The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

SLA.TOUST—VIATKA. 4131721. Thanks to its convergent situation, it lias since then advanced rapidly, andis now the terminus of the railway opened across the Urals in 1879, and traversingsome of the mineral districts in the Ural, Volga, and Ob basins. In 1863 acannon foundry was established in the neighbouring town of Motovilinsky, andcopper mines have here been worked for over a hundred years, the produce ofwhich is sent to the Ekaterinenburg mint. Yet the rich coal-fields of the UpperKama basin, in some places 40 feet thick, are still neglected, although the Englishcoal imported for the Perm arsenal costs £5 per ton.The old fortress of Kioigur, raised against the Bashkirs, on a tributary ofthe Chusovaya, south-east of Perm, has also acquired a certain manufacturingimportance for the mining districts, which it supplies with boots and shoes andhardware. At Sarapul, its rival in the boot trade, and one of the chief places onthe Kama, there are some extensive boat-building yards, besides machinery andsmall-arms factories. The Government small-arms establishment at Ijovsk alsoemploys several thousand hands.A large portion of Perm belonged formerly to the Strogonov family, originallyfrom Novgorod, who in the seventeenth century had a domain as large as Bohemia,with 120,000 serfs, mostly descended of Novgorod settlers.The largest tributary of the Kama is the Bielaya, or " White " River, whichtraverses nearly the whole of the government of Ufa, the richest mineral region onthe west side of the Urals. Slatoust, or the " Golden Mouth " (Zoloto-Ust), lyingat an elevation of 1,300 feet above sea-level in a pleasant valley watered by theAi, a tributary of the Ufa, has also a large manufacture of small arms, guns, andrifles, besides several metallurgic works supplied by the neighbouring iron andcoal mines. Miners and workmen from Solingen and Klingenthal have herefounded a numerous German colony.Ufa, at the junction of the Ufa and Bielaya,formerly a Bashkir village, is now a flourishing town, doing a large trade with thesurrounding mineral districts, and especially with Blagoveshchensk, near whichare some copper mines yielding annually about 25,000 tons of ore. Ufa, thecapital of a province with more Moslem than Christian inhabitants, is the seat ofthe Chief Mufti of the Russian Mohammedans. Sterlitamak, lying to the southof Ufa on a head-stream of the Bielaya, is an important salt and mineral depot, andMenzelinsk, on a small southern affluent of the Kama, has a large fair, at whichthe yearly sales have averaged about £800,000 since 1864.Viatka, capital of the government of like name, is one of the oldest places inthe Kama basin, having been founded in 1181 by Novgorod colonists on aneminence overlooking the junction of the Viatka and Khlinovitza Rivers. Fornearly three centuries it maintained its republican independence, and the housesbuilt for defensive purposes are still so disposed as to form a continuous outercircuit. The neighbouring town of Slobodsko'i has numerous distilleries andtanneries, and prepares fur cloaks and gloves, hundreds of thousands of whicharticles are forwarded to Archangel and Nijni-Novgorod.