by Ivan Doig
I check my notes. Swan first saw this creation in the village of Masset in the Queen Charlotte Islands on the tenth of July 1883. The carver, one of the Haida magicians either in wood, stone, or in gold or silver, still was at work on the cane.
A second snake, this one of wood, drives up the cane from the bottom in three precise writhes covering most of the length, until the head poises very near to the carved struggle of snakehead and frog. After snake eat frog, the outlook seems to be snake eat snake. This deft crawler along the cane length has a broad scalloped design along the middle of its back, with cross-hatched scales along either side of the broader cuts. It also has tiny blue-green abalone eyes, a gentle everlasting glitter.
Snakes white and brown, contorting a stick of wood into struggle, legend, art. I very nearly reel back from this example of Haida blade magic.
Over lunch in a restaurant which confusedly has tried to rig its interior as a shipdeck, I think of Swan coming upon the snake-cane six hundred miles to the north of here. Keen as he was about art of this coast, he must have felt like a prospector whose boot has kicked up a potato-sized nugget in front of him. The carved scene ripples the other way in me, from art out into life. I see back to the instant when a jay attacked into the garden outside my window, its flash of blue and black and the high excited HEEP HEEP HEEP cry and then the toss of the garter snake which had been sunning on the warm dirt. In combination of grappling and chopping, the jay finished off the snake in an instant, then undertook to pull it apart, like a man trying to stretch an inner tube he is standing on. After a few minutes of tugging, the jay dropped the loop of corpse in disdain, bounded across the garden in three arrogant hops and flew off. When I went out to look at the snake, I found it as long as the span of my hand, nine inches: gray-green with three strings of yellow down its length. In places the jay had frayed through the body, small ruptures like those a knife makes in rubberoid wiring. Even as I bent in study of the snake, not two minutes after the jay’s ambush had begun, an ant clambered on like a pirate coming aboard a derelict schooner, dashed in and out of the snake’s open mouth and up to a quick circle of the flat skull, then raced off in exploration of the first body-rip. How sudden it all, the same eternal suddenness of the ivory frog sinking down the ivory snake’s gullet.
End of the Port Townsend day, the Kaleetan churning a fast white current away from the town. In the early dusk—hard to tell this day’s darkness from its daylight—I can see from the afterdeck back to today’s second reference point of Swan’s embarkment toward the Queen Charlottes that early summer o£ 1883. The bespired red-brick courthouse, and in it the records of the municipal court which Swan himself presided over in some earlier years, and within those records this verdict from the twenty-sixth of May 1883:
It is Ordered, Adjudged and Decreed that...James G. Swan is an Habitual Drunkard as described in Section 1674 of Code of Washington Territory. And it is hereby further ordered...to every Dealer in Intoxicating Liquor and to all other persons residing in the County of Jefferson...not to give or sell under any pretence any Intoxicating Liquor to said James G. Swan...
Day Sixty-Six
Unfold a map of the North Pacific, and you notice, some six hundred miles north of the British Columbia capital of Victoria and not far under the overhang of Alaska, a large stalactite-like shard which has fallen free of the continental cliff of shoreline. The illusory plummet has carried the chunk fifty miles to sea, striking its western edge into some of the trickiest weather of the entire Pacific and shattering the landmass into a hundred and twenty-five fragments from the size of rocky hummocks to big adrift peninsulas. Swan’s telling of these geographic proportions: The extreme length of the group from North Point, North Island to Cape St James the southern extremity is 156 miles. The Islands of the main group are North, Graham, Moresby and Prevost. Graham and Moresby, are the largest and constitute nearly eighty five per cent of the whole area....
White seagoers had arrived in the late 1780s—the islands received their name from the British captain who sailed in on the trading vessel Queen Charlotte—but except for the Hudson’s Bay post at Masset and a dogfish oil refinery at Skidegate, white enterprise and settlement across the next hundred years remained strangers to the Haida homeland. (This changed sharply at the end of the nineteenth century, and on into this: the Queen Charlottes now count a population o£ about 6,000, the majority of it non-Haida.) Here in 1883, then, the archipelago still was, as Swan so heavily had hinted a decade before in his Smithsonian article on Haida tattoo patterns, not familiar territory to whites, and his own prime intention lay with the least known geography of all: the west coast of the Queen Charlottes, that region swept peopleless by the smallpox epidemic among the Haidas two decades earlier.
The idea wafted to Swan out of the report of the most recent previous white expeditionary to the Charlottes. Geologist George M. Dawson in the mid-1870s had been able to sail and clamber at will among the Charlottes, except: “The time and means at my disposal did not enable me to make a survey or geological examination of the west coast of the islands, which would require to be carried on during the early summer...the least boisterous portion of the year. It is a very dangerous lee shore for sailing craft...” Swan pointed out to Baird at the Smithsonian the west shore’s defeat of Dawson, nor has any one visited this Coast or examined it who has made any reliable report. Since he, Swan, would be in the Charlottes anyway...
Running a little late in life as usual, Swan at six and a half decades intends an expedition which I, twenty-five years younger and with the advantages of modern equipment, can never hope to duplicate. The point is moot this winter, since this season is not the necessary “least boisterous portion” of the weather year, but precisely its most. The still-unpopulated western coastline of the Queen Charlottes remains one of the remotest loose ends of North America, and winter flogs it with surf, gust, downpour. Telephoning to the Queen Charlotte communities to ask about hire of a fishing boat or airplane or helicopter to glimpse some of that shore, I am roundly advised to put even that notion out of my head, wait for a summer. Which, remembering the one near-drowning this North Pacific coast warned me with a few years ago, I decide I had better accept as gospel. Even in summer, as Swan is aiming for, I cannot have the means he did. The advice had been held out by Dawson to whomever adventured in next: the Queen Charlottes’ west shore “would, I believe, be most easily dealt with in one of the canoes of the country manned by a good Indian crew.” To Swan, rider of canoes throughout the frontier half of his life, those words chimed exactly right. To me, footsoldier of a considerably tamer West, they can only be rue, and useful comparison of some of Swan’s capabilities and my own.
As to why Swan decided to dare the Charlottes’ western shore, when the Haida population and the material he sought to collect for the Smithsonian were peppered along the eastern coastline, the answer does not show itself in his diaries or the letters to Baird. My hunch is that whatever he told himself in his justifying Boston way, he wanted to do it for the edge of challenge, as the Makahs canoeing downcoast along Cape Flattery could not resist darting themselves through the tiderip tunnels in the searocks. Swan held no small estimation of himself as a coastman; a true coastie, in the Dungeness lighthouse keeper’s sudden fine phrase to Carol and me; and here lay one of the last unknown rims of western shore. An extra West, one more over-the-horizon territory for the curiosity that worked in him like a second heart. For certain, this is greatly the broadest leap I have been close enough to see Swan take—his 1849 decision to cast himself west to California being lost to time—and I settle in with anticipation to watch how he will manage it.
From under that Port Townsend civic cloud of decreed drunkenness, which at least was newly lined with the Smithsonian’s silver, Swan sets off for the Queen Charlotte Islands in mid-June of 1883. He voyages in rare style, out of Victoria aboard the Otter, a Hudson’s Bay Company supply steamer. In effect, he is traveling to the Queen Charlottes as the invited guest of Br
itish Columbia’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Dr. Israel Wood Powell. Of their time, Powell and Swan are perhaps the two white men of the Pacific Northwest most ardent and informed about the coastal native cultures, and long have known each other through Swan’s visits across the Strait to Victoria. Powell’s cachet, particularly in vouching for Swan to the Hudson’s Bay Company whose ships and trading posts were the supply line into the North Pacific, was ideal, and with it came the suggestion that Swan be accompanied by one of Powell’s field agents, James Deans. The one hitch in this supremely hospitable arrangement is that Deans missed the boat.
Swan shrugs—watched for Mr. Deans till the Steamer was under way but he did not appear, the diary reports, and lets it go at that—and settles back to savor the cruise of the Otter. Not much of event has happened to him in the almost two years since leaving Neah Bay. Wait, there is this: Henry Webster’s death, which Swan inscribed and then drew triple lines around, crosshatching them darkly at the corners and center until the result looked eerily like the sketch of a coffin. But otherwise, except for a dab of added enterprise when a Haida bracelet maker named Ellswarsh worked for a while out of the back room of his office, Swan’s Port Townsend routine consisted of the minor paperwork chores of old, and the bald patches in the diary which led up to the citation for chronic drunkenness. An overdue change, this shipboard life which Swan is more than veteran at; since his jaunty voyage to Britain four decades earlier, I count more than a year of his life spent on vessels breasting off to somewhere or other. The Otter’s seven-day slalom of supply calls along the North Pacific coast, to Metakatla and Fort Simpson in British Columbia and Fort Wrangell in Alaska, promise a particularly cozy round of visits for Swan, who by now seems to know every living soul, Indian and white, from Shoalwater Bay to Sitka.
Swan, it ought to be reported, is writing now in triplicate. Or rather, in three versions which add up to triplicate and then some. During each day he pencils into a pocket diary, and in it flash his touches of mood, occasional grumbles (the Metlakatla stopover: ...the hour was too early for these settlers who had but just got up. I notice this listlessness, and desire to lie in bed mornings to prevail in Victoria and every where I have been in British Columbia and Alaska. Sit up late at night and get up late in the morning; worse at Fort Wrangell: Arrived...at 8 AM and found the whole town asleep) or frets or chuckles. At first chance he transcribes, in that brown ink, into a small squarish hardbound composition book. This version is narrative at fuller flow, expansion of the pocketed days. Next exists the fifty-page report he later drew up for the Smithsonian, typed—shakily—and with historical background of the Queen Charlottes periodically swatched in. I have had no small amount of decipherment to do on James Gilchrist Swan the past two months, but never before triangulation.
What is happening is this: in a sense, just as Swan is being whetted against a new edge of the continent now, so are the diaries. As I have begun to go through the simultaneous three, it occurs to me that with their blend of detail and elucidation and reprise they are truly taking their place with those supreme westering pages, Lewis and Clark’s and young Patience Loader’s. To tell his Queen Charlottes journey in any higher style, Swan would have to hymn it. And after the ledgerly reports of contentment from his 1878–81 stint at Neah Bay and the unreported discontents of his Port Townsend life of 1882 and early 1883, these diaries’ frank completeness is unexpected and welcome, like having a trout begin to warble to you up through its pond. These next days I am going to stand back a bit and give the busy pages vocal space.
At the end of the afternoon of June twenty-fifth, a shore which appeared low and quite level, but as it was very rainy we did not get a good sight.
The dim landfall is Graham, largest island of the Charlottes.
Arrived at Massett at 5 PM....Delivered my letters of Introduction...took account of my freight as it was landed— wisely: 2 sacks four short in my count & notified Purser Sinclair—and then went to a very comfortable cottage in the enclosure of the HB Co....
Off the Otter’s gangplank with Swan steps the one expeditionary companion he has hired, described in a letter to Baird as a very intelligent young Haida man, a worker in jewelry, a painter and a tatooer who has been with me about 3 months.... Johnny Kit Elswa is the keg-chested fellow beside Swan in the second Victoria studio portrait, and his jacket-and-trousers attire does not hide that he is a new example, perhaps in his mid-twenties, of the outdoor artists in which the Haidas had been so rich. Johnny (Swan calls him so in the diary, and I will follow that) has become the latest in Swan’s line of Indian confidants—Swell, Captain John, the Port Townsend Clallam chieftain Duke of York, Jimmy Claplanhoo—and promises to be especially valuable to Swan as hired helper on this expedition. The most faithful intelligent and reliable Indian I have seen, as Swan touts him to Baird, Johnny is from the village of Cumshewa on an eastern midpoint of the Queen Charlottes shoreline and can show me things of Indian manufacture that the foreign collectors never have seen.
He at once proves to have less exotic talents as well: This forenoon the roof of the house I am occupying, took fire from old stove pipe falling down. Johnny & another Indian put it out with buckets and Mr McKenzie furnished new pipe which Johnny fixed all right.
Swan is advised at Masset that the canoeman he needs is the chief who, before smallpox emptied the area, ruled on the absolute northwesternmost fragment of the Charlottes, then called simply North Island, now on the maps as Langara Island. With that chief and his canoe crew North Island could serve as the pi ton for the journey along the western shore: relatively calm waters from Masset to North, assured shelter there on the chief’s home isle, then the headland to headland descent by canoe seventy-five miles down the coast to Skidegate Channel, the passageway between Graham and Moresby Islands, and through to the settlement at Skidegate at the southeastern corner of Graham Island.
The one omission in the smooth plan echoes the absence of Deans back at the Victoria dock. At the moment, the chief is away somewhere on another canoe errand.
On wait at Masset, Swan begins to entertain himself typically, with his pen. Goes out and counts the Haida community: Sixty-five houses old and new nearly all of them with a carved column or pillar in front, covered with heraldic devices...of the family residing within, and representing some legend.... Does whatever collecting is possible: Johnson brought me a fine model of an ancient war canoe with mat sails, paddles and every thing complete. The Haidahs were formerly a warlike people and a terror to all the Coast tribes...but they have become peaceful lately and no war parties are now sent out, and the ancient canoes have all decayed and gone....Johnny was of great assistance in trading and purchased everything much lower than I could. The Indians remonstrated with him and asked him why he liked the white man better than his own people? Because, was the reply, “the white man pays me, you pay me and I work for you.” This logic did not suit them but they let Johnny alone and I succeeded in obtaining some very interesting specimens. Visits companionably with Masset’s handful of white residents, Alexander McKenzie trader, Charles W. D. Clifford of the Indian Service who was there on a visit and Reverend Charles Harrison the Episcopal Missionary and his wife all of whom were most courteous....
Swan also passes his tests, Haida and white, as a guest. One item I noticed especially in Swan’s consignment of supplies taken aboard the Otter in Victoria was a copper tank for specimens of fish he is to obtain from the waters surrounding the Queen Charlottes. A Baird idea, of course. Besides his duties at the Smithsonian, where he had become secretary after the death of Joseph Henry several years before, Baird in his spare time had assumed charge of the U.S. Fish Commission. He had tapped Swan into the Fish Commission payroll for occasional collecting of fish in the Cape Flattery region, and now Baird wanted samples from the North Pacific. Swan, nobody’s amateur when it comes to packing for a journey, filled the fish tank with oranges bought in Victoria, opens the lid and bestows the fruit on the gratified Hudson’s Baymen and
local Haidas.
Next, the first of July, An Indian sold me 2 halibut heads for 2 pieces of tobacco and I made a real old fashioned down east chowder which we had for breakfast. Mr McKenzie and Mr Clifford pronounced it delicious....Then I showed Johnny how to make a plum pudding which was done by 5 PM & served with baked salmon....This being “Dominion day,” which is celebrated by the Canadians & provincials they considered that my cooking was done in compliment to the day, which however I knew nothing about till this evening.
Clifford, the Canadian Indian agent, walks Swan to the burial ground near the entrance to Masset Inlet that afternoon. Beyond the gravestones—the Christianized Haidas now were importing them from Victoria—they see the platforms which elevate the remains of a trio of tribal skagas, medicine men. The skeletons show through the rotting plank coffins, rather as if the skagas are getting restless about eternity. Together with their sacred bones, Swan knows, will be the carved instruments of magic, medicine stick? and implements of office....But we did not care to examine too closely at this time for fear of giving of-fence, so we turned our attention to examining the surrounding scenery.
