Resource exploiters also found profitable applications for the Pacific walrus.
Ivory, one of the commodities sought by Russian fur seekers in Alaska, appeared on returning vessels as early as 1755.55 In their first year at the Pribilof Islands in 1786–1787, Pribylov’s Aleut hunters killed enough walruses to yield 14,400 pounds of ivory.56 During the 1810s Aleuts collected 7,200 pounds of ivory an-nually for the Russians, hastening the eventual extermination of walruses at the islands.57 The last of the Pribilof herd fell in 1891.58
Russians forced Aleuts to hunt walruses on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula. Frederick Litke witnessed the process in the 1820s:
The hunters surround them from the water’s edge then rush in upon them, shouting and crying out, and driving them all inwards towards the middle of the sandbank. They then set upon them with pikes, stabbing them where their skin is least thick. One of the most essential precautions is to prevent any of them from getting to the sea because then the whole herd will follow and it becomes difficult to dodge the tusks of these enraged animals and avoid being knocked down by them and dragged into the sea. This danger-ous hunt lasts about ten days. When they are preparing to leave for it, the Aleuts always bid farewell to one another.59
Between 1799 and 1857 the Russian walrus kill totaled an estimated 500,000.60
Whalers turned their attention to the walrus in the late 1850s in the off-season for whaling and as a substitute for whales a few years later (Table 3.3).
The bark Carib out of San Francisco brought in one of the first large catches:
100 barrels of walrus oil in 1860 or 1861. Whalers found the best hunting on the ice floes of the northern Bering Sea. For several years they harpooned the animals; thereafter they used rifles. Customarily, a boat carrying three men ap-proached a herd from downwind. A rifleman clothed in white stepped onto the ice floe, crept up to the herd, and tried to shoot one dead lest it go into the water followed by the others. If the first one fell in place the rest of the herd would stay, and the rifleman could approach the herd and kill many or all of
them. Accustomed to the cracking of ice, walruses showed no fear of rifle shots.
In this manner one whaling vessel secured 700 walruses in 48 hours and 1,600 in less than three weeks in summer 1877.
After the killing, crew members removed the heads for ivory and the skin and blubber in strips. Occasionally the warm blood caused the ice floe to melt or split, sending the walruses to the bottom and giving the hunters a cold bath.
Aboard ship, crews separated the blubber from the skin strips, diced it, and rendered it into oil in the try-pots used for whale blubber. Cooks often fried the liver and heart and made sausages or roasts of the meat.
Ivory went to carvers in New York, London, Japan, and China. Carvers fashioned handles, dice, dog whistles, and other ornaments. American whalers seldom bothered to keep the skins, although Europeans took them for manu-facture of harnesses and shoe soles.61 Weighing 200 pounds or more, skins sold in London for $1–$1.25 per pound for use in metal polishing and other in-dustrial processes.62 In the peak walrus-hunting years of the 1870s, whalers discarded all but a few of the skins. On average they got 20 gallons of oil from a walrus, graded equal in quality to elephant seal oil and marginally superior to whale oil. A large bull walrus could contain 60 gallons. Between 1869 and 1880 whalers gathered an estimated two million gallons of walrus oil. They wasted many animals; one herd of 1,600 killed on a beach all washed away in a high tide.63 Catches and herds atrophied.
table 3.3. Recorded Pacific Walrus Harvests by the Whaling Industry, 1849–1914
Year Number Year Number Year Number Year Number
Source: John R. Bockstoce, “The Harvest of Pacific Walruses by the Pelagic Whaling Industry, 1848 to 1914,” Arctic and Alpine Research 14, 3 (1982): 187.
Note: Does not include Native subsistence kill or animals killed and lost.
Effects on Eskimos
Commercial whaling and walrus hunting greatly affected Eskimo culture, mostly in negative ways. It ended the trading system by which Eskimos ob-tained Russian goods from Siberia and Hudson’s Bay goods from Canada. To augment profits or avoid losses, whalers increasingly carried trade goods to the Eskimos. Inland Eskimos moved to coastal towns for access to trade items and to work as whalers or walrus hunters. By the turn of the 20th Century, several shore-based Eskimo crews operated on their own, selling baleen and keeping what they needed for food. The collapse of whale populations reduced food supplies of those still relying on them. Whalers carried diseases, periodically devastating local populations. Influenza and measles killed about 300 people at Barrow between 1900 and 1902. Liquor imported by whalers, traders, or whaler-traders proved irresistible and socially destructive, as it did among other Native Americans. One quart of whiskey could bring $200 worth of furs or other products.64
Liquor and disease hurt the Eskimos more than the loss of walruses did.
In 1873, primarily because of Indian troubles in the West, the U.S. govern-ment banned the sale of liquor and breech-loading rifles to Native Americans.
Revenue cutter patrols appeared in the Arctic in 1879, but liquor smuggling persisted and the gun ban made it more difficult for the Eskimos to get food and clothing. Prostitution and venereal disease escalated. In 1890 an estimated half of Barrow’s population had syphilis. Large numbers of Eskimos died of introduced diseases, as had other Natives.65
In 1877 the whaling brig William H. Allen stopped at Cape Prince of Wales and traded liquor for fox furs. That night the Eskimos got drunk. The next day, sixteen men and a woman returned to the ship in an umiak. The men came aboard and demanded liquor. Captain George Gilley, seeing that they had nothing to trade, refused to give them liquor. Becoming more belligerent, the Eskimos began to push the crew around. First Mate Finnegan lost his temper and struck back, whereupon one of the Eskimos stabbed him to death. The Hawaiian crew then attacked the Eskimos, who retreated under the forecastle.
They used boat hooks to pull the Eskimos out one by one, clubbed them, and threw them over the rail into the umiak or the sea. Only the woman survived.
The incident soured relations between whalers and Eskimos for years and may have induced the murders of several crew members who went ashore.66
Hired Eskimos carried out much of the commercial harvest of walruses on which they had traditionally relied for food, boat coverings, dwellings, leather, and ivory to carve into spearheads and other implements. Once at least, their lack of foresight backfired. According to visiting seafarers, in 1878 St. Lawrence Islanders obtained barrels of whiskey from traders. Then came a season of heavy ice, making hunting difficult. Some combination of alcoholism, bad weather,
absence of whales and walruses, starvation, and disease caused ruin. During the winter of 1878–1879 all the people of three villages on St. Lawrence Island died, and only one of the island’s eight villages remained viable. People ate skin houses, boats, and dog harnesses. By 1881 two-thirds of the island’s popula-tion of 1,500 had died. As news of the disaster spread, some whaling captains brought loads of food to the Eskimos.67
Modern analysis led to the conclusion that in 1878–1879 an El Niño event caused warm winds to blow from the south, preventing the normal semi-open ice cover on which walruses and seals hauled out. By contrast, a La Niña event in 1879–1880 blew so cold from the north that it left few openings in the pack ice. In neither year could the St. Lawrence Islanders successfully hunt walruses, already depleted by commercial hunting. Of the fewer than 2,300 people, at least 90 percent died. The population continued to decline for two decades or more despite the immigration of culturally similar Yup’ik from the Chukotka Peninsula. Living patterns changed from dispersed groups to concentration in a few villages. Hunting methods changed from solitary pursuit to groups in umi-aks. Ironically, the survivors reaped a valuable harvest of walrus ivory and baleen from the schooner Lolita, wrecked on the coast in the fall of 1880.68
Ivan Petroff commented in 1880 that
the trading vessels coming to this [Arctic] region . . . have carried such quan-tities of alcoholic liquor that the natives have acquired a craving for the same Remains of villagers starved at St. Lawrence Island, early 1880s. In Michael A. Healy, Report of the Cruise of the Revenue Steamer Corwin in the Arctic Ocean in the Year 1884, Washington, DC: GPO, 1889, p. 13. A combination of unfavorable weather and depletion of sea mammals visited ruin on island residents.
that no longer can be subdued, and this causes them to look for no other equivalent for their furs, oil, and ivory than the means of intoxication. At the same time they become utterly reckless in their pursuit of fur-bearing and other animals, thinking only of satisfying their desire for the present without the slightest thought of the future; and if this state of affairs be continued the extermination of the people, consequent upon the exhaustion of their means of subsistence, can only be a question of time.69
Captain Michael Healy, commander of the revenue cutter Corwin, stated that in 1884 liquor caused the only significant conflicts between whites and Eskimos. He described the Eskimo men as “kindly and hospitable” when sober but “demoniac” when drunk: “The most brutal fights occur when they are in this condition. Their long, sharp hunting-knives make frightful wounds, and their rifles are used without stint and often with deadly effect.” Their wives, normally well treated, “are frequently brutally beaten when liquor has frenzied the men.” When the Corwin crew conducted a liquor seizure, “[T]he women recognized us as their friends and used every exertion to assist us in our search.”
Healy called for stiffer regulation of liquor and for lifting the ban on repeating rifles and ammunition so Eskimos could more effectively hunt for food.70 Pa-trolling by the revenue cutters, however, caused the whaler-traders to take their liquor to the Siberian side. Alaskan Eskimos then traded their furs and ivory for liquor from the Chukotka Natives, who in turn gave the goods to the whaler-traders for more alcohol.71
Stories about the walruses surfaced in the mass media. As early as 1869 the Alaska Herald of San Francisco lamented, “American whalemen seem to think of [walruses] as of no consequence, being only anxious to secure the tusks, abandoning the carcass.” The complaint would become familiar a century and more later, when Eskimos took the place of whalers. An editorial in the Alaska Appeal of San Francisco related in 1879:
Sixteen of the nineteen vessels of the Arctic which have arrived at this port during the past month have brought 27,500 pounds of ivory, consisting entirely of tusks of the walrus, and 4,000 pounds were lost in the Mercury.
This is an average of 1,853 pounds to the vessel. . . . Let us be moderate in our estimate, and say that 10,000 walruses have been destroyed this season.
We have characterized this wholesale destruction as wanton; it were, perhaps, more fitting to term it criminal. . . . [We are told by] intelligent and truth-ful masters of whaling vessels, that “for every one hundred walruses taken a family is starved.” The season’s slaughter, then[,] represents the sufferings and death of thirty-five families, and the word families implies that at least as many helpless mothers have striven ineffectually to ward off the death pangs of their still more helpless little ones. The total value of the ivory brought to San Francisco this season cannot exceed $3,500, for of late years the market
has been glutted, and the price at which this article is sold is actually not over ten cents per pound.72
People in the villages between Point Hope and Barrow traditionally con-sumed about 500–600 walruses annually, but by 1890 they seldom got more than 10.73 One critic of the slaughter, missionary Sheldon Jackson, Alaska’s general agent of education, visited northwest Alaska in 1890. He learned of the steep reduction of sea mammals, caribou, and Eskimos over the previous fifteen years. He blamed the commercial whalers directly for the losses of whales and walruses and attributed the disappearance of caribou to breech-loading rifles the Eskimos had recently acquired. At King Island in 1891 he found the in-habitants in a state of starvation, eating seaweed and, in some cases, their dogs.
Captain Healy steamed the revenue cutter Bear 200 miles to the nearest trad-ing post and bought food to tide the islanders over to the next hunttrad-ing season.
Jackson organized a reindeer industry (Chapter 14) as an alternative economic base for the Eskimos.74
Cash wages stimulated wants and needs, many artificial, from industrial society. Visits by whalers, traders, and other Europeans or Euro-Americans re-inforced values that weakened Eskimo traditional cultures. The shift toward a cash economy increased dependency on outside technology and income op-portunities. Eskimos voluntarily participated in the changes, benefiting in some ways and suffering in others.
20th-Century Walrus Hunting
Predation of walruses did not end when the great whaling fleets no longer journeyed to the Arctic. During the Gold Rush era, passengers on steamships bound to and from the Yukon River shot hundreds of walruses from the rails as they passed by. By 1900 the walrus had virtually disappeared south of Nuni-vak Island. The entire North Pacific herd had been cut down drastically.75 The U.S. government halted commercial hunting of the walrus in 1908 after it had become less profitable.76
The new law restricted the take of walruses in American waters to Natives for food and clothing, to scientific collectors, and to others in emergencies. But walrus hunters simply moved outside the three-mile limit and resumed opera-tions. Charles Madsen, contracted by the Hibbard Stewart Company in 1909, gathered 100,000 pounds of walrus hides to be used on polishing wheels and for women’s handbags. Hunting in Bering Strait and the Chukchi Sea from Nome in the summer, he usually took aboard his schooner Sea-Wolf ten Eski-mos and their one-man kayaks plus two umiaks. He picked them up at King Island, Cape Prince of Wales, and Little Diomede. They sailed north until they
spotted walruses on ice floes, launched the skin boats, and quietly approached from downwind. First they tried to shoot the lookout animal and, next, as many others as quickly as possible before they slid into the sea. They shot some in the water and speared them with ivory-tipped harpoons tied to sealskin floats to prevent sinking. To be lethal, a bullet had to strike a walrus on the neck ver-tebrae, in the brain through the eye, or from the side or rear of the head. The Eskimo crew undertook the heavy work of skinning the animals, some weigh-ing 3,000 pounds or more, and feasted on meat, blubber, and clams taken from the stomachs. Successful trips could reap 40 to 50 walruses per day, the skins weighing 300 to 400 pounds each.77
Crews salted the hides and stowed them in the hold, to be sold at 7.5 cents per pound and shipped to Seattle for processing. Each member owned an equal share of the ivory, although Madsen received nearly all of it in exchange for trade goods. Much of the meat and blubber went back to the hunters’ home villages. The crew also shot many hair seals and polar bears. At least five other walrus-hunting vessels operated at that time: Captain Louis Lane’s Polar Bear, Olaf Swanson’s Nanook, C.T. Pederson’s King and Winge, and the Norwegian Kit.78 The Kit, a factory whaler, had arrived in 1912 and returned in 1913 and 1914. Unable to find whales, it took on Eskimo hunters and pursued walruses Polar bear struck by bullet, off Point Barrow, 1920. By J. Hadley. Powell coll. 64-43-201, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska and Polar Regions Archives. Explorers, whalers, sport hunters, and others shot polar bears without concern for the survival of the species.
in the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea. It collected about 2,400 walruses, but the owners lost money on the venture and sold the vessel to Russia.79
Like many undertakings in wild corners of the North, walrus hunting of-fered moments of peril. Chasing a wounded bull in his umiak, Madsen fended off repeated attacks by the enraged beast, which nearly succeeded in sinking the boat. When an Eskimo arrived to assist, the bull tore his kayak to pieces, and the hunter survived by getting behind the bull’s head and hanging on to the tusks. A near-drowning followed when the walrus dove, the hunter still cling-ing to it.80
Madsen guided sport hunters for walrus, as did other captains. F.E. Klein-schmidt chartered Captain Larsen’s Abler out of Nome for a 1913 trip by four wealthy men from the East Coast. They bagged 14 animals but lost at least 24 more killed or wounded. They noted that the Kit had taken 900 skins that year, raising protests.81 Sport hunting, while far more modest in impact than commercial ventures, nevertheless aggravated the scarcity of walruses, to the detriment of Eskimos.
Eskimos, however, on their own killed large numbers of walruses from the American shores. They hunted the animals on the ice, removed the tusks, and left nearly all the bodies. Biologist Joseph Bernard traveled 200 miles along the coast north of Point Hope in the summer of 1923 and counted the walrus Walrus sport hunter and trophy, Chukchi Sea, 1913. In Edward M. Scull, Hunting in the Arctic and Alaska, Philadelphia: Winston, 1915, p. 124. Sport hunting added, if modestly, to the strain on the walrus population.
bodies that had drifted ashore. He found more than 1,000, two-thirds of which had their tusks cut off. The rest, presumably, had been shot and lost. Walruses no longer dared to come ashore where they could more easily be harvested for food. Bernard recommended that a 25-mile stretch of shoreline formerly used as a walrus haulout be declared a walrus preserve, as had been done by the Chukchis on the Siberian side. The preserve did not materialize, but in 1925 the village council of Gambell on St. Matthew Island imposed restrictions on hunting walruses for ivory only.82
During the Great Depression the Bureau of Indian Affairs assisted Eskimos in organizing cooperative stores and a handicraft industry, including ivory carv-ing, as substitutes for the failing reindeer and trapping economies.83 The 1941
“Walrus Act” limited hunting on the American side to Native Americans. It
“Walrus Act” limited hunting on the American side to Native Americans. It