Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
J. P. Henry, a Sitka native long resident at Yakutat, was able to speak, read,
and write english well and understood thoroughly the necessity of accurate
information. After he knew of our interest in these phenomena he repeat-
edly indicated to us, before reaching certain places, that uplift had occurred
there, and we never found such statements of his as we could verify to be
untrue or exaggerated; moreover, he and other natives know the shores of
the inlet intimately, for they canoe there every spring in search of seal and
would certainly know when such striking changes occurred.” Tarr and Mar-
tin therefore accepted the natives' statements without further reserve: “even
if other lines of evidence did not so convincingly point to the same conclu-
sion, we feel that there should be no hesitancy in accepting this testimony
of the Alaskan natives as to the date of uplift.” The natives also “described
the great shaking of the earth, the water waves, the fish killed or left stranded
by these waves, the appearance of new islands, the uplift of sea caves and
beaches (one of these the beach on which the natives camp each year in the
sealing season), the formation of the whitened bryozoan film, and the ava-
lanches.” The natives were, in short, “keen observers of nature.” The local
“white men,” on the other hand, residents of Yakutat Village, were likely not
familiar enough with the bay to have taken note of such changes—“engaged
in fishing or lumbering, [they] concerned themselves little with the wonder-
ful fiord at their doors.”
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The investigation also depended on the testimony of a group of eight
prospectors who happened to be hunting gold and platinum in Yakutat Bay
in 1899. Subject to the most violent effects of the earthquakes, these men
“were too frightened to notice any change of level or saw too much of more
spectacular things to report it.” Two of the prospectors published accounts
of their experiences in Alaska newspapers. Tarr and Martin interviewed a
third, whom they found to be “a very intelligent man, then working as a
carpenter in Yakutat.” Only the most fortunate conjunction of events al-
lowed the prospectors to escape with their lives. The men had been camped
on the edge of a glacier in a fjord of Yakutat Bay when the shocks began. The
first strong one came on 3 September, after which the men strung up a seis-
moscope out of hunting knives, clanging against each other as the tremors
began. it was a “rude” instrument, Tarr and Martin commented, “but more
delicate than their own perception.” On 10 September the knives recorded
fifty-two separate shocks between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. The strongest one lasted
nearly three minutes and threw the men to the ground. One of the men de-
scribed the motion as simultaneously “circular” and “waving up and down
like the swells of the sea, only with considerably more energy.” They ran
from their tents just in time to witness the bay roaring up from below on
