Siletz news /, March 01, 2001, Page 9, Image 9

TRIBAL PROGRAM NEWS
Tribe Supports Elakha - Sea Otter
The Siletz Tribal Council approved a resolution in January to become a
member of the newly formed Elakha Alliance, and appointed “Tribal Council
member JoAnn Miller, the Cultural Resources director, and the Natural
Resources manager” to represent the tribe in this alliance.
The Council also decided to support efforts to develop a plan to re-introduce
the Elakha and the eventual restoration of the Elakha to the Oregon Coast.
The following article traces the history of the sea otter and is written by
tribal member David Hatch.
Elakha
by David R. Hatch
This is a story without a beginning or an ending.
For the sake of a beginning, we’ll start with a queen, actually a Russian Empress
named Catherine. At the time she was known as “Her Imperial Majesty Empress
Catherine.” In 1725 she sent Vitus Bering on a five-year journey to find out if in fact
her kingdom extended to the Americas that were being invaded from the east by the
Europeans. Although Vitus sailed right through a narrow strait separating two
continents, the weather was so lousy he never saw the continent just to the east.
Upon Vitus’ return, the new empress, Her Imperial Majesty Empress Anna,
sent Vitus Bering on another five-year journey to look farther for more answers to
the same question. On this trip, Vitus and his crew in their ship, the St. Peter,
overextended themselves. Many of the crew, along with the captain, were not able
to survive the winter in the sea we call the Bering Sea and were shipwrecked on
an island just off the coast of Russia that we call Bering Island
Those who lived through the winter survived because of the natural curiosity
of a beautiful and abundant animal, which was relatively easy to kill. This animal
gave them both their food and their clothing. In those parts, the animal was called
Kalan; here in these parts the animal was called Elakha, but most of us know this
animal as the sea otter. The survivors returned with more than 800 pelts. Empress
Anna was overwhelmed and immediately commissioned a full-length cloak.
This trip was almost as successful for the Elakha and my family on the
Aleutian Islands as it was for Vitus Bering. The fur of the Elakha provided the
motivation for the Russian invasion of the Americas. In their quest for fur, the
Russians brought along their unfamiliar diseases and soon learned to enslave the
decimated families by taking the young girls - wives, daughters, and sisters -
hostage in order to force the men to hunt for fur, even during the winter storms.
After a few years in one spot, the otter and people populations were pretty much
removed and it was time to move on to the next island.
While the Russians were exploiting their way south, word spread of the
valuable fur trade. This inspired an extension of the Spanish invasion northward
in 1774. Within a year, the Spanish were going about their business murdering the
Alaskan Natives and the sea otter.
Not to be left out, the English, led by James Cook, showed up in 1778. They
started renaming the geographic features so recently named by the Russians
and/or the Spanish and trading a night with a daughter for a pewter plate. Just
prior to his return trip to Hawaii, where he managed to get himself murdered by
the natives, Cook noted the potential of the sea otter trade:
“The fur of these animals, as mentioned in the Russian accounts, is certainly
softer and finer than that of any others we know of; and therefore the discovery of
this part of the continent of North America, where so valuable an article of
commerce may be met with, cannot be a matter of indifference.”
Just seven years later in 1785, Capt. Hanna returned to the area in his ship,
the Sea Otter, to initiate the commercial fur trade for the English. The French
followed the next year and the year after that, Robert Gray left Boston to represent
the Americas. All of these trips were inspired by the exploitation of Elakha.
This rush to exploit provided the initial contact between the invaders and the
people of the Oregon Coast. Prior to this contact, Elakha was an important part of
the people’s lives. The second most common marine mammal bone in our middens
were the bones of Elakha.
Sea Otter - Elakha
While Lewis and Clark were strolling across the continent with their particular
Corps of Discovery, the Russians were landing ships loaded with 15,000 fresh sea
otter pelts. Over and over, the pattern of depopulation was repeated as Russian
invaders hopped from island to island. By 1810, the Spaniards were killing the
Aleut hunters enslaved by the Russians as poachers in San Francisco Bay. Fort
Ross, just 65 miles north of San Francisco, was established in 1812 and stands
today as a tourist attraction and monument to the extent of the Russian invasion.
By the time the wagon trains arrived in Oregon, it is estimated that more than 1
million sea otters had been slain along the Pacific Coast. The sea otter populations
were in such poor shape that the Alaskan Territory was no longer of interest to the
Russians and was sold to the United States in 1867. In Oregon, the story of Elakha
looked like it was coming to an end. The sea otter was about to assume the distinction
of being Oregon’s first population wiped out by the various invaders.
In 1877, an Englishman named Wallis Nash traveled with his English friends
from the new town of Corvallis to a little settlement called Newport. Here he reports:
“I remember well after supper that evening, we three Englishmen went into
‘Bush’ Hammond’s store to chat and smoke. A smoking wall lamp lighted the
place. As the doorbell jingled, a couple of Indians came in out of the dark, one
carrying slung over his shoulder some long, dark beast which he jerked on the
counter before the store-keeper. Moseley pricked up his ears and came to take
notice. From nose tip to tail, the animal was about four or four and a half feet
long, plainly of the otter type - the fur dark brown and glossy, but the feet were
webbed. ‘I have never met this before,’ Moseley said to me. ‘It is the sea otter of
the Pacific.’ The Indian began to dicker with ‘Bush’ for the hide. The bidding
started at two hundred dollars, and Moseley’s face fell for, by slow degrees it
went to four hundred, and changed hands at that. The price was too high for him,
and he had to content himself with the skeleton, which we arranged to have cleaned
by the ants at a neighboring ant-heap in the wood. In due time, that skeleton
followed him to Oxford, and took its unique place in the Museum of Natural
History. Even then these sea otters were rare - now they are all but extinct.”
Wallis Nash returned to Corvallis and helped to start what’s now called
Oregon State University (OSU).
Frank Priest and Joe Biggs killed the last native sea otter reported in Oregon
in Newport in 1906. They sold it for $900. In 1910, fewer than 30 sea otter skins
were taken in the entire Pacific Northwest.
In 1910, the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent a 16-year-old Aleut orphan from
Alaska to the Chemawa Indian School. This orphan is my grandfather, Nick Hatch.
In 1910, a local census listed nine surviving Siuslaw people along the Siuslaw
River near today’s town of Florence. Fifty years earlier, 2,300 Siuslaw people
were estimated to be living along the river. By 1914, two of the nine were dead
and an ll-year-old orphan was shipped to the Chemawa Indian School. This
orphan is my grandmother, Hattie Martin.
In 1911, another census estimated that there were between 500 and 1,000
surviving sea otter in 13 small colonies between Mexico and the Aleutian Islands.
The 1911 Fur Seal Treaty signed by Russia, Japan, Britain, and the United States
(See Sea Otter on page 10)
March 2001
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Siletz News
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