by Ivan Doig
They are, then, a set of mutually interested men. The Makah canoeman who has adventured aboard steamships and schooners; the Boston ship’s chandler who has adapted to cedar canoe. A young chieftain who knows the politics of his tribe and is attuning to some of the white version; a middle-aging white man with keenest interest in the coastal Indian cultures. At first they can only have been curiosities, griffin met with centaur, to one another; then, as Swan’s diary agenda shows, exchangers of lore; then, from every evidence of the aftermath of Swell’s slaying, friends. Such a growth of regard sometimes will happen when two people are cupped together in a single happenchance season of closeness—aboard a fishing boat, in a line cabin of a cattle ranch, at a military outpost; in this instance, at an outpost of another sort, the frontier pinnacle that was Neah Bay. Swan was able to know the Makah chieftain for about a year and a half before the life was blasted from Swell in the breakers at Crescent Bay. By that late winter night, the two of them had entered what I would phrase a kind of adopted kinship, stronger than differences of blood can ever be. Winter brothers, perhaps call them.
But Swan. What besides tireless ears did a domestic fugitive from Massachusetts have to offer Swell and the other Makahs? That answer too puts itself together from these diary entries, in the remark of a sketch here, a carved gift there; clearest of all in the laconic and intriguing entry for an October day in 1859 that Swan had gone down to a sandstone cliff along the Neah Bay beach and carved a swan into the rockface.
Artistry. Right there, in the fact that virtually the only skill of hand lacking in Swan was the ability to clutch a dollar, was his ticket into the Makah community. Draw, cut stone, invent patterns of paint, produce creatures from within the covers of his books: he could perform a range of tasks admired by a tribe in love with ornament. What was more, not much daunted Swan: Went to Billy Balch’s house and finished the Thunder bird. This was the hardest sketch I ever undertook. The lodge was dark and the board covered with smoke & grease and hid by boxes & baskets of food. The Indians removed these & washed the board with urine & then the only way I could decypher the painting was to mark round the drawing with a red crayon....
In fire and reek, as the storymasters of sagas would have said, and Swan blithely tracing. The Makahs met him at least halfway in rampant enthusiasm for picturizing, as Swan noted some years later when he wrote at length about his role as a frontier ambassador of art. I have painted various devices for these Indians and have decorated their ta-ma-na-was masks; and in every instance I was simply required to paint something the Indians had never seen before. One Indian selected from a pictorial newspaper a cut of a Chinese dragon, and another chose a double-headed eagle, from a picture of an Austrian coat-of-arms. Both these I grouped with drawings of crabs, faces of men, and various devices, endeavoring to make the whole look like Indian work; and I was very successful in giving the most entire satisfaction, so much so that they bestowed upon me the name of Cha-tic, intimating that I was as great an artist as the Cha-tic of Clyoquot (a tribe living north of the Makahs, on the coast of Vancouver Island).
So, no small gifts these—twin-headed eagles, dragons from beyond the rim of the Pacific, new flaunts of paint, a stone swan set afloat through time—to a people as vivid and showy as the Makahs.
Whale hunters, coastal annalists, slaveholders, art fanciers, the Makahs also were a people who chafed more than a little under the pale regime of frontier bureaucrats wanting to refashion the tribe’s life. Swan is once more at Neah Bay—his sixth stint there so far—when in the autumn of 1861 the Makahs, after six actionless months by the territorial officials, decide to exact their price for the death of Swell.
Once resolved upon, their vengeance on the Elwhas begins to be brewed, savored. Conference, more conference, the Elwha village sketched on the sand, a plan of attack argued out. As Swan watches and jots, Neah Bay’s largest canoes are worked up into fighting trim; the outsides blackened, interiors daubed a fresh red. Lord Nelson, with his blood-colored battle decks, would have nodded approval. Bow and stern of each canoe are embellished with green spruce limbs. Onto long poles are lashed faggots of pitchy wood to torch the hapless Elwhas’ lodges. Guns, knives, spears, clubs, arrows, bows are hefted judiciously, made ready.
At last, the nineteenth of September of 1861, two hundred and two days after Swell’s death, the war party mills together in final encouragement on the Neah Bay beach. Some speeches, a few dances, and they leap to their decorated canoes and head east the sixty miles to deliver holocaust to the Elwhas.
Twelve canoes, with eighty warriors, they aim up the Strait past Swan like a volley of arrows on the water. His account of the scene was published in a territorial newspaper, and so has been primped and extended beyond the usual:
I stood on top of the rocks at Webster’s point and saw them pass....Their green headdresses, black faces and brown arms, fashing paddles and beautiful canoes, urged to their utmost speed, presented a scene at once novel and interesting. I watched until a projecting point hid them from view.
Then the waiting, the war spirit still boiling in the Makah village. Women and children, seated on the tops of their houses, were beating the roofs with sticks and uttering the most piercing shrieks I ever heard. Every day at sunrise and sunset they performed these savage matins and vespers....
On the third day the canoes flash back into sight, the crews announcing themselves across the water by exuberant musket shots and songs of victory. The war, however, turns out to have been considerably less than total. The avenging Makahs landed on the beach opposite the monument of Swell...and forming into a line came up the beach in single file with old Cowbetsi, their great war chief, at their head. A short distance behind him came a savage holding with both hands a bloody head that had been severed from the body of an unfortunate Elwha. Two or three Indians followed this and then another grim trophy, held in the same manner as the first.
Swan learned that the war party had lucked upon the hapless pair of Elwhas hunting seals at Crescent Bay, the precise site of Swell’s murder. When blood was most ready to answer blood, the two were simply targets of opportunity. Having shot and beheaded them, the Makahs noted the alarms being shrieked by several Elwha women who had watched the ambush from a distance, held a rapid council, and decided revenge had been sufficiently done.
In all of this Swan takes greatest interest, so much so that he makes the mistake of spectating too close to the song circle which has formed around the severed heads. After they had finished their war song, I heard my name called, and thinking I was in the way of some of their operations was about moving off, when I was again summoned in a manner that left no doubt in my mind but that I was wanted.
The Makahs gesture Swan into the circle, beside the heads. Cowbetsi and an Indian who is to interpret to Swan face him.
Cowbetsi orates to Swan that they killed the Elwhas because the territorial Indian agent did not settle the matter of Swell’s murder. A line of fact indisputable.
Swan responds gingerly that the Indian agent at the time has been removed from office, consequently he could not come as he had promised, but that he had not lied for I knew that he fully intended to have done just what he had promised to do; that Mr. Simmons was a friend of Swell’s and they all knew—a careful veer here—I was a friend also.
“Yes,” said Cowbetsi, “we know you are our friend, and we are friends of yours.”
Swan emits a degree of relief when I was assured of the fact; but I thought that their friendship was of the kind that might induce them, should I give offence, to stick my head on top of a pole for a memento....He stands stock silent through a victory dance performed while four Makahs point guns at the heads and his general vicinity, and does not give offense. Only the two trophy skulls of the Elwhas go up on poles above Neah Bay like queer jack-o’-lanterns.
Swan by this time has written his way, in years and fractions of years, through four diaries—black, tan, black and tan again—and been back and forth between Neah B
ay and Port Townsend until he seems more a citizen of midwater than of either community. Early in the diary of his fourth year on the Strait, the brown pocket volume for 1862, a different rhythm begins to rise out to me. Swan is at Neah Bay with the hope now, through Webster’s doggedly achieved new position as agent in charge of the Reservation, of staying on for some steady span of time, and a beat of hour comfortably nudging hour, of settledness, sets in.
Wind NW fresh, the seventeenth of March. Caught a large male’skunk. Finished the Tomanawas stone for John. Sundown, sch Alert off San Juan harbor trying to beat out. A ship and two barks also wording out slowly. A year ago, the salmonberry & other shrubs were in blossom. Now no signs of vegetation are visible. Peter came up today and I cut out a coat for him out of some blue flannel he had.
Wind SE rain all day, the twentieth of March. Ship Wm Sturgis from Pt Townsend hove to this forenoon & landed Charly Howard, who came down as pilot. Howard brought letters & papers....Caught another’skunk...measured 28 inches from nose to tip of his tail.
Wind SE very light, the twenty-first of March, Foggy with constant rain. Brook very high. Peter came up today and told me that he had made up his mind to buy Totatelum, Colchote’s daughter, but he did not wish either white men or Indians to know it except myself. He wishes to make the girl a present and will bring it up to me and wishes me to give it to Totatelum...I am curious to see the result of this courtship.
Light airs from SE, the twenty-second of March, with calms and thick fog. Walked down to Neeah to see Totatelum and announce to her Peter’s desire. She was somewhat surprised and said she would think about the matter....Old Sally, the paralyzed woman, died last night and the Indians buried her by caving in the bank of sand under which she has been lying since they turned her out of the lodges. They are cruel wretches to the poor and sick.
Calm, cloudy & some fog, the twenty-third of March. Carried Peter’s present—calico, needles, thread, and two bars of soap—down to Totatelum, who received it very modestly....
Wind SE Morning cloudy and showery, PM calm, the twenty-seventh of March. John said that the people in Victoria told him that Queen Victoria had ordered a very hot summer to make up for the cold winter. Caught another skunk—8.
Day and day and day the diaries say it now. Swan’s life is patterning itself to this frontier coast. Tomorrow, then, to the first of the coastal sites where Swan’s paths and mine braid together. To Dungeness.
Day Eleven
Above the two of us the eagle glides a complete slow circle, as if studying from the corner of his eye our surprising plaid skins. Near enough he floats, perhaps a hundred fifty feet over Carol in her jacket of gray and yellow and black, me in my red and black, that we easily can see the scalloped pattern of feathers at the ends of his wings, the snowiness of head and tail that marks him as a bald.
One more silent exact noose of patrol, then the dark flier flaps off southwest across the bay. The Boston bird, Swan says the coastal Indians began to call the eagle after arrival of the earliest American trading ships, pale New Englanders aboard them with the glittering wide-winged image on their coins. Under this taloned hunter’s glide now a fleet of swimming ducks crash-dives in fear, but they are not the target of the moment. When the eagle scrapes into the water, it is a fish that lofts away to doom.
We stand atop Dungeness Spit’s rough spine of driftwood to watch the bald eagle and his meal vanish into the shore trees. From up here, all its bowed length into the Strait of Juan de Fuca—seven miles—Dungeness prickles into view like a gigantic hedgerow somehow weired atop the water. Age-gray drift logs tumble across each other to the height of a Dutch dike, fresher logs perpetually angle ashore, yellow and tattered from grinding across the gravel beach, to pile in turn onto the long heap. The rarity of Dungeness in all the dozen thousand miles of America’s coastal edge speaks itself even in the flat intonings of scientists: longest natural sandspit in the United States; driest point on the West Coast north of San Diego. A thin hook of desert snagging the water, within walk of glaciered mountains and cool fir forests.
Swan, as said, voyaged by here for the first time on a February morning of 1859, inbound for Port Townsend and his resumed western life. With his feathered name and that migratory nature he was something of a Boston bird himself, testing new waters, fresh paths of glide. For the several years after his arrival to the Strait, Swan shows up time upon time at this sandy breakwater, usually portaging across the base of the Spit as the most direct canoe route between Port Townsend and the Makah settlement at Neah Bay. If he happened to journey by ship, the route cut close past the site of the lighthouse which rises like a white candle at the far end of the Spit ...A keeper’s house and fine brick tower 92 feet high, he recorded in that year of 1859, in which is placed a stationary light of the order of Fresnel.
The Dungeness light tower is now white-painted concrete, and not so lofty, that original beacon having proved to be so eminent that it blinked futilely above the fogs that drift on the face of the Strait. Until a few years ago a Fresnel lantern still was in use, not the one Swan describes but an 1897 version, an exquisite six-sided set of glass bull’s-eyes which flung a beam of brightness eighteen miles.
Once Carol and I had the experience of being drawn the full length of the Spit, through the exact blackest center of night, by the focused blaze out of that elegant box of glass. I was to write a magazine article about the Coast Guard families stationed there at the remote end of the Spit’s ribbon of sand, and Carol to shoot photographs for illustration. We arrived here to Dungeness about an hour before a November midnight and met a specter.
The bosun’s mate in charge at the lighthouse had phoned that he would drive in to meet us on the coastal bluff overlooking the Spit. He wavered now out of the blackness like a drunken genie, clasping a hand to half of his forehead and announcing thickly that we had to hurry to keep the tide.
Wait a minute, we said. What exactly had gone wrong with his head?
Groggy but full of duty, he recited that when he judged the time had come to drive in above the tide, he traveled fast. Racing through a bank of spume, his four-wheel-drive vehicle bounded over a log the way a foxhunter’s horse takes a hedge, and when man and machine plunged to sand again, his forehead clouted the windshield.
With woozy determination our would-be chauffeur repeated that we would lose the tide if we did not hurry. I looked at Carol, some decision happened between us, and we clambered into the four-wheel-drive.
Headlights feeling out the thin route between driftwood debris and crashing waves, our Coast Guardsman ducked us through cloud upon cloud of spume sailing thigh-deep on the beach. That spindrift journey was like being seated in a small plane slicing among puffy overcast. From that night I have the sense of what the early pilots must have felt, Saint-Exupery’s blinded men aloft with the night mail above Patagonia, avid for “even the flicker of an inn lamp.” We had our ray of light, leading us with tireless reliable winks, but even it could not see into our foaming route for us.
At last at the lighthouse, with the engine cut, no next encounter between four-wheel-drive and fat driftlog having been ordained, the Fresnel lens wheeling its spokes of light above our heads: we breathed out and climbed down to the Dungeness sand for our weekend stay.
Two moments stand in my memory from that next day at the tip of Dungeness Spit. The first was seeing the lens itself, coming onto the fact of its art here on a scanty ledge of sand and upcast wood. What I had expected perhaps was something like a titanic spotlight, some modern metallic capsule of unfathomable power: not a seventy-five-year-old concoction of magnifying prisms, worked by the French artisans to angles as precise and acute as those of cut-glass goblets, which employed a single thousand-watt bulb and stretched its glow across nearly twenty miles. The magnifying power from this small cabinet of glass was as pleasantly astounding as Swell’s explanation of the aurora borealis glinting up from Eskimo campfires.
The second memory is of the mustached bosun’s
mate himself. With what pride he showed off his domain of Dungeness, not only the artful glass casing at the top of the lighthouse but the radio beacon apparatus and the foghorn and even the flagpole with a red storm-warning flag bucking madly at the top. “The wind wears out about ten flags a winter,” he said to impress us, and did.
Lighthouse life dimmed a bit when he escorted us in to talk with his wife and the wife of the young petty officer on duty with him. Both proved to be edgy about the strand-of-sand way of existence. Mrs. Bosun’s Mate calculated to when their oldest child would start school, which would loft the family away to land duty: “I WANT to move inland.” Until that could happen she was forbidding the children to leave the fenced yard around the quarters because they might injure themselves in the driftwood. The petty officer’s recent bride, dwelling in the building attached to the base of the lighthouse tower itself, was disconcerted to have in her living room one huge round wall which emitted a night-long beamish hum.
The bosun’s mate heard them out, evidently not for the first time, then led the pair of us off to see any further feature of lighthouse keeping he could think of. The day, blown pure by last night’s wind, had its own magnifying clarity. Mountains rose in white shards far north along the Canadian coastline. Mount Baker lorded over the glinting horizon of the Cascades to our east, highest ice-flame among dozens of ice-flames, while the Olympic range crowded full the sky south and west of us. Dungeness seemed more astounding than ever, a gift of promontory grafted carefully amid the mountains and strait.
