The story so far: In about 500 AD, the Arawaks of the Caribbean develop a more advanced package of navigational technology than they did OTL, and use it to raid and spread mayhem around Atlantic America. This promotes a much more extensive development of bronze technology, for use in warfare, and this in turn leads to the development of more technologically-advanced and socially-complex New World societies than in OTL.
In about 1600, via contact with Chumash sailors from California, the Salish of the Puget Sound area enter the Bronze Age. The Salish quickly add masts and sails to their already-impressive package of maritime technology, leading to a population explosion due to massively increased fish harvests, and a transition from a highly-complex society of hunter-gatherers into a true civilization.[1] This maritime-based civilization works its way fairly rapidly up the coast of British Columbia, as both the Salish polity expands and the sail-and-writing technological package starts to provoke sharp population increases and increased social complexity among groups such as the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) and Bella Coola.
But the most dramatic impacts of the rise of Salish occur farther to the north, in what OTL will become Alaska, and it is there that we will focus our attention.
==
Puget Sound, 1632
In 1632, the Salish village at *Bellingham[2] is playing host to one of the earliest of the Puget Sound Games. The Salish are still very much in the process of transitioning from a complex tribal society into a true civilization, and the last few years have been violent. *Bellingham, the loser in some recent clan conflicts, was deliberately chosen by the Salish chiefs as the location for this year’s Games as part of an effort to tamp down ill will and bring the tribes of the Salish nation closer together. The Games are already becoming highly culturally marked as a sacred time when organized violence is forbidden. Thus, the Salish are caught with their proverbial pants down when Haida[3] raiders from the far north attack *Bellingham in the midst of the Games; the Haida are able to kill a dozen or so Salish braves, abduct some women, and abscond with (among other things) a cedar box full of bronze medallions, before the Salish are quite able to react. It has been a number of years since Haida raiders have ventured as far south as Puget Sound, and the older warriors are shocked and astonished at how much Puget Sound society has changed since their youths.
Pleased by their success, the Haida mount a larger-scale raid the following year; but this time the Puget Sound folk are ready. The Haida are met on the beach by Salish warriors; they fight their way inland, but are stymied by the new palisades around *Bellingham. Worse, as the Haida retreat to their canoes and take to the water, they are chased down by the fast-moving, wind-borne vessels of the Salish. Only a small group of Haida survives to make it back to their home in the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Haida chiefs decide that the mighty cities of Puget Sound are too dangerous to raid; and so they turn their attention to their neighbors and rivals to the north: the Tlingit.[4]
The Haida are rather far from the Salish cultural hearth, and unlike the Salish—who were taught directly by Chumash sailors--have to figure out sails and outriggers based on the great ships they see during their trading voyages to the south (and occasional, rarely-successful raids to more close-by southern neighbors). Their version of the sailing canoe is not quite as grand or efficient as the Salish model, but for a time it affords them an advantage over the Tlingit, with whom they have been contending for control and occupation of Price of Wales Island for decades.
But only for a time. Eventually, the Tlingit figure out sail technology that puts them roughly on par with the Haida. More significantly, as bronze artifacts, including the occasional weapon, begin to filter into Tlingit hands, they are more able to recognize its value than the Haida, who only use captured bronze jewelry as prestige items for chiefs and their wives. The Tlingit’s northern neighbors are the Eyak living in the delta of the Copper River, so-named for its vast quantities of placer copper[5]. The Tlingit are well aware of the Eyak habit of pulling copper nuggets from the riverbed and working them into jewelry;
Eyak copper jewelry is a prestige item among the Tlingit nobility. This bronze stuff sure looks like copper, but is both harder and forms sharper edges. Probably it is mixed in with some other metal?
The first group of Tlingit to figure this out, naturally enough, are the Inside-the-Glacier People living at the head of Yakutat Bay, one embayment over from Orca Inlet, home of the Eyak.[6] In the mid-1650s, Tlingit artisans, having spent many a long hour hunched over campfires with various metal ores, become the latest New World inhabitants to make bronze. The chief of the Yakutat Tlingit, recognizing the strategic value of the metal-rich Copper River Delta, launches a series of raids on the Eyak over the next several years that eventually culminate in the de facto enslavement of the Eyak and Tlingit control of the Delta. This brings benefits beyond access to the placer deposits; the Copper River Delta is also home to the most prodigious run of red salmon in the world. With their greater sailing technology, the Yakutat Tlingit also begin harvesting halibut from Gulf of Alaska waters. Their population rapidly grows.
A generation later, the Inside-the-Glacier-People are bristling with ambition and a surfeit of young men. The new chief, Katlian[7] by name, who at age 17 succeeds his father, is a kind of man not unfamiliar to world history: extremely ambitious, moody and often violent, and possessed of a strategic vision extraordinary for his time and place. Over the next several decades of his remarkable life, Katlian leverages his people’s large population and his monopoly over bronze manufacture into dominance over the kwaans and clans[8]. He uses all the means available to him to consolidate power—marriage, trade, threats, raids, occupation, lending resources to the southern kwaans fighting the Haida. Near the end of his life, he throws the most massive potlatch Tlingit society has ever seen; all of the chiefs from all of the clans come to Yakutat and receive his benefactions; vast quantities of bronze jewelry and weaponry are given away. Craftsmen from each of the clans build totem poles in his honor, which stand in a proud cluster outside his grand longhouse; never before have multiple totems honored a single man. Although no one use this language in Katlian’s own time—the man himself would never claim that the other chiefs are actually subordinate to him—future generations of Tlingit will venerate Katlian as the first High King of the Tlingit—although the Tlingit title really translates to “Lord of Raven’s Sky.”
The Tlingit realm is certainly not a centrally-controlled empire with an official bureaucracy; but his last days and the days of his successors, tribal feuding within Tlingit society is nearly eliminated, and all of the considerable martial resources of the Tlingit nation begin to be directed outwards, in semi-coordinated fashion, towards the ancient Haida foe. Over the next several decades, the Tlingit retake their lost lands on Prince of Wales Island and begin to raid the Queen Charlotte Islands; by century’s end, the raids have turned into an invasion and raiding chiefs are turning into generals with subordinate commanders. And the chief of the Inside-the-Glacier People at Yakutat is becoming more and more recognizable as a paramount ruler, gaining special ritual prominence. Promising young Tlingit boys are recruited into his elite bodyguard; they are brought at a young age to Yakutat, where they are put through an elaborate and rigorous training regimen. The most unusual feature of the training—designed to promote balance, core strength, and cold-water tolerance (all critical skills in the Tlingit way of warfare)—involves standing up on cedar planks in the waters of Yakutat Bay. Whenever the Lord of Raven’s Sky returns from visiting his vassals, at the mouth of Yakutat bay he disembarks from his sailing ship and is rowed by Eyak slaves in a canoe to the beach, while his bodyguards ride their cedar boards through the surf.[9]
Heavy is the head that wears the crown; with increasing centralization of Tlingit rule come increased burdens of state. The mid-1720s are particularly trying years for the Lord of Raven’s Sky. The Queen Charlotte front is in bad shape; despite their slight edge in weapons technology and organization, the Tlingit are operating at the end of a long supply line, while the Haida are on their home turf. Furthermore, alarming reports have come in from the front about some Haida warriors using a grey-metaled weapon that is harder and sharper than bronze. And speaking of bronze, the artisanal foundries in Yakutat and *Cordova aren’t making enough of the stuff; the limiting factor, as always, is tin. The Tlingit and their Eyak slaves have scoured the immediate area pretty much clean of useable tin ore, and the metal is now only available via trade with the mysterious people of the interior, via Ahtna intermediaries[10], whom the Tlingit find annoying and greedy. The Tlingit don’t know where the tin originates from, but trader talk suggests that it comes from the lands of a primitive, seafaring people to the north. The High King decides to dispatch a small fleet of warships west along the coast to see if the tin country can be found and be brought under Tlingit control; if all else fails, the Tlingit can at least start establishing colonies in Prince William Sound—the primitive Alutiiq[11] seem like pushovers compared to the Haida.[12]
In the spring of 1728, the Lord of Raven’s Sky, escorted by his surfer guard, paddles into *Cordova for a council of war with his Copper River Delta vassal, whom—as the guardian of the Tlingit western marches—he has tasked with mounting the expedition. *Cordova, the Tlingit realm’s vibrant trade entrepot, is all-abuzz with news, strange even by the standards of trader’s tales. It seems that the Athabaskans of the interior are insisting—swearing up and down—that a mysterious tribe of hairy men with metal clothes have come from over the sea into the north country and are killing everyone they can get their hands on, with magical weapons. The High King does not know what to make of this, and in any case there are more pressing matters to attend to, but he feels that an ill wind will soon be blowing through Raven’s Sky.[10]
[1] As detailed in the prior BANW installment “Bronze Age New World: In Seattle” by Gareth Wilson
[2] Throughout, I will use the OTL names of contemporary place-names, preceded by an asterisk, to indicate Native locations on or near the site in this universe
[3] The Haida, sometimes referred to as the Vikings of the New World, were apparently newcomers to the Pacific coast, having showed up from interior Canada only a couple hundred years before European contact. Possibly because they were hemmed in by already-existing cultures to the north and south and thus restricted to living in the Queen Charlotte Islands and not the more resource-rich mainland coast, they seem to have relieved to a very great extent on raiding and warfare as a means to acquire resources. Although culturally part of the Pacific Northwest, they speak a language isolate and do not seem related to any other group
[4] The Tlingit, the “People of the Tides,” are considered the northernmost group in the Pacific Northwest cultural complex; they are distantly related to Athabaskan-speakers. Also relative latecomers to the coast, they appear to have been expanding north and south at the time of European contact.
[5] Enough metal to turn the river a distinct greenish color. The source of all that copper is the literal mother lode; the most productive copper mine in history, the Kennicott, is in the mountains above the upper Copper River Valley
[6] The Eyak, sometimes known as the Copper Indians, were well known OTL for the extensive use of copper in their material culture. Linguistically, they are distantly related to the Tlingit and Athabaskan; culturally they resemble a simplified version of Pacific Northwest society. The Eyak realm had been larger than it was at the time of European contact; they lost territory to the expansionist Tlingit. Indeed, the people of Yakutat Bay, although thoroughly Tlingit culturally, are genetically a mix of Tlingit conqueror and Eyak vanquished.
[7] Katlian was the OTL name of the Tlingit leader who successfully (in the short-term, obviously) fought off the Russians in Sitka. I don’t know any other Tlingit names, and it seemed apt.
[8] It’s more complicated than this, but “kwaan” is a territorial designation (occasionally translated as tribe) and “clan” is a lineal designation. Both were, and are, significant in the Tlingit social structure.
[9] Yakutat is the surfing capital of Alaska in OTL. No, really.
[10] The Ahtna are an Athabaskan people who picked up some cultural adaptations from their Eyak neighbors and Tlingit near-neighbors, in OTL, really did act as trade intermediaries between other Athabaskans of the deep interior and the coastal folk.
[11] The Alutiiq appear to have been a group of Yup’ik Eskimo who cut across the Alaska Peninsula around 1100 AD and conquered and/or displaced the pre-existing culture, the Ocean Bay people, of the outer Alaska Peninsula, Kodiak Archipelago, and western Prince William Sound, picking up some of their adaptations in the process. Culturally, they are essentially transitional between the comparatively resource-poor cold-water Eskaleut cultures to their west and north; and the resource-rich warm(er)-water Pacific Northwest cultures to their east and south—but more like the former than the latter.
[12] Although they’re giving the Lord of Raven’s Sky fits at the moment, the Haida are actually in a weaker position than they were at this time OTL; in this universe, they’re being squeezed by the somewhat more advanced Tlingit from the north and the much more advanced peoples to the south. OTL the Tlingit/Haida boundary is on Prince of Wales Island; by this point ATL, it’s on the northern corner of Graham Island.
[13] It’s worth noting that in OTL, the Tlingit held the Russians half-trapped inside the palisades of their New World capital at Novoarkangelsk (Sitka), for something like a decade. ATL, the Tlingit have sailing ships, significantly greater numbers, and something approaching real military organization, and bronze weapons; and via more highly-developed trade routes, they’re about to start getting iron, steel, and maybe even muskets. On the other hand, the Russians are investing more resources and state-backed attention to their New World project than they did OTL.
==
Thoughts? Comment and criticism is both welcome and appreciated.
In about 1600, via contact with Chumash sailors from California, the Salish of the Puget Sound area enter the Bronze Age. The Salish quickly add masts and sails to their already-impressive package of maritime technology, leading to a population explosion due to massively increased fish harvests, and a transition from a highly-complex society of hunter-gatherers into a true civilization.[1] This maritime-based civilization works its way fairly rapidly up the coast of British Columbia, as both the Salish polity expands and the sail-and-writing technological package starts to provoke sharp population increases and increased social complexity among groups such as the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) and Bella Coola.
But the most dramatic impacts of the rise of Salish occur farther to the north, in what OTL will become Alaska, and it is there that we will focus our attention.
==
Puget Sound, 1632
In 1632, the Salish village at *Bellingham[2] is playing host to one of the earliest of the Puget Sound Games. The Salish are still very much in the process of transitioning from a complex tribal society into a true civilization, and the last few years have been violent. *Bellingham, the loser in some recent clan conflicts, was deliberately chosen by the Salish chiefs as the location for this year’s Games as part of an effort to tamp down ill will and bring the tribes of the Salish nation closer together. The Games are already becoming highly culturally marked as a sacred time when organized violence is forbidden. Thus, the Salish are caught with their proverbial pants down when Haida[3] raiders from the far north attack *Bellingham in the midst of the Games; the Haida are able to kill a dozen or so Salish braves, abduct some women, and abscond with (among other things) a cedar box full of bronze medallions, before the Salish are quite able to react. It has been a number of years since Haida raiders have ventured as far south as Puget Sound, and the older warriors are shocked and astonished at how much Puget Sound society has changed since their youths.
Pleased by their success, the Haida mount a larger-scale raid the following year; but this time the Puget Sound folk are ready. The Haida are met on the beach by Salish warriors; they fight their way inland, but are stymied by the new palisades around *Bellingham. Worse, as the Haida retreat to their canoes and take to the water, they are chased down by the fast-moving, wind-borne vessels of the Salish. Only a small group of Haida survives to make it back to their home in the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Haida chiefs decide that the mighty cities of Puget Sound are too dangerous to raid; and so they turn their attention to their neighbors and rivals to the north: the Tlingit.[4]
The Haida are rather far from the Salish cultural hearth, and unlike the Salish—who were taught directly by Chumash sailors--have to figure out sails and outriggers based on the great ships they see during their trading voyages to the south (and occasional, rarely-successful raids to more close-by southern neighbors). Their version of the sailing canoe is not quite as grand or efficient as the Salish model, but for a time it affords them an advantage over the Tlingit, with whom they have been contending for control and occupation of Price of Wales Island for decades.
But only for a time. Eventually, the Tlingit figure out sail technology that puts them roughly on par with the Haida. More significantly, as bronze artifacts, including the occasional weapon, begin to filter into Tlingit hands, they are more able to recognize its value than the Haida, who only use captured bronze jewelry as prestige items for chiefs and their wives. The Tlingit’s northern neighbors are the Eyak living in the delta of the Copper River, so-named for its vast quantities of placer copper[5]. The Tlingit are well aware of the Eyak habit of pulling copper nuggets from the riverbed and working them into jewelry;
Eyak copper jewelry is a prestige item among the Tlingit nobility. This bronze stuff sure looks like copper, but is both harder and forms sharper edges. Probably it is mixed in with some other metal?
The first group of Tlingit to figure this out, naturally enough, are the Inside-the-Glacier People living at the head of Yakutat Bay, one embayment over from Orca Inlet, home of the Eyak.[6] In the mid-1650s, Tlingit artisans, having spent many a long hour hunched over campfires with various metal ores, become the latest New World inhabitants to make bronze. The chief of the Yakutat Tlingit, recognizing the strategic value of the metal-rich Copper River Delta, launches a series of raids on the Eyak over the next several years that eventually culminate in the de facto enslavement of the Eyak and Tlingit control of the Delta. This brings benefits beyond access to the placer deposits; the Copper River Delta is also home to the most prodigious run of red salmon in the world. With their greater sailing technology, the Yakutat Tlingit also begin harvesting halibut from Gulf of Alaska waters. Their population rapidly grows.
A generation later, the Inside-the-Glacier-People are bristling with ambition and a surfeit of young men. The new chief, Katlian[7] by name, who at age 17 succeeds his father, is a kind of man not unfamiliar to world history: extremely ambitious, moody and often violent, and possessed of a strategic vision extraordinary for his time and place. Over the next several decades of his remarkable life, Katlian leverages his people’s large population and his monopoly over bronze manufacture into dominance over the kwaans and clans[8]. He uses all the means available to him to consolidate power—marriage, trade, threats, raids, occupation, lending resources to the southern kwaans fighting the Haida. Near the end of his life, he throws the most massive potlatch Tlingit society has ever seen; all of the chiefs from all of the clans come to Yakutat and receive his benefactions; vast quantities of bronze jewelry and weaponry are given away. Craftsmen from each of the clans build totem poles in his honor, which stand in a proud cluster outside his grand longhouse; never before have multiple totems honored a single man. Although no one use this language in Katlian’s own time—the man himself would never claim that the other chiefs are actually subordinate to him—future generations of Tlingit will venerate Katlian as the first High King of the Tlingit—although the Tlingit title really translates to “Lord of Raven’s Sky.”
The Tlingit realm is certainly not a centrally-controlled empire with an official bureaucracy; but his last days and the days of his successors, tribal feuding within Tlingit society is nearly eliminated, and all of the considerable martial resources of the Tlingit nation begin to be directed outwards, in semi-coordinated fashion, towards the ancient Haida foe. Over the next several decades, the Tlingit retake their lost lands on Prince of Wales Island and begin to raid the Queen Charlotte Islands; by century’s end, the raids have turned into an invasion and raiding chiefs are turning into generals with subordinate commanders. And the chief of the Inside-the-Glacier People at Yakutat is becoming more and more recognizable as a paramount ruler, gaining special ritual prominence. Promising young Tlingit boys are recruited into his elite bodyguard; they are brought at a young age to Yakutat, where they are put through an elaborate and rigorous training regimen. The most unusual feature of the training—designed to promote balance, core strength, and cold-water tolerance (all critical skills in the Tlingit way of warfare)—involves standing up on cedar planks in the waters of Yakutat Bay. Whenever the Lord of Raven’s Sky returns from visiting his vassals, at the mouth of Yakutat bay he disembarks from his sailing ship and is rowed by Eyak slaves in a canoe to the beach, while his bodyguards ride their cedar boards through the surf.[9]
Heavy is the head that wears the crown; with increasing centralization of Tlingit rule come increased burdens of state. The mid-1720s are particularly trying years for the Lord of Raven’s Sky. The Queen Charlotte front is in bad shape; despite their slight edge in weapons technology and organization, the Tlingit are operating at the end of a long supply line, while the Haida are on their home turf. Furthermore, alarming reports have come in from the front about some Haida warriors using a grey-metaled weapon that is harder and sharper than bronze. And speaking of bronze, the artisanal foundries in Yakutat and *Cordova aren’t making enough of the stuff; the limiting factor, as always, is tin. The Tlingit and their Eyak slaves have scoured the immediate area pretty much clean of useable tin ore, and the metal is now only available via trade with the mysterious people of the interior, via Ahtna intermediaries[10], whom the Tlingit find annoying and greedy. The Tlingit don’t know where the tin originates from, but trader talk suggests that it comes from the lands of a primitive, seafaring people to the north. The High King decides to dispatch a small fleet of warships west along the coast to see if the tin country can be found and be brought under Tlingit control; if all else fails, the Tlingit can at least start establishing colonies in Prince William Sound—the primitive Alutiiq[11] seem like pushovers compared to the Haida.[12]
In the spring of 1728, the Lord of Raven’s Sky, escorted by his surfer guard, paddles into *Cordova for a council of war with his Copper River Delta vassal, whom—as the guardian of the Tlingit western marches—he has tasked with mounting the expedition. *Cordova, the Tlingit realm’s vibrant trade entrepot, is all-abuzz with news, strange even by the standards of trader’s tales. It seems that the Athabaskans of the interior are insisting—swearing up and down—that a mysterious tribe of hairy men with metal clothes have come from over the sea into the north country and are killing everyone they can get their hands on, with magical weapons. The High King does not know what to make of this, and in any case there are more pressing matters to attend to, but he feels that an ill wind will soon be blowing through Raven’s Sky.[10]
[1] As detailed in the prior BANW installment “Bronze Age New World: In Seattle” by Gareth Wilson
[2] Throughout, I will use the OTL names of contemporary place-names, preceded by an asterisk, to indicate Native locations on or near the site in this universe
[3] The Haida, sometimes referred to as the Vikings of the New World, were apparently newcomers to the Pacific coast, having showed up from interior Canada only a couple hundred years before European contact. Possibly because they were hemmed in by already-existing cultures to the north and south and thus restricted to living in the Queen Charlotte Islands and not the more resource-rich mainland coast, they seem to have relieved to a very great extent on raiding and warfare as a means to acquire resources. Although culturally part of the Pacific Northwest, they speak a language isolate and do not seem related to any other group
[4] The Tlingit, the “People of the Tides,” are considered the northernmost group in the Pacific Northwest cultural complex; they are distantly related to Athabaskan-speakers. Also relative latecomers to the coast, they appear to have been expanding north and south at the time of European contact.
[5] Enough metal to turn the river a distinct greenish color. The source of all that copper is the literal mother lode; the most productive copper mine in history, the Kennicott, is in the mountains above the upper Copper River Valley
[6] The Eyak, sometimes known as the Copper Indians, were well known OTL for the extensive use of copper in their material culture. Linguistically, they are distantly related to the Tlingit and Athabaskan; culturally they resemble a simplified version of Pacific Northwest society. The Eyak realm had been larger than it was at the time of European contact; they lost territory to the expansionist Tlingit. Indeed, the people of Yakutat Bay, although thoroughly Tlingit culturally, are genetically a mix of Tlingit conqueror and Eyak vanquished.
[7] Katlian was the OTL name of the Tlingit leader who successfully (in the short-term, obviously) fought off the Russians in Sitka. I don’t know any other Tlingit names, and it seemed apt.
[8] It’s more complicated than this, but “kwaan” is a territorial designation (occasionally translated as tribe) and “clan” is a lineal designation. Both were, and are, significant in the Tlingit social structure.
[9] Yakutat is the surfing capital of Alaska in OTL. No, really.
[10] The Ahtna are an Athabaskan people who picked up some cultural adaptations from their Eyak neighbors and Tlingit near-neighbors, in OTL, really did act as trade intermediaries between other Athabaskans of the deep interior and the coastal folk.
[11] The Alutiiq appear to have been a group of Yup’ik Eskimo who cut across the Alaska Peninsula around 1100 AD and conquered and/or displaced the pre-existing culture, the Ocean Bay people, of the outer Alaska Peninsula, Kodiak Archipelago, and western Prince William Sound, picking up some of their adaptations in the process. Culturally, they are essentially transitional between the comparatively resource-poor cold-water Eskaleut cultures to their west and north; and the resource-rich warm(er)-water Pacific Northwest cultures to their east and south—but more like the former than the latter.
[12] Although they’re giving the Lord of Raven’s Sky fits at the moment, the Haida are actually in a weaker position than they were at this time OTL; in this universe, they’re being squeezed by the somewhat more advanced Tlingit from the north and the much more advanced peoples to the south. OTL the Tlingit/Haida boundary is on Prince of Wales Island; by this point ATL, it’s on the northern corner of Graham Island.
[13] It’s worth noting that in OTL, the Tlingit held the Russians half-trapped inside the palisades of their New World capital at Novoarkangelsk (Sitka), for something like a decade. ATL, the Tlingit have sailing ships, significantly greater numbers, and something approaching real military organization, and bronze weapons; and via more highly-developed trade routes, they’re about to start getting iron, steel, and maybe even muskets. On the other hand, the Russians are investing more resources and state-backed attention to their New World project than they did OTL.
==
Thoughts? Comment and criticism is both welcome and appreciated.
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