Winter Brothers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  DECEMBER-JANUARY

  Day One

  Day Two

  Day Three

  Day Four

  Day Five

  Days Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten

  Day Eleven

  Day Twelve

  Day Thirteen

  Day Fourteen

  Day Fifteen

  Day Sixteen

  Day Seventeen

  Day Eighteen

  Day Nineteen

  Day Twenty

  Day Twenty-One

  Day Twenty-Two

  Day Twenty-Three

  Day Twenty-Four

  Day Twenty-Five

  Days Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Eight

  Day Twenty-Nine

  Day Thirty

  Day Thirty-One

  Day Thirty-Two

  Day Thirty-Three

  Day Thirty-Four

  Day Thirty-Five

  Days Thirty-Six, Thirty-Seven, Thirty-Eight

  Day Thirty-Nine

  Day Forty

  Day Forty-One

  Day Forty-Two

  FEBRUARY

  Day Forty-Three

  Day Forty-Four

  Days Forty-Five, Forty-Six, Forty-Seven

  Day Forty-Eight

  Day Forty-Nine

  Days Fifty, Fifty-One, Fifty-Two

  Day Fifty-Three

  Day Fifty-Four

  Day Fifty-Five

  Day Fifty-Six

  Day Fifty-Seven

  Days Fifty-Eight, Fifty-Nine, Sixty

  Day Sixty-One

  Day Sixty-Two

  Day Sixty-Three

  Day Sixty-Four

  Day Sixty-Five

  Day Sixty-Six

  Day Sixty-Seven

  Day Sixty-Eight

  Day Sixty-Nine

  Day Seventy

  MARCH

  Day Seventy-One

  Day Seventy-Two

  Day Seventy-Three

  Day Seventy-Four

  Day Seventy-Five

  Day Seventy-Six

  Day Seventy-Seven

  Days Seventy-Eight, Seventy-Nine, Eighty

  Day Eighty-One

  Days Eighty-Two, Eighty-Three

  Day Eighty-Four

  Days Eighty-Five, Eighty-Six, Eighty-Seven

  Day Eighty-Eight

  Day Eighty-Nine

  Day Ninety

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 1980 by Ivan Doig

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The author and the publisher wish to thank the following for their permission to quote material: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, for the lines from Bill Reid on pages [>], [>], and [>] of Indian Art of the Northwest Coast: A Dialogue on Craftmanship and Aesthetics, by Bill Holm and Bill Reid (Houston, Texas: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1975; distributed by the University of Washington Press, Seattle); McGraw-Hill Book Company for an excerpt from the diary of Patience Loader as quoted in The Gathering of Zion by Wallace Stegner, copyright © 1964 by Wallace Stegner; the New York Times for lines from “Times of the Males,” by Wright Morris, the New York Times Rook Review, January 1, 1979, © 1979 by the New York Times Company. The four Haidah Indian designs, by James G. Swan, are reproduced from the Smithsonian Institution collections through the courtesy of the New York Public Library.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Doig, Ivan.

  Winter brothers.

  Based on the journals of James Gilchrist Swan.

  1. Swan, James Gilchrist 2. Washington (State)—History—To 1889. 3 Makah Indians. 4. Pioneers—Washington (State)—Biography. 5. Indianists—Washington (State)—Biography.

  I. Swan, James Gilchrist. II. Title.

  F891.S972D64 9797'03'0924 [B] 80-7933

  ISBN 0-15-697215-8 (Harvest: pbk.)

  ISBN 978-0-15-697215-4

  eISBN 978-0-547-54673-5

  v2.0313

  THIS ONE IS FOR THE MISSOULA GANG,

  WHEN WE OWNED THE WEST.

  Bill Bevis Bill Farr Steve Krauzer

  Juliette Crump Bud Guthrie Norman Maclean

  M. C. Crump Carol Guthrie Bob Reid

  Sarah Crump Duane Hampton Gayle Reid

  Jim Crumley Dick Hugo Annick Smith

  Madeline DeFrees Ripley Schemm Ross Toole

  Rick DeMarinis Dorothy Johnson Jim Welch

  Carol Doig Margaret Kingsland Lois Welch

  Dave Emmons Bill Kittredge

  DECEMBER-JANUARY

  The Boston Bird

  HOOYEH

  (The Crow)

  Day One

  His name was James Gilchrist Swan, and I have felt my pull toward him ever since some forgotten frontier pursuit or another landed me into the coastal region of history where he presides, meticulous as a usurer’s clerk, diarying and diarying that life of his, four generations and seemingly as many light-years from my own. You have met him yourself in some other form—the remembered neighbor or family member, full of years while you just had begun to grow into them, who had been in a war or to a far place and could confide to you how such vanished matters were. The tale-bringer sent to each of us by the past.

  That day, whenever it was, when I made the side trip into archival box after box of Swan’s diaries and began to realize that they held four full decades of his life and at least 2,500,000 handwritten words. And what life, what sketching words. This morning we discovered a large wolf in the brook dead from the effects of some strychnine we had put out. It was a she wolf very large and evidently had five whelps. Maggs and myself shinned her and I boiled the head to get the skull....Mr. Fitzgerald of Sequim Prairie better known as “Skip!” walked off the wharf near the Custom House last night and broke his neck. The night was very dark, and he mistook the way....Jimmy had the night mare last night and made a great howling. This morning he told me that the memelose were after him and made him crazy. I told him the memelose were dead squid which he ate for supper very heartily....Mr Tucker very ill with his eye, his face is badly swelled. This evening got Kichook’s Cowitchan squaw to milk her breast into a cup, and I then bathed Mr Tucker’s eye with it....

  I recall that soon I gave up jotting notes and simply thumbed and read. At closing hour, Swan got up from the research table with me. I would write of him sometime, I had decided. Do a magazine piece or two, for I was in the business then of making those smooth packets of a few thousand words. Just use this queer indefatigable diarist Swan some rapid way as a figurine of the Pacific Northwest past.

  Swan refused figurinehood, and rapid was the one word that never visited his pencils and pens. When, eight, ten years ago, I took a segment of his frontier life and tried to lop it into magazine-article length, loose ends hung everywhere. As well write about Samuel Pepys only what he did during office hours at the British admiralty. A later try, I set out carefully to summarize Swan—oyster entrepreneur, schoolteacher, railroad speculator, amateur ethnologist, lawyer, judge, homesteader, linguist, ship’s outfitter, explorer, customs collector, author, small-town bureaucrat, artist, clerk—and surrendered in dizziness, none of the spectrum having shown his true and lasting occupation:
diarist. This, I at last told myself, wants more time than I ever can grant it.

  Until now. Here is the winter that will be the season of Swan. Rather, of Swan and me and those constant diaries. Day by day, a logbook of what is uppermost in any of the three of us.

  It is a venture that I have mulled these past years of my becoming less headlong and more aware that I dwell in a community of time as well as of people. That I should know more than I do about this other mysterious citizenship, how far it goes, where it touches.

  And the twin whys: why it has me invest my life in one place instead of another, and why for me that place happens to be western. More and more it seems to me that the westernness of my existence in this land is some consequence having to do with that community of time, one of the terms of my particular citizenship in it. America began as West, the direction off the ends of the docks of Europe. Then the firstcomers from the East of this continent to its West, advance parties of the American quest for place (position, too, maybe, but that is a pilgrimage that interests me less), imprinted our many contour lines of frontier. And next, it still is happening, the spread of national civilization absorbed those lines. Except that markings, streaks and whorls of the West and the past are left in some of us.

  Because, then, of this western pattern so stubbornly within my life I am interested in Swan as a westcomer, and stayer. Early, among the very earliest, in stepping the paths of impulse that pull across America’s girth of plains and over its continental summit and at last reluctantly nip off at the surf from the Pacific, Swan has gone before me through this matter of siting oneself specifically here: West.

  The companion I feel an urgency to spend this winter with, meet day by day on the broad seasonal ground of time, here along the continental edge that drew us both.

  If Swan attracts me in the way that any oracle among the coastal Indians of the Pacific Northwest inevitably attracted him—that here flashes the bard of a vivid tribe, worth all amount of attention—it is the diaries which throw his particular needle-sharp glints.

  The diaries dazzle and dazzle me, first simply by their total and variety: Out of their gray archival boxes at the University of Washington library, they could be the secondhand wares of an eccentric stationer dreamed up by Charles Dickens. Some are mere notebooks with cheap marbled covers, and occasionally even a school exercise book sidles into the collection, but most are formal annual volumes (for the purpose of registering events of past, present, and future occurrence, announces the opening page of the 1860 version) and a good number of them display deft clasps to snug themselves closed from outsiders’ eyes. It exaggerates marginally to say no two Swan diaries look closer alike than cousins, but I haven’t yet turned up three of any single kind. Black-covered and green, tan and faded maroon, what they do present in common is that nearly all are small enough to fit into the palm of a hand, or a busy pocket. Those that won’t are actual ledgers, such as the aristocrat of the congregation, 1866, some nine inches wide and twelve high, weighing four and a quarter pounds and displaying an elaborately hinged and embossed spine and a cover panel of leather into the middle of which has been tooled in rich half-inch letters J. G. Swan. I can scarcely wait for 1866—lay it open to the first of its 380 lordly pages, and handwriting neat as small embroidery instantly begins to recite: Diary and private journal of James G. Swan, being a continuation of daily record commencing July 1862 at the Makah Indian Agency Neah Bay, Washington Territory—but what browsing I have done into any of the diaries has been seductive. Opening the pages of Swan’s years is like entering a room filled with jugglers and tumblers and swal-lowers of flame, performance crowding performance. Went to see Capt John this morning, found him better. All the Indians except his squaws and children have left the lodge. John is alone in one corner, surrounded by a mat screen. He tells me that the small pox will collect in his head and when it leaves him it will come out of the top of his head like a puff of smome. To prevent it spreading he has a large hole left open in the roof directly over his head, through which the sickness is expected to escape....Last evening when the gentlemen from the Cutter were here, Capt Williams asked me for a drink of water. I handed him a dipper full from my pail, and he found a live toad in it which I had dipped up from the brook....Bricktop the blacksmith and some other roughs got on a spree & took Hernandez the loony shoemaker to Hunt’s Hotel and made him treat. John Cornish was there and stripped himself to his drawers to fight.... Swan records the weather morning-afternoon-night; notes down when salmonberry has popped into spring bloom, when autumn’s geese begin to aim past to the southern horizon; logs all ships that sail past his eyes and on along the Strait of Juan de Fuca or Puget Sound; remarks his off days (Severe attack of neuralgia today Dr. Minn tried to cure it injecting morphine or something of the sort under the’skin on my left cheek—This checked the pain but made me feel dizzy & sick at the stomach—the remedy was worse than the disease) and the other coastal days that shone as doubloon-bright as the most exhilarating hours anywhere; keeps account of letters written and received, and books borrowed and lent, and of his exceedingly ramshackle finances. His jottings overflow the day-by-day pages onto the inside covers of the diaries: mailing addresses of relatives in his native New England, Indian words and their definitions, sketches. On one back page a little Indian girl on the wharf at Seattle, the child prettily prone on the planks as she directs a tiny fishing stick-and-string to the water and a level stare at the pencilman creating her. Elsewhere the unmistakable pyramidal outline of Mount Baker, dominant peak of the Strait country; how many thousand times Swan saw its wide white cone. On an inside cover inspiration of one more sort, a pasted-in clipping of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier: Though dim as yet in tint and line / We trace Thy picture’s wise design / And thank Thee that our age supplies / The dark relief of sacrifice / Thy will be done!

  Terrific as the various expended diary energy is, page upon page and volume after volume, the simple stubborn dailiness of Swan’s achievement seems to me even more dazing. It compares, say, to that of a carpenter whanging an hour’s hammerstrokes on the same framework each morning for forty years, or a monk or nun spending that span of time tending the same vineyard. Or to put it more closely, a penman who a page or so a day writes out a manuscript the equivalent length of five copies of War and Peace, accomplishing the masterwork in frontier town and Indian village and sometimes no community at all.

  For example, this: This is the 18th day since Swell was shot and there is no offensive smell from the corpse. It may be accounted for in this manner. He was shot through the body & afterwards washed in the breakers—consequently all the blood in him must have run out. He was then rolled up tight in 2 new blankets and put into a new box nailed up strong.

  Swell was a chieftain of the Makah tribe of Cape Flattery, that westmost prow of this coast. He also was Swan’s best-regarded friend among the coastal tribes of Washington Territory, a man Swan had voyaged with, learned legends from. The diary pages show them steadily swapping favors: now Swell detailing for Swan the Makahs’ skill at hunting whales, now Swan painting for Swell in red and black his name and a horse on his canoe sail. Swell said he always went faster in his canoe than the other Indians...like a horse, so he wanted to have one painted....On yet another diary end-page there is the roughed outline of a galloping horse and above it in block letters the name SWELL, with five-pointed stars fore and aft. If Swan carried out the design, Swell sailed under the gaudiest canvas in the North Pacific.

  I know the beach at Crescent Bay where Swell’s life was snapped off. Across on the Canadian shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca the lights of modern Victoria now spread as white embers atop the burn-dark rim of coastline, and west from the city occasional lighthouses make blinks against the black as the Strait seeks toward the Pacific. But on Swell’s final winter night in 1861 only a beach campfire at Crescent on our southern shore flashed bright enough to attract the eye, and Swell misread the marker of flame as an encampment of traveling members of h
is own tribe. Instead, he stepped from his canoe to find that the overnighters were from a nearby village of Elwha Indians, among them chanced to be a particular rival of Swell, and his bullet spun the young Makah dead into the cold quick surf.

  The killing was less casual than the downtown deaths my morning newspaper brings me three or four times a week—the Elwhas and the Makahs at least had the excuse of lifetimes of quarrel—or those I might go see in aftermath, eligible as I am for all manner of intrusion because of being a writer, were I to accompany the Seattle homicide squad. James G. Swan did go hurrying to be beside Swell’s corpse, and there the first of our differences is marked.

  A morning soon after learning of Swell’s death Swan strolled into the Elwha village. Charley, the murderer, then got up and made a speech. He said that he shot Swell for two reasons, one of which was, that the Mackahs had hilled two of the Elwha’s a few months previous, and they were determined to kill a Mackah chief to pay for it. And the other reason was, that Swell had taken his squaw away, and would not return either the woman or the fifty blankets he had paid for her.

  Swan was not swerved. I could not help feeling while standing up alongside this murderer...that I would gladly give a pull at the rope that should hang him.... The day’s chastisement was administered with vocal cords rather than hemp, however. My object was not to punish or kill Indians, but to recover property. Swan haggled out of Charley the potware Swell had been carrying as cargo for a trader, several blankets, and a dozen yards of calico, and as I had no authority to make them disgorge any other plunder called it sufficient.

  Swan next carried the matter of Swell’s death to the federal Indian agent for Washington Territory. Met inconclusion there. Sent a seething letter to the newspaper in the territorial capital of Olympia ...an Indian peaceably passing on his way home in his canoe, laden with white men’s goods...foully murdered...too good an Indian and too valuable a man...to have his murder go unavenged...agents of our munificent government have not the means at their disposal to defray the expenses of going to arrest the murderer.... And at last canoed once more along the Strait to accompany Swell, still nailed up strong, to burial at the Makah village of Neah Bay.