Tent Life in Siberia eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 467 pages of information about Tent Life in Siberia.

Tent Life in Siberia eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 467 pages of information about Tent Life in Siberia.

The second class comprises all the natives in eastern Siberia who are evidently and unmistakably of Mongolian origin, including the Tunguses, the Lamutkis, the Manchus, and the Gilyaks of the Amur River.  It covers a greater extent of ground probably than both of the other classes together, its representatives being found as far west as the Yenesei, and as far east as Anadyrsk, in 169 deg.  E. long.  The only branches of this class that I have ever seen are the Lamutkis and the Tunguses.  They are almost exactly alike, both being very slenderly built men, with straight black hair, dark olive complexions, no beards, and more or less oblique eyes.  They do not resemble a Chukchi or a Korak any more than a Chinaman resembles a Comanche or a Sioux.  Their dress is very peculiar.  It consists of a fur hood, tight fur trousers, short deerskin boots, a Masonic apron, made of soft flexible buckskin and elaborately ornamented with beads and pieces of metal, and a singular-looking frock-coat cut in very civilised style out of deerskin, and ornamented with long strings of coloured reindeer hair made into chenille.  You can never see one without having the impression that he is dressed in some kind of a regalia or uniform.  The men and women resemble each other very much in dress and appearance, and by a stranger cannot be distinguished apart.  Like the Chukchis and Koraks, they are reindeer nomads, but differ somewhat from the former in their mode of life.  Their tents are smaller and differently constructed and instead of dragging their tent-poles from place to place as the Chukchis do, they leave them standing; when they break camp, and either cut new ones or avail themselves of frames left standing by other bands.  Tent-poles in this way serve as landmarks, and a day’s, journey is from one collection of frames to another.  Few of the Tunguses or Lamutkis own many deer.  Two or three hundred are considered to be a large herd, and a man who owns more than that is regarded as a sort of millionaire.  Such herds as are found among the Koraks in northern Kamchatka, numbering from five to ten thousand, are never to be seen west of Gizhiga.  The Tunguses, however, use their few deer to better advantage and in a greater variety of ways than do the Koraks.  The latter seldom ride their deer or train them to carry packs, while the Tunguses do both.  The Tunguses are of a mild, amiable disposition, easily governed and easily influenced, and seem to have made their way over so large an extent of country more through the sufferance of other tribes than through any aggressive power or disposition of their own.  Their original religion was Shamanism, but they now profess almost universally the Greco-Russian faith and receive Christian names.  They acknowledge also their subjection to the authority of the Tsar, and pay a regular annual tribute in furs.  Nearly all the Siberian squirrelskins which reach the European market are bought by Russian traders from Wandering Tunguses around the Okhotsk

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Tent Life in Siberia from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.