ntons of Tarkhan to submission, the Cossacks
entered the country of the most considerable of the Ostiak princes,
named Samar. Allied with eight hundred other little princes, he was
waiting for the Russians with firmness, in order to decide, by a battle,
the lot of all the ancient country of Yugorie. Samar boasted of his
courage and of his strength, but he forgot prudence, for he, his army
and his guards, were plunged in sleep when at the hour of dawn the
Cossacks attacked his camp. Awakened by the tumult, he rose, seized his
arms, and fell, shot to death at the first volley. In an instant his
troops dispersed, and the inhabitants agreed to pay tribute to Russia.
Already Iermak had reached the shore of the Obi, an important river,
concerning the course of which the ancient Novgorodians had some
notions, but whose source and mouth, according to the Muscovite
travellers of 1567, were hidden in unknown regions. Master of Nazym,
principal town of the Ostiaks, and of many other fortresses, having in
his power the Prince of Siberia, Iermak had to deplore the loss of one
of his brave companions-in-arms, the hetman Necetas Pan, killed in an
assault with some of the most intrepid Cossacks.

He did not desire to penetrate farther into a country which only
presented frozen deserts to him, places of desolation where during the
summer the burning rays of the sun hardly warmed the surface of immense
marshes covered with moss, and where bogs, hardened by the frost and
strewed with the bones of mammoths, presented the aspect of a vast
cemetery. Iermak appointed Alatscha, an Ostiak prince, as chief of the
tribes of the Obi. Then he again took the road of the capital of
Siberia, treated as a conqueror and a sovereign by his tributaries. He
was received everywhere with demonstrations of absolute submission, as a
redoubtable warrior endowed with a supernatural strength of soul. To the
sound of warlike music, the Cossacks ascended the rivers. They
disembarked clad in their finest raiment in order to astonish the
inhabitants by their riches. Having thus assured the domination of
Russia from Berezoff to Tobol, Iermak, satisfied and tranquil, arrived
safely at Isker.

Then only he announced to the Stroganoffs that with the aid of God he
had been able to conquer the Sultan, had taken his capital, his states,
his nephew, and had made his people take the oath of allegiance to
Russia. At the same time he wrote to the Czar that his poor Cossacks,