Kempendeeyi

Kempendeeyi, usually written Kempendyai in Russian sources, is associated with the salt springs of the Vilyuy country in Sakha. A report of 1640 brought the locality into Russian written records: the Cossack Voin Shakhov obtained a hundred poods of salt there. This was a report of extraction by a Russian newcomer, rather than evidence that the springs had previously been unknown to local people.

The springs later attracted the scientific parties working across Siberia during the Second Kamchatka Expedition. In 1736 Stepan Krasheninnikov and A. Ivanov investigated them. These episodes give the locality a history different from a generic frontier settlement founded only for furs: its distinctive resource was brine and the salt recovered from it. Indigenous information, Cossack activity and imperial scientific inquiry successively brought the same resource into written accounts, tying a place in the northern forest to wider administrative and research networks.