Winter Brothers (21 page)

Their weaponry is potent and mysterious, and growing more so all the time. (
Lieut Hanbury US Topographical Engineer called on me today he is engaged On steamer
Celilo
taking account of force of current at various points on the Sound for the purpose of ascertaining if it is practicable to make use of torpedoes as a means of harbor defence.)

Their boats are even more prodigious. Long schooners—the admiring Makahs have told Swan their word for them is
bar-bethl'd: house on the water—
which moor at the sawmill settlements and take aboard what had been sky-touching groves of trees. Steamboats which with their thrashing sidewheels can travel without the wind.

Their food ranges from disgusting—hard salted beef which the sailors call “mahogany horse”—to marvelous: molasses, rice, coffee.

Their views on whiskey are inconstant: some Port Townsend whites irate about the Indians sharing in it at all, others making a commerce of the liquid fire.
(Thomas Stratton brought a bottle of whiskey to me which he took from a Clallam Indian this noon under the wharf of the hotel. The Indian said he got it at Sires saloon and it was lowered through the floor to him.)

So too their notions on sex: the white men are ostentatious about preferring women of their own skin, yet Port Townsend has a growing population of half-breed children. (This matter and the previous one meet once in Swan's pages, when he reports that an elderly couple of the Dungeness area have complained of their neighbors
that Squaws and Whiskey were legal tender among them.)

These whites are showy as well about their dead, keeping the corpses about for a day or more for the sake of ceremony instead of putting them instantly to rest in the earth.

A good many whiteskins, particularly those along Port Townsend's waterfront, are several baths per annum less clean than the Indians. (Especially less so than the Makahs, of whom Swan at Neah recorded that whenever a grimy task such as flensing a whale carcass was completed, they at once scoured themselves in sand and surf and
came out clean and bright as so many new copper tea kettles.)

Above all, this: they are a moody people, hard to predict, their community sometimes boisterous, sometimes dead silent. The afternoon, make it, that Swan and the other townspeople learned that the iron wagons of the railroad would not be coming: watch them from the eyes of Chetzemoka the Duke of York, how the bearded men cluster and mutter and slump away to their houses, how the street stands emptier than empty after them, how even the whiskey voices in the saloons cannot be heard.

You might imagine, the myth already finding words inside your lips, that this odd white tribe had abruptly got aboard one of its wheeled boats and gone away.

And then Port Townsend would jerk awake again and scarcely blink between excitements. In one span of a dozen weeks Swan inscribes these doings:

 

...Edwin Jones died during the night of heart compliant. He had been playing in the band at a dance in Masonic Hall and was on his way with the rest to Aliens to get supper. He stopped in at Urquharts Saloon where he had a room, laid down and died immediately.

 

...About Midnight Wednesday night Bill Leonards cow came into my entry and I drove her out. Then Ike Hall brought a drunk man into his office and I got up to see who it was and took cold by so doing....

 

...A Clallam Indian was cut in the head by another Indian and the squaws came and complained. The Sheriff took the guilty Indian and locked him up.

 

...John Martin stabbed Poker Jack his morning about 2 oclock in Hunts Saloon....

 

...Joseph Nuano the half breed Kanaka
—Hawaiian—
who murdered Dwyer on San Juan—was hanged today at the Point near the Brewery....

 

...The 6 canoes of Haida Indians who have been camped on Point Hudson for several days left this morning—They first went to Point Wilson where they burnt up the body of a Hydah man who died in Port Discovery 3 days ago—then they gathered up the bones and carried them off all leaving for Victoria and thence to their homes on Queen Charlottes Islands—

Lot of Hydah Indians with me this day in office,
the tenth of May of 1873.
I copied the tattoo marks on the back and breast of Kitkune....

He did indeed, and the creatures from Kitkune's epidermis writhe up at me now, from the pages of
Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge No.
267. The breast tattoo is a head-on image of a dogfish, twin tails looping beneath its gills to both sides: it is a broadline cartoon of some tropical mouthbreather which might gape at you from an aquarium tank. The creatures of the back—a pair of them, sitting up and facing to opposite directions like book ends—are crossbreeds of killer whales and wolves. They have snouted heads with teeth like sawpoints, claws long and pointed as fork tines, broad curved scimitar-like tails, and an extra eye just beneath the neck.

The skin art of the visiting Haidas plainly captivated Swan. He sketched a dozen of the patterns—the most decorative visitor seems to have been a canoeman named Kit-ka-gens, who displayed a thunderbird across his back, squids on each thigh, and frogs on each ankle—and lamented that they were
but
a
portion of the whole which were tattooed on the persons of this party....
Soon another of his letters was away to Baird at the Smithsonian proposing the article for
Contributions.
(Proposing a bit nervously, given all these whalewolves and ankling frogs:
the Haidas,
Swan assured Baird,
are no more grotesque in their attempts to imitate nature than are our designs of griffins, dragons, unicorns and other fabulous animals.)

His fascination with the Haidas is more than understandable. They surge in the history of this coast as a Pacific Northwest version of Vikings. Writers are habitual about the analogy of raids down from northern waters, canoes like small dragonships, fur-shirted warriors bursting up from the thwarts to do battle. Swan never blazons that comparison, and I think he was right. The Haidas of his time amply deserve attention entirely as Haidas. Undo the past and disperse a few hundred thousand Haidas along this coast from their home islands of northern British Columbia, the Queen Charlottes, south as far as the mouth of the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon, prime them with firepower equal to ours, and white civilization still might be waiting to set its first foot ashore here. The Haidas from all I can judge would have warred implacably as long as we could have stood it, then negotiated us to a frazzle.

The actual arithmetic is that as late as 1835 perhaps as many as six thousand Haidas dwelled in the Queen Charlotte Islands and by 1885 there were eight hundred. Alcohol and other allurements of white frontier society had made their usual toll of a traditional way of life, but more terrible harvest yet, civilization's diseases killed these warrior people like kittens. A smallpox epidemic in 1862 spread north out of Victoria and devastated what was left of the natives of the British Columbia coastline. No one knew the total of corpses—a ship's captain counted a casual hundred scattered along the shores like flotsam on his voyage from the Stikene River to Victoria—but the estimate has been that of a coastal Indian population of perhaps sixty thousand, one-third perished. Among the Haidas that smallpox outbreak obliterated several particularly strong villages along the remote lengthy western margin of the Queen Charlottes archipelago. That west shore population, reported a visiting geographer in 1866, “has become wholly extinct”; every Haida had left in terror or stayed and died.

If the Haidas were a diminished tribe, in unaccustomed baffled retreat to the safest of their shores, they remained a profound academy of artists. Besides the tattoo pages in Swan's
Contributions
article he drew a few of the stone carvings the visiting Haidas had brought with them, miniatures of the carved cedar columns which soared in their villages, and I can barely pull my gaze from the one that proffers four fantastic figures lined one atop the other. Just what the merry hell is going on here, it is not clear at first. Count on Swan to explain the foursome into two sets of two creatures:...
the lower one is
Hoorts
the bear holding in his paws the
Stoo
or crayfish. The upper figure is the
Tsching
or
Tsing,
the beaver, holding the
Tl-kam-kostan
or frog....The Indian, however rude or grotesque his carvings or paintings may be, is always true to nature. He knows that the bears eat crabs, crayfish and other littoral marine crusta-cea, and that the frog is the fresh-water companion of the beaver....If the carver had reversed the grouping, he would have been laughed at by his friends....
The linework is as fluid as the logic; no inch of the carving is without some thrust of action, something amazing about to begin. The beaver could be some creature of Mayan art gone mad; the frog he holds looks like some semi-human doing a handstand while wearing a gas mask; the bear could be a South Seas version of a jolly grizzly; the crayfish being plucked up backwards into his jaws is clearly from some far star. Restless skilled minds move behind this deftly stacked menagerie; minds which took magic from the forest, had the power to draw the coastal fir wilderness and its beings into the brain like fog into a cave and joyously make them art.

Swan caught an idea from the Haidas during that day of tattoo tracing in his Port Townsend office, and it became the underpattern of his
Contributions
article: the Haidas were a most intriguing tribe—
of larger stature, better proportion, and lighter complexion
than the natives of the Strait—whose home villages in the Queen Charlotte Islands—a
healthy picturesque territory
—ought to be visited—
if the Government would empower some person here, and appropriate sufficient funds to be expended
—by someone probably named Swan.

 

That notion persisted, I find, as if one of the Haida tattooists had engraved it on the inside of Swan's forehead. Entrancement with the Haidas' vivacious art surely has gripped Swan here, but I wonder whether something more is not urging him as well: a longing to step away, if only temporarily, to a new horizon. To the next West he can find (a
healthy picturesque territory).
Catching his third wind, so to speak, after having moved his life to California and then to the Washington coastline, Swan looks to me ready—yearnful—to venture again, and he would be typical enough of his era (and mine, now that I count up my own veers) to do so.

Whatever ran in his mind here in 1873, over the next years Swan's letters to Baird say steadily this:
I am more desirous of making explorations in the Queen Charlotte Island Croup than of doing anything else.

And Baird's to him say as steadily only:
I hope that one of these days...

 

Later: something remembered as I stare at Swan's sketch of Beaver fondling Frog, Bear sampling Crayfish. When we returned from our time in Britain six years ago Carol brought with her a recording of
African Sanctus,
the fusion of African songs and dances with Western choir music, and began to use it in her semantics course to show the queer capturing power of rhythm, the vast sophistication of “primitive” folk art. The Haida work is something like that awesome
Sanctus:
anthems of existence, modulation upon modulation of the creaturedom which we too belong to. Carved music.

Storm. Fencefloater. Goosedrowner. None of which is fractionally enough word for such weather. Nightlong, rain swatted walls and windows, the wind pounded and ripped among the valley trees. Carol and I yanked awake at the gale's first try at peeling the roof from the house, never fully slept from then on. I was certain that the birch trees outside the bedroom would be bending, eluding, as they always do in southwest blows. I was equally certain I would be greeting one or more of them in through the rafters any moment.

After breakfast—the birches still stood, although branches thicketed the lawn as if someone had spent the night up in the limbs with a pruning saw—I slumped away to try for sleep, Carol drove up the hill to meet her classes. The wind roared on. In minutes I admitted myself more or less awake for good, managed to decide that I would head for Shilshole to see this weather at full run on the Sound.

In the car: full run hardly says it either. Wind-flung clouds dive almost into the streets. Just beneath their reach traffic lights dance like lanterns swung by frantic trainmen. People waiting for buses try to squeeze themselves narrow enough to fit the lee spaces behind telephone poles. Everywhere a sprinkle of evergreen branches has sifted down, as if the city has been seeded with them by a giant foresting hand.

In restaurants I pass, people are talking to each other with their hands. “Famous weather,” a man brogued to me on a Killarney street one wan but rainless spring morning, “famous weather.” This gale, the unruliest in the dozen years I've lived beside Puget Sound, is going to have a name of its own sort. It takes much to draw a gesture from a Puget Sound resident, but steaming mugs of coffee are being waved around in there to punctuate the expostulations that somebody's daughter and son-in-law got up this morning to find a Douglas fir limb exploded down through the carport roof, that they themselves will not even attempt driving to the job at Boeing this morning, that there's been nothing like this christly wind since the Columbus Day blow of, what was it, '62?

At Shilshole: I lean my way out onto the fishing pier. A bird lifts hazardously in front of me near the boat ramp. Incredibly, it is a kingfisher, blown in from some forested river bank or another and looking very weary of wind. I glance west, north, south, and find the Sound absolutely empty of ships and boats, the first time I have ever seen it so. The next surprise is that the weather is not the steady rage down here that it is in our valley. A harsh uneven chop ruffles the water, but no higher than a tugboat's bow, and not much breakage of wave along the shoreline. I realize what is happening: instead of crashing the waves ashore here, the southerly wind is skidding the water the length of the Sound. When all the miles of chop finally fetch up against the banks of Whidbey Island the banging spray must be colossal.