roken Heart

No wilder lord of the wild northland ever existed than that old madcap
Viking of the Pacific, Alexander Baranof, governor of the Russian fur
traders. For thirty years he ruled over the west coast of America from
Alaska to southern California despotic as a czar. And he played the
game single-handed, no retinue but convicts from Siberia, no subjects
but hostile Indians.

Whether leading the hunting brigades of a thousand men over the sea in
skin canoes light as cork, or rallying his followers ambushed by
hostiles repelling invasion of their hunting-ground, or drowning
hardships with seas of fiery Russian brandy in midnight carousals,
Baranof was supreme autocrat. Drunk or {317} sober, he was master of
whatever came, mutineers or foreign traders planning to oust Russians
from the coast of America. Baranof stood for all that was best and all
that was worst in that heroic period of Pacific coast history when
adventurers from all corners of the earth roamed the otter-hunting
grounds in quest of fortune. Each man was a law unto himself. There
was fear of neither man nor devil. The whole era might have been a
page from the hero epic of prehistoric days when earth was young, and
men ranged the seas unhampered by conscience or custom, magnificent
beasts of prey, glorying in freedom and bloodshed and the warring
elements.

[Illustration: Alexander Baranof.]

Yet in person Baranof was far from a hero. He was wizened, sallow,
small, a margin of red hair round a head bald as a bowl, grotesque
under a black wig tied on with a handkerchief. And he had gone up in
life much the way a monkey climbs, by shifts and scrambles and
prehensile hoists with frequent falls. It was an ill turn of fortune
that sent him to America in the first place. He had been managing a
glass factory at Irkutsk, Siberia, where the endless caravans of fur
traders passed. Born at Kargopol, East Russia, in 1747, he had drifted
to Moscow, set up in a shop for himself at twenty-four, failed in
business, and emigrated to Siberia at thirty-five. Tales of profit in
the fur trade were current at Irkutsk. Tired of stagnating in what was
an absolutely safe but unutterably monotonous life, Baranof left the
factory and invested all his {318} savings in the fur trade to the
Indians of northern Siberia and Kamchatka. For some years all went
well. Baranof invested deeper, borrowing for his ventures. Then the
Chukchee Indians swooped down on hi