At this place in the year 1579 a band of 640 Cossacks suddenly appeared desiring to be enrolled in the private army of the Stroganovs. These adventurers were under the double leadership of a Cossack named Ivan Koltso (who, accordcording to some authorities, had not long before been condemned to ignominous death by the Tsar's orders), and a hardly more reputable hetman named Yermak. The name of the latter, preserved in stirring popular ballads and hylineSj was later to typify the pioneering and imperialistic genius of the Russian race. "Whether the legendary exploits of this illustrious brigand represent the actual history^ of an indiWdual, or whether, as some Russian historians maintain, we have in Yermak one of those composite heroes to the making of whose reputation the fame of half a score of lesser pioneers has been sacrificed, is a fact impossible to verify at the present day.
Aside from their sudden and suspicious appearance in the district administered by the Stroganovs,
present inhabitants of "Oustloug the Great" there exists at least one spacious church or monastery! Local tradition declares that most of these structures — erected by adventurers returning from the Siberian trail as a thank offering for the dangers they had escaped — represent not so much the piety of their builders as the prudent expiation of the sins committed in the mysterious beyond: the cleansing, as it were, of conscience and fortune before their builders resxmied the humdrum hfe of Holy Russia.
all that was known of Yermak and his Cossack companions can hardly have induced these prosperous merchants to invite the newcomers to remain longer than necessary in the vicinity of their warehouses filled with stores of precious furs and metals. During the dark winter months following their arrival, the merchants appear to have urged upon their guests the glorious advantages to be gained by a campaign against the forest tribes, whose villages and hunting grounds lay just beyond this frontier station. In proof of these statements they showed the eager Cossacks nuggets of placer gold and specimens of those strangely coloured, semi-precious minerals of the Urals which even modem geologists are often at a loss to value or classify. Among the Voguls, Ostiaks and other peoples of Finnish origin against whom the Stroganovs had for generations carried on their indecisive forays, the Cossacks were assured that gold was "hardly prized at all." Other booty, it was urged, such as furs and mastodon ivory, might readily be captured from such cowardly and ill-armed forces. It is, moreover, probable that the Cossack leaders (at least one of whom still felt a noose tickling his neck) were only too glad of an excuse to put further leagues of wilderness between the avenging troops of Ivan the Terrible and their own guilty persons.
Unknown to Yermak at this time, his most heroic contest was to be waged with the natural difficulties of the • /ildemess. Such a struggle was less suitable, perhaps, for the poetic treatment of the bylines than his battles with the aborigines. But any traveller who has had occasion to visit the country lying about the Urals will find, in the Cossack leader's persistent courage as an explorer, a subject of admiration which will out-rival his mihtary achievements. The native tribes they first encountered — unlike the more warlike subjects of the Tartar princes further to the southward — could not oppose any formidable resistance to the better armed Cossacks. Like the scattered remnants of their descendants who surWve to the present day, the Voguls and Ostiaks lived in family groups dispersed in the deepest recesses of the forest. They were small of stature, cowardly and anxious to live at peace with their neighbours. In addition to the real dangers of the wilderness they inhabited, a thousand other foohsh terrors assailed them through their superstitious belief in forest demons, wood sprites and other fantastic creatures, whom they propitiated by a system of complicated idolatrous rites. These beliefs forming their only religion led them to look upon their chiefs or medicine men with uncanny reverence.
Skilful hunters and trappers — so that their filthy bodies were covered with the rare furs of mink, otter and royal ermine — their only weapons of defense were bows and arrows. Against such adversaries the firearms of the Coss£':;ks, like those carried by the conquistador es of Peru, were quick to establish a terrible superiority.*