Winter Brothers (24 page)

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....

But Fisher is a now and then performer, showing up when Swan's assiduous pen takes time off to chuckle. The most frequent figure in the diary of this second Neah Bay stint is Swan's most affectionately written ever.

Little Janji and Joe Willoughby amused themselves this forenoon in my woodshed splitting sticks for kindling. while so engaged they hear a noise and ran in and slammed the door too. Joe said “Something out there will bite us.—What is it, a squirrel or a rat? I asked No said Janji “big bee bumbel bee.” I went out and saw nothing and told the boys there was no bee there. “Yes said Janji, hear him sing.” Just then the fog whistle blew at Tatoosh Island and the distance made the sound hum like a bee. I explained to the little fellows what it was but they didnt believe me and Joe ran home. Ginger said, “Josie fraid, I not fraid I big boy I not fraid Bumbel bee.” He then went out and caught a bee in a fox glove blossom which he hilled by stepping on it and then showed it to me in triumph....I told him he is the chief of the bumble bees, and he is very proud. He still things the fog signal is an immense bee in my woodshed which he intends to kill with a hatchet....

He reminds me of my own boyish days...is constantly in motion never at rest from the time he gets up till he goes to bed and is as healthy a little boy as there is....Jimmy's relatives were at Capt Johns house, they were telling little Ginger how kind I am to him, when to the surprise of every one the little child said “I love Mr Swan and when I am a big man I will marry a Boston kloochman and have a big house and Mr Swan shall come and live with me and I will take care of him when he is old....
”

Janji is very polite and will open the gate for me to pass through. The only instance of an Indian's politeness that I ever knew. If he lives, he will be a superior man and may be of great service to his tribe.

Jangi Claplanhoo, “Ginger,” was the son of Jimmy, Swan's first student nearly twenty years before. Swan, refugee from Boston family responsibilities for nearly half of his life, now becomes a kind of honorary frontier grandfather. The diary is open about it: Ginger, he writes,
is a dear little fellow and I love him very much....
Or, more open still, that fretful little earlier phrase about the boy:
if he lives.
Swan had written that of another Makah once, when he met Swell.

 

One other significant newness in the pages of this second Neah Bay life of Swan's. The Indians of the past—
clip tillicums, the first people,
the woman Suis had called them at Shoalwater all those years before—are having their effect on Swan's night hours. The incident of Swan's-dream-of-the-dead-and-subsequent-gift-of-clams occurs, and another as well. The twenty-seventh of February 1879:

I had a dream last fall that...Boston Tom came to me and requested me to move his wife's remains so that the salt water should not wash them away but I did not know till today where she was buried. A few more storms will wash the grave away. Dashio promised to have the remains removed as soon as the weather gets settled....

Swan seems not to know what to make of these nighttime visitations. Nor do I. Evidently Captain John is going to have to be our final source.

In Cardiff I remember hearing of the Welsh custom of nicknaming by item of livelihood. It was said that in one village, the mechanic was known as Evans the Garage, and his father, local purveyor for a medicinal liquid of some sort, as Evans the Oil. By that standard, in 1880 this winter companion of mine truly becomes Swan the Pen.

He is sixty-two years old, hale, sufficiently salaried at last, away from Port Townsend and its tempting aroma of whiskey, among the Makah community he knows perhaps better than his own white tribe. He celebrates all this in ink, ink, ink.

 

This forenoon,
the third of January,
called to see Capt John. Mary Ann made me a New Years present of a cap of Sea otter
skin which she had just finished. It is a very nice one and very warm. Little Janji was very well and very lively, and told me the cap was a present from him.

 

Peter, David, Albert & Lechessar, of the newly elected chiefs came up,
the fourteenth of February,
to get their “papers” or certificates of election which Capt Willoughby gave them in my office. They were then told to choose one of their number as head chief for one year and they chose David.

 

Today,
the nineteenth of March,
I commenced painting a Thunder Bird and whale on the top of the chest I bought from Fannys father. I made up the design from the drawings of whales and Eagles done for me by Haida Indians....

This remarkable year, even mishap amends itself.
This forenoon,
the twenty-first of March,
while splitting a stick for kindling it flew in my face injuring my right eye, and catting my eye brow and nose. I expect a weeks black eye in consequence....I thought it would be imprudent for me to go up to the house to dinner this evening as it was raining and I feared I might take cold in my eye So Mrs Willoughby sent my dinner down in grand style. First the Captain came then Mrs. Willoughby and with her 16 school girls each one bearing something. One had soup, another meat, another bread, the 4th one had pie, 5th had pepper, 6th salt, 7th vinegar and so on...and the smallest one Emma, had my napkin.

 

With the arrival of spring, Swan does his
summary of the seal fishery for the quarter ending March 31
—1,474 seals harvested by the Makah canoe crews and the schooners
Lottie, Champion, Eudora, Teazer
and
Letitia.
Then back to notes of pleasure:

Frogs in full blast tonight for the first time,
the twenty-second of April.

 

One of the Rhododendron plants which came from Port Townsend and was set out by me Dec 31 1878 has blossomed,
and today
—the thirtieth of May—
is in full bloom. This is the first time a Rhododendron ever bloomed in this portion of Clallam County. They are found at Port Discovery but I think not farther west than Sequim Bay. I have 30 plants and think nearly every one will blossom next year.

 

Neah Bay is not yet so domesticated it can pass a year without commotion. In late June, the body of a visiting Quillayute Indian is found in the forest, murdered and robbed. When the investigation proceeds more slowly than the Quillayutes think it should, Swan has a talk with Peter.
Said he “you remember when I killed a man at Crescent Bay for helping to kill my brother Swell I thought I was right but Mr. Webster put me in the fort at Steilacoom and kept me there a year I have learned better since then and now I am the head of the police and Washington pays me to look after the bad people.
” In a week, Peter is stepping aboard a schooner to take the Makah accused of the murder to Port Townsend for trial.

 

Swan does his second quarterly report, the final one, on the seal harvest, calculates that the total is up to 6,268 skins.