a couple of days but eventually would die and drift ashore.

  Birket-Smith was describing what in the 1930s were already considered the “old” ways; when he visited Chenega, he wasn’t sure if whales were still being hunted there or anywhere else in the sound. The region and its people had changed much by then, largely because of the influence of, and eventual domination by, outsiders. Those early-eighteenth-century Russians who had been rebuffed by the natives of Prince William Sound had soon been followed by others who wouldn’t take no for an answer. In 1793, just fifteen years after Cook, Russia established a fort on Hinchinbrook Island, putting down the locals in the process. Now the Russian American Company, given exclusive rights to the territory by the imperial government back home, had free rein to obtain the pelts of sea otters and other animals, which fetched high prices in China and elsewhere. But they needed the local population’s assistance, in the form of their knowledge and hunting skills. The result, at least at first, was the virtual enslavement of natives throughout many parts of southern Alaska. In some villages—including, perhaps, Chenega—Russian traders and trappers known as promyshlenniki forced all the able-bodied men to leave their homes and work for them, and ensured their cooperation by holding women and younger men hostage.

  Over the ensuing decades of Russian rule in Alaska, treatment of the natives improved, although native men were still required to work for the Russian American Company for a defined period of time, usually a couple of years. But in 1867, when the US secretary of state, William Henry Seward, negotiated the treaty that resulted in the purchase of the Alaska territory for $7.2 million, Russia’s economic influence quickly waned.

  American rule brought changes. Natives could now sell their pelts to one of several trading companies competing in a region where the Russian American Company had long had a monopoly. At first this was good for the Chugach, as prices rose. But sea otters, in particular, were quickly played out, and eventually the government declared a moratorium on hunting them. By the beginning of the twenti
eth century, with fur trading in decline, commercial fishing began to overtake it. This had an even greater impact on the natives’ subsistence way of life, as they were no longer fishing just for themselves and their community. Almost overnight, canneries sprang up around the sound, most of them owned by a packers’ association based in San Francisco. Salmon was the primary catch initially, and at first Chugach natives just sold their surplus fish to the canneries. But within a few decades most of the natives were working for the canneries for most of the summer. The men fished not in kayaks but in boats that were rented to them by the packers’ group, often at exorbitant rates. They took their own fish only after they had satisfied the needs of the canneries. The women worked for the canneries too, preserving the fish.

  For the people of Chenega, this meant that during the summer most families left to live and work at a cannery on a bay called Port Nellie Juan, which was reached by a circuitous water route via a narrow channel called Dangerous Passage. For more than three months every year, Chenega became a ghost town.

  Not that the village had ever been a bustling metropolis. The first federal census, in 1880, showed a population of 80. By the turn of the twentieth century that number had increased to 141. But that was the peak; when Birket-Smith showed up in the 1930s, there were about 90 Chenegans.

  Economic prospects, strong or weak, caused some of the population’s rise and fall. The 141 people counted in the 1900 census included some non-natives who described themselves as prospectors—they were caught up in the gold fever that caused so many adventurers to come to Alaska.

  Fevers of a different kind affected Chenega as well. Like so many indigenous communities around the world, those in Prince William Sound suffered from epidemics of diseases brought by outsiders. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Russians attempted, with some success, to vaccinate many natives against one of the most insidious of those plagues, smallpox. But the natives had no protection against other diseases. An outbreak of diphtheria and pneumonia in 1906–07 was especially brutal. People succumbed all around Prince William Sound, but Chenega was by far the hardest hit. Over a fortnight twenty-two villagers died, and many others who fell ill barely recovered. Few in the village were spared agony, and no one was spared grief. Chenega, as one Russian American publication described it, had become “the kingdom of death.”

  Half a century later, death would again stalk the little village in Prince William Sound. This time it would be violent, and would come from the sea.

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  By the time Kris Madsen arrived in Chenega in 1963, Alaska had been part of the United States for nearly a century—first as a territory and, since January 3, 1959, as the forty-ninth state. As if to reinforce that point, one of Madsen’s duties was to raise the Stars and Stripes on a flagpole outside the schoolhouse each morning.

  But decades-long Russian colonial rule in the nineteenth century had left indelible marks on the village, as it had on many other Alaskan native communities. One of the main influences was readily apparent in the list of students that Madsen received from state education officials. Of the fourteen children on her list, almost all had Russian-sounding surnames: Kompkoff, Eleshansky, Selanoff. Chenega was laced with Russian blood, the legacy of relations between the promyshlenniki and natives years before.

  Everyone in the village knew one another, which was to be expected in a place with fewer than eighty people. People sometimes came and went—teenagers would move to Valdez or Cordova temporarily to attend high school, for instance, accompanied by a parent. But Chenega remained home.

  The village was tight-knit in a more direct way: almost everyone was related. Grown children lived in homes that their parents had once occupied, while the parents now lived nearby (no one was more than a few doors away in Chenega). Families intermarried; there were cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers all calling one another neighbor.

  Another lasting Russian influence was readily apparent: the church. The Russian Orthodox religion had been spread through Alaska by missionary priests beginning in the late eighteenth century, and, in part because the church worked to counteract some of the more brutal practices of the Russian traders, it stuck among natives. By one estimate, in the mid-1960s about a third of all Alaskan natives were church members.

  Chenega had had a church for as long as anyone could remember, and in 1963 the small building was still very much the center of village life. For Chenegans returning from a hunting or fishing trip it was the first stop, to give thanks for their bounty. At weekly services—usually Saturday night and Sunday morning—the entire village was in attendance, men standing on the right and women on the left, listening to the words of a lay priest and singing Russian hymns. The services were where news of interest to the whole community was shared and where, once a year, a village chief was elected. In 1963, the chief was forty-year-old Charles Selanoff.

  The most important person in the village wasn’t the chief, however, but the longtime lay priest Steve Vlasoff. Vlasoff, who was born in 1888, spoke Alutiiq, English, Russian and Ukrainian. He had dark hair with a wisp of gray at the temples, a weathered, drawn face and an impish smile. He could be imposing in his black robes, with two crosses hanging around his neck, and the children of Chenega certainly found him so—for one thing, he required that all of them attend Sunday school. But Madsen found him to be charming. He’d come to her classroom and talk to the students about how to behave. “If you’re not good, the teacher is going to pull your ears,” he’d say. Then he’d turn his head to show his long droopy earlobes, which he claimed were a result of misbehaving during his religious training.

  Even in the 1960s, the way of life in Chenega was still largely one of subsistence. Villagers earned money from fishing, which they did in boats leased from the cannery (and which bore the initials NJ, for Nellie Juan). The income enabled them to buy staples like flour and sugar from the store and other necessities through the mail (the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs were much-thumbed in the village), delivered by boat or floatplane. But Chenegans still took a lot of fish for themselves, in late summer after the canneries had been satisfied, and smoked and dried it to last all year. They relied on the land and sea for most of their other food: gathering berries and wild duck eggs, trapping small animals, fishing for halibut and other fish, digging up clams and hunting goats and deer, as well as seals and other marine creatures. Herring eggs on kelp, boiled up and served with some seal oil or butter, made an especially tasty dish.

  Madsen soon settled into life on the island. Tlo, the half-collie, half-Lab puppy that she had gotten from a family she’d stayed with in Anchorage (and named using the initials of the head of the household), was constantly by her side. She’d become friends with an older man in the village, Norman Selanoff, who sometimes made duck soup for her. She’d also settled into the routine of teaching, although in a one-room schoolhouse not much was routine. She grew fond of her students—they were a playful group, honest and filled with energy, and the older students were good about putting up with, and helping, the younger ones. Timmy Selanoff, a son of the chief, was a favorite. The eleven-year-old had a bit of mischief in him, Madsen thought, but never got in too much trouble. None of the children did, really. But she found that students often brought trouble from home. Excessive drinking was a problem—it seemed to get worse around the time that the mail boat would arrive, Madsen thought—and sometimes when her students would show up in the morning it seemed as if they hadn’t slept at all the night before because the adults in the household had been drinking.

  But by and large Chenega was a happy place for a child. There was the beach to play on, with plenty of space to chase birds, play marbles or ball or look for shellfish when the tide was out. Children started fishing and hunting at an early age, and often whole families would go out together, taking turns with their .22-caliber rifles picking off seals. In the winter, the hills were fine for sledding, and the pond above the schoolhouse became an ice rink of sorts. No one had ska
tes, but they’d play on the frozen pond anyway.

  Russian Christmas, celebrated in early January according to the Julian calendar used by the Orthodox Church, was an especially joyful, even raucous, time. Everyone participated in the Orthodox tradition of “starring,” which is derived from the Christmas story of the Star of Bethlehem. Villagers would make ornate stars and carry them around in groups, stopping at each house to spin the star, sing Christmas carols, eat pies made by the woman of the house and drink. Adults would throw coins on the floor, which children would scurry around and pick up. The festivities would continue for several nights.

  At the school, Madsen had help from a man in the village, Joe Kompkoff, who served as janitor. He was known to almost everyone by his nickname, Sea Lion Murphy. He’d gotten the name, or so one story went, when in a bar in Cordova he’d bragged to a bunch of non-native Alaskans about the merits of roast sea lion—that it was the “beef of the sea.” The others had been intrigued, so they had gotten a beef roast and some sea-lion meat and set up two slow-cookers on the bar. When they dug into the meat at the end of the day, they couldn’t tell one roast from another. The other men were so impressed that they gave Joe Kompkoff the nickname.