Shis'g'i Noow, the Tlingit Fortified Village

In 1804, native Tlingit and Russian forces fought over territory in southeastern Alaska. After the Tlingit retreat, the Russians established a permanent colony on Baranof Island. Earlier events in 1802, which led to the battle, are also important. Although its exact location remained uncertain until recently, the park has long commemorated the spot of the Kiks.ádi fort that Russian invaders destroyed over 200 years ago. This conflict is an important story to share from the indigenous perspective, but the Kiks.ádi clan’s connection to the land goes much deeper.

The Fort Unit site is a story of resistance to Russian colonialism and the fur trade, as well as a story of Kiks.ádi adaptations to a coastal environment and the long history of fishing camps on land they fought to protect. Materials recovered from the site, Russian historical accounts, and Tlingit oral histories, tells a story of traditional use for the land challenged by new forces.

Kiks.ádi Fishing Camps

The Sheet’ká Kwáan (the Tlingit people of the Sitka area), a tribe of the Northern Tlingit, occupied the western half of Baranof Island, the greater portion of Chichagof Island and smaller islands seaward. Cultural traditions established thousands of years ago are still in practice, including the reliance on fish and shellfish for food. Starting over 3,000 years ago, the Sitka Tlingit began using fish weirs to collect salmon, which was and continues to be an important part of their diet. Owing to its significance, the Tlingit traditionally regarded salmon as non-human persons that were handled carefully and commanded respect. Much is known about the location of fishing camps and life from traditional and oral history. Archeological surveys have sought to find physical evidence to corroborate this knowledge.

With the onset of summer, the Sitka Kiks.ádi clan and house groups moved from their winter village at Sitka to their fishing camps. The camps sat at various salmon streams throughout Shee Atiká (Sheet’ká), which translates to “Outside Edge” and is the name the Tlingit of the Sitka area call their traditional territory. There they caught and cured salmon and gathered a wide variety of berries and other plants as they became available. Like all Sitka Tlingit, the Kiks.ádi used a wide variety of techniques to harvest salmon in rivers and offshore. These methods included trolling with a hook and line, trapping with basket-style fish traps, and using gaffs, spears, leisters, and stone or wood stake weirs. They stayed in summer encampments until the fall.

When the people returned to the winter villages, they engaged in activities such as harvesting plants, often rosehips (k’incheiyí) and low bush cranberries (daxw), fishing for coho salmon, and drying the fish afterwards. Some went to the mountains to hunt bear, mountain goat, and deer before going to the winter village, because the animals were at their fattest then. The wealth of the summer and fall harvests made winter an ideal season for holding the traditional potlatch.

Kiks.ádi summer houses were small and roughly built compared to winter houses. Some summer houses were built temporarily and had frames lashed together with spruce roots. Others were permanently joined frames. They often had no flooring but instead were built directly on the ground. The houses were covered by slabs of bark or boards removed from the winter houses and transported to the site. During fishing season, the structures functioned both as smokehouses and single-family dwellings.

According to Kiks.ádi oral histories, they inhabited salmon fishing camps along Kaasdahéen (Indian River) within the park since time immemorial (i.e., the earliest human occupation on the island) and through the nineteenth century. In an interview, Kiks.ádi clan member Isabella Brady recalled her childhood growing up along the Indian River before the park was established: “we had a smokehouse right in the back, a big-sized smokehouse, or a woodshed we called it, and we could dry a lot of fish there.” Three or four smokehouses and adjacent buildings stood on the east bank of the Indian River. It was a very productive salmon fishery between July and November.

In 1993, Kiks.ádi elder Herbert Hope gave a map to then Park Superintendent, Micki Hellickson, showing the locations of structures along Indian River. He noted where several former fish camp structures once stood, according to family lore and stories passed down. In Survey Unit A, ten artifacts were recovered around Depression A-1: woodworking and fishing tools that included a splitting wedge, the head of shingling hatchet, and a salmon gaffing hook. Six hand forged iron spikes, an iron strap, a fragment of flat copper or brass knife or ornament, and a nail head fragment were also recovered. A “clenched” nail was also found, which was probably used to construct the structure. The pre-1850 hand-forged nails and the gaffing hook suggest that the archeologists located one of the fish smokehouses indicated on Hope’s map.

Traditional Kiks.adi oral histories recall a series of smokehouses near the perimeter of the Fort Site Clearing. In this survey area, one feature contained a large, flat piece of iron buried about 26 cm deep. A piece of wood with an iron spike was also recovered nearby, so together these artifacts suggest a structure existed at this location. Metal detector inventories identified several use areas and features that point to possible eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fish smokehouse sites, supporting Hope’s recollection. This study proved that oral traditions, while they may not be written down, are just as accurate and valid as archeological research.

Food Cache Pits

A cache pit is a secure place of storage that keeps contents dry and readily available. Although Tlingit cache pits are commonly associated with winter villages, they were also frequently built for summer fishing camps. The cache pits seen here are resource caches, which often conceal food supplies below living surfaces. When a cache pit is found, that usually means a structure, often a residential one, is nearby.

Outside of the Fort Site Clearing, the structural shape and size of Depression A-1 suggests a basement or subfloor cache pit. The glass and ceramic artifacts recovered nearby allude to a historic occupation preceding the Cameron family, who built their fish trap there in the early twentieth century. The Cameron family’s oral history recalls two stone traps from a previous family at the mouth of the Indian River, but the traps eventually washed away. Tlingit occupying the area before the Camerons likely used the cache pit to store food.

Archeologists used dendrochronology to date the cache pits by studying a large tree that grew and partially filled Depression A-3. Dendrochronological analysis determined that the tree started growing into the cache pits circa 1830, after the cache pits were in place. If these features represent pre-1830 Kiks.ádi cache pits, they could have been as large as 13 square feet. The pits were commonly dug behind houses to store food. They were lined with planks and capped with a bark roof covered with mud. Cache pits were constructed of bark and small poles or gabled using planks, with roofs that peaked as high as 5 feet above the ground with the pit dug a similar distance into the ground.

Shovel tests in the Fort Site Clearing recovered 306 objects. They included 28 nineteenth-century artifacts from Survey Unit B, such as a hand painted teacup shard, a fragment of a late nineteenth-century transfer-printed saucer rim, a homemade adze made from a pipe, a pontil-marked bottle base, a cut nail, and 22 fragments of a black glass bottle. The dates acquired for these cache pit artifacts provide hard physical evidence that this was the general area of a nineteenth century Kiks.ádi village site.

During the winter, the Kiks.ádi constructed large, long term occupation sites with maintained storage facilities. However, cache pits were dug and filled during different seasons in different ways to accommodate the given demands of a season’s associated resource availability. Based on the cache pits that archeologists discovered among salmon fishing camp sites, storage of food procured in the fishing season was probably an important buffer against times of scarcity.

The demands of varied seasons produced the varied archaeological signature we see for these features on the landscape. Highly structured food storage practices created a stable food supply within family groups, as well as an elaborate system of social storage based on ritual inter-tribal exchange events, such as potlatches. Through archeological investigation of these cache pits, we can better understand the ways local communities used food storage to respond to regional social and economic changes.

The Battle of 1804

In June 1741, an Imperial Russian expedition under the command of Vitus Bering entered the Sheet’ká area and explored Sitka Sound. The Spanish followed the Russians, beginning with Hezeta and Bodega in 1775, and then the British when Cook came through in 1778. American traders followed shortly after in 1785, and the French headed by La Perouse passed through a year later. By 1790, a lively and competitive international trade had begun to develop in Tlingit territory. The Kiks.ádi were introduced to firearms, blankets, and other commodities in exchange for furs.

Eager to monopolize the fur trade, the Russians formed the Russian American Company in 1799. That year, the people of the Kiks.ádi village, Shee Atik’á, hosted Aleksandr Baranov, who represented the interests of the newly formed Russian-American Company. However, Baranov was not highly regarded and the Kiks.ádi found him to be cold, aggressive, and stingy. His harsh ways earned him the pejorative title of L'ush Teix', which translates to "Without a Heart".

The Kiks.ádi clan initially maintained good relations with the Russians, but Baranov was determined to establish a fur trade enterprise on the island – no matter what – and secured a location for a new trading post through a series of conflicts and threats. Inevitably, this situation rapidly deteriorated to a point of violence, when on June 15, 1802, Kiks.ádi warriors destroyed the Archangel Saint Michael’s Redoubt at Old Sitka. Led by K’alyáan of the At Uwaxiji Hit, the Kiks.ádi burned the fort to the ground, killing many inhabitants and capturing others. However, this was not an isolated event, as the Russians had spawned widespread resentment and hostility by their behavior and experienced almost simultaneous attacks at this time across a broad area, from rebellions in Yakutat in the north to the Kaigani Haida in the south.

Knowing Baranov wanted revenge, the Kiks.ádi spent the next two years constructing a unique fortified structure to secure their protection upon the Russians’ return. This fort was atypical in both its physical setting and construction in that it was built specifically for the anticipated battle with the Russians and their heavy arms. While the Tlingit typically situated their defensive positions at that time on high points of ground or rocks, they constructed the fortified village Shis'g'i Noow on flat ground between the Indian River and Crescent Bay. The choice of green wood logs, likely spruce and hemlock, is reflected in the fort's name, which is best translated as "Green Wood Fort". Green wood was the most durable under the stress of cannon fire. Shis'g'i Noow was distinctive in that it consisted of a large, palisaded enclosure incorporating at least fourteen houses. This was the largest fortification the Kiks.ádi built and was set up to be occupied for days or weeks if necessary.

This unusual character of Shis'g'i Noow reflected the Tlingit’s complete familiarity with their Russian adversary’s weaponry. It was built specifically for the coming confrontation with the Russians and reflected the Russian fur trade expansion to the shores of North America. Baranov underestimated Kiks.ádi resolve to control their own trade and lands. With their acquisition of firearms from the American and British traders, the Kiks.ádi became increasingly bold and ready to take on Baranov’s forces of 120 Russian-American Company employees and 800 Aleut allies. They finally converged on Sitka in September 1804 to bring the Tlingit, but more specifically the Kiks.ádi clan, under the dominion of Imperial Russia.

While the Kiks.ádi in the fort raked a heavy musket fire through the Russian and Aleut attackers, the warrior K’alyáan led a simultaneous attack out of the fort that broke the Russian and Aleut ranks, wounding Baranov and causing a temporary abandonment of the cannon. The Kiks.ádi used every possible means to defend themselves and had accumulated a sizable collection of small arms, flints, gunpowder, and projectiles that they captured during their destruction of the Russian fort. This was very different from the traditional hand-to-hand combat they were used to with hostile Native groups that approached by canoe, but they were prepared for it. However, the Kiks.ádi quickly ran out of gunpowder due to part of their supply being destroyed a few days earlier. After five days of fighting, the Kiks.ádi abandoned Shis'g'i Noow during the night and traveled inland and over the island’s rugged mountainous terrain to safety.

Site 49SIT751 is a multicomponent 19^th century site within the Fort Unit, the primary component being Shis'g'i Noow and its associated battleground. A four-year archeological inventory of the Fort Unit resulted in the recovery of 1,787 artifacts ranging from firearms and ammunition to fishing tools, domestic household items, and construction and architectural materials.

Two large pits, Depressions A-2 and A-3 lie in the heart of the battle zone as indicated through recovered musket and cannon balls. Two cannon balls and two canister shot, both from 12-pound cannon, and four musket balls were recovered near the center of the two depressions. The depressions are similar in size, orientation, and have uniform berms on the north side of each, confirming they are man-made.

While it is likely these depressions represent cache pits built underneath fish smokehouses sometime after the battle, they may also be associated with Shis'g'i Noow. The fortified village was located within the Fort Clearing, and oral histories reference pits in which the Kiks.ádi took refuge from Russian cannon and musket fire. Multiple Russian accounts described dugout pits inside each house and defenses that included dugout houses set in a shallow depression in the ground.

Metal detector surveys identified small arms ammunition associated with the conflict. The recovered artifacts include a four-iron canister shot about 1 inch in diameter, two cannonballs about 2 inches in diameter, two cannonballs about 4¼ inches in diameter, and four lead balls of .35, .44, and .63 calibers. The solid iron artillery shot recovered includes 12-pounder solid shot, 12-pounder canister, and 12-pounder grapeshot, the typical size of late 18th and early 19th century Russian naval guns. The spherical, lead musket balls are of the calibers likely used by both the Kiks.ádi and the Russian-Aleut forces, firearms that were likely .69-caliber trade guns and 36-caliber, .40-caliber, and .44 or .45-caliber small arms.

These battle artifacts tell us what the Kiks.ádi clan went through during their days under siege. Oral history tells the story of the battle, but the remains of the ammunition used against the Kiks.ádi serves as a physical reminder of their hardship. The discovery of these depressions in the ground teaches us more about the families of these warriors and the violence they endured, living on a battlefield and witnessing the colonizers’ destruction of their homeland. Due to archeological surveys of the Fort Unit area, we now know more about the types of weapons that were used against the Kiks.ádi men, women, and children as they stayed within the protected boundaries of this fortified village.

Baranov destroyed Shis'g'i Noow, possibly by burning, but perhaps more likely by salvaging the wood for construction of his new trading post on Castle Hill. With Kiks.ádi withdrawal and subsequent Survival March over the rugged mountains to the other side of the island, the Russians built a fortified compound, naming it Novo-Arkhangelsk. Although the Tlingit Kiks.ádi had lived in this area for centuries and participated in an intricate tapestry of interrelationships with the land, surrounding waterways, animals, and plants, and other peoples, the Russian-American Company seized much of the Tlingit land by force, with no compensation to the Tlingit.

The Kiks.ádi made peace with the Russians and returned home starting in 1805. With the end of outright hostilities, the Tlingit again continued to utilize the land, establishing a new village on the north edge of Novo-Arkhangelsk in 1821. The return of the Tlingit began an era of sometimes uneasy truce with the Russians in close, daily interactions. However, the Russians withdrew to the motherland after transferring the Alaskan Territory to the United States in 1867, and Novo-Arkhangelsk became Sitka.

Sitka National Park originated as a National Monument specifically to commemorate the traditional village of the Kiks.ádi clan and the site of the 1804 Battle of Sitka, making Shis'g'i Noow central to interpretation at the park and a significant focus for learning more about Tlingit history and culture. Today, the site retains its integrity and contains data that will likely yield more important historic information in the future.


Sources:

Howey, Meghan C. L., and Kathryn E. Parker
2008 "Camp, Cache, Stay Awhile: Preliminary Considerations of the Social and Economic Processes of Cache Pits along Douglas Lake, Michigan." Michigan Archaeologist, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 19-44.

Hunt, William J., Jr.
2010 Sitka National Historical Park. The Archeology of the Fort Unit: Results of the 2005-2008 Parkwide Inventory; Survey, Testing, and Analytical Data. Vol. 1 and 2. Midwest Archeological Center. National Park Service.

Thornton, Thomas F., and Fred Hope
1998 Traditional Tlingit Use of Sitka National Historical Park. National Park Service.