Winter Brothers (16 page)

Sawed wood—firewood—decides my site when I am here inside the cabin. I settle at the kitchen table, close by the cookstove which must be fed each hour or so. (Howard has told me he will harvest his own firewood when summer comes, from the stand of alder woven within the mullioned window. A neighbor who owns a team of workhorses will skid the downed trees in for sawing. I wish the harnessed horses were there now, the leather sounds of their working heft coming down the mountainside. Instead, if anything is out there, it will be either Solo on reconnaissance to see whether I have mended my anti-dog ways, or the slowly gliding deer.) Today out of the mound of mail which has been building on my desk since Swan's diaries moved into my days I finally have winnowed the letter from Mark, in his faculty office in Illinois—we may be the last two American friends who write regularly and at such length to one another—and the quote which he found during his research on mid-nineteenth-century frontier missionaries. The Reverend John Summers, reporting from Benton County, Iowa, in July of 1852:

“A young man recently left for California, who for two years has been very anxious to go, but during his minority had been restrained by the influence and authority of his parents. They offered, for the sake of diverting him from his purpose, to furnish him the means to travel and visit the Eastern cities. He derided the idea. He would not turn his hand over to see all that could be seen in the East, but he must go to the Utopia of the New World; and he has gone.”

Gone west and cared not so much as a flip of his hand to know any of that lesser land behind him. In all but flesh, that young Iowan was my grandfather, my great-uncles, my father and his five brothers, me. After my Doig grandparents sailed from Scotland and crossed America to a high forest-tucked valley of the Rocky Mountains, nobody of the family for two generations ever went to the Atlantic again. When I journeyed off to college I was spoken of as being “back east in Illinois.” My father adventured to Chicago once on a cattle train and twice to visit me. My mother, after her parents moved from Wisconsin to the Rockies when she was half a year old, never returned beyond the middle of Montana.

This westernness in my family, then, has been extreme as we could manage to make it. We lived our first seventy years as Americans on slopes of the Rockies as naturally, single-mind-edly, as kulaks on the Russian steppes. (Nights when I have been at my desk reading Swan's pages I have noticed that my square-bearded face reflected in the desk-end window could be a photographic plate of any of those museful old Scotsmen who transplanted our family name to the western mountains of America. If we have the face we deserve at forty—or thirty-nine and some months, as I am now—evidently I am earning my way backward to my homesteading grandfather.) My own not very many years eastward, which is to say in the middle of the Midwest, amounted to a kind of instructive geographic error. (Instructive, literally: Montana as evaluated at Northwestern University in Evanston, 1957: “youse guys,” confides my new college friend from the Bronx, “youse guys from Mwawntana twalk funny”) The journalism jobs in the flat-horizoned midland turned my ambition in on itself, impelled me to work the salaried tasks for more than they were worth and to sluice the accumulating overflow of ideas into pages of my own choice. Also, happiest result of my brief misguess of geography (chiding from a friend who had stepped back and forth among writing jobs: “It doesn't matter anymore where you live in this country.” It matters.), I met Carol there, already edging west on her own, and when the two of us turned together, away from editorial careers and ahead to independence, we strode a fourth of the continent farther than any of my family had done. Puget Sound's salt water begins but a half mile from our valley-held house close by Seattle.

And so with Swan, I judge. When the Midwestern reverend wrote those opining words, Swan of Boston already had been on the Pacific shore for two years and was about to head onward to Shoalwater Bay and ultimately the Strait and Cape Flattery. Finding the place to invest his life meant, as it has to me, finding a West. (Roulette of geography, of course, that the American frontier stretched from the Atlantic toward the Pacific instead of the other way around. Erase
Santa Maria
and
Mayflower,
ink in Chinese junks anchoring at San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound four hundred years ago, reread our history with its basis in Confucianism, its exploit of transcontinental railroads laid across the eastern wilderness by quaint coolie labor from London and Paris, its West Coast mandarins—the real item—aloofly setting cultural style for the country.) What Swan and his forty-year wordstream will have told me by the end of this winter, this excursion back where I have never been, I can't yet know. But already I have the sense from his sentences and mine that there are and always have been many Wests, personal as well as geographical. (Even what I have been calling the Pacific Northwest is multiple. A basic division begins at the Columbia River; south of it, in Oregon, they have been the sounder citizens, we in Washington the sharper strivers. Transport fifty from each state as a colony on Mars and by nightfall the Oregonians will put up a school and a city hall, the Washingtonians will establish a bank and a union.) Swan on the Strait has been living in two distinct ones, Neah Bay and Port Townsend (and sampled two others earlier, San Francisco and Shoalwater Bay) and neither of them is the same as my own Wests, Montana of a quarter-century ago and Puget Sound of today. Yet Swan's Wests come recognizable to me, are places which still have clear overtones of my own places, stand alike with mine in being distinctly unlike other of the national geography. Perhaps that is what the many Wests are, common in their stubborn separatenesses: each West a kind of cabin, insistent that it is no other sort of dwelling whatsoever.

At Neah Bay, Swan writes on. Writes the daily diary entries, frequent newspaper articles, writes letter after letter in the series which, as I began to crank 120-year-old words into sight at the University of Washington library, filled a roll of microfilm thick as my fist. From the files of the Smithsonian Institution, “SWAN, JAMES G., Official Incoming Correspondence.”

Eventually nearly half a thousand pieces of correspondence flowed from Swan to the savants within the Smithsonian's castle-like museum. It was—is—a spellbinding cataract of mail. Swan's machine-magnified handwriting reads like lines from a Gulliver who every so often pauses on one North Pacific promontory or another to empty out his pockets and his thoughts.

 

I have now ready to ship by first opportunity a case containing 16 birds shins, mostly large 2 Indian skulls 1 backbone of fur seal with'skull 2 grass straps for carrying burthens 1 dog hair
blanket specimen sea weed 1 fur seal skin 2 fur seal skulls 4 specimen fossil crabs 2 miniature hats 2 down blankets shells taken from ducks' stomachs....

 

The Indians here judge of the weather for the following day by observing the stars whenever there happens to be a clear night in this humid atmosphere. If the sky is clear and the stars “twinkle brightly” they predict wind for the following day and with uncanny certainty. If on the contrary the stars shine tranquilly they say there will be but little wind, and consequently, prepare themselves at midnight to go off to their fishing grounds some 15 to 20 miles outside Cape Flattery. They believe the “wind in the air” makes the stars twinkle.

 

I have been reading with great interest the work on archaeology by Mr Haven, which was received among other books from the Smithsonian....On page 148 Mr Haven remarks in his conclusion while speaking of the Indians at the Columbia River & Nootka, “There too prevails the singular and inconvenient custom of inserting discs of wood in the lips and ears.” Now the fact is, that there is not an Indian from the Columbia to Nootka who has, or has had, a disc of wood in either lips or ears....

 

...In 66 consecutive days there has fallen a little more than 2½ feet of water. I think that Astoria, which is usually accounted the most rainy place on this coast, can hardly beat this quantity....

 

...I have got the names of the male decendants of Deeart the chief from whom Neeah Bay or Deeah as these Indians pronounce it is taken. There are twelve generations and by a little patience I can trace the various collateral branches and by that means find out the relationship existing between the present descendants. But to ask these Indians as Mr Morgan lays down the rule viz “what do I call my grandmothers great aunt” &c, the answer invariably is “Klonas” or dont know.

...2 Indian cradles 1 grass blanket 2 medicine rattles made of scallop shells 2 birds nests 1 little basket robins eggs fossil crabs baskets of shells 1 bark head dress 1 crab...

 

When we think of our once glorious Union, from its struggling commencement, to the culminating glory of its zenith, as Longfellow says, “We know what master laid the keel/What workmen framed thy ribs of steel...” and then look upon the old ship of state as she now lies wrecked, broken, and apparently a total loss, it is almost enough to make a man doubt whether that Providence who has hitherto watched over us, has not for some national sin withdrawn from us for a season his protecting care....But I am digressing from a commonplace letter on bird skins into topics that have puzzled wiser heads than mine.

 

Most often these bulletins from Swan's persistent pen emerged onto the desk of an even more prodigious creator of mail: Spencer Fullerton Baird, assistant secretary and second-in-command of the Smithsonian. Swan had met both Baird and the secretary of the Smithsonian, Joseph Henry, during that interim of his in the national capital in the late 1850s. Henry and Baird added up to a most formidable museum team. While Henry, a practical scientist who had made pioneering discoveries in electromagnetism, enforced a tone of scientific enterprise for the Smithsonian, Baird was endeavoring to fill the place up like a silo.

He was one of those Victorian work machines, Baird, who could have run the affairs of the world by himself if he'd had more writing hands. In 1860 he noted in his journal that he had dashed off a total of 3,050 letters that year, without the aid of stenographers. And he soon got stenographers. Baird's passion was nothing less than to capture North American nature for the Smithsonian. When in 1850 he moved from his post as a professor of natural history to the Smithsonian, with him arrived two freight cars of his own bird specimens. Ever since, he had been welcoming, as the institution's annual reports testify, items ranging from dead garter snakes to meteorites. And perpetually, perpetually, churning out his messages of encouragement to an army of unofficial Smithsonian helpers who ranged from backyards amateurs—“Never fear the nonacceptability of anything you may send,” Baird once wrote to an enthusiast who had been mailing in insects from Eutaw, Alabama—to such scientific eminences as Louis Agassiz and George Perkins Marsh.

Swan's enlistment date was January 10, 1860. He put a box of seashells aboard a steamer at Port Townsend,
happy at all times,
he assured the Smithsonian's caliphs of science,
to add my humble collections to specimens in your museums.

The Smithsonian and Baird of course were rare eminences to Swan's back-of-beyond existence while Swan was merely one, and a most distant one at that, of a battalion of science-struck gleaners. When the orb of microfilm begins to glow out its “LETTERS TO SWAN FROM SPENCER F. BAIRD,” the difference between the epistles of the man in the frontier schoolhouse and the man in the red-brick castle registers about as might be expected.

I should be pleased did your time permit it you could give me some reliable idea of the state of affairs at Washington,
Swan will pen, exuberantly—wistfully?—filling all four sides of a folded broadsheet.
I can gather very little from the contradictory statements of the newspapers and know about as much of the doings of the Khan of Tartary as of our own government.
Back from Baird arrives a considerable fraction less of paper and bonhomie:
We had the very great pleasure today of receiving the box of shells from Nee-ah Bay sent by you....

Master of perfunctory encouragement that Baird was, he nonetheless did enrich Swan's life at Cape Flattery. The specimens Baird asked for—birds and fish, particularly—made a welcome change of task from the Neah Bay routine Swan once summed as
attending to the sick, listening to Indian complaints of various hinds and looking after things generally.
(The Makahs occasionally held a dimmer view of Swan's break the-monotony specimen collecting.
Last evening I shot a horned owl of the mottled grey species....This forenoon I skinned it and prepared it for the Smithsonian Institution. The Indians think
owls are dead Indians and I had quite a talk with some children who assured me that the owl was not a bird but an Indian
.) And as Swan freighted in his hodgepodge of promising items, Baird sent west to him an array of books of science, another bonus to a frontier life. (Swan was a reader. Through the years in the diaries I look over his shoulder to Stanley's account of tracking Livingstone, Mark Twain's
Innocents Abroad,
Thackeray's
Pendennis,
Melville's
Omoo...
) Most vital of all in these Neah Bay years, Baird's encouragement sat Swan down to an ambitious piece of scholarly enterprise: an ethnological study of the Makahs.

Swan likely did not even think of his intention as ethnology, or its mother science, anthropology. Only in the wake of Darwin's theory of evolution, not all that many years before, were such fields of study becoming recognized. Language, not the net of culture behind it, was the original lure for Swan, the Neah Bay diaries every so often showing self-instruction in Makah:
December Se-whow-ah-puthl January S-a-kwis-puthl February Klo-kjo-chis-to-puthl...
Eventually Swan is complimented by a visiting tribesman
that he thought I was a real Indian as I could talk Makah so well....I said to him that I could only talk the Makah dialect a little.
But Swan did have the necessary impulse, the flywheel of curiosity within him—or call it that penchant for eyewitnessing—to follow language into culture.
I know the importance of making these collections and writing the Indian memoirs now, while we are among them and can get reliable facts,
he once avows to Baird.
The time is not distant, when these tribes will pass away, and future generations who may feel an interest in the history of these people will wonder why we have been so negligent.