Year after year the promyshleniki pressed farther along the Aleutian chain, leaving a trail of devasatation and death in their wake.  When one island was stripped of all its otters, the plunderers moved on like a horde of locusts to ravage another.  The male inhabitants of a native settlement were enslaved and forced to hunt day and night in their skin boats while the Russians lived ashore with their women.  Matchless pelts were purchased for a mirror or a string of glass beads.  If the islanders rebelled, they were clubbed as callously as the otters, and their villages were looted and burned.  The fur stampede had become a war of invasion and conquest.

-Where the Sea Breaks Its Back, Corey Ford