was the booty of precious furs plundered, or bludgeoned, or
exacted as tribute from the Indians of Northwest America. The plunder,
when successful, or trade, if the crazy planks did not go to pieces
above some of the reefs that cut up the North Pacific, was halved
between outfitter and crew. If the cargo amounted to half a million
dollars in modern money--as one of Drusenin's first trips did--then a
quarter of a million was a tidy sum to be divided among a crew of, say,
thirty or forty. Often as not, the long-planked single-master fell to
pieces in a gale, when the Russians went to the bottom of the sea, or
stranded among the Aleutian Islands westward of Alaska, when the
castaways took up comfortable quarters among the Indians, who knew no
other code of existence than the _rights of the strong_; and the
Russians with their firearms seemed strong, indeed, to the Aleuts. As
long as the newcomer demanded only furs, {82} on his own terms of
trade--the Indians acquiesced. Their one hope was to become strong as
the Russians by getting iron in "toes"--bands two inches thick, two
feet long. It was that ideal state, which finical philosophers
describe as the "survival of the fit," and it worked well till the
other party to the arrangement resolved he would play the same game and
become fit, too, when there resulted a cataclysm of bloodshed. The
Indians bowed the neck submissively before oppression. Abuse, cruelty,
outrage, accumulated on the heads of the poor Aleuts. They had reached
the fine point where it is better for the weak to die trying to
overthrow strength, than to live under the iron heel of brute
oppression.

The immediate cause of revolt is a type of all that preceded it.[1]
Running out for a thousand miles from the coast of Alaska is the long
chain of Aleutian Islands linking across the Pacific toward Asia.
Oonalaska, the most important and middle of these, is as far from
Oregon as Oregon is from New York. Near Oonalaska were the finest
sea-otter fields in the world; and the Aleutians numbered twenty
thousand hunters--men, women, children--born to the light skin boat as
plainsmen were born to the saddle. On Oonalaska and its next-door
neighbor westward were at least ten thousand of these Indian otter
hunters, when Russia first sent her ships to America. Bassof came
soonest after Bering's discovery; and he carried back {83} on each of
three trips to the Commander Islands a cargo of furs worth from
sevent