by Ivan Doig
Reputation here has waned a bit, too, at least from what I can determine by reading around in Port Townsend’s past. Swan once writes that in its early years the town was noted for whiskey so strong it was suspected to be a vile compound of alcohol red pepper, tobacco and coal oil. The quality of Port Townsend’s early inhabitants occasionally was questioned in similar tones, as when a transplanted Virginian assessed his period of residence: “Suh, when I first came here, this town was inhabited by three classes of people—Indians, sailors, and sons of bitches. Now I find that the Indians have all died, and the sailors have sailed away.” Those of us who grew up in small towns of such lineage (“Tell ’em”—the Montana rancher to me, sixteen-year-old ranchhand about to brave the community of Browning on a Saturday night—“tell ’em you come from Tough Creek, and you sleep on the roof of the last house”) may become rare as mules in this citifying nation, but meanwhile a Port Townsend, adoze out on its end of the continent, reminds us of the vividness.
No ferry from the cities of Puget Sound connects to Port Townsend, and the road to its flange of headland on the Strait is a dozen-mile veer from the main highway of the Olympic Peninsula. In fogless weather I can very nearly see to the town, north past the jut of Point No Point, from the bluff above our valley. But driving here on this day of murk, the sky like watered milk and the road spraying up brown slush, Port Townsend seemed far-off and elusive as a lookout tower atop a distant crag.
From its initial moment of settlement, which happened in 1851, the remarkable siting has been Port Townsend’s topic to boast, whenever not cussing it. As the first community astride the Strait of Juan de Fuca-Puget Sound water route, claiming a spacious headland with a sheltering bay along its southeastern side, Port Townsend looked to be a golden spot on the map. But the promontory site turned out not as the dreamed-of stroke of geography collecting all inbound ships but merely a nub of coast around which the lane of maritime commerce bent, like a rope pulleyed over a limb, and lowered cargoes onward to the dock-lands of Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and Olympia. Those cargoes still are going past.
The civic personality did not quite prove out as anticipated, either. Huge aspiring Victorian houses and unexampled views across water shoulder side by side with the scruff and shagginess of a forest clearing. The town is divided between the abrupt waterfront (brinklike in more ways than one: Swan once reports to his diary that One Arm Smith the waterman jell through the privy of the Union hotel down onto the beach and injured himself severely & perhaps fatally) and the expansive reach of bluff behind it, where the big old betrimmed houses rise like a baker’s shelves of wedding cakes. Downtown is divided again, between the blocks of brick emporiums of the 1880s and a straggle of modern stores which look as if they have been squeezed from a tube labeled Instant Shopping Center.
I discover from the diaries that Swan achieved his move from Neah Bay to Port Townsend by way of Boston, a transcontinental detour not entirely surprising from him; if he had been paid by the mile in this Strait period of his life he would have made it to millionairehood. The holiday season of 1866 and the first months of 1867 Swan spent with his daughter and son, Ellen and Charles, and not incidentally was on hand to claim a windfall: an inheritance of $6,427.14 from an uncle. About half the sum he rapidly poured off for merchandise consigned to Port Townsend (1 doz money belts, the pocket diary begins enumerating day by day, 1 covered wagon...1 set harness...cod lines...pistols etc.). Much of the rest flowed away in gifts for Ellen and Charles and in an astounding number of $25 checks written to himself. By the first of June, 1867, he had his bank balance successfully decimated to $647.32, and took ship for the west again.
In mid-July Swan was back here at Port Townsend—he had shortcutted by way of Panama—and in mid-August drifted out the Strait to visit at Neah Bay. Near year’s end he went off on a buying trip to San Francisco for one of the Port Townsend storekeepers. In 1868, at last I find pages where he begins to settle in to town life.
Swan has had another windfall, of sorts. The ship Ellen Foster smashed apart on the rocks near Neah Bay and he undertakes to salvage the wreck. Beachcombing in the truest sense of the word, this is, and Swan holds no illusions about it. The warehouse he rented on the Port Townsend waterfront to sort the Foster’s bounty is consistently dubbed in his diary the junk store.
Simultaneous with the junkwork Swan begins to take on paperwork. As the customs port for the Puget Sound region and county seat and the biggest dab of settlement between Victoria and Seattle, Port Townsend had become a kind of official inkwell for the Strait frontier. Swan always swims best in ink. Rapidly he plucks up semi-job of some official sort after semi-job.
I have established myself here at Port Townsend, he soon confides in one of his letters to Baird at the Smithsonian, having been appointed by the Governor as a notary public and Pilot Commissioner, and by the Supreme Court as United States Commissioner, and having appointed myself as a commission merchant and ship broker. Thus you see honors are easy with me....I reverse the saying that a prophet is without honor for I have the honors without the profit.
Days Forty-Five, Forty-Six, Forty-Seven
Swan has come down with railroad fever.
How strong and delusory a frontier ailment, this notion that wherever you Xed in your town on the blankness of the west, a locomotive soon would clang up to it with iron carloads of money. I admit for Swan and Port Townsend that they had a germ of reason for their railroad hopes: the attractive harbor sited closer to the Pacific and its trade routes than any other of the contending anchorages of Puget Sound. And a single germ can bring on delirium. Swan’s breaks forth in letters to Thomas H. Canfield, an executive of the Northern Pacific Railroad:
Had the most skillful engineer selected a site for a great and magnificent city, he could not have located a more favored spot than the peninsula of Port Townsend....It may be of interest to you as a meteorological fact, that while during the past winter, the snow on the Sierra Nevada has been so deep as to obstruct the Central Rail Road, causing the mails and express to be transported for a time on snow shoes, and while at San Francisco, snow has fallen to the depth of two inches, yet in the mountain passes north of the Columbia River, the greatest depth of snow does not exceed five feet, and on Puget Sound particularly Port Townsend from whence I write, there has not been a particle of snow this winter....The whole of the rich valley of the Chahalis, which empties into Grays Harbor, and the valley of the Willopah the garden of the Territory, which connects with Shoalwater Bay, would be tributary to a city at Port Townsend, and could furnish supplies for a population larger than the dreams of the most sanguine enthusiast....A ship could sail direct from New York with a cargo of Railroad iron, which could be landed at any desired point on Hoods canal....
Swan, I would turn you if I could from this railroad courtship. I know its outcome, and you would be better off spending your ink money and postage to bet on fistfights in your favorite waterfront saloon. The commercial future lay in wait here along the eastern shoreline of Puget Sound, not across there with you at pinnacle-sitting Port Townsend. Seattle and Tacoma, these points where the westward flow of settlement quickest met deep harbors—they became the region’s plump rail-fed ports. (While Swan still was busheling oysters at Shoalwater Bay in 1853, a territorial newspaper already was crediting the barely born town of Seattle with “goaheaditiveness.”) Had Swan and his hamlet of destiny been able to admit it, the very sweep of water which served as Port Townsend’s concourse, Admiralty Inlet and Puget Sound, now made its moat.
The letters to Canfield flew on, however, and in the sixth of the series Swan made bold to say that the Northern Pacific not only needed Port Townsend, it required him as its local eyes and ears:
I would respectfully submit to you whether it would not be for the interest of the company to have some careful reliable person to prepare a statement of all matters of interest relative to the harbors of Puget Sound....For $150, a month I will undertake to furnish every information, and pa
y all the expense of obtaining it, such as travelling expenses boat and canoe hire &c....
Swan in this Port Townsend life is showing something I have not seen much of since his time among the Shoalwater oyster entrepreneurs. He has a little bright streak of hokum in him, which begins at his wallet.
It is the thing I would change first about the West, or rather, about an ample number of westerners. Their conviction that in this new land, just because it is new, wealth somehow ought to fall up out of the ground into their open pockets. Such bonanza notions began with the Spaniards peering for golden cities amid buffalo grass, and surged on through the fur trade, the mining rushes, the laying of the railroads, the arrival of the loggers, the taking up of farmland and grazing country, the harvest of salmon rivers, and even now are munching through real estate and coal pits and whatever can be singled out beyond those. Besides a sudden population the West—the many Wests—have had to support this philosophy of get-rich-quicker-than-the-next-grabber-and-to-hell-with-the-consequences, and the burden of it on a half-continent of limited cultivation capacities has skewed matters out here considerably. The occasional melancholy that whispers like wind in westerners’ ears I think is the baffled apprehension of this; the sense that even as we try to stand firm we are being carried to elsewhere, some lesser and denatured place, without it ever being made clear why we have to go. And the proper word for any such unchosen destination is exile.
Anyway, Swan strives on a central route of his era, a site he is not generally found at, in his current quest for bonanza. His problem is that nowhere among his skills is the knack for hitting it rich. This stone fact asserts itself in these Port Townsend years by not only keeping Swan unrich but chronically short of any income at all. He has tried to tap a field he knows much about, the native artwork of the Northwest, but without much success. In his periodic letters to Baird at the Smithsonian he attempts now and then, with more than ample justification, to pry whatever occasional collecting salary he can: I know that I can do this work as well and probably better than any man on the Pacific Coast, but I cannot do myself or the subject justice, unless I am paid for my time, labor and expense. Baird’s thrifty fist stays closed. When Swan on his own contrives a trading trip to Sitka in Alaska, the venture seems not to produce much except some interesting new scenery.
Time and again the Port Townsend diaries have to make account of small borrowings, from Henry Webster, from a friendly storekeeper named Gerrish, most of all from the local jeweler, Bulkeley, who is steadily ready with a few dollars. The sum usually flits from Swan so promptly he scarcely leaves a fingerprint on it: Borrowed of Bulkly $5.00 Paid wash bill $1.00....His credit plainly holds good; generally he notes repayment of his debts the same day he comes into any real cash and is himself then touchable for a loan. But chronic is chronic and so the Swan I watch in these railroad missives still is a fellow I would cheerfully accompany to Katmandu, but am not so sure I would buy a horse from, if he happened to be needy for funds at the moment.
Therefore his crowbar work on the coffers of the Northern Pacific. To my astonishment, which shows how much I know about financial sharpstering, Swan is hired, and at his price. I can only think that the New York railroaders wanted to overlook no chance, and if the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca somehow proved worthy of railroad iron, this careful reliable person who wrote such blarneying letters did know that outback shore.
Getting himself hired was different from maneuvering a railroad into town. Swan escorted the railroad moguls around when Canfield led a group of them out from New York, lobbied now and again in the territorial capitol at Olympia, tried to tout the prospect of transpacific trade with Siberia after talking with a barkentine captain who had come from the Amur River in the very short passage of 28 days, drew maps of the proposed rail route up from the Columbia River to Port Townsend, lined up local pledges of land if the town was tapped as the terminus. Then Canfield inexplicably telegraphed Swan to meet him at Ogden, Utah.
Swan, now no young man by any count of the years, jounced off into sage and desert on a 700-mile journey of horseback, steamboat and stagecoach. Very hot and dirty, the battered pocket diary of this trip mutters...alkali plain...rattlesnakes...hottest ride I have yet had...desolate...miserable log house full of bedbugs...At last at Ogden, a message meets Swan: Canfield has decided not to wait for him.
After that jilt Swan skidded downhill both fiscally and physically. Arriving back at Port Townsend from the three-and-a-half-week wild goose chase he jots constant notes of bad health—Sick in house all day from the effects of my journey and a cold and sick for some time—and probably despond as well. He also begins to record that the Northern Pacific has omitted to pay him several months’ wages and he is having to nag for the sum.
It all spins out, Swan’s several years of railroad fantasy, into a few words at the end of the summer of 1873. That spring, having thoughtfully bought much of the townsite first, the Northern Pacific had chosen Tacoma as its transcontinental terminus; now, on the eighteenth of September, the railroad underwent a financial collapse which took years to mend. Swan wrote unknowing prophecy in his diary at Port Townsend two days earlier: Town very dull nothing doing.
I have some feel for Swan’s railroad debacle, because the bulldozers on one of the slopes across this valley remind me steadily of futility of my own. My effort was to narrow progress, Swan’s was to lure it in his direction, but in the end we are each as futile as the other.
The bulldozers are carving out housing sites. On any scale the slope they are swathing was no hillside of grandeur: scrub alder, madrona. But amid Seattle’s spread of suburbs it made a healthy green lung, and its loss is one more nick toward changing the Puget Sound region into Los Angeles North.
At the hearing I spoke against the total of 107 houses designated for the site, suggesting if nothing else that half the number, on lots the same size as the reasonably generous ones on our side of the valley, made a more swallowable sum for the area. The zoning law, however, permitted that the size of the lots could be averaged over the entire acreage, including slopes of unbuildable steepness—a principle by which Los Angeles can be averaged off into the Mojave Desert and it be proven that every Angeleno owns a numerical rancho—and 107 houses it is going to be.
Part of me has known the prospect is not bright that I can go on and on through life as a suburban druid. Seattle, the city I have most affection for, which until not so many years ago was a green quilt of neighborhoods without much pretension beyond that, has begun to overgrow, preen itself into metropolis. (I hear the same of Denver, Portland, Boulder, Billings...) Probably, too, I am at the point of life where, in this odd cottage industry of making words, my velocity has slowed enough that I notice society’s more. Yet understanding the fact that change, alteration of landscape and manscape alike, is a given of life does nothing to make me think its consequences won’t be particular for me; everyone in the world has a nose but we all sneeze differently.
This attack of bulldozerphobia I know is a mood I should put away, box it in the admission that I am sounding like a grumpy homesteader who has just seen new chimney smoke on his horizon. (Make that 107 new chimney smokes.) Swan, you there in mid-spiel of your wooing of a railhead for Port Townsend: you might tell me that I have western policy backwards, that even yet “limits” is not a word to say, but you ought to hear this much of my side of it, for it includes you more than you know. While they were eating me like banqueters sharing a cheese, the landholder’s lawyer and the developer’s experts and the county’s planners, the developer himself said least of all, and I remember an instant when our glances met, baffled. I wore my one suit, so as to look less like a beaver trapper among the bureaucrats. The developer was in his rough shirt to show humble toil. Guises aside, we probably are not so very different; I would guess I was piling hay bales at least as early in life as he started pouring concrete. But the matter between us has become one of mysterious creed—how many homeowners may dance on the top of a
surveyor’s stake?—and the prevailing scripture is on his side, not mine. Which is why his housing developments fell my forests, and tracks are laid to a town the railroad owns instead of one where a Swan dreams. Preach as we may in our own backyards, cottagers do not often sway a society’s fiscal theology.
Day Forty-Eight
Rain trotting in the drainpipe when we woke up. Now, at ten in the morning, a gray pause has curtained between showers, a halfhearted wind musses among the trees. Today and yesterday are standard Puget Sound winter, rain and forty-five degrees, after the weeks of clear frost-rimed weather. A rich winter of two seasons, this. Time of frost, time of cloud.
Last comment unearthed from Swan on the railroad adventure. Did not alter my opinion, I come across him suddenly grumbling, apropos of nothing, during a visit to Tacoma years later. That it is unfit place for terminus.
Day Forty-Nine
A day that promises better weather one minute and reconsiders the next. The valley is sought out by wind every so often, but not yet rain, and the thermometer is nosing fifty. I would have known without checking that the mercury was up, for the cat is tucked atop a post of the fence at the far side of the neighbor’s yard. More than ever he looks like a lion seen from far off, adoze at the edge of some thornbush thicket, waiting for a mouse-sized wildebeest to patter into his dreams.
