he Russians obtained such results
only by a system of musket, bludgeon, and outrage, that are repellent
to the modern mind. Women were seized as hostages for a big hunt.
Women were even murdered as a punishment for small returns. Men were
sacrificed like dogs by the "promyshleniki"--riffraff blackguard
Russian hunters from the Siberian exile population; but this is a story
of outrageous wrong followed by its own terrible and unshunnable
Nemesis which shall be told by itself.

[1] The price of the sea-otter varied, falling in seasons when the
market was glutted to $40 a pelt, selling as high, in cases of rare
beauty, as $1000 a pelt.

[2] See John Burroughs's account of birds observed during the Harriman
Expedition. Elliott and Stejenger have remarked on the same phenomenon.

{80}

CHAPTER IV

1760-1770

THE OUTLAW HUNTERS

The American Coast becomes the Great Rendezvous for Siberian Criminals
and Political Exiles--Beyond Reach of Law, Cossacks and Criminals
perpetrate Outrages on the Indians--The Indians' Revenge wipes out
Russian Forts in America--The Pursuit of Four Refugee Russians from
Cave to Cave over the Sea at Night--How they escape after a Year's Chase

"_God was high in the Heavens, and the Czar was far away_," as the
Russians say, and the Siberian exiles--coureurs of the sea--who flocked
to the west coast of America to hunt the sea-otter after Bering's
discoveries in 1741 took small thought and recked no consequences of
God or the Czar.

They timbered their crazy craft from green wood in Kamchatka, or on the
Okhotsk Sea, or among the forests of Siberian rivers. They lashed the
rude planks together, hoisted a sail of deer hide above a deck of,
perhaps, sixty feet, and steering by instinct across seas as chartless
as the forests where French coureurs ran, struck out from Asia for
America with wilder {81} dreams of plunder than ever Spanish galleon or
English freebooter hoped coasting the high seas.

The crews were criminals with the brands of their crimes worn
uncovered, banded together by some Siberian merchant who had provided
goods for trade, and set adrift under charge of half a dozen Cossacks
supposed to keep order and collect tribute of one-tenth as homage from
American Indians for the Czar. English buccaneers didn't scruple as to
blood when they sacked Spanish cities for Spanish gold. These Russian
outlaws scrupled less, when their only hope of bettering a desperate
exile