On special occasions in the olden time, with great ceremony the visitors landed at a distance from the village, drew their canoes ashore and proceeded to the village dressed in festive garments adorned with sealion heads or other strange headdresses, in which they danced the rare and picturesque "Beach Dance," in acknowledgement to the Spirit of the Sea for the bountiful supply of salmon and herring of the past season--for the native American is a thankful being and omits not to show it when occasion offers to acknowledge it to the Giver of all good and perfect gifts.
During the earlier years of the colony the Kolosh were implacable enemies. War parties of young men constantly haunted the islands of the bay, lying in wait for any unwary hunter or fisherman from the fort. Later, when they were settled under the walls of the fort they became more tractable, for their homes and families were commanded by the guns of the fortress, but on the least provocation the savagery in their blood would boil, from their great tribal houses they issued forth, faces blackened to the semblance of devils, war masks grinning, and the howling mob shouted defiance at their neighbor over the stockade. Many a bloody tragedy was enacted in the "Ranche" for their code was primitive, "an eye for an eye," and a life for a life.
Feuds raged between the different totemic families. About 1853 a party of Wrangell Indians (Stikines) visited Sitka, and while being entertained in the guest-house were murdered and their bodies piled into a canoe which was then paddled to Japonski Island. On striking the shore it was so heavily laden with the bodies of the dead that tradition says the canoe split from end to end. It is said that the bones of the dead are still to be seen in the undergrowth along the shore. In retaliation, about 1855, the Wrangell Kolosh made an attack on the Hot Springs settlement, burned the buildings, stripped the inhabitants of property and clothing and left them to make their way over the mountains around the head of Silver Bay to Sitka, where they arrived more dead than alive from hunger and exhaustion. This feud was not settled until 1918, when a peace treaty was consummated between the kwans on Armistice Day, a coincidence which is much made of by the tribesmen.