Winter Brothers

by Ivan Doig

  This odd community of time I mentioned at the start of this book of days. Since then I have spent a pair of simultaneous spans with James Gilchrist Swan, the first two months of this coastal winter and the quarter-century after he detached himself from Boston for the Pacific shore. By now I know of him, what?

  That he has failed at two major tasks, teaching to the Makah children and butlering for the transcontinental railroad. The oyster venture at Shoalwater, he seems never to have got engrossed enough in for his abandonment to qualify as failure. His collecting of specimens for the Smithsonian is “attended with success,” as Baird periodically hurrahs him, but as a way of earning is a slow dollar indeed. Swan fends rather than amasses. With his Port Townsend collection of not-quite-livelihoods he reminds me of a householder with a leaky roof, distractedly positioning a washbasin under this drizzle, a battered pot under that one, until the plinks somehow are all, or at least mostly, caught.

  That he is a spree drinker, dry for weeks, months—at Neah for years—at a stretch. No constant souse can have written his thousands of diary entries, hundreds and hundreds of letters, frequent newspaper articles, the Smithsonian treatises, and The Northwest Coast.

  That he is mildly forgetful, having a tendency to leave behind a book or a spare pair of pants in a hotel room. The big Neah Bay ledger diary once goes into a fluster: This evening I lost or mislaid my spectacles in a singular manner for which I cannot account. I had given two of the boys some medicine and entered it in my book which was the last time I had them on. A few minutes afterward I could find them nowhere. The boys and myself hunted for over an hour without success. Next day: I took down my prescription book and to my great pleasure found my spectacles which I had placed in the book had unthinkingly shut....

  That he is not a chronically jokey man, but laughs at the frontier’s humor probably more than a sound Bostonian ought to. The Olympic Peninsula settler who has a prized rooster named Brigham Young is cheerfully in Swan’s pages, as is the sailor—a Dago or a Russian Finn—who notices the carcasses of skinned fur seals on the shipdeck and asks, Captain will I throw them cartridges overboard? Swan can ping a nice note of irony, as when he stepped from the Neah Bay schoolhouse to watch a Makah tamanoas ceremony and was much edified to notice that two of my scholars Jimmy, who had just recovered from a severe attack of cold, and George, were performing on the beach entirely naked....

  That, in the frequent way of solitary persons, he loves song. His regular choiring began long before Dolly Roberts was there to share a hymnbook, and at times he vocalizes in the living room of one friend or another, an occasion he is apt to record as a grand frolic. I imagine his voice as a bit nasal and, the twenty-five frontier years notwithstanding, notably Yankee in accent.

  That he can get very full of himself, particularly when his own evidence on a matter is contradicted. During a dispute with a Smithsonian scientist who maintained that fur seals all birthed their young at the Pribilof Islands off the Alaskan coast, Swan tetchily writes to Baird: I do not believe all the fur seals of the North Pacific Ocean assemble on the Pribiloff Islands any more than I believe all the flies of this coast alight on one or two carcases of dead animals.... (Current science suggests Swan somewhat misjudged the seals’ independence; the Pribilofs are considered to be the single birthing grounds.) But other times he can drift into a dress-blue funk: the great care and anxiety I feel...Evidently not for long, and perhaps most often when he has to count another birthday (I trust that the remainder of my life may be passed more profitably than it has so far...), but he does know gloom.

  That all the regularity in him is channeled down his right arm into his pen. He may pass from job to job to job with the liquid hops of a squirrel, but his diary account of his days and his record of effort to learn from the Indians are the steadiest kind of achievement. Constantly I am impressed with Swan’s care to be exact; the steady spatter of arithmetic through the diary pages as he measures and totals things, for instance, and the fact that as early as his stint at Shoalwater he made it policy that whatever lore was given him by a tribal member, he would check by later asking others about it, one by one. A scrupulous correspondent, Swan is perpetually eager for mail and often answers instantly, putting the reply on the same mailboat. No question: the stickum that holds his life together is in his inkwell.

  That he has a quality I do not know what to call except gallantry. An ingredient of it must be New England manners. In the diary he misters even as old a friend as Webster, and is an instinctive caller on friends, welcomer of strangers, visitor of the ill (white or Indian), sharer of magazines and books and undoubtedly bottles. But it goes beyond that, into the attitude he seems to hold that the human race is a kind of fascinating commonwealth. Swan does not have this perfected; the Indians periodically exasperate him into an inked mutter of savages. Consistently, however, he respects their skills and lore and is able to see and judge them, and for that matter his own white tribalists of Port Townsend and the Strait country, as individuals rather than a corps. Which must be the most valuable possible discernment for a diarist.

  What escort he has been. The ancient woman Suis whom Swan in his Shoalwater years had questioned about the natives’ names; she spoke to him of the carrying influence of ancestors, first people. For those of us on this long coast now, successor tribe to Suis’s in our pale thousands and thousands, Swan is of our own first people. (Making those of us of this moment, in T. H. White’s term, the after-people: the ones for whom “music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship...the human contribution to the universe” are inheritance to try to add to.) Swan is doubly valuable to me because the people of my own blood are gone now, buried in Montana, the storytellers, reciters of sayings, carriers of the Scots lowland voice that is scarcely traceable on my tongue, and Swan filling his days and mine with his steady diary lines is an entrancing winterer—a tale-bringer, emissary from the time of the first people—such as I have not been around in the years since. He seems a kind of human bonus, a dividend to me for making this chronological passage. And there still is a month of him to collect.

  Day Sixty-One

  Capt John came to my house this afternoon, the sixteenth of November of 1878, and told me the following queer yarn. He says that at the time Ah a yah’s son died at Hosett, Peter, whose sister is mother of the boy, and Ah a yah were putting the body in a box for burial. They had that portion of the lodge screened with mats and fastened the door so that no one but themselves should be present. A woman however who was in the lodge unobserved made a hole in the mat screen and looked through. She first heard the dull sound of something chopping, and saw Peter and Ah a yah cut off both the boys arms below the elbows and then put the body in the box and bury it.

  Some time the past summer the Indians found near a small brook which runs near Ah a Yah’s house two human fore arms & hands or rather the bones, one end of which rested in a tin plate and the hands rested on a stick held by two forced sticks, so they could be roasted before a fire, the remnants of which were plainly seen. The marrow which had melted into the plate had mostly been removed but some remained which was hard and white.

  These were lethal doings, Captain John solemnly explained to Swan. With the substance in the plate Peter had cast a spell—bad medicine—which took the life of a boy of the tribe.

  I listened very attentively to the recital of this fabulous tale just to find out to what lengths Johns superstitions will lead him but the idea of Peter roasting the arms of his own nephew to extract grease to work bad medicine to kill his enemies, is too monstrous and absurd for me to believe without better proof than Capt John.

  Captain John’s busy tongue: the mysteries of Peter: Swan’s recording pen. Unmistakably, life at Neah Bay.

  Swan returned to Cape Flattery in mid-August of 1878, once more kited on the wind of Henry Webster’s political fortunes. Newly appointed as collector of customs for Puget Sound, Webster named Swan his inspector at Neah Bay, a job at last exactly Swan’s size
and fit. The first several months of each year a small fleet of schooners in the fur seal trade now worked out of Neah Bay. Swan was to make sure their sealskins were the harvest of Makah canoe crews launched from the vessels, rather than any catch from the natives of alien British Columbia across the Strait. Another trader at Neah dealt in the oil of the small sharks called dogfish, a useful lubricant for sawmill machinery. Swan similarly was to see that the dogfish oil remained all-American, or had the proper import fee paid. As to the Makahs themselves, original merchants of Cape Flattery, they were to be regularly cautioned against trading dutiable goods with the British Columbia tribes. Those few tax sentry tasks made the sum of Swan’s new job. Otherwise, he was free to read, write, and, finally, collect one single salary he could live on.

  His new prosperity wasn’t fancy; as assistant customs collector, he received about a hundred dollars a month. But it could not help but be steadier than his life had been in Port Townsend the past few years. The diaries of 1876–77 show a number of gaps, the dangerous silences when Swan is either ill or in whiskey; one month-long void follows the note that he has been enjoying Scotch whiskey punch with some chums. Then he begins to regain himself when Neah Bay becomes a prospect again, in late 1877. His welcome back to Neah the next year was generous. A former Puget Sound steamboat captain named Charles Willoughby now held the job as agent of the Makah Reservation, and Willoughby promptly dealt Swan into the doings of the agency by calling on him to interpret to the Makahs. Swan in turn thought well of the Willoughby style of administration, as when an election process was set up to choose tribal leaders: One feature in the election was that several women voted by permission of the Agent—this a dozen years before any state permitted women the vote, and forty before the nation did—thus establishing a precedent in this tribe of womans suffrage which is right, as the women of the tribe always have a voice in the councils. This is the first election ever held by the Indians here, and will be followed by similar elections in Waatch Tsooess & Hosett.

  Another amendment to Makah life Swan’s pen liked not at all. While at the Lighthouse yesterday, Capt Sampson informed me that whales have been quite plenty around the vicinity of the Cape this Spring but the Indians have not been after them as they devote themselves exclusively to sealing. I think the business as now conducted is a positive detriment to these Indians. They neglect all other avocations during the sealing season, from January to June, and the money they receive for the’skins they secure is either gambled away or is spent for flour, bread, sugar &c, is distributed in potlatches to their friends.

  Not only in their lapse from whale hunting did the Makahs seem less dramatic and turbulent than in the past. After twenty years of persistent Reservation administration, they had become not quite citizens of either their ancestral world or the new white world, but of some shifting ground between; as though the Cape Flattery “earthshakes” Swan used to record in his schoolhouse tower were sending tremors up through the tribal society as well.

  On the one hand, the customary ceremonies of the tribe lived roaringly on:

  The Indians had a great time last evening. They visited the various lodges and performed some savage scenes one of which was eating raw dog. A lot of boys imitated raccoons and climbed on Davids house and entered through the roof throwing everything down from the shelves and making a deal of mischief. Other boys imitated hornets and had needles fastened to sticks with which they pricked every one they met. Today they had the thunder bird performance and a potlatch. These Makahs are as wild and savage in their Duktvalli performances as when I first knew them twenty years ago.

  But another day, Swan is startled when the schoolgirls, playing in a corner of his office, pretend they are holding a tea party and begin by primly reciting grace.

  There is a moment in the diary when the tilt—to the Makahs, perhaps a lurch—toward the future can almost be seen to be happening. Swan is called to interpret as Makah mothers bring in youngsters who are to begin school. The schoolroom baffles the little newcomers. They were as wild as young foxes and some were quite alarmed and struggled and bellowed. The school girls were standing outside to receive them and they looked so nice and neat, that it reminded me of what I have read about tame animals being taught to tame and subject wild ones.

  And one mark further of change in the tribe. Neah Bay in these years has a chief of police, and he is Peter.

  In other areas besides Peter’s psyche Neah Bay showed itself as a greatly tamer place now than in the early 1860s.

  Regularly each week, a steamship chugged in; no more three-day canoe trips to Port Townsend. Another vessel was on station in the bay with pilots to go aboard ships entering the Strait. There was even an official but underfunded lifeboat station. (When Swan and the Makahs watched a few annual practice rounds being fired from the station’s mortar, Old Doctor told me he thought the mortar would be a fine thing to kill whales with.) Willoughby’s Reservation staff of whites was much expanded from Webster’s original shaggy little crew of bachelors. Wives and children, even a woman schoolteacher, were on hand now. This new Neah Bay is capable of social whirl which reads almost giddy in the pages where Swan used to record the pastime of warring on skunks:

  Mrs Brash and Mr Gallick came up today and dined. After dinner Mrs Willoughby, Miss Park, Wesley Smith and I sang, or tried to sing the Pinafore but with poor success as I had a bad cold and a head ache and the others were not feeling well and to crown all our discomfort the organ was badly out of tune, but we blundered through it some how and our audience said we did well, but I did not think so....

  Mr Fischer, Charley Willoughby and Mr Plympton came in this evening and I read from Scribners magazine the “Uncle Remus” stories which amused them very much particularly Mr Fisher who pronounced them “Doggoned good yarns.”

  If Neah Bay was changing, so was Swan, at least the diarying part of him, and tremendously for the better. After years of crabbed pocket diaries, these thirty-six months at Neah, August of 1878 to August of 1881, are exquisitely, almost artistically, penned. Swan returned to the grand 1866 ledger which he had been using only to copy letters of almighty importance, such as his blandishments to the Northern Pacific, and resumed the day by day superior script he had practiced in the last years of his previous Neah Bay life. When he reached the bottom of the ledger’s final page on the thirtieth of June 1879, he procured an identical leather-covered volume and invented even more elaborate diarymanship, now annotating events in the margins and summarizing each month with a stupendous double-page weather chart which recorded Cape Flattery’s every nudge of temperature and drift of breeze.

  In more than penmanship, these are high years for Swan. He is puttering usefully, staying sober and enjoying health. His days seem not only better kempt, but glossed.

  Last night was very calm and at 11 PM there was but little surf on the beach and the air being perfectly still the least sound could be noticed....As the swell of the ocean gently fell on the sands and receded it sounded like harmonious music. I laid awake an hour listening to it. The air seemed at times filled with...the steady notes of some great organ.

  Indians out again tonight after ducks. Their torches make the bay look as if a number of vessels were lying at anchor.

  Called on Capt John....He then gave me the words of a wedding song, which originated with the Nimpkish Indians in Alert Bay....When a Nutka man buys a Nimpkish woman and she is brought home, they sing,

  “Ya ha haie, ya ha haie

  Halo hwai kook sa esh

  Yaks na artleesh, mamats sna aht

  Cha ahk wyee, cha ahk wyee,

  Ya at ho ho ho ho ho hoo hoo”

  and may be rendered thus. I have a strong house on an island full of presents, and I will toss you there as if you were a bird.

  The final word is a jingle like row de dow dow in an English song.

  John could not give me the full explanation of the words but said there would be some Nut fa Indians here before long and I could find out from
them the exact meaning, but I inferred that it was as difficult for him to explain what the words meant as it would be for me to interpret Mother Goose’s melodies to him....

  Capt Dalgardno, Pilot Stevens and Mr Fisher made me a visit this evening and we had a pleasant time telling stories in which Fisher as usual carried off the palm. He told about firing a 4th of July salute in a mining camp in California with a quicksilver can, which at the last discharge kicked through a pine stump then flew into a miners cabin knocked the top off a loaf of bread and finally jumped into a bunk among the blankets.

  Fisher, the Reservation farmer, proves a particular boon to Swan, the kind of rumbustious frontier character he has savored ever since the days of the oyster boyos at Shoalwater Bay. Fisher shot two very fat wild geese a short time since and eat them both at one meal and drank up about a pint of Goose oil. It rather loosened him up for a couple of days....Fisher sent an order to the “Toledo Blade” for a book on horse diseases and received by mail yesterday a copy of Pictorial Bible Biography with a postal card that they had sold out all the horse books....