by Ivan Doig
The knot on his forehead barely visible beneath his cap bill, hands fisted for warmth into his jacket pockets, the bosun’s mate looked around at this ice-and-water rim of the Pacific Northwest in a quick expert glance, then turned to us.
“I’m a shallow water sailor,” he announced as if introducing himself. “A true coastie.”
The Dungeness light has blinked through a number of hundreds of nights since then, and today in bright sun Carol and I casually prowl the inside shore of the Spit, around to where smaller Graveyard Spit veers off from Dungeness. In outline from the air Dungeness and Graveyard together look like a long wishbone, Graveyard poking shoreward from near the end of Dungeness like the briefer prong of the forked pieces. Out there now just beyond where they join, the lighthouse and outbuildings sit in silhouette against Mount Baker, a white peg and white boxes beside that tremendous tent of mountain.
I am watching for snowy owls. This is a year in their cycle of migration which brings them far south from the Arctic, and we once sighted one here, a wraith of white against the gray driftwood. Pleased with ourselves, we returned to Seattle to discover that another snowy had taken up a roost on a television antenna above a midcity restaurant and half the population had been out to see him. No owl today, nor the blue herons who often stilt along Graveyard Spit.
We stay with the inside shore, the one facing Graveyard. The wild-fowl side, commissary for migrating ducks and brant, as the outward shore is the lagoon for seals who pop up and disappear as abruptly as periscopes. Today’s find presents itself here on the interior water: a half-dozen eider ducks making their kor-r-r, kor-r-r chuckles to each other, then, as if having discussed to agreement, all diving at once.
An edge of ice whitens the shoreline, a first for all the times—fifty? seventy-five?—we have come here. Full-dress winter greeted Swan once, in January of 1880: We arrived in Dungeness harbor at 10 AM and found three feet of snow had fallen during the night. Everything was covered with a white mantle, our boat’s deck was loaded with snow and the light house tower on its north east side had a thick coating from the base to the lantern. Fog signal house and all the other outbuildings were covered, and the whole scenery of Dungeness Spit and bluff was the most like an Eastern winter of any I have seen in this country. This afternoon, mountains stand in all directions with the clear loveliness Swan observed during one of his early visits—unobscured by mist or clouds their snowy peaks shone most gloriously....Across the Strait at Vancouver Island, where we can see in miniature detail the tallest downtown buildings of twenty-mile-distant Victoria, Swan had marveled at the endless timber level as a field of wheat, following the undulation of the ground with a regular growth most wonderful for such a dense forest.
How cold the day, but how little wind, not always the case in this restless spot. Swan on an excursion past the Spit on a day in May of 1862:
Stopped for the night at the light house where Mr Blake, the keeper treated me very politely to a supper & a share of his bed. Next morning: Left the light house at 3:15 A.M., calm. Passed round the spit where a breeze sprung up which freshened into a squall wth rain. A tremendous surf was breaking on the beach & we for a time were in great peril. But finally we managed to get ashore at Point Angeles where we found shelter....
Dark settles early, the sun spinning southwest into the Olympic Mountains instead of dropping near the end of the Strait as it does in summer. We leave the Spit before dusk, heading back to Seattle to spend New Year’s Eve in our traditional geographically diverse game of penny-ante poker. Baltimore—“Ballumer,” she says it—will play her challenging, by-God-you’re-not-going-to-get-away-with-it style. Texas, behind a cigar which would credit J. P. Morgan, contents himself until a strong hand, when he raises and reraises relentlessly. Carol—New Jersey—is the steadiest of the bunch, and wins regularly from the rest of us. By way of Montana—me—comes an uncharacteristically fevered kind of style which can swathe through the game, devastating everybody else for three or four hands in a row, or obliterating my own stake.
Swan would approve the pastime, if not our particular card-table temperaments. He once passed up a chance to visit with the lightkeeper at Dungeness because he and the others concluded to remain on board, devoting our energies to the successful performance of a game of seven-up, or all-four, or old sledge, as that wonderful combination of cards is variously termed.
Day Twelve
The new year.
On Sunday, January 1, 1860, his first New Year’s Day on the coast of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Swan creased open a new tan pocket diary and inscribed on its first page:
May it be not only the commencement of the week, the month and the year, but the commencement of a new Era in my life, and may good resolve result in good action.
Day Thirteen
Today Mr Brooks, William Ingraham & myself finished setting the posts for the main building of the school house and when we had all ready which was at noon, I told Capt John to call the Indians. Some twenty-five or thirty came out and when Mr Brooks was ready I told John who then gave the word and the sticks were lifted into their places and the whole of the sills for the main building fastened together in about an hour. I told John that when the buildings were done Mr Webster would give them a treat to pay for the good feelings evinced on this occasion. They have been opposed to having the building erected back of their lodges and I have had a deal of explanation to make, to do away with the superstitious prejudices of the old men. But by the exercise of a great deal of patience I have succeeded in inspiring them with a confidence in me, which makes them believe not only what I tell them is true, but what we are doing is for their good.
The noontime came on the fifteenth of October 1862, and the exertions which overtopped the cedar longhouses of the Makahs with the framework of a schoolhouse lofted more good for James G. Swan than he let his pen admit.
Precisely when his mind had become set on securing the job as teacher at Neah Bay, there is no direct evidence. But hints murmur up from the diary pages. Likely as early as those first visits to Cape Flattery in 1859 Swan divined that Henry Webster would try for the appointment as Indian agent when the Makah Reservation came into being. Even more likely is that Webster, noticing Swan’s knack of getting along with the Indians, advised or asked him to seek a Reservation job.
Those discernments and Swan’s rummaging curiosity about Makah tribal life were the pulls to Neah Bay. The push was that Port Townsend had not worked out well for Swan, and a fundamental reason seems to have been whiskey.
Once I happened across the lines of a diarying compatriot o£ Swan’s, a Scot named Melrose who also had alit to the Pacific Northwest—to Victoria, north on the Canadian coast of the Strait—early in the 1850s. The alcoholic atmosphere of this frontier enthused Melrose to near rapture. “It would almost take a line of packet ships,” he wrote cheerily, “running regularly between here and San Francisco to supply this isle with grog, so great a thirst prevails among its inhabitants.” Melrose took care to note down how far his companions in thirst overcame their parching: whether each had become one-quarter drunk, one-half drunk, three-quarters drunk, or wholly drunk. Every so often the Melrose diary presents the forthright wavery notation: “author whole D.”
Swan, I hardly need say, was not a man to record himself as whole D or any other degree of it. But that he was tussling with the temptation of the bottle is plain enough in his own diary even so.
Joined the Dashaway Club of Port Townsend—a group who took a pledge of abstinence and whom one unsympathetic editor dubbed a claque of “high-toned drunkards.”
Cut my lip with a brush hook this evening in Gerrishes store in a scuffle with Maj. Van Bokkelin—Van Bokkelin was one o£ Swan’s closest friends and a pillar of community respect, and a scuffle hardly thinkable of a sober Swan.
Days later, Made a pledge...not to drink any more liquor for two years from this date, the ninth of December 1860.
That pact may have been as much with Webster, gatek
eeper to future employment at the Makah Reservation, as with himself. Whether or not, most of the next twenty-one months until Webster finally was able to pluck the appointment as Indian agent found Swan odd-jobbing in sobriety at Neah Bay. (And quartering at the Baadah Point trading post with Webster and whoever else happened to be on hand, in what seems to have been a peppery household: During the evening a’skunk came into the kitchen to eat swill. Mr Webster fired at him with his pistol, cutting some of his hair off with the boil. The skunk made his escape but filled the house with his stench.) Some months more had to pass before Webster could enroll Swan on the Makah Reservation payroll as teacher, but then, the first of July of 1862, at last Swan having secured position and salary, immediate dig-nification sets in. Three and a half years of jotted doings in pocket notebooks leave off and the first of Swan’s ledger diaries, the pages long and officious and the handwriting scrupulously clear and margined, ensues.
What is recorded for the first year and more has nothing to do with education, except that over this course of time Swan’s classroom ever so slowly gets carpentered to completion. Instead Swan spent the time lending a hand in the sundry chores of the little Neah Bay work force, especially the labors of the Reservation’s farmer, Maggs, earnest bearer of agriculture to damp Cape Flattery.
“Making the earth say beans instead of grass,” Thoreau teased himself about his garden at Walden. At Neah Bay, the official notion was that the brush-tufted coastal soil ought to orate potatoes.
We plow the land twice, Swan recorded, harrow it twice, then plow in the potatoes and harrow the whole over again....If what we plant grows as thrifty as the wild raspberry, currant, gooseberry and elder and nettles, cow parsnip and other rubbish grew we shall have a famous crop. A kind of Hibernian woefulness moans through this idea of remaking such a people of the sea as the Makahs into potato farmers. I think of the “potato Protestants” of Connaught in the Irish famine, forced to barter their religion for the meals of survival. (Credit Swan with grave doubts about persuading the Makahs to trade canoe for plow: Indians cannot live on potatoes alone, any more than the white man; they require animal food, and prefer the products of the ocean to the farina of the land. It will take many years, and cost the Government large sums of money to induce these savages to abandon their old habits of life and acquire new ones....I think they should be encouraged in their fisheries... .) The Makahs, however, with an oceanful of seafood at their front doors, were not at the edge of desperation and so managed to make the best of the potato policy. As democratic eaters they blithely demanded their spud allotments whenever a harvest was produced. But as uninspired agriculturalists they conspicuously left most of the plowing and other field labor to Maggs and Swan.
Through 1862 and most of 1863, Swan dabbles as extra muscle in the potato field. Gleans lore from the Makahs. (Captain John is an ever-ready, if problematical, fund of it: ]ohn as a general thing is a great liar, but he is well informed on all historical matters....) Does sketchwork. Keeps the diary constant. And otherwise disposes of days until the carpenter hired by Webster at last whams the final nail into his schoolhouse.
Webster himself is absent from Neah Bay much of the time now that he has Swan and the others in place there, so Swan fairly often discovers himself standing in as arbiter among the Indians. Peter came in this evening and had a long talk with me relative to his conduct since he came back from California. He promised to do better and said he hoped I would be friendly to him. I told him I always had been his best friend and was now, but his actions had displeased me and in particular the fact that he had not paid a debt he owed in Port Townsend to Sheehan the tinsmith....And sometimes the tumbleweed white population as well. Capt Melvin arrived in the schooner Elisabeth. He had been down on a trading voyage and had been trading whiskey among the Nittinat Indians in the vicinity of Barclay Sound...he assured me positively that he had not nor would he sell any liquor near the reserve. He however inadvertently showed me his account book and I saw that he had with his potatoes one barrel 33 gallons whiskey...I advised him to keep away from where I was for so soon as I had proof of his selling whiskey so sure would I complain of him.
This Neah Bay Swan, if you look steadily at him for a moment, is a greatly more interesting and instructive fellow than the Shoalwater oysterer/loiterer first met on this frontier coast. He has shown himself to be a chap who likes to hear a story and to take a drink, not absolutely in that order; reveals a remarkable fast knack for friendships, among whites and Indians both; is as exact a diarist as ever filled a page and as steadily curious as a question mark; contrives not to stay in the slog of any job very long (although we shall have to see about this forthcoming profession in the Cape Flattery schoolhouse); can drily characterize—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—or get a bit preachy—I told Peter I always had been his best friend and was now, but—long since has unwifed and defamilied himself yet maintains week by week steady correspondence with Matilda, Ellen, and Charles; hardly ever meets a meal he doesn’t like or a coastal scene he doesn’t hanker to sketch; muses occasionally, observes always.
And is about to offer more instruction yet. Mid-November of 1863, the potato harvest in, the schoolhouse at last roofed and windowed, I painted the alphabet on the blocks Mr. Phillips made for me and tomorrow I intend to commence teaching.
Day Fourteen
Neah Bay pedagogy gets off to a stuttery start. The first morning, the seventeenth of November of 1863, a single student showed up; Captain John’s ten-year-old nephew, Jimmy Claplanhoo. Swan chose a bit of guile. This evening I got out the magic lantern and gave Jimmy an exhibition of it as a reward.... Within a few days four more Makah children edged into the schoolroom and were treated to Swan’s picture show. By the end of the first week, Twenty children present today exercised them on the alphabet and then gave them a pan full of boiled potatoes.
Success in the schoolroom, discord in the world. Something here sets Swan unusually to brooding about the Civil War and its politics: I do not believe in the principles of the Republican party as enunciated by Greely, Sumner, Phillips, Beecher...but I do believe that the country is in real danger and I believe at such times it is the duty of every true man to stand by his Government (no matter what the party) in saving this country and ourselves from ruin.
That out of his system, Swan goes on to record that the Indians’ dogs killed two skunks in the lumber pile.
He next has to take three days out to supervise the digging of the schoolhouse cellar, introducing the Makah laborers to the wheelbarrow, which they think a hilarious machine. Then a drain to carry the runoff from the schoolhouse roof needs to be finished. Jimmy Claplanhoo comes down with a cough so severe that Swan worries the ailment may be consumption. The Makahs put on a raucous tamanoas ceremony to boost Jimmy’s health, just as a gale rips across Neah Bay. Crows tip over Swan’s rain gauge. He sets to work on them with shotgun and strychnine. Makahs from the village of Waatch arrive for Swan to dispense potatoes to. One of the Makah men brings his two-year-old son to school to learn the alphabet and creates uproar by spanking the tot for not mastering it. A number of the Indians embark on a drinking spree which gets rougher as it progresses day by day. There are knife wounds and one combatant smashes three canoes with a stone before other partyers knock him out with a brick.
At risk here was more than a few cedar hulls. This drunken frolic shows how easily these people can be excited to deeds of violence, Swan’s pen scolds. We are powerless under the present circumstances either to prevent these drunken scraps or protect ourselves in case of an attack. But I have not the least apprehension of any difficulty if liquor is kept from them.
Now Swan catches cold; I have not felt so sick for a year certainly. Jimmy Claplanhoo’s health mends and he arrives back at school. The agency’s winter larder begins to be questionable: Sometimes we are very short of provisions and have to depend on our beef ba
rrel, then again the Indians will bring in such quantities of fish and game that there is a surfeit. The agency cattle start dying. Cold, damp weather holds and holds. On December 16 the most remarkable fall of rain I have ever known, gurgling to the top of his rain gauges twice,’ a total of nearly seven inches. A number of the Indians begin another knockabout drinking party. One participant this time is blasted in the arm with a dragoon pistol and another asks to borrow a shovel from Swan. He went to where old Flattery Jack, Sixey’s father had been buried and dug up one of his arm bones which was taken and bound on as splints to the arm of Sixey. The Indians believing that the bone from the father’s arm would cure.
A weakened bull from the staggering agency herd has to be put in the basement of the schoolhouse for shelter. He takes out a window on his way in. Another party of Makahs from Waatch troops in to purchase a bride: They came in the house and rigged themselves up with masks and feathers and all went to Whattie’s house to make their trade.
Five weeks since Jimmy Claplanhoo inaugurated the schoolhouse, Webster at last sails into the bay with some supplies, and an audible sigh lifts from the ledger pages as Swan turns his pen toward the coming of Christmas and the making of a plum pudding.
Day Fifteen
The strop of this weather on the days, each one brought identically keen, tingling. Rainless hours after rainless hours glimmering past, it has dawned on me how extraordinary is this dry cold time, as if I were living in the Montana Rockies again but without the clouting mountain-hurled wind. There is a bright becalmed feel, a kind of disbelief the winter has about itself. Other years, by now I might have shrugged almost without noticing into our regional cloak of rain and cloud, the season’s garment of interesting texture and of patterned pleasant sound as well. “Rain again,” a friend growls. “Right,” I say and smile absently, listening for the boommm and whoommm of foghorns out in the murk of Puget Sound. But through yesterday morning the temperature hung below freezing for four days and nights in a row, the longest skein of its kind I can remember here at the rim of the Sound. I bury our kitchen vegetable scraps directly into my garden patch each evening as immediate compost and the shovel brings up six-inch clods of frozen soil, like lowest-grade coal.
