by Ivan Doig
Thursday. My surmise last evening proved correct, it was the cutter Joe Lane which arrived. Mr Webster came down and breakfasted with me and then went on board the cutter in a canoe with five Indians who afterward conveyed him to Baadah.
Yowarthl brought one cord oven wood today. Paid him 12 buckets of potatoes.
Went to Baadah this PM Mr Webster gave me a letter to send to the Cutter, which I sent by Hopestubbe & Yachah, who carried it and delivered it safe. Wrote this evening....
Friday. 7.30 AM The Cutter got under way and stood out of the bay bound to Barclay Sound in search of Bark Narramissic, said to be lost or missing....
Saturday. Went to Baadah to pay off Indians. Peter says that a short time since a Quillehuyte Indian named Towallanhoo came across by way of the Hoko river and from thence down on foot to Baadah where he arrived at night and reconnoitered Mr Webster’s premises and then passed on to Waatch. This may account for the Indians asking me if I was not afraid to be alone in this great house and also the reason why Russian Jim cautioned me not to open my door to any one without enquiring who was there, for the Indians say that the Quillehuytes have threatened to come here and attack, the whites. This may or may not be true and may be only some scheme of these people to do mischief and charge it on the Quillehuytes.
Day Eighteen
Swan’s day-upon-day sluice of diary words: why?
Was the diarying habit something which surfaced out of instinct, the unslakable one that murmurs in some of us that our way to put a mark on the world is not with sword or tool, but pen ? Or did contents mean more to him than the doing of it—the diary a way to touch out into life as it flowed past him and skim the most interesting as an elixir? Either way Swan clearly was not using his pen nib merely to pass the time. So much interested him, inside the covers of books and wherever else his glance fell along this coastline, that boredom seldom seems to have found him. I do accept that the brown-inked words helped to keep straight in memory what he was seeing or being told; Swan possessed a granny’s passion for gossip, and a broker’s fixity on exact sums and issues. But passions and fixities do not commonly last for forty years and two and a half million words by hand. Any of us serve summer terms as diarists, generally at some moonstruck time of our lives. Somewhere in the tumble of family items in a closet of this room is interred, deservedly, the five-year diary I began in my final year of high school. I lasted at the routine a few months and am now told nothing by it but a recitation of football and basketball scores and journeys between my boarding place in town and the family’s sheep ranch. That dry stick of a youngster tracing such items into my life, I can scarcely recognize. Almost twenty years passed before I undertook a diary again—oddly, the occasion was the same as that earliest eddy of Swan’s torrent of paper, a time spent in Britain—and even yet I dodge behind the constant excuse that a page should be a hireling, not the field boss, to evade for days, weeks, at a time. This journal of winter, ninety days of exception, I face down into regularly because it must be kept, as a ship’s log must. To navigate by; know the headway. But Swan’s diary plainly masters him. Pulls his hand down onto each day’s page like a coaxing lover. How far beyond the surface of the paper he ever can be coaxed is yet to be seen. Swan’s days and the land and people of them get scrupulous report; less so his own interior. Unlike that other tireless clerk, Pepys of plague-time London, Swan does not confess himself every second sentence, gaily jot down whom he last tumbled to bed with and is eyeing next nor repent every hangover nor retaste every jealousy. Much more assessor than confessor, is Swan. Yet, yet, his words do configure, make enough significant silhouette that I stare hard for the rest. No, the Swan style of diary-keeping—this dialogue of a man with his days—is not merely maintenance but more like architecture, the careful ungiddy construction of something grand as it is odd. Swan works at these pages of his as steadily, incessantly, as a man building a castle out of pebbles.
Castling his own life, I suppose, while I have the luck to look on in curiosity.
Day Nineteen
In continental outline the United States rides the map as a galleon carpentered together from the woodyard’s leftover slabs: plankish bowsprit ascending at northernmost Maine, line of keel cobbled along Gulf shores and southwest border (Florida the Armada-surplus anchor chain hung fat with seaweed), the surprising long clean amidship straightness of the 49th parallel across upper Midwest and West. This patchwork ship of states is, by chance, prowing eastward. Or as I prefer to think of it, forecastle and bow are awallow in the Atlantic while great lifting tides gather beneath our Pacific portion of the craft.
Trace to the last of this land vessel at the westernmost reach of the state of Washington, to the final briefest tacked-on deck-line of peninsula. There is Cape Flattery, where the Makahs of James G. Swan’s years lived and where I am traveling today.
Towns thin down abruptly along this farthest-west promontory. In the sixty-five-mile stretch beyond Port Angeles only three—Clallam Bay; within sight of there, Sekiu; then after fifteen final miles of dodgy road, Neah Bay—and each one tightly hugs some cove in the northern shoreline of the Olympic Peninsula, as if grateful to have been rolled ashore out of the cold wallowing waters of the Strait.
The tiny communities exist on logging and seasonal salmon fishing and, as such places do, produce ample vacant time for their citizens to eye one another. The man beside me this morning at the Sekiu café counter was working his way through hash browns, sunnyside eggs, toast, sausage, coffee, and vehemence.
“That kid,” he grumped across the room to the waitress, “that kid never did make much of a showing for himself around here. Glad to see him gone.” An instant later, of someone else: “Never liked that lamebrained SOB anyway.” As fork and tongue flashed, a close contest whether his meal or the local population would be chomped fine first.
At Neah Bay, now at midmorning, I am the one looked at, for my red beard and black watch cap. The Makahs of Neah Bay have been studying odd white faces in their streets for the past two hundred years. One story suggests that an early Russian sailing vessel smashed ashore at Cape Flattery and Swan believed that those survivors and probably other voyagers had left their genetic calling cards. (Some Makahs, he noted, have black hair; very dark brown eyes, almost black; high cheek-bones, and dark copper-colored skin; others have reddish hair, and a few, particularly among the children, light flaxen locks....) It is definite that Spanish mariners arrived in the late eighteenth century to build a small clay-brick fort, which seems to have lasted about as long as it took them to stack it together. Every so often Swan and a few interested Indians would poke around in the Spanish shards, and the midden would stir up righteousness in him: How different our position from theirs. They came to conquer. We are here to render benefit.
After a hundred and twenty years as a reservation people under United States governance the Makahs might care to argue that point of benefit. Neah Bay meets the visitor as a splatter of weather-whipped houses, despite its age a tentative town seemingly pinned into place by the heavy government buildings at its corners: Bureau of Indian Affairs offices, Coast Guard enclave, Air Force base on the opposite neck of the peninsula. One building stands out alone in grace, a high-roofed museum built by the tribal council to display the finds from an archaeological dig southward along the coast at Cape Alava. Despite the museum’s brave thrust and the bulky federal presence, the forested hills which crowd the bay seem simply to be waiting until the right moonless night to take back the townsite.
I have brought with me the copied portions of Swan’s diaries where he writes of Cape Flattery’s place in the tribal geography of the North Pacific. Remoteness and the empty expanses of Strait and ocean ought to insulate such a site, but that was not the case at all when Swan lived among the Neah Bay villagers in the early 1860s. He discovered them carrying on a complicated war of nerves, and occasionally biceps, which would do credit to any adventurous modern nation. South, north and east, the Makahs looked from their
pinnacle of land toward some tribal neighbor they were at issue with.
The slowest-simmering of these rivalries extended southward, about a half-day’s canoe journey down the coast to the territory of the Quillayute tribe. The Makahs suspected the Quillayutes of having massacred one of their whaling crews which had been blown downcoast by storm. Time and again this dark tale reached Swan at Neah Bay, occasionally with the added note that the murdered canoemen had been glimpsed as owls with shells hanging from their bills similar to those worn by Makahs in their noses.
Suspicion of the Quillayutes remained a matter of muttering, however. With the Elwhas, east along the strait, the galling issue was their killing of Swell, and it rankled hard and often. (Nor does it seem to have been assuaged by the harvest of those two Elwha heads at Crescent Bay.) In Swan’s diary months Neah Bay jousts repeatedly with Elwha over the dead young chieftain. Early on, Swan and a Makah canoe crew returning from Port Townsend brought back with them an Elwha chief who wanted to talk peace. The Elwha breakfasted with Swell’s brother Peter, everyone seemed to be pleasant and friendly but the point was sledged home to the Elwhas: It is generally understood that if they will kill Charlie entire peace will be restored.
Weeks later, other Elwhas showed up to parley some more, to no further result. Months later, a Makah elder abruptly announced that he was going to set fire to Swell’s burial monument because the white men had not arranged vengeance for his murder.
Of a sudden, inspiration evidently lit by that torching speech, the Makahs now scored a move: Today Peter stole a squaw from Capt. Jack, one of Clallam Indians who was here on a visit. The squaw was part Elwha and Peter took her as a hostage to enforce pay from the Elwhas for robbing and killing a year and a half ago.
The ransom fell through, one of the Makah tribal elders allowed the woman to escape. Peter came to me today with a very heavy heart in consequence of the squaw having absconded.
Just then the attention of the Makahs pivoted abruptly northward, across the Strait, which customarily was the worst direction to have to expect trouble from; the northern Indians beyond Vancouver Island were numerous and powerful canoe-people with a history of raiding almost casually down onto the smaller tribes of the Strait and Sound. The north could mean the Tsimshians and the Tlingits, and most dread of all, the Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, almost to Alaska. Swan once had watched a canoe party of Haidas depart Port Townsend under the uneasy jeers of the local Clallams and Chimakums. For farewell, a Haida woman ripped a handful of grass and blew the shreds in the face of a Chimakum chieftain. That, she said: that is how easily our warriors could kill you.
This once, however, the threat did not loom from the far-north marauders, but from a nearer and smaller tribe, the Arhosetts on the west side of Vancouver Island. A Makah and an Arhosett chief had wrangled about some trading goods: Sah tay hub getting angry because the Arhosett Indian would not agree to his terms, stabbed him with his knife.
Here was a bladed version of Swell’s death, with the Makahs this time on the delivering end, and Swan records Neah Bay’s jitters about the Arhosetts voyaging down on them in revenge: a whooping and yelling all night occasionally firing off guns to show their bravery. No enemy however appeared.
Tension now on two fronts, and during a potlatch at Neah Bay a number of tribesmen from the outlying smaller Makah villages declared they wanted peace at least with the Elwhas. But Peter said that he would never be satisfied until he received pay in some shape for the murder of his brother....
Next, however, intelligence reached the Makahs and of course Swan’s pen that the Arhosetts were having their own problems of pride. This forenoon Frank told me that he had just received news from his father, old Cedakanim of Clyoquot. It appears that the Arhosett Indians have been trying to induce the Clyoquots to join them in an attack on the Makahs....They offered 100 blanks and 20 Makah women as slaves provided they could catch them. Cedakanim and the other Clyoquot chief rejected this offer and demanded a steamboat, a sawmill and a barrel of gold. This difference of opinion came near resulting in a fight but at length old Cedakanim told them he would not fight the Makahs nor did he want any pay from the Arhosetts as he was much richer than they and to prove this he ordered 100 pieces of blubber to be given them....This, said Frank, made the Arhosetts so ashamed that the sweat ran out of their faces....
Perhaps deciding that it would be easier to negotiate with enemies than allies of Cedakanim’s sort, the Arhosetts held back to see what might be forthcoming from Neah Bay. Agent Webster suggested to the Makahs that they offer the Arhosetts a peace settlement of, say, twenty blankets; the U.S. government would provide half the total.
Given the prospect of getting out of a possible war at the cost of only ten blankets of their own, the dramatic Makahs took the chance to preen a bit, find out just how much pride had been sweated out of the Arhosetts. Swan was nominated the Neah Bay plenipotentiary to go over to the Arhosetts and find out if they are willing to settle the affair by a payment to them of blankets, and if so the Arhosetts were to be invited to come over and get them, but we were not to carry anything at first to them but merely to find out the state of their feelings.
As it turned out, the luckless Arhosetts did not even have the face-saving moment of receiving an envoy from the Makahs. Swan peremptorily sent word to them through Cedakanim, the Clyoquot chief who had faced them down with his wealth of blubber, and eventually two abashed Arhosetts arrived at Neah Bay to say they would settle for the blankets.
Peace ensued for two weeks, until the Elwhas protested that a cousin of Peter had wounded with a knife the brother of Swell’s killer, Charlie. Peter responded that he was sorry. Sorry that Charlie’s brother only had been wounded instead of killed, for he would do it himself if he could get a chance.
Peter being Peter, the chance was got. This culminating entry by Swan:
Tried to get Indians to go to Pt. Angeles for Mr. Webster but all are afraid as Peter on his trip down killed an Indian at Crescent Bay. The Indian was an Elwha and some years ago killed Dukwitsa’s father. Peter obtained a bottle and a half of whiskey from a white man at Crescent Bay and while under its influence was instigated by Duktvitsa to kill the Elwha which he did by stabbing him. Peter told me that after he had stabbed the man several times he broke the blade of the knife off in the man’s body.
As might be expected, that stabbing invited battle. As might not be expected, the skirmish lines shaped themselves not be twcen the Makahs and the Elwhas, but the Makahs and the United States. These years at Cape Flattery had been passing with remarkable tranquility between the natives and the white newcomers, as Swan was quite thankfully aware: I have been reading this evening the report of the Comr. of Indian Affairs and it seems singular to be able to sit here in peace and quiet on this the most remote frontier of the United States and read of the hostilities among the tribes between this Territory and the Eastern settlements. Peter’s knife punctured that state of affairs. Swan’s daily narrative begins to show move, countermove, counter-countermove:
Mr. Webster arrested Peter this evening and took him on board the sch. A. J. Westen to be taken to Steilacoom, the territorial army headquarters.
...A canoe with a party of Indians followed the schooner and this evening it was reported that they had rescued Peter and conveyed him to Kiddekubbut. I think this report doubtful. But later ascertained it was true...Old Capt. John and 16 others came this forenoon to make me a prisoner and keep me as long as Mr. Webster keeps Peter but when they found that Peter had escaped they came to tell me not to be afraid. I said I was not afraid of any of them and gave them a long lecture. John said I had a skookum tumtum.
...The steamer Cyrus Walker with a detachment of # soldiers under Lieut. Kestler arrived at Neah Bay about midnight of Tuesday....The steamer with Mr. Webster on board proceeded to Kiddekubbut and succeeded in arresting 14 Indians: Peter and thirteen others.
Peter now vanishes from the Neah Bay chronicle, to Swan’s considerable reli
ef. I have tried for the past three years to make Mr. Webster believe what a bad fellow Peter is, the diary splutters in farewell to the Makah warlock.
A fiery enough record, these few years of Makah bravado and occasional bloodshed as chronicled by Swan. Yet while this sequence of ruckus was occurring out on the poop deck of the continent at Cape Flattery, the United States of America and the Confederate States of America were inventing modern mass war at Antietam and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. If it is a question as to which civilization in those years was more casual with life, the Makahs don’t begin to compete with the Civil War’s creeks and bayous of blood. Nor has their martial inventiveness kept pace with our own. Driving here from Seattle this morning, I stopped at the west end of the highway bridge which sweeps across Hood Canal on barge-sized concrete pontoons and looked along the channel to where a military base is being built for nuclear-missile-bearing Trident submarines. The killing capacity of Swan’s tetchy Makahs compares to that of a Trident as a jackknife to bubonic plague.
Some hours in Neah Bay fitting its geography onto Swan’s era—a breakwater, built in the name of World War II security, now stretches from the west headland of the bay to Waadah Island; the Bureau of Indian Affairs buildings top the eastern point where Webster’s trading post stood—and I turn toward the ocean.
Cape Flattery is, as I have said, as far west as you can step on the mainland forty-eight states of America. But along the Cape’s Pacific extremity there are thrusts of cliff actually out above the ocean; ultimate sharp points of landscape as if a new compass heading had been devised for here, west of west.
