Demise of St. Lawrence Island, 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 235-238: One of Hooper’s responsibilities was to patrol the capes and islands of Alaska in search of rum merchants, whose illicit trade in alcohol was proving disastrous to the natives. It was in the service of that responsibility that in late June, Captain Hooper stopped at St. Lawrence Island, an ice-gouged crescent of volcanic rock set in the middle of the frigid sea, directly west of the mouth of the Yukon River. Part of America’s Alaskan territory, St. Lawrence Island was nearly a hundred miles long and some twenty miles wide. Three years earlier, the island had had a population of more than fifteen hundred Yupiks, living in a dozen well-established villages scattered along the coast. Theirs was an ancient, thriving culture built principally on the walrus hunt. But then, in a single winter, the populace had been nearly extinguished by some…