Once they had writing, and knew lions and tigers
Editorial contextNear Sredne Kolymsk Wrangel befriended an 82-year-old Yakut who read and wrote Russian. The old man said his people had been more civilised before they split from 'the other Tartar races', and had once had their own writing, since lost. As proof that they once lived far to the south, he quoted old sayings that mention gold, gems, lions and tigers, things Yakuts no longer knew.
He complained of the ignorance of his countrymen, who he said, had been formerly more civilized; and that before they separated from the other Tartar races, to whom they are allied, they had possessed written characters, and consequently means of intellectual cultivation, which they have since lost. He maintained, that his race had once inhabited far distant southern regions
About Yakuts (Sakha)
Keep in mind
One elder's memory of lost traditions, which he himself says were fading. Old Turkic peoples of the south did use runic writing, but the elder gives no specifics.
Not the ruins of a departed race
Editorial contextSergeant Andreyev reported in 1763 a ruined timber 'fortress' on the Bear Islands, its beams seemingly cut with stone tools, built by 'what other nation cannot now be determined'. A German writer, von Berg, later saw such ruins as signs of great changes over many centuries. Wrangel disagrees in a footnote: these half-buried wooden huts are just like those still used in the region and are far too flimsy to have survived for centuries. This passage is not about Tartars, but it is an early, direct warning against reading ordinary ruins as relics of a lost people.
A hasty glance at these half-subterranean WOODEN jurti is quite enough to convince any one, that they are not the remains of any remote antiquity, but merely huts resembling those still in use among the population of these regions, and of too slight a construction, and too perishable a material, to permit of their having remained for centuries as the monuments of a departed race.
About Unknown builders (local Arctic peoples)
Keep in mind
Andreyev's description is quoted from his 1763 journal (pages n99 to n100); Wrangel's own survey in 1820 found no trace of the fortress.
Claws of a giant bird, or a rhinoceros?
Editorial contextSummarising the explorer Hedenstrom, Wrangel says one of the Lyakhov Islands seemed to be made of mammoth bones, which hunters had carried off by the boatload for eighty years. Along the Arctic shore lay skulls of two unknown beasts, one found with what looked like three-foot claws of a giant bird. The Yukaghirs used these 'claws' to strengthen their bows and told marvellous tales about the bird. A footnote says Dr Kyber believed they came from a kind of rhinoceros.
Near these last-named skulls something like the claw of an enormous bird is generally found. These claws are often three English feet long … The Jukahiri, who make use of these horny claws, to give increased force to their bows, maintain that the head and claws have both belonged to an enormous bird, respecting which they relate a number of marvellous stories.
About Yukaghirs and Russian fur-hunters
Keep in mind
Not about Tartars. The 'claws' are almost certainly the horns of the extinct woolly rhinoceros, as Kyber suspected; the giant bird is Yukaghir legend.
A priest who burned the idols
Editorial contextWrangel reports that the Kolyma Yakuts were now all baptised. A priest named Slezzow, twenty years earlier, had destroyed every idol and pagan altar he found, by fire or water. Yet shamans still had followers and were consulted, even by Russians, to find stray animals or thieves. A footnote adds that newborn girls had once often been left in baskets hung in trees.
The Jakuti are now all baptized. A priest from Sredne Kolymsk visits these settlements every year. An ecclesiastic named Slezzow, who lived here twenty years ago, showed undaunted and unwearied zeal in the abolition of Schamanism. Wherever he discovered idols or heathen altars, they were destroyed by fire or by water, and none such are now to be met with.
About Yakuts (Sakha) of the Kolyma
Keep in mind
Wrangel approves of the conversion; the destruction he describes means few Yakut sacred objects survived to be seen.