by Ivan Doig
While Swan carried on his love affair with Shoalwater’s food and leisure, he likely flirted often enough with alcohol as well. The bayside residents, white and native, emerge out of his words and those of others as a boozy bunch who did as much roistering as oystering. One Fourth of July, to take the prime frolicsome example, after orations and eating and a feu-de-joie by the guns and rifles of the whole company, the Shoalwater patriots stumbled onto the inspiration to close the performances for the day by going on top of the cliff opposite, and make a tremendous big blaze. They found a colossal hollow cedar stump, filled it to the brim with dry spruce limbs, touched the pyre off. It made the best bonfire I ever saw, Swan recollected with considerable understatement, and after burning all night and part of the next day, finally set fire to the forest, which continued to burn for several months, till the winter rains finally extinguished it.
A jolly conflagration of four or five months’ duration couldn’t have been entirely usual, but much other unsober behavior was. And when Swan remarked of one of his Shoalwater compatriots that like all the rest of the frontier people, he was fond of Old Rye, the unwritten admission is there that also among those frontier people was numbered James G. Swan.
In the spring of 1853 when the region north of the Columbia River was hived off from Oregon to become Washington Territory, several of the Shoalwater oysterboys had been inspired to file for land claims. Swan selected a site at the mouth of what is now the Bone River (the Querquelin, it was called by the Indians: Mouse River) on the bay’s northeastern shore. Reasoning that the absence of a wife by some three thousand miles didn’t really unhinge the marital status all that much, he claimed 160 acres for himself and a second 160 for Matilda.
A half-mile manor of frontier conjured from ink. I was perfectly delighted with the place, Swan enthuses in one breath, and notes in the next that the unwooded portion stood overgrown with nettles and ferns three feet high. In that divided comment he sounds precisely like my kin who grew up on our pair of Doig homesteads south of Helena, entranced to the end of their lives with memory of the blue-timbered glory of the Big Belt mountains and still furious with the impossible winter snows as well.
Swan and the convivial Captain Purrington eventually set about building a cabin on the new riverside estate. Their cabin work went at a creep, or something less. You can all but see the pair of them, midmorning upon midmorning, sighing regret at the blisters on their hands and settling onto a handy log for the captain to recite another sea story. With winter stalking in fast, they at last cobbled together a shack from the split cedar boards of an abandoned Indian lodge, and Swan inventively masoned a huge fireplace out of clay blocks cut from a nearby cliff. The first real storm of winter made mud of his handiwork, sluiced a couple of bushels of coals and ashes into the middle of the room and very nearly set the abode ablaze. Not long after, Swan catches a schooner back to San Francisco, to clerk under a dry roof until spring.
Fresh dollars in his pocket, he is on display again at Shoal-water at the start of summer 1854. For the first of numerous times in his life Swan now wangles a brief, modest niche in the federal payroll. He was appointed assistant customs collector for that portion of the coast north of the Columbia, including Shoal-water Bay and Gray’s Harbor to Cape Flattery; the duties of the office being to report all vessels arriving at or departing from Shoal-water Bay, and to keep a diligent watch on the coast to see that none of the Russian or Hudson Bay Companies’ vessels came around either for smuggling or trading with the Indians.
Since this comprised an all-but-empty stretch of shore, with only the lackadaisical oysterers at Shoalwater, a handful of stump farmers and sawmillers up around Grays Harbor, and the tiny tribal settlements at a few river mouths, Swan’s precinct seems to have been spectacularly free of major smuggling prospects. The only time he is on record as having had to exert himself was when the Indians, as a joke, lured him several days up the coast to check on a vessel which turned out to be a U.S. Geological Survey steamship. Swan being Swan, he did not much mind the futile jaunt. So far as related to smuggling, I had walked sixty miles up the beach for no purpose, but I did not regret having started, as I had seen a line of coast which few, if any white men had been over before.
Months slid past, years began to go. Yet not nearly all o£ Swan’s time at Shoalwater could have been spent promenading the coast or aiming himself into the bottom of a bottle. He has left us a frontier view greatly wider and deeper than that. The maraud of a smallpox outbreak at Shoalwater which merely made the white men ill but slaughtered the Chinooks and Chehalis. The pride of place when selecting a homestead site. The casual reach of distance as Swan strolled sixty miles of wild coast to gaze upon an innocent steamship. These carry a sense of this rough margin of the west as true as a thumb testing the teeth of a ripsaw. And all of them derive from Swan as serious and published author, in a work I have been quoting from ever since he squished ashore at Shoalwater. (If Swan was diarying regularly in these years, and I judge he was not, although he mentions having written and lost a collection of notes about the Indians, the volumes never have come to sight.) The Northwest Coast, he titled the book, then thought he had better elucidate: Or Three Years’ Residence in Washington Territory.
This coastal drifter, then, this dabbling man born two decades or so before my own great-grandfather, spent part of his life at the enterprise I do, shaping words into print. Whether the fact nudges Swan closer into resemblance of me or me to Swan I am not ready to say, but certainly it fetches both of us into the same cottage industry at least some hours of the week. I imagine that Swan, like me, when he held pen in hand for another chapter of Northwest Coast or, as later, to begin an article for a frontier newspaper, had his times of wishing he had chosen some sounder cottage job, such as lacemaking or raising chinchillas. I imagine as well that in the next minute or so he was knuckle-deep into the words again. Cottagers have to be like that.
Harper & Brothers brought out Northwest Coast in 1857, and with its lore of baked skunks and patriotic pyromania the tome stands as a jaunty grandfather of us all who face west above our typewriters. But more than that. This book of Swan’s time at Shoalwater conveys, as he would in the diary pages for all the length of his life, his rare knack of looking at the coastal Indians as flesh and blood rather than the frontier’s tribal rubble.
He does not go all the way, sometimes dwelling overmuch on the simplicities of the bay’s natives, while he and the other oysterboys were not exactly an advanced institute themselves. Oftener than not, however, his remarks carry uncommon sympathy and insight about the Chinooks and Chehalis:
The Indians can see but little or no difference between their system of Tomanawos and our own views as taught them. For instance, the talipus, or fox, is their emblem of the creative power; the swispee, or duck, that of wisdom. And they say that the Boston people, or Americans, have for their Tomanawos the wheark, or eagle and that the King George, or English people, have a lion for their Tomanawos.
Or again: One day, while being more than usually inquisitive, old Suis...after trying to make me understand that the names I was asking about had no meaning, at last said, “Why, you white people have names like ours; some mean something, and others mean nothing. I know your name, Swan, is like our word Cocumb, and means a big bird; and Mr. Lake’s name is for water, like Shoalwater Bay. But what does Mr. Russell’s or Baldt’s, or Champ’s or Hillyer’s, or Sweeney’s, or Weldon’s name mean?”
I told her I did not know. “Well,” she replied, “so it is with us. We don’t know what those names you have asked mean; all we know is that they were the names of our ancestors—clip tillicums, or first people.”
Thoughtful jots about first people, and the tamanoas of whites. The time of comradeship with Swell and the honor to repaint his funeral boards lay not so far ahead from such lines.
With Swan you never know where a competence is going to lead, if indeed it ever ambles anywhere. It is his skill with the native lore and language
s which now transports him for a while out of the Pacific Northwest. In the mid-1850s, territorial officials of Oregon and Washington began to summon the Northwest tribes into treaty councils. These worked out as was usual in our continental history: The Indians got a chance for soulful rhetoric, and the whites got the land. When this ritualistic process of dispossession reached southwesternmost Washington with a treaty parley at a site on the Chehalis River in February 1855, Swan inevitably was on hand, having been invited by Territorial Governor Isaac I. Stevens to come over from the coast and interpret. Swan’s service lasted beyond the riverbank oratory. When Stevens later was elected territorial delegate to Congress, Swan the scholarly frontiersman was enlisted as his secretary.
First his follow of Charles J. W. Munchausen-Russell up to Shoalwater, now this traipse back around the continent behind a political patron. Moves of this sort cause me to think Swan must have been something like a jack in life’s deck, not a man of an instinct quite to be king. A bit of a courtier, say.
In any case, the Swan trajectory now loops from the frontier Washington to the governmental Washington. But only until Stevens’s term in Congress concludes. Swan then swerves like an oiled windvane to the Pacific Northwest again.
Not again to Shoalwater and the oystering life, however. On some amalgam of advice from Stevens that the community might be a comer and his own none-too-well-formed notion that he maybe would set up a supply station for whaling ships, Swan decides this time his site will be the customs port for Washington Territory, an aspiring frontier village called Port Townsend.
The location was, and is, one of the most intriguing on this continent. The Strait of Juan de Fuca swings broadly in from the Pacific, a fat fjord between the Olympic Mountains of Washington and the lower peaks of British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, until at last, after a hundred miles and precisely at the brink of land which holds Port Townsend, the span of water turns southward in a long, sinuous stretch like an arm delving to the very bottom of a barrel. The topmost portion is Admiralty Inlet; the rest of the thrusting arm of channel is Puget Sound. I live at its elbow. This small valley which holds my house is one of the wrinkles in the Sound’s tremendous timber-green sleeves.
So it is that there is a route I walk regularly, a few hundred strides along this suburban valley, to the bluff above my house for a studying look northwestward, to where the Sound bends off toward the Strait. Around that horizon, at six on the morning of February 13, 1859, Swan awakes aboard the schooner Dashaway to find the ship passing the lighthouse at Dungeness Spit, coming on the wind into these waters where he will spend the rest of his years.
Day Four
Sour ink today, Swan’s and mine both. Again I am alone in the house, a week now, and the fact echoes. The cottony moodless weather which arrived yesterday does not help. No winter I have spent in the Pacific Northwest—this will make an even dozen—ever has been as grayly bland and excitementless as the season’s reputation. (“Oh, Seattle,” anyone from elsewhere will begin, and one of the next three words is “rain.”) There can be winter weeks here when the Pacific repeatedly tries to throw itself into the air and out across the continent, an exhilarating traffic of swooping storms. Other durations when the days arrive open-skied and glittering, the mountains of the Olympic and Cascade ranges a spill of rough white gems along two entire horizons. All else quiet, this modest valley invites wind, the flow of air habiting to the southwesterly mood of winter and arriving into this green vee like rainflow to a stream bed. Oceanburst or brave thin days of sun or spurting breeze, Northwest winter I enjoy as restless, startful; except that this gray first of morning, it has followed me onto dead center.
To work, the reliable season of the alone. To Swan, that other winterer. As I have told, by the time Swan spoke good-bye to Matilda and the East in the first month of 1850 there were two children of the divided household: Ellen, four, and Charles, seven. In that moment Swan jettisoned them. Left daughter and son to Matilda and her lineal Boston colony as part of his passage price, which he seems to have been little enough agonized about assuming, for his leaving of New England.
At about the age of Charles, I was jettisoned myself, by the death of my mother. Following my father up and down our Montana ranching valley I began to learn that a sundered family can heal strongly across the break. If, that is, the remaining parent possesses the strength of stubbornness, and I think it can be granted that Matilda likely had her share of that. Hard witness that I am today, then, I am able to wish for Charles and Ellen only that they could have come argonauting with Swan. To reverse him in the imagination from stepping aboard the ship to San Francisco is merely to see him spending his time on the Boston waterfront, or any other waterfront, in preference to twiddling under the family roof. To transfer the roof with him, Swan and Matilda and the children all staunchly mutual new citizens of the Pacific shore, is to find the family settling to the grooved routines of a city neighborhood again; likely in Portland, with its New England affiliations. But could the Swan youngsters have grown up at their father’s inquisitive side here along this new coast in the life he led, absorbing the Indian languages and lore as he did, poking along the shore with him into the bays he appraised like a portraitist, stooping as he did to the frontier’s odd bouquets of salal and kinnickinnick and yarrow and skunk cabbage, what western venturers that daughter and that son might have been.
Come they did not, of course; could not except as I would reinvent their lives; and but for Swan’s scanty visits back to Boston heard their father’s voice only from across the continent, by the paper echo of mail, for the next half-century.
Evening, last inches of the leaden day. Ellen and Charles missed sprigs of knowledge indeed when their father left them to Boston. From Swell’s tribe, the Makahs, Swan noted down that their version of the sun arrived robustly each morning by thrusting away the stars with his head and trampling night underfoot. Rainbows, they considered, had claws at either end to seize the unwary. Comets and meteors were the luminous souls of dead chiefs. As for the mysterious northern lights that sometimes webbed the sky beyond the Strait, Swell explained them astutely to Swan:
Under that star, many snow’s sail from here in a canoe, live a race of little men, very strong, who are dressed in’skins. They look like Indians, but they are not taller than half the length of my paddle. They can dive down into the sea and catch a seal or a fish with their hands. Their country is very cold, and they live on the ice where they build great fires, and that light is the fires of those little people....
Swell as tutor about Eskimo life puts light on something else as well. Along the wilderness that was the North Pacific coastland, more than five hundred miles of broken shore from Neah Bay even to southernmost Alaska and greater distances beyond that to the people of the ice, ideas of that sort must have traveled like thistledown on puffs of breeze: canoeing tribe in wary touch with canoeing tribe, a seed of story deposited, to be borne along by the next barter-trip southward. By the time the Makahs received the story of the miniature ice-men of the north, lore had been nurtured into legend. I recognize such wafts of alchemy, for I live with them as well. A morning in the nineteen-twenties a dozen riders are returning to their home ranches after a weekend rodeo. Whenever the horses’ hoofs strike the dryness of a Montana country road, dust drifts up until from a distance the group looks like men of smoke. Most of the journey, however, cuts across open sageland, and the slap of the gray tassels of brush against leather chaps competes with their talk of the rodeo broncs. Unexpectedly the loose troop reins to a halt. Across a stretch of pasture they have always ridden through, a fresh barbed-wire fence glints. The owner of the land emerges from a nearby cabin to explain that he intends to plow the ground, that they can no longer go across the field-to-be. A rider with a notch-scar in the center of his chin—he was my father—grins down at the man and says in his style of half-joke, half-declaration: “We never saw any place yet we couldn’t go.” Turning his horse to the fence, he touches spur to flank,
and mount and man pass through the air above the blades of wire. One after another the others soar after him, like boys on great birds of sorrel, roan, dapple gray.
The story and its impromptu anthem of the West’s last horseback generation have come down to me, on embellishing lips, very much as legends of the Eskimos must have arrived south to Swell. “The same winds blow spring on all men’s dreams,” I read once from a folklorist. Whether there were a dozen ro-deoers or just four; whether they all lofted themselves in the barbed-wire steeplechase or just the rider with that starred chin: in the tale as it has whiffed to me, they are twelve and they soar.
Day Five
Christmas.
Carol steps from the airport ramp at 6:03 P.M., five lofted hours from New Jersey. Swan in his lifetime managed to go from one coast of America to the other, and back, a half-dozen times. In the fourteen years of our marriage Carol and I have crisscrossed the continent on family visits or business so many times we have lost count.
The retributive pun I have been saving for days—“Hey, I’ve heard of you. The Christmas Carol, right?”—draws her groan and grin. We hold each other, amid the community of hugs of families reuniting. The New Jersey report is good; her parents are in health, and chipper.
