y-five thousand to one hundred thousand dollars in modern money.
The effect on the Siberian mind was the same as a gold find. All the
riffraff adventurers of Siberia swarmed to the west coast of America.

We have only the Russian version of the story--not the Indians'--and
may infer that we have the side most favorable to Russia. When booty
of half a million was to be had for the taking, what Siberian exiles
would permit an Indian village to stand between them and wealth? At
first only children were seized as hostages of good conduct on the part
of the Indians while the white hunters coasted the islands. Then
daughters and wives were lured and held on the ships, only to be
returned when the husbands and fathers came back with a big hunt for
the white masters. Then the men were shot down; safer dead, thought
the Russians; no fear of ambush or surprise; and the women were held as
slaves to be knouted and done to death at their masters' pleasure.

In 1745--four years after Russia's discovery of western America--a
whole village in Attoo was destroyed so that the Russians could seize
the women and children fleeing for hiding to the hills. The next year
Russians were caught putting poison in the food of another village: the
men ate first among the Indians. The women would be left as slaves to
the Russians; and these same Russians carried a pagan boy home to {84}
be baptized in the Christian faith; for the little convert could come
back to the Aleutian Islands as interpreter. It was as thorough a
scheme of subjugation as the wolf code of existence could have entailed.

The culmination came with the crew of Betshevin, a Siberian merchant,
in 1760. There were forty Russians, including Cossacks, and twenty
other Asiatic hunters and sailors. Four of the merchant's agents went
along to enforce honest returns. Sergeant Pushkareff of the Cossacks
was there to collect tribute from Russia's Indian subjects on the west
coast of America. The ship was evidently better than the general run,
with ample room in the hold for cargo, and wide deck room where the
crew slept in hammocks without cover--usually a gruff, bearded, ragged,
vermin-infested horde. The vessel touched at Oomnak, after having met
a sister ship, perhaps with an increase of aggressiveness toward the
natives owing to the presence of these other Russians under Alixei
Drusenin; and passed on eastward to the next otter resort, Oonalaska
Island.

Oonalaska is like