# Siberia (Price)/Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI
THE SIBERIAN BACKWOODSMAN AND FRONTIER TRADER
IN relating my experiences in a peasant village I have, in the last chapter, had occasion to refer to that class of Siberian who, on account of his greater independence and enterprise, has penetrated single-handed to the remote comers of Siberia, and become the pioneer of Slavonic trade and influence in the wilder spots of Russia's Eastern Empire, in the sub-Arctic forests and on the frontier plateaus.
The agricultural colonization of the Slavs is confined to a belt lying between latitudes 55 and 57 in Western Siberia, and to a tract of country in the foothills of the Altai, in the Tomsk and Yenisei governments. North of these districts he immense stretches of almost uninhabited country. First comes the sub-Arctic forest zone stretching northward for 700 miles and eastward right across the whole continent. This great conifer forest, probably the largest in the world, lying just above sea-level, and unbroken by a single hill, is dotted with countless swamps in its southern latitudes and with areas of stunted scrub all along the toundra border. It is traversed by the great rivers Obi, Irtish and Yenisei, and along their banks the colonies of Siberian traders have for many decades past made their abodes. Tobolsk, the principal town of Western Siberia, was ​one of the earliest settlements of Cossacks and Russian fur traders. From here they spread northward, and founded Surgut, Narim, Beryoza, Obdorsk and Yeniseisk.
But Russian village colonization in these northern latitudes does not extend beyond the banks of the main rivers, for nowhere else are the typical communal colonies of Siberian peasants, who live by fishing, trading and cultivating rye, to be found. On all sides these little colonies are surrounded by a boundless expanse of forest, scrub and swamp, and in the farthest north by the frozen toundras. In these sub-Arctic forests and wastes between latitudes 57 and 62 a sparsely scattered semi-nomadic population of Siberian backwoodsmen live—men who have left their villages on the rivers' banks and gone off pioneering in the wilds alone. The vastness and monotony of the land which surrounds them, and the length and rigour of the winter season, are in striking contrast to the beautiful and fertile black earth steppes and the foothills of the Altai in the south. It is under the former conditions that one sees Siberia in that uninviting aspect which has in the past always figured so largely in the European mind.
The principal and in fact the only other inhabitants of these forests and toundras are the native Finns, who live a nomadic life, fur-hunting, fishing and keeping reindeer. They are the relics of the so-called Ugrian tribes which once covered Siberia and formed no doubt an important element in the Tartar Khanate, which was overthrown by Yermak and his Cossacks. With these natives the Siberian colonies along the rivers have intercourse, trading in fish and ​fur, for many of the more independent and enterprising of these North Siberian colonists leave their original villages and go forth into the wild country, where they find the native nomad Finns on their own ground, and where they often live with them a semi-nomadic existence themselves.
Across the toundras and through the forests there are certain tracks, well known to these Siberians, and along which they proceed by means of sledges and sometimes on snowshoes. Over the unending level plain of conifer forests and mossy swamp these pioneers push their way, travelling partly by boat along the rivers during the summer, and the rest of the way by sledge through the forests during the winter. Here, perhaps, in some open spot where two rivers meet, they build their log-huts and live with their wives and families throughout the greater part of the year. To these little trading stations come the nomad Samoyedes and Ostiaks, generally in the winter months after they have finished their sable-hunting. Wandering south from the toundras with their reindeer they pitch their encampments of birch-bark wigwams in these flat mossy wastes. Here, sheltered by scrubby forest, they make their winter quarters hard by the log-houses and stores of the Siberian fur trader. During these winter months the natives barter the products of their autumn hunting for such articles as flour, tobacco and tea, which the Siberian keeps in his little store. And so Siberian and Finn are thrown together for many a long winter's day, during which the sun rises only to set again, and the bitter Arctic winter holds the surrounding forest and mossy wastes in its snowy grip.
​But the life of the Siberian in the sub-Arctic forest is by no means confined to fur-trading with the Finns. He, too, by force of circumstances, adopts the customs and habits of the Samoyedes and Ostiaks. Frequently, during the autumn, he goes off to the forests alone to hunt squirrels and the cheaper fur-bearing animals which are caught with specially trained dogs. He is generally wise enough, however, to make use of the valuable hunting instincts of the natives, whose knowledge of the chase and forest craft he knows by experience to be superior even to his own. I remember a Siberian fur trader, whom I met in Krasnoyarsk, telling me that in the Turukhansk district he hunted furs only in those districts where the native Finns never go, for, he said, it paid him better to let them do the hunting and to barter with them for their furs in the autumn. When, therefore, the hunting after the second fall of snow is over, and the native encampments have been brought to the lower reaches of the river, the Siberian traders who have there built their huts and have their stores, get their best chance. At that season of the year one may not infrequently see priceless black sable exchanged for a few pounds of tea, or a dozen squirrel-skins given for a little bag of flour. The Siberians in trading generally keep to particular districts and to special native encampments. Thus one has his hut and stores at the mouth of one river, where he monopolizes the fur products of a certain encampment of natives, who winter there, while fifty miles beyond, separated by great expanses of flat forest and swamp, is his neighbour's sphere of influence.
But during the summer, when the natives have ​taken their encampments far away to the recesses of the forests or have trekked to the toundras bordering the Arctic, then the Siberians either return to their nearest market town along the main rivers, where they exchange their goods and visit their friends, or turn their hands to fishing in the rivers and lakes near their trading posts. Here again they find the natives useful as a means of attaining their ends. Certain tribes of Samoyedes and Ostiaks, who keep no flocks of reindeer and do not live by hunting, engage largely in fishing. Some of these natives have fishing reserves on certain lakes, and here they turn their religion to practical account by holding these waters sacred to their shamman spirits. The Siberians respect these native traditions, and so the fishing here is only done by natives, from whom the Siberians purchase their fish. Along the desolate shores of these lakes the traveller can see in summer the little native encampments with the rafts and nets of the fishermen. Here and there are little huts visited by the Siberians once or twice a year, when they come to offer the little necessaries of life in exchange for the native catches of fish.
But there are other parts of Siberia besides the sub-Arctic forests and the toundras which are favourable to the isolated life of the trader and hunter. Those physical conditions which in the far north of Siberia create fur-bearing forests, and rivers and lakes abounding in fish, produce the same effects in more southern latitudes along the Siberian-Mongolian frontier. Where the great plains of Western and Central Siberia rise on to the first step of the Central Asiatic plateau, the hardy Siberian frontiersman and ​pioneer is again found, having pushed his way southward from the last village colony. As the country rises on to the plateau, so the steppes give place to open forest, and open forest to dense jungle of conifer, or to park-like stretches of larch forest, accompanied by vegetation of great beauty. Here rivers run in all directions among an intricate maze of mountain masses and ranges. Some of these streams drain into the great Siberian rivers, while others sink away and dry up in the plateau districts to the south. It is along some 2000 miles of this type of country, from the upper waters of the Amur River in the Far East to the high plateaus of the Siberian Altai, that the political frontier between the Russian and Chinese empires has been roughly fixed in the past. It was along this artificial line that Siberian Cossack colonization in the north found a natural barrier against the Mongol tribes and the outposts of Chinese civilization in Asia. In the wild secluded spots of this frontier region one can still see the relics of a still more ancient civilization, which was compelled to retreat before the invasion of both Cossack and Mongol. Here in dense forest and on plateau steppe live the scattered tribes of nomad Finns and so-called Altai Tartars. Here, too, the Siberian frontiersmen have penetrated, as they have also done in the sub-Arctic forests and toundras of Northern Siberia. Some of them live for most of the year in the last communal villages on the Siberian side of the frontier, and from these, during autumn and early winter, they trek southward into the frontier country, where Siberia and Mongolia meet. Like their brethren in the north they spend the early ​winter months in bartering fur with the forest natives or wool with the inhabitants of the plateau steppes. But some of them have been tempted to make their abode in this wild country, and to live here all the year round, where not only can they trade in the winter, but can fish during the summer months in the rivers and lakes, and even themselves hunt for the cheaper furs. So they make rough log-huts and build their stores in suitable spots along the frontier, and even place them on what is nominally Chinese territory on the south of the artificial Russo-Chinese frontier. For by the provisions of one of the early Russo-Chinese treaties a fifty-verst (thirty-three-mile) neutral zone was allowed on either side of the Siberian-Mongolian frontier, where in the plateau forests and steppes the subjects of both nationalities are permitted to settle and trade unmolested. In forests the Siberian generally finds himself alone among the fur-hunting Finnish tribes. Here the whole country is open to him, and although much of it is nominally Chinese territory, no Chinese official is seen from one year to the other. He is, therefore, the only pioneer of trade and civilization in these parts. But on the frontier steppes he has to meet the Chinaman who comes in from the south to barter with the native Tartar and semi-Mongol tribes. The cosmopolitan population of these plateau steppes along the Siberian-Mongolian frontier is an interesting study for the traveller.
A VARIED ASSORTMENT OF MONGOLS, TARTARS AND SIBERIANS ON THE RUSSO-CHINESE FRONTIER IN THE UPPER YENISEI
Besides the natives of this frontier country, there were some Abakansk Tartars, another Turko-Finnish people who had come in from Siberia. They, too, were either dealing in wool or serving the Russian trader. They are a people well worthy of note, for here they seemed undoubtedly in a stage of partial Russification. They had evidently abandoned the nomad life on the steppes and had taken to sedentary habits, engaging in commercial pursuits along with the Russians. Their houses were built of logs in a hexagonal shape, showing thereby traces of both Russian and Tartar influence. I went inside one of these Tartar houses and saw a family at a meal. They were dressed in Russian clothes, and were sitting on low benches round a table in the middle of the room. Their food, consisting of bread, soup and tea, was just like that of the Russians and quite unlike the ordinary fare of the nomad Tartar. When they finished their meal they crossed themselves, showing clearly the influences of Russification upon them. But in the shape of their houses, and the scarcity of furniture, they still showed traces of the old Tartar habits. As I looked on their dark Tartar faces, their Russian clothes, and their short-cut hair, I was forcibly reminded of a Europeanized Japanese.
The representative of the European in this place ​was, of course, the Siberian; but, in spite of his importance as the chief trader in wool and native produce, he seemed so absorbed by his surroundings that, though European still in face, his life and habits were far more Asiatic. In this place, it seemed, the Tartars were becoming Russified, and the Russians becoming, to some extent at anyrate, Tartarified. Among the Siberians here were several who were by no means anxious to return to Siberia. Some of them, I gathered, were wanted for the completion of their terms of military service, and perhaps for other offences of a more serious kind. Here they were in a sort of voluntary exile, for no one seemed to trouble much about them. A Russian official came over once a year to settle any disputes arising among Russian subjects, but it was not difficult to avoid him in such a country as this, and meanwhile they were making a living by trading with the natives. There were always two types of Siberian wool trader. One, for instance, only came for a few weeks from Siberia, with the object of picking up all the surplus wool and skins of low quality, which they could bring back to Siberia and sell in the autumn fairs. They were living in temporary felt tents, just like the native Tartars. The Siberians of the other type spent most of the year in this country, and had built for themselves permanent log-houses of the typical Siberian kind. Some of them, finding logs scarce, had run up walls of mud and wattle with roofs thatched with rush, in partial imitation of the Chinese houses. On entering these houses I always found a typical Russian room. A comfortable, homely feeling came over me as I entered, all the more welcome after many days of weary trekking ​over steppe and through forest. I felt that I had found something at last which indicated European life again. There was the wooden table and chair, the samovar of tea, the baking oven, the baby in the spring cradle suspended from the roof, European clothes, white-skinned faces, and the blue, kindly eyes of a Russian housewife. This class of Siberian frontier trader, at least, had not lost much of his Russian character, and although he was constantly associating with Tartars on terms of equality, he nevertheless retained the material conveniences of Russian peasant life. These Siberian wool traders always bring their wives and families with them, carrying everything by horse caravan. While they are out in the wilds they always look after their personal comfort. Even in the depths of the desert plateaus one can see in the wool traders' huts such articles as jam, biscuits and white bread, luxuries which the natives in their yurts would never see in the whole course of their lives. The food of the native Tartars consists of milk and mutton, and on this, through centuries of custom, they seem to flourish. The Chinaman contents himself with tea and a bowl or two of rice a day, with an occasional delicacy from Central China. But the Siberian must have his cabbage soup, his meat, his dried rusks and his brown bread, and wherever you find him there you will also see some indication of European civilization.
In this little encampment of which I am speaking, all round the Siberian traders' houses and huts, were scattered the felt tents of the Tartar natives. Some of them were on the open steppe, while some nestled inside the little enclosures surrounding the Siberians' houses. Many of these Tartars had become servants ​to the Siberians, and were helping them in collecting, packing and despatching wool and hides to Siberia. In the courtyards I observed how the Russian and Tartar children played games together, mingling as though they were one family. How strange it was to see! How slight the difference here between Russian and Tartar! The Eastern Slav is born to conquer and assimilate the Asiatic races, because in character and in habits he is so Asiatic himself that he can in fact absorb his neighbours without either absorber or absorbed being aware of the process.
But, besides Russian and Tartar, there is another element in the population of this frontier steppe. Here for the first time I saw that enigma of the East, the Chinaman. Seven years before, as I was assured by a Russian, there was not a Chinaman in the place, but now half-a-dozen little shops, built of mud bricks, had sprung up, testifying to the recent Chinese activity in the western part of the Celestial Empire. In these little shops one could buy Chinese brick tea, silk and little choice articles from the flowery land, and there sat the moon-eyed celestials cross-legged on the counter ready to barter their wares. Behind these little shops there was often a den where an old Chinaman would be preparing an evening meal, a messy brew of some choice seaweed brought all the way from China. How weird and uncanny these people looked! I instinctively gravitated toward the Russian, for him I knew and could understand, whereas of the Chinaman I knew nothing. Here he was in the farthest corner of his empire, the same as he always is, laborious, thrifty and most mysterious. His standard of living was utterly different from anything I saw around me. The ​wretched native Tartars appeared no better socially than the pariah dogs that prowled around their tents. The Abakansk Tartars from Siberia and the Russian traders were pleasant, childlike individuals, whose views of life, its comforts, its worries, did not differ very materially from mine. But the Chinaman was something quite different. He stood apart, an isolated social mystery, but perhaps on a higher plane than any of us. As a Russian trader tersely remarked to me one evening as I was talking to him on the subject: "These Chinese! You cannot live with them; they know too much."
Some days later I decided to set out and visit some encampments of native Tartars, a branch of the Altaians, who, I heard, were spending the summer on the high Alpine meadows. Taking Alexieff, a Siberian wool trader, as a companion and guide, I set out, and passing from the cultivated millet-fields we rode across a stony desert, and came to the foot of a barren mountain mass. Following up the bed of a mountain torrent, and winding through gorges of barren rock on every side, we at last emerged into an open plateau covered with Alpine meadows, gentians and saxifrage, and scattered over with clumps of larch. A little distance beyond, nestling in a hollow, lay a beautiful mountain lake, the shores of which were surrounded by meadows and variegated with patches of forest, while dotted about the plateau lay encampments of the native Tartars, who had come there with their flocks for the summer pasturage. This was the summer camping-ground of this branch of the Altai Tartars, and hither, Alexieff told me, he repaired each summer to barter ​wool and skins from these natives. As the sun was going down, he suggested to me that we should go to one of the native yurts and rest there for the night. So we repaired to one of the encampments on the edge of the larch forest in this romantic plateau. It was very like an English gipsy encampment. Here were a dark-skinned people living a wandering life in round felt tents, just such as one would see in a gipsy camp-ground on an English village green. Perhaps this was the kind of life which all mankind once led. A squat-faced little man with broad cheekbones and slit eyes, and dressed in rough sheepskin, came to the door of the tent. He was hideous. The sight of him at first repelled me, especially as I thought of the terror which these men once struck into the hearts of mankind when they swept over Asia and plundered Europe. But now they were only harmless, peaceful shepherds, and I reassured myself. "Ahmed Bar" (the Turkish greeting), said the Tartar, with a bow, and ushered me in. Inside I found a round space, where smouldered a log fire, the smoke of which was issuing from a hole in the roof. The women's quarters were on the right as I entered, and here an old Tartar woman and two girls were squatting on the ground preparing some food, and shyly hung their heads as my Russian companion and I entered. All round were signs of the nomad life these Tartars led. Skins of fermenting mare's milk or "kumis" could be seen hanging on a triangular frame; crumbling cheese was drying in a pan near the entrance, while some of the girls were rolling horses' hair and wool for the manufacture of felt, and others were distilling spirit in crude wooden vats from kumis. Alexieff and I ​squatted by the fire, and opposite us sat our Tartar host, with his legs crossed in true Eastern style. We exchanged tobacco and cigarettes, lit each other's pipe—a symbol of courtesy in the East—and then Alexieff and the Tartar began to talk volubly in a Turkish dialect. For several minutes they talked, and the old Tartar listened with a phlegmatic air, puffing at his long pipe and passing occasional remarks. The conversation was upon horses and cattle, the price of sheep's-wool in Siberia, the prospect of the autumn fairs and of the Siberian wheat harvest, and the clemency or otherwise of the Weather. I longed to join in the conversation, but the Russian language was of no use as a means of communicating with the Tartars. I felt at a grievous disadvantage, for how could I enter into the life of these people if I could not communicate with them? But at any-rate, while I was in this tent, Alexieff showed me how easily the Russians get on with the native Tartars. They win the respect of Asiatic races as no one else can do. They talk with them in their own tongue at their own firesides, they sleep in their tents by night, they personally conduct business with them, exchanging wool for tea. Indeed it was evident to me that Alexieff had become intimate with these natives by dint of peaceful persuasion and gentle influences. How different from the overbearing tone of a British colonist or a British soldier in an Eastern colony. Though a Russian, Alexieff could without difficulty socially adapt himself to the Tartar. "Do you often spend much time in the year among these Tartars?" I asked. "Generally for three months in the summer I live in a yurt amongst their encampments, collecting wool and skins, and during that time I rarely see ​another Russian," was his reply. "Are you glad to return to your Russian fellow-citizens?" I asked. "Of course," he said; "how could I be otherwise. These Tartars are pleasant and peaceable, but they are not like my Russian brothers; they are not of our type (Volost). For example, you cannot get bread or cabbage soup or vodka here, and the life is wild and tedious in these lands." It was clear, therefore, that the Siberian wool trader on these frontier steppes of the Altai, tolerant as he is of his Tartar neighbours, is more at home in his village, where he can satisfy his everyday necessities more nearly than he can in a Tartar encampment. But, unlike the British colonist, his preference is based less on social than on economic grounds. He can naturally enjoy his life better in a village of his Russian fellow-citizens, for there he can get his bread, his soup and his vodka, while on the steppes he must be content with cheese and kumis. But, socially, he has not the smallest objection to associating and living with the Tartars, for the sake of those material gains which come to him through trading with them. So little, in fact, do social considerations worry him that he even intermarries with them, if he cannot find a Russian girl to suit him. The Siberian frontier wool trader, like the Siberian peasant, has a tolerant mind, he is peaceable and childlike, and his ideas of life are somewhat material.
That night we roasted some mutton on a spit over the fire, used our fingers for forks, and then lay on the floor of the tent wrapped in felt blankets along with the rest of the Tartars.
After spending a few more days in the encampment ​I took my leave of these Tartars and rode off the plateau down the valley to another little frontier trading station, where I arrived at the house of a Siberian wool merchant, who entertained me hospitably. His little house was built of larch logs and mud plaster, and here in this isolated spot on the Mongolian frontier steppes he lived with his wife and family all the year. Close by was a little storehouse where he kept his wool, skins and other articles of local produce. His little plot was surrounded by a pale fence, and inside the yard Siberian cattle and Mongolian horses wandered about, just as I had seen them do in the Siberian villages north of the frontier. His mode of life, however, was more free here. He could ride wherever he pleased upon the open steppes, and over the low desert hills, for, as the Siberians said, the country was "clean"—that is, free from forest. He was surrounded by the native Tartars, who came to him with the products of their flocks and herds. There was no troublesome commune to interfere with his grazing or ploughland rights, no official to come and assess him for special taxation in these wild spots. Several times a year, however, he returned to Siberia with his goods, bringing back other wares. Inside his house I found a typical Russian room, which once more reminded me of a Siberian peasant village and appeared incongruous in its surroundings. At once a comfortable feeling came over me, as if I was at home again. Surrounded by primitive nomads, whose social ideas I could not understand, I felt that the Siberian was my brother. That evening we had a pleasant and somewhat cosmopolitan gathering in the house of this wool trader, which, ​as usual under such conditions, ended in a carouse. There was a most interesting collection of different races and nationalities gathered round this place. Besides the wool trader and his wife and other Russian traders, there were two Abakansk Tartars from Central Siberia who were his servants, a local Tartar native of the district, also a servant, and two Kazan Tartar wool traders, who were breaking their journey here on their way to Mongolia. In addition to these, during the evening a sleek-faced Chinaman looked in, but, needless to say, he did not join us in the revels. Sitting down at a table with a samovar of tea and dishes of soup, hot meat and bread, we conversed on all kinds of topics, chiefly those of a more material nature. We discussed the price of food in different parts of the frontier districts, the quality of wool from the Kemchik, and the news which had filtered in about the prospects of the wheat crop in the Minusinsk district north of the frontier. The social atmosphere, in fact, was thoroughly utilitarian, as was only natural in such a wild spot, where one's first considerations are for personal comfort and the satisfaction of immediate bodily necessities.
After the vodka began to go round some Russian love songs and ditties of the Siberian post road delighted the company. Then we became patriotic and toasted each other's sovereigns, and made impromptu speeches in Russian, complimentary to each other's nationality. And so we spent the evening, Russians, Tartars and Englishman, worshipping at the shrine of Bacchus. My interest perhaps mainly centred in the two kinds of Tartars sitting at the table, each in his own stage of Russifica​tion. There were the Abakansk Tartars, natives of Central Siberia, who had been in contact with the Siberian peasants all their lives. Half Christian and half native-worshippers, no strong religious feeling separated them from the Russians, and they were as much at home in a Siberian's house as they were in their own rough log-huts, which, as I described above, imitate the Russian house in material and the Tartar yurt in shape. These, as servants of the Russian wool traders, sat down to break bread in the house of their masters, for the social, racial and religious barrier between the two was very slight. They had advanced one stage in the process of Russification beyond the native Altaians who lived in felt yurts on the open steppes outside. The latter, although always having intercourse with the Siberian frontiersman, nevertheless have as yet lost nothing of their nomad Tartar habits.
As for the Kazan Tartars, representatives of the other group who sat at table with us, except for their shaven heads, skull-caps, and little pointed beards, which gave them a slightly Turkish expression, no one would distinguish them from the Siberians. In habits and manner they were completely Russian, nor did their strict adherence to Islam prevent them from breaking bread with us that evening. As I looked from the Kazan Tartars to the Abakansk Tartars and then to the Siberian wool trader, sitting round the table together, I saw before me two races in the process of gradual absorption by the third. The Kazan Tartars, through centuries of contact with the Russians in Europe, have absorbed Slavonic civilization, and, as this gathering showed, the two were now going forth together, as subjects of the ​Tsar, to colonize and trade in these undeveloped parts along the Siberian frontier. The common ties of everyday life, which are always particularly strong in such places and in such circumstances as these, had brought Siberian frontiersmen and Kazan Tartar socially together. But the process of Russification was evidently natural and gradual, and on that account quite peaceful. Whatever may be the nature of the national movements going on in European Russia at the present time, they have not struck root here, for in contact with wild nature Russian and Tartar tend to sink their social differences under the influence of common economic ties.
Next day, in order to see something of the Chinese traders who, I heard, had recently settled along this Mongolian frontier zone, I visited one of their houses and trading posts, which was near to the Siberian trader's post. Although within a short distance of each other, the Russian and Chinese competitors rarely met. A social barrier seemed to divide them and to shut off intercourse completely. The Russian is generally prone to fraternize with all sorts and conditions of Asiatics, but between him and the Chinaman there is a gulf, the result of two distinct standards of civilization. The house I went to visit was that of a Chinese merchant, who had come originally from Uliassutai in Mongolia. It was made of mud bricks, with a flat roof and lattice windows and doors. The courtyard was surrounded by a palisade of brushwood, and several little mud shanties were dotted about in the yard, in the dark recesses of which the Chinaman stored his wares, cooked his food and carried on his daily transactions with the natives. A peculiar, indescribable smell pervaded ​the air as I entered the yard, a musty smell, like that of a mixture of oil and cheese. Inside the house was a long, low room, where two or three moon-eyed celestials, clothed in dark blue tunics, lay dreamily on raised couches. On a table near by was a tin of Chinese tobacco and something which looked like an opium pipe. One of them was busy over a little stove preparing some messy dish, some delicacy, such as seaweed, fungus, bird's nest, or some weird edible, the value of which only the Chinese know. At the end of the room there were shelves filled with all sorts of wares—household utensils, cheap crockery, bricks of tea, tobacco and a few articles of Chinese art. On the counter in front of this a Chinaman was sitting with his legs crossed, bargaining with a native over a fur cap. There were tobacco pouches embroidered with Chinese silks, pictures of weird Chinese figures, men with grotesque Chinese faces in even more grotesque attitudes, there were porcelain jars with the willow pattern, delicate paintings of Buddhist gods with forbidding faces, and fire-breathing dragons exquisitely coloured on rice paper. Everything in the house was as weird and uncanny as the inmates themselves, but upon the whole more attractive than repellent in its grotesqueness.
What a contrast indeed to the crude-coloured prints of the Tsar or Russian generals that I used to see in every Siberian trader's house! There could be no doubt as to which of these two peoples were on the higher level of civilization.
But yet I felt ill at ease in this place. I conversed through the medium of Russian with one of the Chinaman. But his cold, uncanny manner reacted upon me. He thought I was a Russian; nor did I ​undeceive him, and yet I felt there was a gulf between us that I could not bridge, try as I might. I could not sympathize with him as I could with the Siberian across the way. His outlook on life was different. How could there be any fellow-feelings between us? How could I understand one who reclined all day in such an artificial atmosphere as this? The Chinaman is no child of nature like the Siberian. He gives one the impression that he is living in another world. And I had an uncomfortable feeling that the Chinaman represented a higher type of civilization than the Siberian, a reflection degrading for me, who could only associate with the latter.
These Chinamen lived here all the year round, and in these wild spots along the Siberian-Mongolian frontier had set their trading stations, which they had built in the same style and adorned with the same taste as any Chinaman would in the heart of the Celestial Empire. Every two or three months one of their number returns to the nearest Chinese town in Mongolia to sell his goods and obtain supplies. In this particular house there were three brothers trading together and dividing the profits, but they had no family, for by Chinese law they had not at that time been allowed to bring their women to these frontier districts. After a few years of this life of exile they generally returned to their families and resumed their old life in Inner China. And so, exiled from wife and family, and living a sedentary life indoors, continually eating messy delicacies in small quantities throughout the day, the Chinese frontier trader passes his life in these remote spots until he has made his money or until death overtakes him. Remarkable business honesty, a great capacity ​for bargaining, cheapness of living and laborious thrift, are the qualities which characterize them as much on the Siberian-Mongolian frontier as they do in the heart of China itself. By these qualities they compete against the influence of the Siberian traders, and indeed the Chinaman more than holds his own, for while he will live upon a bowl of rice a day with a few native delicacies brought from Central China, the Russian must have his "chai peet," his samovar of tea, and his meal of meat and bread at least twice if not three times a day. The Chinaman's standard of civilization both social and economic was unlike anything I had ever seen before in my travels, and obviously betokened a highly developed and cultivated race with remarkable power and energy, against which the more primitive Siberian finds it very hard to compete. Here, on the neutral ground of the frontier steppes which border Southern Siberia and North-West Mongolia, these two civilizations meet.
Leaving the plateau steppes where Siberia and Mongolia meet in the Altai and plunging into the heart of the forest country, which surrounds these steppes and covers also a large area of the valleys along the Siberian-Mongolian frontier, we find another type of hardy, independent frontiersman. He too has left his fellow-peasants in the last outpost village, and has migrated along with his wife and family to some spot where he can carry on trade in furs with the native Finns of the forest; where he can hunt in the taiga (or virgin forest), or fish in its unknown rivers and lakes.
POPLAR DUG-OUT BOATS USED BY SIBERIAN FUR TRADERS ON THE UPPER YENISEI
The extraordinary isolation of his existence in this forest country bordering Siberia and Mongolia, produces in the Siberian frontiersman an independence of character which is unknown to the peasant colonies on the north of the frontier; and the farther one goes into these wild districts, the more self-reliant and individualistic does the Russian become. Instead of hanging together in little groups, each relying upon the other, every man is engaged in his own business in his own way, and is dependent upon his own initiative only. The character of these pioneers, moreover, is in many respects even more attractive than that of the peasants farther north. There is never any tendency among men to intrigue against a stranger who wants to deal with them, as the peasants in the communal colonies sometimes do. On the contrary, one is struck with their frank and straightforward nature. Those that I met reminded me more of the typical Norwegian and Swedish peasants or the Canadian backwoodsmen than any I had ever seen in Russia before. I had always thought that such types did not exist among the Russians until I saw them in the summer of 1910 in the country where the Siberian Yenisei Province borders North-West Mongolia. Here they form the most advanced guard of Slavonic civilization.
I found from inquiries that these men were originally peasants from the communal peasant villages in Siberia farther north, who began by making their visits every autumn to the native hunting tribes in search of furs. After a while they had found it easier to make their headquarters in ​this country and so they built their houses in these wild frontier spots, often on the Chinese side of the frontier. Here they live with their wives and families, and a few horses and cattle which they drive through the forest, and only return to their old villages once or twice a year to renew their supplies and dispose of their furs.
During my journeys in the Upper Yenisei plateau in 1910, I had many opportunities of studying the Siberian frontier fur trader. While wandering in this country my companions and I often had occasion to visit their trading posts; we made our camps beside their log-houses and partook of rough meals with them and their families; we even accepted their hospitable offers to sleep under their roof, and more than once I stretched myself out on the rude wooden floor of a Siberian trader's log-house or in the out-house across the yard, where the stores and skins were kept. I remember staying with one in particular, who was a Cossack, originally from the Trans-Baikal country. He had come into the country with his wife and family some years before, after serving his time in the Far East. He was a rough but genial man, and his knowledge, in fact, was far greater than that of any Siberian peasant I had met, although his opportunities for learning had been no greater. He had never been out of Siberia and Mongolia, but he knew his map of Europe well. He could ask intelligent questions about England, and he had a general idea of the position and character of India; but, like all the rest of his kind, he was obsessed by the fear of the awakening of the yellow races. It was in his little log-house at the junction of two rivers, on the Upper Yenisei, that we ​first heard definitely of the death of King Edward VII., two months after the event.
On another occasion, entering a hut at a wild spot at the source of the Yenesei, I found a fur trader and his family who seemed different from the other Siberian frontiersmen I had previously seen, although I could scarcely describe in what the difference consisted. On the table I saw a newspaper printed in a European language that I could not understand. The arrangement of everything in the room seemed different, and there were certain articles of food upon the table, such as cheese, that I never saw among the Siberians. After a few sentences of conversation in Russian I found that I was in the house, not of a Siberian at all, but of a Lett from the Baltic province. I tested him to see if he understood German, which I knew would be one of his mother tongues in his original home, but he had forgotten most of it, and only retained a knowledge of Lettish. We therefore fell back upon Russian as the best means of communication, although it was the mother tongue of neither of us. It turned out that this man and his family had left the Baltic province in early youth, whether for political or other reasons I did not learn. He had settled in a frontier village in the Yenisei Government among the Siberian peasants, and, being of an adventurous nature, he had decided to seek his fortune in the forests across the frontier. Once a year, indeed, he returned to Siberia, where he got news of the outer world, and an occasional paper from the Baltic province. I asked him if he intended to go back to his old home again. "No," he said; "I am happy here. I have all I want, and no one to interfere with me, but if I went back, I might be worse off." So he lived in this ​remote spot in the larch forest on the Mongolian frontier, separated by a hundred miles from the nearest Siberian village. The whole country was open to him. He could trade with the encampments of native Finns; he could fish in the river that flowed at his very door; he had an endless stretch of woodland meadow for his flocks to graze upon. Was he not better off than in a Baltic town, amidst "the fretful stir unprofitable, and the fever of the world"? Thanks to his hospitality, I spent two nights with him and his family. We sat down to meals of bread and cheese and I fancied myself back in Finland or Scandinavia. I observed with interest various little signs of the family's Lettish nationality. In some respects, however, they had been Russified by constant contact with the Siberians. Nor had they apparently suffered by it, for they had been influenced by some of the best types of humanity that the Russian Empire can produce.
On another occasion I came to a Siberian fur trader's house, the farthest outpost up that particular valley. Here lived a very fine type of Siberian, who had pushed farther than all his neighbours into these wild parts. He lived in a well-built house with a large cattle-yard and trading store. Inside were spacious, well-furnished rooms, with portraits of the Tsar and other celebrities and public men. All his belongings, which were of a kind to be a credit to anyone, wild as the spot was, had been brought up over some hundred miles of river and forest. At the meal which he hospitably set before me, I found him a genial and communicative companion. Moreover, his intelligence and culture were almost startling. He might have been an educated Moscow gentleman, ​judging from his knowledge of history, geography, politics, literature and affairs in general. It is, indeed, true that the very finest types of Russians, both physically and intellectually, find their way into these frontier districts. He had been for thirty years trading on the Siberian-Mongolian frontier in the Upper Yenisei, and I asked him what changes he had observed since he first came there. "Formerly," he replied, "we did very good business, for sable was very numerous. But for every four black sable we saw then, we only see one now. Besides, Safianof [another trader] and myself were then alone in this part of the country, but now we have Cafkas, Skobeff, Kriloff and twelve others in this valley, all working on the same ground." "And what effect has the coming of the Russians had on the native Finnish tribes?" I asked. "When I came here first," he said, " we saw the natives very little. They stayed away in the forest all the year, as if they were afraid of us. Their condition was very bad, and one winter, I remember, it was very severe and many of them died of cold and hunger. A tribe that we had seen with forty tents had only twenty left the next year. Gradually they began to come to us, and we gave them flour, tea and sugar when they were starving in the winter, and they gave us skins and sable which they had caught in the autumn. They come regularly now, and give us their furs in exchange for those articles which we bring up from across the frontier. There is never a famine among them now, for they can always change squirrel and sable furs for tea, sugar or flour." "Do you not wish to return to your comrades in the Siberian villages?" I asked. He looked at me with kindly eyes and ​said: "It is God's will that I should live here among the natives; for me it is all the same. At first it was tedious, but now I am accustomed to the taiga and the wild places. They have grown with me and mingled in my nature."
Often did the Siberian frontiersman talk to me in that rather fatalistic strain, a strain which is characteristic of his race. But in addition to this I often noticed other traits in his character which indicated to me that he had, to some extent, modified his Russian nationality. He referred little to his comrades in the Siberian villages: his mind was fixed upon his life out there in the wild country, where he could pursue his independent life unaided and unhampered by the village commune. He was, I think, less of a true Russian and had more of the true Siberian aboriginal element about him. For in his ideas he seemed strangely out of touch with his peasant kinsmen on the north of the frontier, or even with his wool-trading brethren of the frontier steppes. His isolation in the depths of gloomy forests and almost unknown wooded valleys had a peculiar effect upon his nature. I thought I could discern that his national ideals and even his national religion had been to some extent modified. After all, is it not natural that alone and surrounded by wild nature from year to year, unable, except on rare occasions, to return to kinsmen in the frontier villages, his national consciousness and even his national religion should lose much of its reality? Indeed with the Russians their nationality is their religion, and their religion their nationality, and when the one grows weak through natural circumstances, the other will weaken too. Nor can we marvel ​at this, for, after all, the doctrines of the great religions of the world were in their early days but thinly veneered upon a groundwork of that universal religion revealed by nature, the earliest and most natural religion of mankind. From Constantinople on the Bosphorus, Christianity spread through Russia into Northern Asia. From Mecca and Stambul, Islam ran like wildfire across Central Asia into China; while from Urga and Lhassa, the Lamas of the yellow religion quietly grafted on to the Mongol and Tartar tribes of Northern Asia those distorted superstitions which now surround the memory of him "Who sprang from the Lotus." But the moral doctrines and ideals of these three religions were presented in many parts of the world to a humanity that knew no objects of reverence except those agents of nature which it could see before its eyes. And so it was that these revealed religions so often degenerated into a low and superstitious fetishism profitable mainly to priests, Mullahs and Lamas. But I venture to suggest that in many parts of the world the old nature worship is still the fabric of man's moral structure. Under the influence of national exigencies it is generally obscured, but under the influences of nature it tends to revive. Thus, in contact with nature from their cradles, the natives of Siberia learn to look with awe and reverence upon the mountains, forests, rivers and lakes. So did I when I found myself alone in the dark and endless pine forest, or upon some rugged peak with piles of jagged screes in an uninhabited country, remarkable only for its featureless monotony. It was then that I first learnt to understand the native reverence, and fear of the spirits of nature, which imagination con​jures up in those desolate spots. The silent mystery of an expanse of forested hills begets the craving to see what lies beyond, and calls one as if to find the spirits that are hidden there. The same mental atmosphere is begotten also among those Siberian Christians whose lot has been cast among similar conditions. The isolation of his life has produced in the character of the Siberian fur trader an indifference and apathy to national ideals and national religion. He tends to lose his Russian patriotic sentiments and to become indifferent to the orthodox faith. The nearest church is perhaps a hundred miles distant across the mountains and forest. Perhaps he does not visit it for several years, and when he dies he is buried without a service in a little grassy glade beyond the enclosure within which he has always lived, and nothing but a paling erected round the mound will be left for future generations. Children are born and not christened, and marriages are solemnized by consent of parents only. Isolation has not only bred apathy towards the national religion, but also an inclination towards the superstitions natural to the country. A Siberian in this isolated spot applies the names of the Christian saints, that he has heard by name, to those localities which he knows well. A spot where two rivers unite it called the place of St Peter and St Paul, or a place in the valley where gold is known to exist is called the place of St George Pobedonostseff (the victorious), or a grassy tract where cattle can graze may be called Bogdanof ("granted by God"). And so nature is woven into their religion, as it must be with all those who are brought in contact with it for long. In the words of the Russian writer, Tyan Shansky, ​"In the eyes of the Siberian a living nature is imparted to the forests, hills and glades, peopled as they are with the spirits of their departed friends." A Siberian frontiersman is a child of nature. Taming Nature as a pioneer, he is in turn tamed by her.
* ↑ See Ethnographical Diagram of Western Siberia.
* ↑ See Map of Vegetation Zones of Western and Central Siberia.
* ↑ See Map of Vegetation Zones of Western and Central Siberia.