Tent Life in Siberia, and Adventures Among the Koraks and Other Tribes in Kamtchatka and Northern Asia
By . New York : G. P. Putman and Sons.
MR. GEORGE KENNAN was an employee of the Russo-American Telegraph Company, “or, as it was more properly called, the ' Western Union Extension,’” which was organized in the summer of 1864 for the purpose of building an overland telegraph line to Europe. The success of the Atlantic Cable, as is well known, caused the enterprise to be abandoned, and all the benefit that the world or the stockholders have reaped from the three million dollars engulfed in the gigantic attempt is such as has accrued to literature and science in the volumes of Messrs. Whymper and Dali, and now of Mr. Kennan. Whether we have in these books the money’s worth of knowledge and amusement is a question which we do not feel called upon to decide. Mr. Kennan has certainly told us many new and interesting facts about the desolate steppes of Northern Asia, and about the half-savage tribes with which he had so much to do ; and no one, except perhaps the heaviest holder of the company’s stock, can fail to be amused by a greater part of the humor in which the present volume abounds.
Mr. Kennan sailed from San Francisco in a little brig, and after a long, desolate voyage he lands at Petropavloski, in Kamt chatka. Here he prepares for the two years of his wild, adventurous life in the snowy wildernesses. He does not start, however, until he has witnessed a most grotesque Cossack marriage. In the ceremony the bridegroom wears a dusty crown which is altogether too big for him, and slips down over his head like a candle-extinguisher, causing him to step on the bride’s " furniture-print” calico dress, and do many other ludicrous things. Further on in the volume another wedding ceremony is described, which is even stranger and more trying to him who is conventionally called " the happy man ” on such occasions with us. It is among the Reindeer Koraks, a nomadic tribe of the vast steppes. There custom compels the bridegroom to work years for his betrothed, and then at last, in our civilized hour of champagne and congratulation, he is whipped and tripped up by a whole community of women, while in a steeplechase after his bride. If he does not catch her he has to work two years longer. Among those barbarous Northerners, indeed, it is evidently harder to get a wife than to support her afterward, which would seem just like our civilized life, as depicted in the modern novel.
Of the strange adventures which are so frankly told in Mr. Kennan’s hook we can give no idea in a summary. To learn what hardship the human frame is capable of enduring, and to take a just measure of the bounds of Yankee pluck and good-nature, one must read “Tent Life in Siberia ” for himself. We must regret an occasional slip in grammar and redundancy and carelessness in style and statement, but we should be loath to part with a jot of the fresh human nature which might not have got into a book more carefully written. The author tells his story, not like a book-maker, but as a bright young man would tell it to his comrades. Even some of the descriptions which are most objectionable in a literary point of view have the merit of giving a vivid idea of phenomena scarcely ever before described at all.