by Ivan Doig
Our car enters the freeway aqueduct of headlights streaming north to the city. We are to stop for Christmas dinner at the home of friends. On the table we can predict will be sauerkraut from her Baltimore, pecan pie from his Texas. Christmas Day of 1861 on the Strait, I read in the pages this morning, Swan set to work at this business of holiday dinner with similar seriousness. Duck stew and roast goose he produced for his guests, a pair of other batching pioneers, then brought out his gamble of the day. That autumn when a Makah canoeman had presented him a chunk of whale meat, Swan thoughtfully boiled it and chopped it, plopped in apples, raisins, wild cranberries, currants, brown sugar, salt, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, and a quart of rum, then crocked the works in a stone jar. These months later he cautiously offers to his guests slivers of the baked result. Lifts a forkful himself, chews appraisingly for a moment. The eyes of the holiday trio light in elation, and they hurry on to further helpings of the whalemince pie.
Days Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten
I have begun to follow Swan exactly year by year through his long muster of diaries. His own brevets of identification still are on them—a small paper label on each cover where the title of a book would appear, the year inked there in his slanting hand—and upon opening the earliest diary, 1859, I found that it advertises itself as Marsh’s Metallic Memorandum Book WITH METALLIC PENCIL The writing of which is as permanent as when written with a claim I could now tell Swan is not nearly true. Luckily his experiment with Marsh’s wan stylus ended when Swan ran out of pages in the memo book on the last day of August and switched to a plain tan pocket notebook and an ordinary pencil of blessed black clarity. But it is back in those dimmest of pages, early 1859, that Swan’s daily words of his Pacific Northwest life commence: the twenty-ninth of January, when he embarked at San Francisco on board ship Dashaway Capt J M Hill...bound for Pt Townsend, W.T.
When the Dashaway hove into Port Townsend on a morning in mid-February, a few weeks past Swan’s forty-first birthday, almost precisely at the midpoint of his life, the diary shows that Swan at once ruddered himself as many directions as there were routes of water spoking out from the little frontier port. The editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin had agreed to buy from him a series of articles about Washington Territory; what San Francisco didn’t take, Swan could readily place in one or another of the weekly papers in the fledgling port towns of Puget Sound; and there still hovered that proclaimed notion of his to examine certain harbors, with a view of ascertaining the best locality for a whaling station. Whenever a ride could be hitched by schooner, steamboat, or canoe, then oil Swan would jaunt along the Strait or into the serpentine length of Puget Sound, up amid the San Juan archipelago or across Admiralty Inlet to long-cliffed Whidbey Island. His wake of ink shows him voyaging in and out of Port Townsend, his purported new site of enterprise, eight times in the first six months.
Inside all that motion, however, a pattern is shaping. Time upon time Swan’s loops of travel happen to stretch westward the same distance, like the whorls of a topographic map compressing at an abrupt face of landscape.
March seventeenth:...came to anchor in Neah Bay & after dinner went ashore to Mr Webster’s house where I passed the night.
June fourth, fifth, and sixth, again at Neah Bay.
September fourteenth, Left Port Townsend at 5 PM in Swells canoe...for Neah Bay. Nine days, he stays this time.
October ninth, back at Neah Bay. Length of stay: fifty-five days.
At that time Neah Bay had its place as the geographical pinpoint on the American map that, say, Alaska’s Point Barrow holds today: a final tribal outpost before the north margins of the planet take over entirely. The crescent eye of bay and its namesake village peek out between headlands at the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The site nicks into the top—that is, the north-facing shore—of the coastal prow of rock which was dubbed Cape Flattery by Captain James Cook on his 1788 voyage, when a deceptive indent of the shoreline “flattered us with hopes of finding a harbour there.” It vouches about the stormy remoteness of Cape Flattery that along its coastline the luck of even the incomparable Cook was nil; two and a half explorations around the world by sail, but here not only was he misled about a harbor prospect, Cook missed as well in the gray drifts of weather his chance to discover the dozen-mile-wide entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and all the shoreline of Puget Sound beyond.
Cape Flattery’s resident sailors, the several hundred Makah tribal members at Neah Bay and four smaller villages dotted west and south along the peninsula, deservedly would have guffawed at seamanship of such low order. Out on their promontory into the Pacific which Swan began to share from them in 1859 and I now try to share from him, the Makahs casually launched away in canoes to hunt creatures ranging in size and threat from sea otters to gray whales. In land terms that would be spaniels to dinosaurs. A prodigious seagoing people, these, and small wonder that from here on, in steady diary and occasional newsprint, the Makahs come off Swan’s pages like people flinging open a door.
...The Mackahs are fond of music...and, as many of the men have made voyages to San Francisco on lumber vessels, they have learned a number of popular tunes....I was astonished, on entering a lodge one day, to hear a party singing “Oh Susannah” and “Old Folks at Home,” accompanied by an accordion....
The Makahs, in common with all the coast tribes, hold slaves....In former times, it is said, that slaves were treated very harshly....On the death of a chief, his favorite slaves were killed and buried with him....Latterly, this custom seems to have been abandoned, and their present condition is a mild kind of servitude....
This morning some squaws were swimming in the brook at high tide and sporting about as if it was midsummer. I don’t think these people are as sensitive to pain as whites. They cut themselves on all occasions without seeming to mind it at all. And go into water at times when a white man would be chilled to death....
At daybreak this morning I was awakened by children singing and on getting up I found it proceeded from twelve girls who were going in a sort of procession with Sustaies, who has had her months’ turns commence...for the first time. She had a blue blanket over her head and the party went a short distance up the beach where she was washed and then covered with a white blanket and the procession started for home. They came out twice afterward and had two more washes....
The festivals are but few, and are confined to the ta-ma-na-was ceremonies, which usually take place during the winter months; to certain “medicine” performances...and the pot-latches, or distributions of presents, which are made at all seasons of the year. The pot-latches occur whenever an Indian has acquired enough property in blankets, beads, guns, brass kettles, tin pans, and other objects of Indian wealth, to make a present to a large number of the tribe; for the more an Indian can give away, the greater his standing with the others....
Blankets are the principal item of wealth, and the value of anything is fixed by the number of blankets it is worth. In the early days of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and until within the past ten years, a blanket was considered equal in trade to five dollars; but since so many different traders have settled on the Sound, with such a variety of qualities and prices, the Indian in naming the number of blankets he expects to receive...will state what kind he demands. Thus, if the price is to be twenty blankets, he will say, “how many large blue ones,” which are the most costly, “how many red, and how many white ones?”...
They believe that, originally, mankind were animals, and that the present race were formed by a series of transformations. The Mackah tribe were a hybrid race, half-dog and half-Indian—the progeny of a white dog and the daughter of a great chief or necromancer, who lived on Vancouver Island, nearly opposite Neah Bay. His chief being angry with his daughter, sent her and her seven progeny to Cape Flattery, where a magician turned them into human beings, and the present race of Mackahs are their descendants....
More than legend linked the Makahs and their Vancouv
er Island neighbors, the Nootkans. The tribes shared that brilliant skill, their seagoing hunting of whales, which sets them apart in the history of this coast.
From what Swan could judge, the Makahs by the late 1850s were not as headlong avid about whale hunting as they had been in their past. Whether the whales were more numerous, or that the Indians, being now able to procure other food from the whites, have become indifferent to the pursuit, I cannot say.... Yet when Swell in the autumn of 1859 recited off for Swan the year’s toll of whales, the kills added up to seven, which seems not too lackadaisical a tally. Fully practiced or not, the ocean abilities of the Makahs were so evident that Swan set down his estimation of the tribe in the most exalted terms a Massachusetts man could think of. They are, in fact, to the Indian population what the inhabitants of Nantucket are to the people of the Atlantic Coast.
As Swan discerned, when whales plowed north past Cape Flattery in their spring migrations, the Makahs would push out to hunt the sea behemoths with methods and tools they had honed to stiletto keenness. Their canoes were swift high-prowed blades of cedar which carried crews of eight: helmsman, six paddlers, harpooner. This last performed as the gladiator, the one who triggered death for the whale; stood above the cruising creature with a harpoon eighteen feet long, twice the length of a modern javelin, made of two pieces of yew scarfed together with splicing bark, and lunged it home. The wooden shaft detached when the whale was struck and left embedded in the flesh a harpoon point of sharpened copper or iron, barbed with spikes of elk or deer horn so that it would claw within the whale’s body the way a fishhook snags itself with wicked irreversible angle inside a trout’s mouth. Trollers of leviathan, were these Makahs.
Roped to the harpoon point with a cord of whale sinew was a buoy-like float made by skinning a seal and turning the pelt with the fur in, as when a sweater is pulled wrongside out. Then the apertures of the head, feet and tail are tied up airtight, Swan narrated, and the’skin inflated like a bladder. When further harpoons were hurled into the body of the whale, it is not unusual for from thirty to forty of these buoys to be made fast to the whale, which, of course, cannot sink, and is easily despatched by their spears and lances.
Dispatched and towed ashore, the whale begins to become bill of fare. All hands swarm around the carcass with their knives, and in a very short time the blubber is stripped off in blocks about two feet square. The portion of blubber forming a saddle, taken from between the head and dorsal fin, is esteemed the most choice, and is always the property of the person who first strides the whale. The saddle is termed u-butsk. It is placed across a pole supported by two stout posts. At each end of the pole are hung the harpoons and lines with which the whale was killed. Next to the blubber at each end are the whale’s eyes; eagle’s feathers are stuck in a row along the top, a bunch of feathers at each end, and the whole covered with spots and patches of down...The u-butsk remains in a conspicuous part of the lodge until it is considered ripe enough to eat, when a feast is held, and the whole devoured or carried away by the guests....
Swan would, and did, journey almost anywhere with the coastal Indians in their canoes, but I do not discover in his diary pages or other writings that he ever went whaling with the Makahs. My guess is that he lost any such appetite early on, the time he was idling along in a canoe full of Makahs paddling for Port Townsend when a whale innocently broached beside them in the Strait. Swan emerged from the resulting commotion enormously grateful that no harpooning equipment happened to be aboard and the Indians had to forfeit their excited plan of pursuing the whale to the water-end of the earth or to his death, whichever arrived first.
Swan’s eyewitness knowledge of the Makahs’ soldiery of the sea, their whale hunts, then stops at the shoreline, and my questions go unmet. Whether the seabirds shadowed the canoes in white and gray gliding flocks as the whale-men stroked out from Cape Flattery into the Pacific. Whether there hung—I cannot see how else it could have been—an audible silence of held breaths before the first paddler behind the harpooner judged the distance to the whale and cried: Now throw! Whether the crew shouted a united great cry when the harpoon blade snagged home, a chorus of conquest. And whether some tincture of apprehension mixed with whatever exaltation they clamored, (or success meant this: their canoe lashed behind the harpooned whale: a seagoing cart harnessed to a creature several times the size of a bull elephant and dying angry.
Yet if he did not go see whales stabbed, not a lot else of Makah life escaped Swan’s attention. What a listener he must have been, the rarest kind who aims his ears as if being paid by the word. Whatever the majority of the Makahs thought of their white newcomer—and just as surely as his constant mention of some of them is testimony that they were attracted to him in friendship or something very close to it, there would have been those who suspected Swan, supposed him silly or perhaps even vaguely dangerous—a great number of the tribal members did talk with him, allowed him to rove along on the rim of their Neah Bay life. Even yet in his words their personalities breathe hotly to me. Swell, of course, with his knack for fact and his easy competence. His brother Peter, a brawler and restless under the cleft of the white men’s growing power over the natives. The obliging Captain John, something of a tribal bard, who drew on the first page of this book one of the’skookums who cause the lightning by running out its tongue. (Swan in turn later sketched Captain John into the front of a diary—an oval ocher face, low broad-lipped mouth, dark quarter circle eyebrows of surprising delicacy, amused eyes. Swan estimated him as without exception the biggest coward in the tribe and at the same time the biggest braggadocio, but he is shrewd and smart and accomplishes by finesse...as much as some of the others do by their physical prowess.) The exuberant Billy Barlow, who escorted Swan duck hunting and wanted me to shoot everything I saw from a crow to an old woman who was at work on the prairie. Tsowiskay, an inveterate old savage implacable against white men; on his death a rarely harsh Swan raps out that the old fellow is no loss and his death did not affect the other Indians (except his own family) any more than if a dog had died. Colchote, a war chief who recited his skirmishes with other coastal tribes as if from a list in hand.
And the one of them all I would give most to have stood beside Swan and heard, an ancient woman, one of Colchote’s slaves, from Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, who recounted for Swan the explorers she had seen arrive from the sea. She said she remembered when Meares brought a lot of Chinamen to Nootka, and built a schooner: 1788, more than seventy years before. And Vancouver, whom she called Macowber: 1792. And she saw the massacre on board Astor’s ship, the Tonquin, and spoke of Mr. McKay, the purser, who it was supposed blew the ship up: 1811, the year before Swan was born.
Two sudden and vital friendships make themselves known here in Swan’s notations of his first visits to Neah Bay. The earliest, and the one that would last for decades, took hold with the single resident of Neah Bay who was not a Makah: the white man Henry Webster, owner of a trading post at the eastern headland of the bay. It is enough to say of him now that Webster assays as a bleak-faced, obstinate frontier entrepreneur who did not get along with Indians notably well. In these beginning months of Swan’s acquaintanceship with him a clash occurred in which, after an argument of some nature, five Indians pummeled Webster with rocks, dragged him along the beach, and threatened to kill him. Another instance Swan reports to the diary page: The Indians talk very saucy today about shooting Webster. Neither the battering nor the threats at all dissuaded Webster from staying on at his trading post, or indeed from patiently pulling political strings for a couple of years until he won appointment as the first federal agent for the new Makah Reservation. Swan had that tendency to lean on men chestier than himself—Russell, Isaac I. Stevens—and Webster amply seems to have been of the type. (He also, Swan noted promptly and gladly, was a man who knew how to fill a table. The old adage that “God sends meat and the devil sends cooks” does not apply to my friend Webster’s culinary department. Epicurus himself would have re
joiced over the nice and palatable dishes of fresh codfish tongues, fried; fresh halibut fins, broiled; fresh salmon, baked; together with side dishes of sea eggs, deep sea oysters and brook trout; with puddings made of the luscious salal and other rich berries of the season, winding up with cranberry tarts and pies; the whole the product of the ocean and land in the immediate vicinity of the house.)
The other immediate friend, supple and deft as Webster was granitic, of course was Swell. Rapidly in the diaries it becomes evident how valued a companion the young Makah chieftain proved to be. The pages of Swan’s eight weeks at Neah Bay in late 1859 bustle with the forming connection: Went to Swell’s house and made a sketch of some Tomanawos boards....Swell told about their land, that they were not satisfied with the way the treaty was written....Went to Swell’s house. He says that the past year there were 30 canoes engaged in the whale fishery 8 men to each canoe but they have not all been out this past year....Swell says that there are in the Makah tribe 220 men 300 women 200 children 100 slaves....Made sketch of Swell....Swell started for Dungeness this morning. Saluted him with the swivel—1 gun....Swell brought down 50 bushels of potatoes from Dungeness....Swell’s name Wha-laltl Asabuy....Made a carving today of the Ha hake to ak or the animal that makes the lightning...I cut it on a piece of sandstone from the cliff & intend giving it to Swell....
Elsewhere Swan testifies of Swell’s intelligence, of his knack for leadership, his prowess as a canoeman; I could almost say, reading not very deep between the lines, his alacrity to meet and learn about the white way of life that had come calling at Cape Flattery. Swell was a stag of a man, his name among the whites deriving from his posh sartorial preference: he sat resplendent in a new suit of Boston clothes when Swan made his first canoe trip to Neah Bay with him in mid-September of 1859. Swell has been among the white men as sailor and pilot, Swan recorded, and was the person who assisted in rescuing Capt. Weldon and the crew of the Swiss Boy, which was wrecked in Nittinat Sound in early 1859. He saved them from bondage, and landed them safe among their friends....He is still quite a young man, but if he lives, he is destined to be a man of importance among his own and neighboring tribes.
