The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum Page A

weather would pass before they were all blown into the Pacific. How could a man on his own make it through the full blast of a northern winter?
    Another anxious realization: As long as he was a marine, George never had to worry about where he’d get his next meal; it was more often than not salt pork and beans, but the cook doled it out regularly and with a generous ladle. In the wilderness, he’d need to make do with what nature offered—provided he had the skill to hunt in bleak or frozen country.
    George was shrewd enough to understand that he needed an education in a way of life that was foreign and, by instinct, even unnatural to him. And so while the other marines made it a point to steer clear of the Indians who lived outside Sitka in a compound set off by a high wicker gate, snarling rudely about their god-awful smell and poking fun at the scraggly wisps of mustaches many of the braves sported, George decided he wouldn’t be so finicky. He would seek out the Tlingits. He would go through the gate.
    IT WAS Aleksandr Baranov, a heavy-drinking, bulbous-nosed merchant and the first administrator of Russian America, who, back in the early 1800s, had originally ordered the construction of a sturdy cedar fence along the outskirts of what was then called New Archangel. “Russians inside the wall, Tlingits outside” was his official edict.
    There were three major Indian tribes in Alaska: the Athabascans, hunters who had settled in the harsh interior; the Haida, seafarers and whale hunters who inhabited the islands south of Juneau; and the Tlingits, who numbered about 12,000 and were spread in a variety of clans along the southern coast. The Tlingits were different from the other tribes. They were artists, skilled in carving masks and totems. By instinct they were competitive and ambitious. And as Baranov had discovered when he’d tried to take their land and claim their hilltop fortress, they were warriors.
    Swinging stone-headed hammers, the Indians had smashed open the heads of the invading Russian sailors as easily as if they were cracking summer melons. Three separate attacks on their fort had been quickly repulsed. Yet after the failure of the third charge, Baranov, with a cruel practicality, came up with another plan. He directed the captains of the four Russian naval ships in the harbor to fire their cannons at will. The cannonade was relentless and devastating. Booming barrage after barrage of heavy iron balls pounded into the fortress and its small log houses. They whistled through the air and landed with a thudding power that mocked the swing of a Tlingit hammer. The earth shook. Buildings broke apart. And bodies cracked in this thick hail of hard iron balls. Warriors, women, children—all were victims. There was no refuge, and there was no escape.
    It was after the Tlingits had surrendered, after Baranov had barked the order that the remains of their fort be burned to the ground, and after he’d begun building his own ample cottage, forever known as Baranov’s Castle, on the commanding site of the old Indian fortress, that he decided it would be prudent to keep the Tlingits outside the heart of the settlement. He was still scared. He feared that led by a new bold chief they would arm themselves with their stone hammers and try to reclaim all that had been taken from them. Yet except for a short-lived attack in 1836 and another rebellion following the rape of a squaw by some drunken marines in 1877, the Tlingits, once a tribe of legendary warriors, accepted their defeat with passive resignation.
    Each morning many of the Indians would walk past the guards at the fence’s wicker gate and enter the settlement. They would trade furs, sell dried salmon, or report to the servants jobs they had at the homes and offices of the white administrators. And by nightfall, they would trudge back to the other side of the fence. Indians on one side; white men on the other. The wicker gate would be solidly bolted. It was a