Another One from the File Cabinet
Wrote this, had no idea what to do with it when it was done. In a slightly different version, I stuck it in a few guidebook editions.
Trade beads make me happy. One of these days, I'll blow the fifty or sixty bucks to get one of the ones Lewis and Clark took along with them.
Consider: you're about to go to the other side of the world, to a place no one from your world has seen or knows about. Once there, you're going to have to make friends with the locals. What do you bring them? Something useful, right?
Or maybe not. For hundreds of years, what travelers brought were beads and trinkets--especially beads. On Semen Dezhnev's 1648 voyage to the waters between Alaska and Russia, the first expedition to make it into the waters of what's now called the Bering Strait, official stores included "5,000 blue beads," valued at two rubles and a poltin, or the equivalent of the "3 red snowshoe boots" Dezhnev also took along. There's never an explanation for why he only took three boots. It didn't matter; the beads were the hot ticket, and would remain so for the next 200 years.
When you really look into the issue of the beads, you discover that they acted as a kind of balance point in Russian-Alaskan relations. In the earliest days, the Alaskans were anxious for the beads, and the Russians disdainfully tossed them about like royalty bestowing favors. But after a while, the balance of power changed. The Alaskans had enough beads; they were ready for something more useful, like medicine, weapons, or the new craze, tobacco. By the time of the transfer of Alaska to the United States, the Russians found themselves not only despised, but holding useless currency.
The Russians weren't bringing anything new when they took beads to Alaska. Alaskans made their own beads, the most popular of which were made from the colorful dentalium shell. However, getting these was kind of a hassle: you threw a dead body into the water and waited for the dentalium to cover it. It was a high price to pay for wealth. Other beads were made of tooth (caribou was the most common) or some more easily obtained shell. The Aleut, Athabascan, and Southeast Alaskans used beads to decorate clothing--especially hunting visors and caps--and as jewelry, with earrings being the most popular use. Beads were also used for labrets, small decorations placed in a cut near the lips.
But tooth and bone beads were just local, homespun products. Once the big, shiny factory glass beads came in, it was like trying to convince a kid that a homemade shirt is as good as one with a sports team logo. The local crafts disappeared, and for most of the next two hundred years, there was something of a bead rush going on in Alaska.
Sadly, we really only have the Russian side of the story, but it's obvious that the sudden arrival of so many different kinds of beads flooding into Alaska from Russia caused a kind of market craze for them, with imagined rarities and scarcities that put to shame the modern lust for Pokemon cards and Beanie Babies. The worth of beads varied by color, more than shape, and one kind of bead was worth more in one place than in another. A complicated system of values and equivalencies quickly developed across the territory.
The first English account we get of the power of trade beads is in the journals of Captain Cook. When he arrived in Prince William Sound in the spring of 1778, Cook discovered that Russian blue beads were the items of choice. He wrote, "these they seemed to value very much, and I had some difficulty to purchase two or three." As for trading the beads he himself had brought, one of his crewmen noted that "for a few Beads we might purchase of the Natives almost any Quantity of dryed fish we please, either Salmon or Halibut." With such riches to be had--Cook's men were handing out beads like confetti--the Natives paddled up to Cook's ship the Resolution so loaded with furs to trade that they looked like "bears or seals."
In the early 1800s, a single pair of matched blue-green beads was worth three or four caribou skins, or about nine beaver skins in the Norton Sound area (near modern-day Nome or Unakleet). In the Kenai, Alexander Baranov negotiated a treaty that guaranteed the payment of "1 sazhen beads" per beaver pelt (if you're trying to keep track of the measurements, there were two sazhen in a funt).
On the extreme value scale, in the Aleutians, there were reports that in 1791, a good set of earrings made of European beads could buy you a "girl or woman in eternal slavery."
Even though the glass beads pushed out the local product, they were used for exactly the same things. The Russians just killed what they could and then moved on to the next place, never truly taking the Alaskan landscape into their way of thinking. The Alaskans took what the Russians had to give them, and immediately incorporated it into their daily lives. Ivan Veniaminov noted that Aleut hats were "adorned with sea-lion whiskers, trade beads and bone" (interestingly, you could tell whether a hunter was left or right handed by the side of the hat the whiskers were on). As for labrets, in K.T. Khlebnikov's account of his stay in Russian American from 1818-1832, he noted that the Aleut men, "in the soft part of their nose below the gristle they make a hole in which they wear a type of long earrings threaded with beads, corals and amber."
Beads were also accorded ceremonial use: in Southeast, at funerals, some groups would take the strands of beads owned by the deceased and smash them against trees. Only immediate family members had the right to pick the unbroken beads up for reuse.
Although they were the ones bringing in the beads, the Russians really looked down on all this. G.L. Davydov, a fairly sensitive observer for the time, commented on Alaskan uses for beads that "Many of the women would be attractive . . . if they did not decorate themselves in what seems to us an ugly way." As far as the Russians were concerned, they were trading nothing for something, and getting away with it beautifully.
But this couldn't last. The Russians brought in beads by the ton, and inflation was bound to set in. Already at the turn of the nineteenth century, Davydov found that "beads have lost most of their value on Kad'iak because the inhabitants have accumulated a lot of them and have nowhere to dispose of them." In Southeast Alaska, where the Hudson's Bay Company competed with the Russians (and, unlike the Russians, the HBC was willing to trade guns and other fun stuff), it took up to a full pound of beads just to buy one beaver pelt. By 1831, beads were so low on the list of items used for trade in Sitka as to be not worth the effort of counting; an expedition that brought over 1000 blankets for trade brought only four "clusters" of beads. The market was flooded.
Although it was Russians who first brought beads to Alaska, very few if any of the beads were actually of Russian manufacture. In the earliest days of exploration, when expeditions went overland, most of the beads traded in Alaska came from Murano Island, in the lagoon of Venice, where glass bead factories had been in operation since the eleventh century. When the Russians began to send ships around the Cape, stopping in India and China before reaching Alaska, they discovered the Chinese-made beads were a lot cheaper than Venetian. For the last years of Russia's time in Alaska, factories in Canton supplied the Russian expeditions, as they had supplied those of Captain Cook.
Most of the beads taken to Alaska were made in one of two ways: a piece of glass could be drawn out into a long tube, and then the beads cut or broken off that; or one could wind glass around a thin metal tube, again, breaking the individual beads off.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Alaskan demand for beads was gone, and the Russians found themselves without anything to trade; there was a sudden scramble to find new, desirable materials. They tried calico--red was popular--but with HBC bringing in guns and half the Native men in Alaska addicted to imported chewing tobacco, it was too little, too wrong, and too late. In the end, the Russians just couldn't let go of the idea that the beads were worth something. At the transfer of Alaska, the "cut beads" that the Russian American Company was trying to sell to the territory's new owners at 37 1/2 cents per dozen were useless. Inside this boom and bust is the history of Russian Alaska: tentative outreach, mutual benefit, excess, and retreat.
There's no way to even guess how many trade beads were brought into Alaska. It is safe to say that there were at least several tons of beads in motion along the shipping lanes and trade routes of the territory. That makes for quite a pile of beads, and it's no wonder that stashes of them still wash up on shore, or are found under forest mulch.
The beads are a physical link to the days of Russian trading and war ships. In the shops today, you'll find that it's still the blue beads--perhaps the same kind Captain Cook found in Prince William Sound, more than 200 years ago--that have the highest value, and, just like in the past, even today a sazhen or so of reds can be had for less than it would cost to buy a beaver pelt.
Trade beads make me happy. One of these days, I'll blow the fifty or sixty bucks to get one of the ones Lewis and Clark took along with them.
Adventures in the Bead Trade
Consider: you're about to go to the other side of the world, to a place no one from your world has seen or knows about. Once there, you're going to have to make friends with the locals. What do you bring them? Something useful, right?
Or maybe not. For hundreds of years, what travelers brought were beads and trinkets--especially beads. On Semen Dezhnev's 1648 voyage to the waters between Alaska and Russia, the first expedition to make it into the waters of what's now called the Bering Strait, official stores included "5,000 blue beads," valued at two rubles and a poltin, or the equivalent of the "3 red snowshoe boots" Dezhnev also took along. There's never an explanation for why he only took three boots. It didn't matter; the beads were the hot ticket, and would remain so for the next 200 years.
When you really look into the issue of the beads, you discover that they acted as a kind of balance point in Russian-Alaskan relations. In the earliest days, the Alaskans were anxious for the beads, and the Russians disdainfully tossed them about like royalty bestowing favors. But after a while, the balance of power changed. The Alaskans had enough beads; they were ready for something more useful, like medicine, weapons, or the new craze, tobacco. By the time of the transfer of Alaska to the United States, the Russians found themselves not only despised, but holding useless currency.
The Russians weren't bringing anything new when they took beads to Alaska. Alaskans made their own beads, the most popular of which were made from the colorful dentalium shell. However, getting these was kind of a hassle: you threw a dead body into the water and waited for the dentalium to cover it. It was a high price to pay for wealth. Other beads were made of tooth (caribou was the most common) or some more easily obtained shell. The Aleut, Athabascan, and Southeast Alaskans used beads to decorate clothing--especially hunting visors and caps--and as jewelry, with earrings being the most popular use. Beads were also used for labrets, small decorations placed in a cut near the lips.
But tooth and bone beads were just local, homespun products. Once the big, shiny factory glass beads came in, it was like trying to convince a kid that a homemade shirt is as good as one with a sports team logo. The local crafts disappeared, and for most of the next two hundred years, there was something of a bead rush going on in Alaska.
Sadly, we really only have the Russian side of the story, but it's obvious that the sudden arrival of so many different kinds of beads flooding into Alaska from Russia caused a kind of market craze for them, with imagined rarities and scarcities that put to shame the modern lust for Pokemon cards and Beanie Babies. The worth of beads varied by color, more than shape, and one kind of bead was worth more in one place than in another. A complicated system of values and equivalencies quickly developed across the territory.
The first English account we get of the power of trade beads is in the journals of Captain Cook. When he arrived in Prince William Sound in the spring of 1778, Cook discovered that Russian blue beads were the items of choice. He wrote, "these they seemed to value very much, and I had some difficulty to purchase two or three." As for trading the beads he himself had brought, one of his crewmen noted that "for a few Beads we might purchase of the Natives almost any Quantity of dryed fish we please, either Salmon or Halibut." With such riches to be had--Cook's men were handing out beads like confetti--the Natives paddled up to Cook's ship the Resolution so loaded with furs to trade that they looked like "bears or seals."
In the early 1800s, a single pair of matched blue-green beads was worth three or four caribou skins, or about nine beaver skins in the Norton Sound area (near modern-day Nome or Unakleet). In the Kenai, Alexander Baranov negotiated a treaty that guaranteed the payment of "1 sazhen beads" per beaver pelt (if you're trying to keep track of the measurements, there were two sazhen in a funt).
On the extreme value scale, in the Aleutians, there were reports that in 1791, a good set of earrings made of European beads could buy you a "girl or woman in eternal slavery."
Even though the glass beads pushed out the local product, they were used for exactly the same things. The Russians just killed what they could and then moved on to the next place, never truly taking the Alaskan landscape into their way of thinking. The Alaskans took what the Russians had to give them, and immediately incorporated it into their daily lives. Ivan Veniaminov noted that Aleut hats were "adorned with sea-lion whiskers, trade beads and bone" (interestingly, you could tell whether a hunter was left or right handed by the side of the hat the whiskers were on). As for labrets, in K.T. Khlebnikov's account of his stay in Russian American from 1818-1832, he noted that the Aleut men, "in the soft part of their nose below the gristle they make a hole in which they wear a type of long earrings threaded with beads, corals and amber."
Beads were also accorded ceremonial use: in Southeast, at funerals, some groups would take the strands of beads owned by the deceased and smash them against trees. Only immediate family members had the right to pick the unbroken beads up for reuse.
Although they were the ones bringing in the beads, the Russians really looked down on all this. G.L. Davydov, a fairly sensitive observer for the time, commented on Alaskan uses for beads that "Many of the women would be attractive . . . if they did not decorate themselves in what seems to us an ugly way." As far as the Russians were concerned, they were trading nothing for something, and getting away with it beautifully.
But this couldn't last. The Russians brought in beads by the ton, and inflation was bound to set in. Already at the turn of the nineteenth century, Davydov found that "beads have lost most of their value on Kad'iak because the inhabitants have accumulated a lot of them and have nowhere to dispose of them." In Southeast Alaska, where the Hudson's Bay Company competed with the Russians (and, unlike the Russians, the HBC was willing to trade guns and other fun stuff), it took up to a full pound of beads just to buy one beaver pelt. By 1831, beads were so low on the list of items used for trade in Sitka as to be not worth the effort of counting; an expedition that brought over 1000 blankets for trade brought only four "clusters" of beads. The market was flooded.
Although it was Russians who first brought beads to Alaska, very few if any of the beads were actually of Russian manufacture. In the earliest days of exploration, when expeditions went overland, most of the beads traded in Alaska came from Murano Island, in the lagoon of Venice, where glass bead factories had been in operation since the eleventh century. When the Russians began to send ships around the Cape, stopping in India and China before reaching Alaska, they discovered the Chinese-made beads were a lot cheaper than Venetian. For the last years of Russia's time in Alaska, factories in Canton supplied the Russian expeditions, as they had supplied those of Captain Cook.
Most of the beads taken to Alaska were made in one of two ways: a piece of glass could be drawn out into a long tube, and then the beads cut or broken off that; or one could wind glass around a thin metal tube, again, breaking the individual beads off.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Alaskan demand for beads was gone, and the Russians found themselves without anything to trade; there was a sudden scramble to find new, desirable materials. They tried calico--red was popular--but with HBC bringing in guns and half the Native men in Alaska addicted to imported chewing tobacco, it was too little, too wrong, and too late. In the end, the Russians just couldn't let go of the idea that the beads were worth something. At the transfer of Alaska, the "cut beads" that the Russian American Company was trying to sell to the territory's new owners at 37 1/2 cents per dozen were useless. Inside this boom and bust is the history of Russian Alaska: tentative outreach, mutual benefit, excess, and retreat.
There's no way to even guess how many trade beads were brought into Alaska. It is safe to say that there were at least several tons of beads in motion along the shipping lanes and trade routes of the territory. That makes for quite a pile of beads, and it's no wonder that stashes of them still wash up on shore, or are found under forest mulch.
The beads are a physical link to the days of Russian trading and war ships. In the shops today, you'll find that it's still the blue beads--perhaps the same kind Captain Cook found in Prince William Sound, more than 200 years ago--that have the highest value, and, just like in the past, even today a sazhen or so of reds can be had for less than it would cost to buy a beaver pelt.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 6:28 PM
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