In February of 1868, a party of three Russian dogsled drivers arrived at Nulato, a fur trading station on the lower Yukon River. William Dall, an American scientist working there, records that the party consisted of one Russian laborer and two Kreoli, or Creoles, the colony-born descendants of Slavic fathers and Native mothers. They bore gifts of oil, molasses, and a keg of salted geese, but Dall quickly sensed these men had not come merely to deliver presents.
“I asked if any news had arrived from Sitka,” says Dall in his memoir of his time in Russian America, “and received only an evasive reply.”
At this time, the land today known as Alaska had been a Russian possession for more than a hundred years. But rumors had been circulating that Tsar Alexander II had decided to sell his North American possessions, along with the business interests of the Russian America Company (RAC), to the United States. The Russian fort managers regarded this as baseless gossip and dismissed it with a wave of the corporate hand.
In fact, the purchase of Alaska had already happened the previous summer, but Nulato was a long way from anywhere, and in the days before radio, television or email, news could only travel as fast as a ship could sail from San Francisco. Nobody, including the fort managers, knew anything for certain.
Determined to get an answer, Dall singled out one the new arrivals:
After a little while I called Lukeen, who was a jolly little Creole, into my house, and stimulated him until he told me, with many injunctions of secrecy, that the official news had arrived via Nushergak and the Kuskoquim, of the sale of the territory to the United States, that the Russian American Company was wound up, and all the Russians would return to Sitka or the Amoor River by vessels in the spring. This was good news, and I lost no time in hoisting the stars and stripes on our flagstaff in front of the fort.
This “jolly little Creole” was Ivan Semyonov Lukin. One would not know it from Dall’s demeaning description, but he was a prominent figure in the Russian colony, and perhaps one of its most well-traveled citizens.
On that day in February, Lukin was 45 years old. Born 300 miles to the south, on the banks of the Nushagak River, he had lived his entire life in Russian America. Lukin left no record of his thoughts as he sat there in Dall’s quarters. His cheeks would have been flushed and puffy from the cold, and the warmth from the pitchka* — the stone stove that dominated Russian rural dwellings and doubled as a furnace — would have had him feeling drowsy. He had known Dall since the latter had arrived in 1866 with the Collins Telegraph Expedition, a field team sent by Western Union and the US government who were studying the feasibility of running a telegraph line from Siberia to San Francisco, and he may not have liked the man very much. In his memoirs, Dall is frequently condescending toward “half breeds” like Lukin (who, actually, was three-quarters Native), and this attitude probably came out in his day-to-day dealings with them.
Nulato’s courtyard during a winter’s night, lit by the aurora borealis. Engraving from a sketch by Frederick Whymper.
Yet it is clear from this scene that Lukin’s mind was burdened with trepidation. Hardly a surprise, considering the news he brought. His only experience with Americans had been with Dall and his fellow expedition members and, sadly, Dall’s attitude toward Alaska’s aboriginal and mixed-blood societies was more or less typical of his countrymen.
Sitting there next to Dall’s stove, Lukin suddenly faced the same decision that every other Russian subject in North America had to make: Do I stay or do I go? For a man like Lukin, whose whole life was in the rivers and forests of Alaska, the choice was clear enough. Still, no one knew what the future would bring.
Ivan Lukin was born in 1823 at Aleksandrovsky Redoubt near Bristol Bay, where his father, Semyon Lukin, was employed as an interpreter by the RAC. Lukin the elder was a colony-born Creole, the son of a Russian trader and an Alutiiq woman from Kodiak Island. All that is known about Ivan’s mother is that she was an Athabascan Indian from the upper reaches of the Mulchatna River, or possibly the Kuskokwim River, where Semyon was actively involved in establishing the trading post of Kolmakovsky Redoubt near the modern village of Crooked Creek. His family, including young Ivan, joined him there sometime in the early 1830s.
Semyon Lukin had attended parochial school in the colonial capital of Novo-Arkhangelsk (today known as Sitka), and placed a high value on education. He taught his children to read and write, and at the tender age of eight, Ivan was sent to Sitka to continue his studies in history, mathematics, and geography. Each of the Lukin children, including Ivan, learned several Native Alaskan languages during the course of a childhood spent in everyday contact with their aboriginal neighbors and family. It was later recorded that Ivan spoke not only Russian, but the tongues of the Kolchan and Deg’hitan Athabascan people, as well as that of the Yup’ik Eskimo. He returned to Kolmakovsky in his teens, and grew to adulthood working for the RAC as his father’s right-hand man.
Kolmakovsky was strategically located near the border between the Yup’ik Eskimo and Athabascan Indian worlds — a not insignificant detail, given that in linguistic, genetic, and cultural terms these two peoples are as different from one another as Arabs and Norwegians. There was no border drawn on the ground, but generations of hatred and mistrust, to say nothing of murder and slave raids, characterized Eskimo-Indian relations. Ivan’s work often required long trips afield with kayaks, birchbark canoes, and dogsleds, working to build relations and maintain peace between these two societies for the sake of commerce. All the same, throughout his life he showed a greater affinity for the Athabascans than the Eskimos. His Athabascan mother undoubtedly had a lot to do with that. Owing to their matrilineal kinship, Ivan would have been born into his mother’s clan, and his maternal uncles would have seen to his education in bushcraft and his initiation into manhood, which in those days involved killing a grizzly bear hand-to-hand with a spear. The rules of this test were easy: If the bear killed you, you failed.
Historians have pointed out that there were never more than 800 or so Russians living in Alaska at any given time, but this demographic assertion, while technically correct, overlooks the vibrant and populous Creole society to which Ivan Lukin belonged. Since its inception in 1799, the RAC, which under royal charter from the tsar functioned as the quasi-official government of the colony, actively encouraged their employees of all ranks to marry and be fruitful with Native women. Unlike other mixed-blood societies in the Americas, like the Métis of Canada or the Mestizos of Spanish America, the children of these unions were citizens-in-full of the mother country. They were assigned to the social caste of their fathers, or their closest full-blood Russian male relative, though such rank admittedly had little practical value in the Alaskan bush.
Alaska’s Kreoli were the colonial citizenry in every sense of the word, and were officially recognized as such in Russian law. Boys and girls were educated bilingually in both Russian and their Native tongues. Medical care, such as it was in the nineteenth century, was available. Indeed, the Kreoli enjoyed privileges unknown to the full-blood Russian residents of Alaska. The latter were expressly forbidden to settle permanently in the colony until the 1840s, but Creoles like Ivan Lukin were given the freedom to go where they liked, make their home wherever suited them, and live by their own light. Far from the usual experience of being torn between two worlds, these Slavic mixed-bloods were able to take the best of both and combine them into a unique society unlike any other in the Americas. William Dall may have looked down his nose at individuals like Lukin, but the joke was on him. Most Creoles, Lukin included, were at least as well educated as he was, and perhaps even more so.
While at Sitka, Ivan underwent training to become a songleader in the Orthodox Church. This was an important and prestigious duty in a society with only a handful of priests to serve thousands of miles of wilderness. In December 1865, George Adams, another Collins Telegraph alumnus, records that Lukin presided over the funeral of the Nulato manager, who died unexpectedly in his sleep. Lukin spoke the funeral liturgy in Slavonic, then the coffin was lowered into the frozen earth. After the service was concluded, the entire fort staff, including Lukin, opened a cask of the deceased manager’s homemade kvass and proceeded to get drunk. In memoriam, as it were.
Adams, unlike Dall, seems to have thought quite highly of Lukin. He describes him as a master woodsman, but, more importantly, Adams’ account of their travels provides a unique view into Lukin’s personality. On one occasion, Lukin became quite angry when Adams fired at a wolf on the riverbank. His ire did not stem from a love of wolves (this was the nineteenth century, remember); Lukin had been taking aim with his rifle when Adams drew his revolver and started blazing away, missing and causing the animal to run.
“I got a number of words from the incident for my Russian-English vocabulary,” says Adams, “and also some Russian cuss words that it was just as well for the harmony of our expedition that at the time I was not able to interpret.”
Everyone loses their temper on occasion, but there was another side to this man, a side brought to light by Adams’ mention of his Russian-English vocabulary. He had been working hard to learn Russian, but about the only thing he knew how to say was a question he renders as kak etta per russkie? meaning, “How do you say that in Russian?”
On the kayak trip up the Unalakleet River, Adams picked up a piece of river ice and asked the question. Lukin responded with lote,** the Russian word for ice. Over the course of the day, Adams pointed to various objects, and Lukin, quickly grasping what he was about, set to instructing him, while at the same time asking the English words for the same items.
The lessons didn’t end there. One night Adams went to work in his notebook, writing the letters A, B, C, and D in English. “I showed them to Lukine [sic],” says Adams, “And said ‘kak ruskie alphabet’ and he answered at once, ‘dar, ruskie alphabet varm narder’ and he took my book and wrote the thirty seven letters of that language for me.” Lukin went on to help Adams create a chart listing the pronunciation of the Cyrillic characters, speaking each letter phonetically as Adams pointed to it on the page. This was obviously no dim-witted savage; he was just as interested in learning English and the Latin alphabet as Adams was in learning the Russian Cyrillic.
Here, Adams gives us a beautiful scene from the history of North America’s most far-flung frontier. The labels and epithets melt away and we are left with two literate, educated men learning one another’s language on a riverbank in the wilds of Alaska, on the eve of a tectonic cultural upheaval.
Ivan Lukin was nearly twice George Adams’ age. We have no way of knowing how much he told Adams about his life as their mutual vocabulary grew around their many campfires. But he had regrets to keep hidden, for he had made his fair share of mistakes.
Church records state that Lukin married Natalia Tretyakov in 1844, when he was twenty-one years old. Like her husband, Natalia was a Creole, though the Native side of her heritage and where she grew up has not survived in the written history. Their first child, a son named Dmitri, was born in 1847. A daughter named Anastasia followed two years later. The young family continued to live at Kolmakovsky, where Lukin pursued his career with the RAC, still assisting his father. But sadly, their domestic happiness was not to last.
In July of 1851, Natalia started a smudge fire atop the stove in their house. Father Iakov Netsvetov, the Orthodox parish priest at Ikogmiut (now called Russian Mission) on the Yukon River, relates what happened next:
[Lukin] kept loaded guns in his house in fear of a possible attack by savages. On the second of July his wife was smoking out the mosquitoes in the house, and the interior became very warm. Lukin, worried that the heat would cause the gun charges to explode, moved the guns and placed them on a cot. He himself sat in the room in a chair. His wife, however, approached the cot. At this very moment, one of the guns discharged, and she was hit in the side and soon thereafter she died.
As an accident report, Father Netsvetov’s account leaves a lot to be desired. Generally speaking, guns only go off spontaneously in the movies. The weapons in Lukin’s house would have been muzzle-loading rifles and shotguns, and even though black powder ignites at a much lower temperature than modern gunpowder, the house would have needed to be hot as an iron smelter to cause such ignition. A more likely culprit would be flying sparks from a pitchka that was burning wide open to generate the heat to keep the smudge going.
There was no such thing as a police force in Russian America, so Father Netsvetov was dispatched to Kolmakovsky to conduct an inquiry. In the end it was clear that it was a tragic accident, though it was also very clearly caused by Lukin’s carelessness. Netsvetov assigned Lukin to perform public penance as punishment, genuflecting in the courtyard and reciting liturgical prayers in the presence of the fort staff.
To make things worse, Lukin’s son Dmitri died the following year, this being an age when many children didn’t make it past their fifth birthday. Then, in 1855, Lukin’s father Semyon passed away. Ivan was promoted to manager of Kolmakovsky, a position for which he seemed eminently suited, given the fact that he’d spent most of his life there helping run the business.
He remarried in 1856, this time to a Yup’ik woman, but things did not go well for him at Kolmakovsky after his father’s passing. The spring of 1860 saw a severe food shortage, and eventually Lukin’s staff, led by his brothers-in-law Ivan Andreyanov and Neofit Ryazanstev, quite literally staged a mutiny. It is telling that his own kin would machinate against him, and still more telling that both Netsvetov and the RAC sided with them in the dispute.
Perhaps Lukin suffered from an over-inflated sense of self-importance and entitlement from having spent his life at Kolmakovsky. Perhaps he lost sight of the fact that the trading post was not his own private fiefdom, but a piece of the commercial enterprise of the RAC’s shareholders. It is also distinctly possible that recent difficulties in his life had finally overwhelmed him. Or maybe he just wasn’t, in modern parlance, management material.
The affair ended with the company relieving him of his duties at Kolmakovsky and reassigning him to Mikhailovsky Redoubt (now the village of St. Michael) on the Bering Sea coast. This must have been a real slap in the face, given that he’d never really known any other home or profession than running the fur post that his father helped found. He was 37 years old at the time, and it is entirely possible that he lay awake during these nights feeling the sting of shame and the angst of not living up to his father’s legacy.
Nothing is known of Ivan Lukin’s activities until 1862, when he was assigned a special mission by Maxim Vakhrameyev, the regional manager at Mikhailovsky. Since 1847, the British Hudson Bay Company had been trading for furs in Russian America, in violation of international treaty agreement. They had even gone so far as to erect a trading outpost — Fort Yukon — somewhere far upriver, beyond the reach of maps. This put them in a position to siphon off much of the lucrative trade in marten furs.
The Russians had been going up the Yukon each summer from Nulato to Nuklukayet, an ancient rendezvous site at the mouth of the Tanana River where hundreds of Athabascan Indians from all over Alaska’s interior gathered to trade. But in recent years, the British had begun coming down to Nuklukayet and trading, in direct competition with the RAC.
The company directed Vakhrameyev to find out all he could about the British fort and the nature and extent of the Hudson Bay Company’s operation on the river. Vakhrameyev decided to send a spy upriver, and the man he chose was Ivan Lukin.
It seems fair to expect that Lukin saw his new assignment as an opportunity to redeem himself. For his part, if Vakhrameyev had any doubts about assigning this important task to Lukin, he did not make them known. Lukin knew the geography of the interior, the boreal forest, and the world of the Athabascan people like the back of his hand, and this made him very much the right man for the job.
He left Nulato that spring with the annual flotilla bound for Nuklukayet. They travelled in bidarras, a modified form of the Eskimo oomiak skin boat, each with a rudder, sail, several pairs of oars, a swivel cannon at the bow, and the colors of the RAC flying from the mast. At Nuklukayet they found the customary gathering of Indians from upriver, downriver, and the unknown reaches of the Tanana basin. Lukin stayed behind when his countrymen departed, then began lining a canoe upriver (essentially walking upriver with the canoe in tow), alone, for two hundred miles.
A Russian bidarra under sail in the Bering Sea. Engraving from a sketch by William Dall.
Accounts vary regarding what happened when he arrived at Fort Yukon. Some say he snuck in disguised as a local Gwich’in Indian. Others say he presented himself to the Hudson Bay manager as a deserter from the RAC, though the post manager’s log makes no mention of the arrival of a Russian from downriver. Either way, he apparently stayed a few days, watching and observing, then slipped away bound for home. Upon his return he drew up a report of the trip, which was duly submitted to the company.
The following May, Johan Furuhjelm, governor of Russian America, awarded him 2000 rubles for peerless service to the colony and the company.
Sitting at William Dall’s table in 1868 and listening politely to the American’s wheedling, Ivan Lukin may have had some inkling of what the future had in store for him and his people. The only world he had ever known had crumbled to pieces with the signing of treaty papers in a distant city he would never see, by people who did not care in the least about his opinion or that of his countrymen. Once the chosen people of Russian America, the Kreoli would soon become contemptible half-breeds in the eyes of the Americans, their social status forever swept away as they amalgamated themselves into Alaska’s various Native societies. For the people of Lukin’s generation, this may or may not have been made up for by the sudden availability of repeating rifles, stylish western clothing, glass windows, and endless supplies of matches and baking powder.
Almost all the full-blooded Russians returned to the old country, but Lukin, like most Kreoli, decided to stay. That spring, the first wave of Americans entered his country, bringing with them a culture utterly alien to him and his people. Not the least disorienting was the fact that their homeland was suddenly being called Alaska. This name was known to them, but it had always referred to the long peninsula that separates the Bering Sea from the Pacific Ocean, forming the tip of the Aleutian Islands. Now, apparently, it meant the entire colony.
For Lukin in this moment, it might have seemed that the earth had suddenly started spinning faster, so fast that, with nothing tying him down, he was liable to go flying off into space. This fate was not entirely unique; it was shared by the descendants of French, Spanish and Danish colonists who had the misfortune to land on the losing side of history. But the view of the courtyard at Nulato — the log palisade, the dovetailed corners of the buildings, the barking of the sled dogs and the Siberian-style sleds they pulled, was entirely his, a splendid vision of a moment in history when both the blessings and misfortunes of one man’s life canceled each other out in the crackling cold of the boreal forest. RL
* In the Alaskan dialect of Russian, the word for stove is usually rendered as “pitchka,” clearly derived from the Russian word печка (pechka).
** Of course the Russian is лёд, normally transcribed as lyod.
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