Josie’s Story: ‘All the territory and dominion possessed’

Third of eight parts. This series tells the untold story of Josie Rudolph, the first settler girl born under the U.S. flag in Alaska — and how her birth here helped her escape from Nazi Germany. Read the first two parts and more about this series here.

Of particular interest in 1868 to Emil Teichmann, the fur company secret agent posing as an Alaska tourist, was the log palisade dividing the new American outpost of Sitka from the “Indian village.”

The stockade of vertical logs stood 18 feet high, he noted, punctuated by several blockhouses guarded by soldiers. Ingress to town was through a gate, and all Natives had to be outside when the gate closed at 6 p.m.

The wall had been built by the Russians after their first outpost on the bay was destroyed in 1802. Since that time, the Russians had maintained a delicate detente with the Tlingit, who allowed them trading rights and full control of life inside their wall. The Tlingit, in exchange, received access to trade goods, fur merchants to play off against British and American cash buyers, and a commercial market for local halibut, venison and firewood.

Though the Tlingit population was much reduced because of Western diseases, their law had prevailed outside the log palisade. But Teichmann saw that under the U.S., that was starting to change.

The Tlingit of Sitka Sound were known as the Sheet’ká Kwáan, one of about 17 regional kwáans in Southeast Alaska. The village and surrounding lands and waters, the hunting and fishing grounds, were divided among independent clans, of whom the two most important locally were the Kiks.ádi and the Kaagwaantaan.

It was the leader of the Kiks.ádi clan who got written up in the New York Herald as “an intractable old curmudgeon” for flying the Russian flag in protest after the transfer ceremony. “He says he gave the Russians their land, he and his ancestors, and it was merely a permit to live here and trade in the vicinity, and that they have no right to make any cession or sale,” the newspaper said.

The treaty of cession had granted to the United States “all the territory and dominion possessed” by Russia in Alaska. The phrase was open to interpretation: How much of the Tlingit lands did Russia actually “possess”?

The treaty promised U.S. citizenship to any Russian (including mixed-race “creoles”) who chose to stay. But no such provision was made for most Indigenous people of the region, who were instead passed along to the new administration with a single sentence: “The uncivilized tribes will be subject to such laws and regulations as the United States may, from time to time, adopt in regard to aboriginal tribes of that country.”

A U.S. artillery battery had placed cannons in the stockade towers, aimed at the Sheet’ká Kwáan village. It is helpful to recall that the decade after the Civil War was the height of the Indian wars in the American West (and another violent peak in the centuries-old war against the continent’s Indigenous tribes). Reports from Sitka to the secretary of war bristle with wariness of their neighbors: “They are savages,” one officer wrote, “and possess the villainous traits of character usually found in that class; but by way of comparison, I do not think they are so bad as the Indians of the plains or of Arizona.”

These soldiers, moreover, were hardened Civil War veterans. Officers spent their time drinking and gambling and carrying on “the most disreputable intrigues with the wives of the Russian officials,” Teichmann wrote, while the “drunkenness and debauchery” of the troops created a reign of terror. “Released convicts would not have been more dangerous to the public security than were these men whose task it was to enforce the law.” During the first winter in Sitka, one-tenth of the military population was in the brig at any one time.

Teichmann blamed the poor discipline on the “weakness” of the post’s commander, Brig. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis. The general was a veteran of the battle of Fort Sumter, where the Civil War’s first shots were fired. But the story that followed him was the shooting of Gen. William Nelson, a commander of Union forces preparing in 1862 to repel a Confederate invasion of Kentucky. A series of escalating insults in a hotel lobby prompted Davis, his face stinging from his superior officer’s slap, to borrow a pistol and fire one quickly fatal shot into Nelson’s heart. Davis was briefly arrested but with the Southern invasion underway no charges were filed. By the battle of Chickamauga in 1863, Davis was back in charge of a Union division. After a post-war stint overseeing Reconstruction policies in Kentucky, Davis had been sent to Alaska to watch over the Indians.

Teichmann’s low opinion of the American soldiers’ deportment, and of their commander, was shared by many other visitors, to the extent that the Army sent an investigative team to Sitka in 1869. In the end, Davis was largely exonerated and retained his command.

Davis considered the Tlingit people to be “proud, warlike, and treacherous.” He told Congress the local chiefs “must be ruled by a strong, vigilant and just government over them, or they will fight and be the rulers themselves if they can.” Davis noted that the Tlingit did not consider deals between Russia and the United States to be legitimate without their consent.

“The right of discovery and occupancy they, in their ignorance, knew nothing about,” Davis wrote, casually referencing a famous papal decree from the 15th century authorizing European nations to conquer the lands of non-Christians, a principle later incorporated into American jurisprudence.

The Tlingit had their own established legal code, encompassing class distinctions, property rights and compensation for infractions, much of it aimed at settling clan disputes short of open warfare. Davis and other American leaders were not ignorant of these Indigenous legal traditions — in some cases, quelling potential disputes or uprisings with payouts of blankets and other trade goods — but at key moments resorted to military superiority to impose their right of discovery and occupancy.

The first such notable incident came a few months after Teichmann’s visit, when an escalating series of back-and-forth misunderstandings and Army blunders led to killings of two Natives, two white lives taken for compensation when restitution payment was not forthcoming, and, in February 1869, the shelling and burning of three villages at Kake by the crew of an American Navy gunboat. Official inquiries traced the origins of this one-sided “Kake War” to a scuffle at the palisade gate between several soldiers and Natives following Davis’ decision at a New Year’s Day party to provide whiskey bottles to the invited clan chiefs, which historian Donald Craig Mitchell, in his book “Sold American,” called “an incredibly stupid act of feigned camaraderie.”

The burning of Kake, which had been abandoned when villagers saw the gunboat approach, left the community without food or canoes. Oral tradition held that the attack resulted in the exposure and starvation deaths of some elders and children. On Sept. 21 of this year, U.S. Navy officers finally returned to the village to offer a formal apology for an attack that “the Tlingit peoples of Kake did not deserve.” Local clan leaders waited to hear the Navy’s words before standing one at a time to accept the apology.

Teichmann admired the cleverness of the Tlingit in trading furs with naive American merchants. He noted that the white outpost grew hungry whenever friction shut down the game market outside the gate. Several times he visited the village, accompanied by a well-connected Army officer who traded for crafts and artifacts. But on the whole he considered the local Indians to be “unfriendly and reticent.”

Teichmann finally departed Sitka after six weeks, the notarized affidavit of his Russian informant carefully packed away. He felt a real pang on the golden summer evening when he sailed away — “and it was with the deepest sympathy I thought of the many good fellows whom I, coming as a stranger there, had made my friends and who were condemned to lead, heaven only knows how long, a life full of hardship in that barren spot shut off from the rest of the world.”

In his book, published posthumously, Teichmann never says whether his furtive mission to American Alaska resulted in any claim or settlement for missing furs. Quite possibly all contracts with the previous owners had been rendered null and void. More interesting than his skulduggery are his eyewitness descriptions of early Sitka’s social life — the picnic outings and mineral prospecting hikes, the flophouse murders and social scandals, the combustible mix of races and alcohol.

He described squeezing through a cabin door to witness a ceremony after the death of a major clan leader, finding himself surrounded by Tlingit men with faces blackened in mourning, and then fighting his way out in a panic. The departed clan leader was buried with full Orthodox rites and finery in the local cemetery, Teichmann writes, then exhumed later, the dignity of the Church intact, and taken to the Tlingit village for a traditional cremation ceremony.

One Friday night, Teichmann joined some of the Russian holdovers at the public bathhouse, a piece of vernacular architecture that survives today in rural Alaska: an exterior room for socializing and a hot steamy interior where “we were compelled against our will to crouch down as low as possible.”

Returning that evening to the room he’d rented, he heard a murmur of voices through the sawn-plank exterior wall. The next building over, which shared the wall, was a warehouse used by a Jewish trader.

“Looking through a crevice I saw quite an assembly of twenty men, all of the Jewish persuasion, who were holding their Sabbath service and reading their prayers under the leadership of the oldest man present who took the place of the rabbi. It was a memorable thing to see this religious gathering in so strange a setting and it said a great deal for the persistence with which the Jews everywhere, even in the most remote countries, practise their devotional exercises. I myself should scarcely have expected it in Sitka among a community which was engaged in such very disreputable occupations.”

Next: Jewish pioneers find their way to the Alaska frontier, and into their community a child is born.

Support for this project was provided by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.