construct
winter quarters, when Stephen Glottoff, a famous hunter on the way back
from Kadiak westward, appeared marching across the sands followed by
eight men. Glottoff had heard of the massacres from natives on the
north shore with whom he was friendly; and had sent out rescue parties
to seek the survivors on the south coast of whom the Indian spies told.

The poor fugitives embraced Glottoff, and went almost mad with joy.
But like the prospector, who suffers untold hardships seeking the
wealth of gold, these seekers of wealth in furs could not relinquish
the {105} wild freedom of the perilous life. They signed contracts to
hunt with Glottoff for the year.

It is no part of this story to tell how the Cossack, Solovieff, entered
on a campaign of punishment for the Aleuts when he came. Whole
villages were blown up by mines of powder in birch bark. Fugitives
dashing from the conflagration were sabred by the Russians, as many as
a hundred Aleuts butchered at a time, villages of three hundred
scattered to the winds, warriors bound hand and foot in line, and shot
down.

Suffice it to say, scurvy slaked Solovieff's vengeance. Both Aleuts
and Russians had learned the one all-important lesson--the Christian's
doctrine of retribution, the scientist's law of equilibrium--that brute
force met by brute force ends only in mutual destruction, in anarchy,
in death. Thirty years later, Vancouver visiting the Russians could
report that their influence on the Indians was of the sort that springs
from deep-rooted kindness and identity of interests. Both sides had
learned there was a better way than the wolf code.[3]

[1] See Coxe's _Discoveries of the Russians_.

[2] Some of the old records spell the name of this wrecked Russian
"Korelin," as if it were "Gorelin," the sailor, of Pushkareff's crew,
who brained the Indian girl; I am unable to determine whether "Korelin"
and "Gorelin" are the same man or not. If so, then the punishment came
home indeed.

[3] It would be almost impossible to quote all the authorities on this
massacre of the Russians, and every one who has written on Russian fur
trade in America gives different scraps of the tragedy; but nearly all
can be traced back to the detailed account in Coxe's _Discoveries of
the Russians between Asia and America_, and on this I have relied, the
French edition of 1781. The Census Report, Vol. VIII, 1880, by Ivan
Petroff, is invaluable for topography and ethnolog