by Ivan Doig
...In 66 consecutive days there has fallen a little more than 2½ feet of water. I think that Astoria, which is usually accounted the most rainy place on this coast, can hardly beat this quantity....
...I have got the names of the male decendants of Deeart the chief from whom Neeah Bay or Deeah as these Indians pronounce it is taken. There are twelve generations and by a little patience I can trace the various collateral branches and by that means find out the relationship existing between the present descendants. But to ask these Indians as Mr Morgan lays down the rule viz “what do I call my grandmothers great aunt” &c, the answer invariably is “Klonas” or dont know.
...2 Indian cradles 1 grass blanket 2 medicine rattles made of scallop shells 2 birds nests 1 little basket robins eggs fossil crabs baskets of shells 1 bark head dress 1 crab...
When we think of our once glorious Union, from its struggling commencement, to the culminating glory of its zenith, as Longfellow says, “We know what master laid the keel/What workmen framed thy ribs of steel...” and then look upon the old ship of state as she now lies wrecked, broken, and apparently a total loss, it is almost enough to make a man doubt whether that Providence who has hitherto watched over us, has not for some national sin withdrawn from us for a season his protecting care....But I am digressing from a commonplace letter on bird skins into topics that have puzzled wiser heads than mine.
Most often these bulletins from Swan’s persistent pen emerged onto the desk of an even more prodigious creator of mail: Spencer Fullerton Baird, assistant secretary and second-in-command of the Smithsonian. Swan had met both Baird and the secretary of the Smithsonian, Joseph Henry, during that interim of his in the national capital in the late 1850s. Henry and Baird added up to a most formidable museum team. While Henry, a practical scientist who had made pioneering discoveries in electromagnetism, enforced a tone of scientific enterprise for the Smithsonian, Baird was endeavoring to fill the place up like a silo.
He was one of those Victorian work machines, Baird, who could have run the affairs of the world by himself if he’d had more writing hands. In 1860 he noted in his journal that he had dashed off a total of 3,050 letters that year, without the aid of stenographers. And he soon got stenographers. Baird’s passion was nothing less than to capture North American nature for the Smithsonian. When in 1850 he moved from his post as a professor of natural history to the Smithsonian, with him arrived two freight cars of his own bird specimens. Ever since, he had been welcoming, as the institution’s annual reports testify, items ranging from dead garter snakes to meteorites. And perpetually, perpetually, churning out his messages of encouragement to an army of unofficial Smithsonian helpers who ranged from backyards amateurs—“Never fear the nonacceptability of anything you may send,” Baird once wrote to an enthusiast who had been mailing in insects from Eutaw, Alabama—to such scientific eminences as Louis Agassiz and George Perkins Marsh.
Swan’s enlistment date was January 10, 1860. He put a box of seashells aboard a steamer at Port Townsend, happy at all times, he assured the Smithsonian’s caliphs of science, to add my humble collections to specimens in your museums.
The Smithsonian and Baird of course were rare eminences to Swan’s back-of-beyond existence while Swan was merely one, and a most distant one at that, of a battalion of science-struck gleaners. When the orb of microfilm begins to glow out its “LETTERS TO SWAN FROM SPENCER F. BAIRD,” the difference between the epistles of the man in the frontier schoolhouse and the man in the red-brick castle registers about as might be expected.
I should be pleased did your time permit it you could give me some reliable idea of the state of affairs at Washington, Swan will pen, exuberantly—wistfully?—filling all four sides of a folded broadsheet. I can gather very little from the contradictory statements of the newspapers and know about as much of the doings of the Khan of Tartary as of our own government. Back from Baird arrives a considerable fraction less of paper and bonhomie: We had the very great pleasure today of receiving the box of shells from Nee-ah Bay sent by you....
Master of perfunctory encouragement that Baird was, he nonetheless did enrich Swan’s life at Cape Flattery. The specimens Baird asked for—birds and fish, particularly—made a welcome change of task from the Neah Bay routine Swan once summed as attending to the sick, listening to Indian complaints of various hinds and looking after things generally. (The Makahs occasionally held a dimmer view of Swan’s break the-monotony specimen collecting. Last evening I shot a horned owl of the mottled grey species....This forenoon I skinned it and prepared it for the Smithsonian Institution. The Indians think owls are dead Indians and I had quite a talk with some children who assured me that the owl was not a bird but an Indian.) And as Swan freighted in his hodgepodge of promising items, Baird sent west to him an array of books of science, another bonus to a frontier life. (Swan was a reader. Through the years in the diaries I look over his shoulder to Stanley’s account of tracking Livingstone, Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, Thackeray’s Pendennis, Melville’s Omoo...) Most vital of all in these Neah Bay years, Baird’s encouragement sat Swan down to an ambitious piece of scholarly enterprise: an ethnological study of the Makahs.
Swan likely did not even think of his intention as ethnology, or its mother science, anthropology. Only in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution, not all that many years before, were such fields of study becoming recognized. Language, not the net of culture behind it, was the original lure for Swan, the Neah Bay diaries every so often showing self-instruction in Makah: December Se-whow-ah-puthl January S-a-kwis-puthl February Klo-kjo-chis-to-puthl... Eventually Swan is complimented by a visiting tribesman that he thought I was a real Indian as I could talk Makah so well....I said to him that I could only talk the Makah dialect a little. But Swan did have the necessary impulse, the flywheel of curiosity within him—or call it that penchant for eyewitnessing—to follow language into culture. I know the importance of making these collections and writing the Indian memoirs now, while we are among them and can get reliable facts, he once avows to Baird. The time is not distant, when these tribes will pass away, and future generations who may feel an interest in the history of these people will wonder why we have been so negligent.
The Indians of Cape Flattery took Swan more than two years to write, and his constant deskmate was interruption. In order to have the work go on as rapidly as possible with the Government buildings I have been obliged to sink the teacher into the caterer for the mess, Swan reported to Baird in the midst of the school-house construction, and a person arranging for the appetites of six hearty men who must have three full meals per day cannot find much opportunity for belles lettres.
But on the thirteenth of April 1865, Swan could jubilate that I have finished my paper on the Makah Indians at last and packed it with the sketches which accompany it in a snug parcel....
“Paper” barely described the work: a 55,000-word ream of manuscript about how the Makahs lived and spoke and believed. Swan’s fetish for fact is on the finished result like a watermark. He describes the Makahs’ canoes, how they fished and hunted seals and whales, what their ceremonies and legends were, how their masks looked, the tribal ailments, what games the children played, what the tribe ate and wore, how they told time, what they called the months of the year: think of a daily moment of life and Swan probably has set down for you how a Makah spent it. And what an interplanetary meeting of wordmen it is to imagine Spencer Baird being introduced, courtesy of Swan’s pen, to Captain John: About three years ago he had lost the use of one of his feet, probably from paralysis, but which he attributed to a “skookoom” or evil spirit, entering into it one day while he was bathing. He had been confined to his house for several months, and was reduced to a skeleton. I saw him during this sickness, and thought he could not recover. One pleasant day, however, according to his account, he managed to crawl to a brook near his house, and, while bathing, heard a rustling sound in the air, at which he became frightened, and covered his face with his bla
nket, whereupon a raven alighted within a few feet of him and uttered a hoarse croak• He then peeped through a corner of his blanket and saw the raven with its head erect, its feathers bristled, and a great swelling in its throat. After two or three unsuccessful efforts, it finally threw up a piece of bone about three inches long, then uttering another croak it flew away. Remaining quiet a few minutes, till he was satisfied that the raven had gone, he picked up the bone, which he gravely informed me was of the Ha-hek-to-ak. He hid this bone near by, and returned to his lodge, and, after relating the occurrence, was informed by the Indian doctors that it was a medicine sent to him by his tamanawas, and this proved to be true, as he entirely recovered in three days.... Swan now steps into the narrative with a bit of exegesis: The tale of the raven alighting near him is not improbable, as ravens as well as crows are very plenty and very tame; nor is it impossible that the raven might have had a bone in its mouth, and finally dropped it; nor is it entirely uncertain that the circumstance so affected his superstitious imagination that it caused a reaction in his system, and promoted his recovery. The same effect might perhaps have been produced by a smart shock from a galvanic battery.
The Makah manuscript done, Swan leaned back to await publication by the Smithsonian. It began to be a long lean. In the microfilm’s blizzard of lines a year passes, two, three. Swan is writing heavier and heavier nudges to Baird. The second of November, 1868: Can you give one any encouragement that it will appear within the next decade? Yet another year: sixteenth of November 1869: When that Makah memoir is published??!!! I should like some copies to send to several officers at Sitka who are much interested in Indian matters....
Either the deprivation of the Sitka officers or the explosion of punctuation did the job. At the start of 1870 The Indians of Cape Flattery, even yet the primary source on the historical Makahs, came into print.
Day Thirty-Nine
Time spent today in the words of other westerners, to try to see Swan within his lineage of frontier ink.
The journals of Lewis and Clark while their expedition sheltered in winter quarters at the tiny stockade called Fort Clatsop, just south of the mouth of the Columbia River. Like Swan, Captain William Clark marks the daily weather scrupulously, but his has a terrible soggy sameness: in four months at Fort Clatsop it rained every day but twelve. A late February day in 1806 begins with typical lament:
we are mortified at not haveing it in our power to make more celestial observations since we have been at Fort Clatsop, but such has been the state of the weather that we have found it utterly impractiable.
Then the captain brightens and as Swan so often did, turns sketch artist.
I purchased of the Clatsops this morning about half a bushel of small fish—they were candlefish, an oily little species—which they had cought about 40 miles up the Columbia in their scooping nets, as this is an uncommon fish to me and one which no one of the party has ever seen, on the next page I have drawn the likeness of them as large as life....
The candlefish swims delicately there among the words, eternally angled along the flow of Clark’s handwriting as if feeding now and again on stray periods and apostrophes.
In Stegner’s The Gathering of Zion, an excerpt from the trail diary of the Mormon girl Patience Loader. In the overland migration to the far half of America opened by Lewis and Clark she was pilgrimaging west to Zion with one of the handcart brigades of 1856, the travelers’ tumbrils in heavy groaning tow all the thousand miles from the Missouri River to Utah. Having trudged six hundred of those miles Patience Loader and weary others began to ford the North Platte River in Wyoming: ...the water was deep and very cold and we was drifted out of the regular crossing and we came near being drounded the water came up to our arm pits poor Mother was standing on the bank screaming as we got near the bank I heard Mother say for God Sake some of you men help My poor girls....Several of the breathren came down the bank of the river and pulled our carts up for us and we got up the best we could...when we was in the middle of the river I saw a poor brother carreying his child on his back he fell down in the water I never knew if he was drowned or not I fealt sorrey that we could not help him but we had all we could do to save ourselves....
In my own scrawl, in one of the 4 × 6 hip-pocket notebooks which traveled western Montana with me the summer before last: Day 2...Gateway Gorg, Yosmit-lk rock c thrusts browing b o us.... Curious to compare, I’ve dug out these notes of the backpack hike Carol and I made into the Bob Marshall Wilderness (and already notice two mighty alterations from Captain Clark’s West and Patience Loader’s West: now it is the wild places which are the enclaves hewn into America’s geography, and now we count our “wilderness” experience by days instead of seasons). From my mix of speedwriting and single-letter Russian prepositions those scenes of the Rockies translate for me again: mountainsides of colossal reefs and deeps like the ocean bottom tipped empty and left on its side...canyons everywhere...high narrow table of trail above the South Fork...Gateway Gorge, Yosemite-like rock with thrusts browing in on us....Me: There’s frost on the outside of the tent. Carol: It’s on the inside....4th day of no people....Made Badger Pass at 12—only slight incline to cross Continental Divide there then climb for 1 hour over ridge to North Fork gorge. At top a sleet squall hit, we took shelter in trees; pellets of hail convinced us to put wool jackets on. Ate trail food, drank water and waited out squall...sound of rocks avalanching to the south...Another 10 mile day....From the top of Family Peak through a notch to the east, farmland pattern of the plains could be seen.... We came out of the mountains not having seen any other humans for five days; had not been dined on by grizzlies or entrapped by sleet; and felt a joy as huge as the peaks behind us.
Clark’s winter of black rain brightened by a candlefish, Patience Loader’s wade through horror; our own brief plunge into what-is-left-of-wilderness, to see how we would fare in it. Reminders to be kept in view while I saunter within Swan’s orderly ledger that the edge of America can also be a brink.
Day Forty
A silver-bright day. Air clear and cold, ready to crinkle like silk, and for the second night in a row frost has daubed its way all across the ground and up into the first branches of the evergreens.
I have a queer edgy clarity in myself, consequence of so few hours’ sleep: a grittiness like diamond dust. Luckily, sleeplessness comes to me in small seasons, two or three nights in a row then vanishes, else I cannot imagine what my daily mood would be like. These strange beings, ourselves. Needing the night but sometimes entirely at odds with it. My nights when sleep will not be coaxed I roll like a driftlog on one of Swan’s beaches, and between last bedtime and early morning I wallowed a deep trough in the dark. In the bed beside mine, Carol’s breathing form calmly ingested the blackness, channeled it on its smooth underskin routes. While my mind was a black blaze. Anything makes fuel; a walk taken around the neighborhood after supper, the day’s writing, a letter from a friend. I steadily try a number of sleepmaking stunts. Breathe deeply, with forced regular rhythm. Let my tongue loll like a loosened strap. Try to sheet the mind with a white blankness. And have the success of a man attempting to win attention to his coin trick against the roaring backdrop of a three-ring circus.
The frustration is double. Sleep at best is a sharp cost of time, not-sleep is a cost to both. Yet not always; there is this morning’s cold clarity, as if the white duff of frost had crept into me during the night too.
Swan on the Makah version of restlessness: Last evening Peter wanted his Squaw to go home with him, she was then in Tahahowtls lodge. She refused, whereupon Peter pitched into her, pulled her hair and blacked her eye. Tahahowtl interfered and Peter went at him and they had a hair pulling match and finally separated to get their guns but friends interfered....
Noon. The morning would not be calmed, kept shoving aside Swan’s logbooks for its own. I let the hours roam back along the entire wordstream of this winter so far, turned them loose on the question of why the West takes hold of a James Sw
an, an Ivan Doig. Notions—they are not answers yet, if they ever grow up to be—tumbled like the scenes in yesterday’s retrieved notebook of the Marshall Wilderness days:...Perhaps the choice of place is in our body chemistry simply as other patterns of taste are, regulating me to dislike brussel sprouts, the color pink, and square miles of pavement....The west of America draws some of us not because it is the newest region of the country but because it is the oldest, in the sense that the landscape here—the fundament, nature’s shape of things—more resembles the original continent than does the city-nation of the Eastern Seaboard or the agricultural factory of the Midwest. As for so much else, mountains account for it. They, and the oceans, are virtually the last pieces of earth we have not someway tamed, transformed. Although we are striving. Go in an airplane above the Cascade Range to see clearcut logging like countless patches of fur shaved off. Study the logging roads which incise the high edges of the Olympics....Or are we drawn west, or merely deposited? The way, say, spores drop into a forest: some spot is found in the immense environment, life is stubbornly established and clung to, whether the site turns out to be rich humus or up a tree?
Enough. What counts for now, this winter, is to keep the question open, let the hours chase at it when they will.
Day Forty-One
