cumbed, and Sibir never again fell from the hands of the Muscovite.
During the next eighty years, up to the middle of the seventeenth century, the Cossacks not only consolidated their hold on the lower and middle Irtish River, but swept across Northern Asia to the shores of the Pacific.
The Siberian Mussulman power being broken, the Cossacks followed the line of least resistance, along the shores of the principal Siberian rivers, building forts and stockades and advancing length by length. In 1591 Beryoza was founded, in 1593 Tara and Obdorsk. From the Irtish they followed up the banks of the Obi, reaching to Surgut and Narim in the early seventeenth century, and thence across to the watershed of the Yenisei, till at length they reached Krasnoyarsk, and the shores of the Chulim. Later in the seventeenth century they reached the Lena River, and the Yakutsk country, and before the end of the century were established on Lake Baikal, where they subdued the Mongol tribes of Buriats. The Finnish tribes in the northern forests submitted everywhere to the new-comers, being of a shy and more peaceable disposition. But the Mongol and Turkish elements, and the remnant of the broken Siberian khanate, took many years before they were really subjugated. Some of them remained in the lower forest zone, and, settling down peaceably undert the Cossacks, became like the Kazan Tartars of European Russia, and are known to-day as the Tartars of Tobolsk. The rest, however, retreated southward into the steppes and plateaus on the Upper Irtish and Obi rivers, and, mingling with the tribes already there, became Tartar nomads of the
