FEATURES OF THE SITKAN REGION.              31
was cleared of their rude barricades, and the foundations were laid then to the castle that still stands so conspicuous. Around this nucleus the Russian settlement soon sprang up in a few months, a high stockade was then erected between the village aid the Indian rancheries, which still stands in part to-day; it was bastioned and fortified with an armament of three-pounder brass guns. From this time on the supremacy of the Russians was never questioned by the Indians of the Sitkan archipelago. The reckless daring of Baranov, evinced by his personal bearing at the head of a handful of men in repeated attacks upon the castle-rock encampment was exag; gerated by the savages in repetition among themselves, until his name to them became synonymous with a charmed life and supreme authority. Baranov himself called this spot the final headquarters of the Russian American Company, and henceforth it became so, and it was officially known as New Archangel; but the tribal name of the savages who lived just outside the stockade fence was " Seet-kah," and soon the present designation was used by all visitors and Russians alike, brevity and euphony making it "Sitka."
It is not probable that the beautiful vistas of this sound influenced Baranov in the slightest when he selected it for his base of operations; but there must have been mornings and evenings when this hardy man looked at them with some responsive pleasure, for certainly the human being who could remain insensible to their scenic glories must be one without a drop of warm blood in his veins. Those high-peaked summits of the Baranov Mountains, which overshadow the town on the east, destroy, in a great measure, the effects of sunrise; but the transcendent glow of sundown, colors is the glow that floods the crown and base of Mt. Edgecumb on the western horizon of the bay, and repeats its radiance in tipping with golden gild the host of tiny islets which stud the flashing waters, to burn in lingering brightness on the peaks of Verstova and her sister hills, when all else is in darkness or its shades around about.
The most characteristic and expressive single view of Sitka is that one afforded from Japan Island, which is close by and right opposite the town: the place was in its greatest architectural grandeur prior to the departure of the Russians, in 1866. The lofty peak which rises abruptly back of the village is Verstova, to the bald summit of which a champagne picnic by the Russians was religiously made every summer. Although the mountain is slightly under three thousand feet in altitude and seemingly right at hand,