from the garrison, discovered the quartz ledge of Baranoff Island.

On Round Mountain, southeast of Sitka, are situated the Great Eastern, the Stewart, and other mines, that attracted great attention at the time of their discovery in 1871 and 1872. The pioneers in this mining district were Doyle and Haley, two soldiers, who had lived in the mining districts of California and Nevada. Nicholas Haley is the most energetic of miners, and has carefully prospected the region about Sitka. He has found stringers of quartz on Indian River, and has more valuable claims at the head of Silver Bay than on the long ledge cropping out on the slopes of Round Mountain. The mines on this ledge have had many vicissitudes, have changed hands many times, have been involved in lawsuits, while no one could hold a valid title to a foot of mineral land in Alaska; and finally, through unfortunate management, the work was stopped, and the mills have stood idle for years. The want of civil government, or adequate protection for capitalists, has prevented the owners from risking anything more in the development of these mines, although the assays and the results of working proved these Sitka mines to be valuable. properties.

FOR

CHAPTER XIV.

SITKA AN HISTORICAL SKETCH.

`OR a town of its size, strange, old, tumble-down, moss-grown Sitka has had an eventful history from first to last. Claiming this northwestern part of America by right of the discoveries made by Behring and others in the last century, the Russians soon sent out colonies from Siberia. The earliest Russian settlements were on the Aleutian Islands, and thence, moving eastward, the fur company, whose president was the colonial governor, and appointed by the Crown, established its chief headquarters at Kodiak Island in 1790. Kodiak still lives in tradition of the Russian inhabitants of the archipelago as a sunny, summery place, blessed with the best climate on this coast.

Tchirikoff, the commander of one of Behring's ships, was the first white man to visit the site of Sitka, and two boatloads of men were seized and put to death by the savage Sitkans, July 15, 1741.

The first settlement was made in 1800 at Starri Gavan Bay, just north of the present town, and the place was duly dedicated to the Archangel Gabriel and left in charge of a small company of Russians. In the same year, when the rest of the world was shaken with the great battles of Marengo

and Hohenlinden, the Indians rose and massacred the new settlers and destroyed their buildings. Baranoff was then governor of the colony, a fierce old fellow, who began life as a trader in Western Siberia, and was slowly aised to official eminence. He established the settlement at Kodiak before he made the venture at Sitka, and when he heard of the destruction of his new station, immediately arranged to rebuild it. In 1804 he tried it over again, building the chief warehouse on the small Gibraltar of Katalan's Rock where the castle now stands, and dedicating the place to the Archange. Michael. Baranoff was ennobled, and, moving his headquarters to Sitka, remained in charge until 1818. He opened trade and negotiations with the United States and many countries of the Pacific; he welcomed John Jacob Astor's ships to this harbor in 1810, and made with them contracts for the Canton trade, that were sadly interrupted by the war of 1812 between our country and England.

In Washington Irving's "Astoria" there is a lifelike sketch of this hard-drinking, hard-swearing old tyrant, and the picture does not present an attractive view of life at New Archangel, or Sheetka. In 1811 Baranoff sent out the colony under Alexander Kuskoff, and established a settlement at Fort Ross, in California, in the redwood country of the coast north of San Franciscc. Grain and vegetables were raised there in great quantities for the northern settlements for the space of thirty years, when the Czar ordered his subjects to withdraw from Mexican territory.

Baranoff ruled the colony with a rod of iron, and his absolute power of life and death over those under

him, and the free use of the knout, kept the turbulent Indians, Creoles, and Siberian renegades in good order. He died at sea on his way home to Russia, and succeeding him as governor came Captain Higuemeister, and then a long line of noble Russian, generally chosen from among the higher officers of the navy.

Under Russian rule the colony ran along n pleasant routine; the southeastern coast was for a time leased to the Hudson Bay Company, and their proximity and the slow encroachments of the English in trade soon aroused Russia to a realization of the danger that threatened this distant colony in the event of a war. Russian America was first offered for sale to the United States during the Crimean war in 1854, by Baron Stoeckl, who afterwards concluded. the treaty of purchase in 1867. In 1854 the English threatened the town of Petrapaulovski on the Kamschatkan coast, and the Russians foresaw the blockading and bombarding of their towns on the American side. This first offer was declined by President Pierce, and later negotiations came to naught in President Buchanan's day, when an offer of $5,000,000 was declined by Russia. Robert J. Walker, who assisted in drawing up the legal documents of transfer when we did finally buy the territory, stated once that during Polk's administration the Czar offered Russian America to the United States for the mere payment of government incumbrances and cost of transfer. Wily old Prince Gortschakoff had to tell it, too, when his envoy made such a shrewd sale for him, that his master was for years anxious to get rid of this distant and unprotected colony at any

sacrifice, provided, always, that it did not fall into the hands of the English, who wanted it so badly.

In 1861 Russia and the United States held council in regard to establishing a telegraph line from this country to Europe, via Russian America, Behring Straits, and Siberia. Four years later an expedition was sent out by the Western Union Telegraph Company, and several ships and a large corps of engineers, surveyors, and scientists, were engaged in exploring the coast from the United States boundary line northward to the Yukon country, and along the Asiatic coast to the mouth of the Amoor River. Over $3,000,000 were expended in these surveys, and a telegraph line was erected for some hundred miles up the British Columbia coast, reaching to a point near the mouth of the Skeena River, that brought Sitka within three hundred miles of telegraphic communication instead of eight hundred and fifty miles, as has been its condition since the scheme was given up. After two years' work, the company abandoned the undertaking and recalled its surveying parties. The demonstrated success of the Atlantic cable, and the difficulty of maintaining the line through the dense forest regions of the coast and the uninhabited moors of the North, induced the company to give up the plan. Prof. Dall, of the Smithsonian Institute; Whymper, the great English mountain climber; Prof. Rothrocker, the botanist, and Col. Thomas W. Knox, who accompanied different parties of the Western Union Telegraph Company expedition, have written interesting books of their life and travels while connected with this great enterprise.

As the time approached for the expiration of the