Winter Brothers Page 24

  I nailed this board to a tree where it will be a conspicuous object on landing, to any one who may be so unfortunate as to camp at this place hereafter.

  Now only a matter of hours from Skidegate Channel if the weather and the canoe bottom both will hold, Swan and party push off to a late start the next morning, 7 oclock instead of 5 which we should have done.... Luckily we found the water smooth, and the canoe slid easily.

  Johnny had collected some spruce gum yesterday, and...all hands took a piece, and soon the jaws of the whole party were in motion....We found the gum an excellent thing to chew before breakfast, cleaning the mouth, strengthening the stomach and aiding the appetite.

  Chawing along in the improved weather, the paddlers idle more than Swan wants, and at one point stop to shoot at seals...After a delay of three quarters of an hour without killing any we again started and lazily proceeded. As the pace of paddling drops Swan’s temper climbs. By now had come up a light wind from the SW which was fair.

  I asked why sail was not set.

  The reply was, “by and by!” and the Indians stopped to light their pipes.

  Swan erupts. Weeks of sopping weather, the dubious companionship of Deans, a doddery canoe with a fracture line down its center, Edinso’s swings of mood, and now by and by and a casual cumulus of tobacco smoke. The ensuing scene in the diary pages is more terse than it possibly could have been: Swan ultimatuming Edinso that I would not pay for any more time to be thrown away....Finally the men took to their oars to their own accord, and having set two sails for the first time since leaving Massett, we began to advance....

  Swan may have won the skirmish, but Edinso takes the day. The canoeists enter Skidegate Channel so late they are met by the ebb tide and must put to shore for the night. Idled away too much time, Swan grumps to his diary that evening.

  The better news is that delay is all he has suffered. I feel thankful that I am so near my journey, and in good health and that no accident has happened to us.

  Next day, the twenty-sixth of August, Swan determinedly sergeants everyone into the canoe before daybreak. Indeed, they barely have blinked into morning when, a few hours after their start, Swan is notating their arrival at the Skidegate Oil Works...very kindly received by Mr. William Sterling the superintendent, who at once ordered a nice breakfast for us...and Mr. Alexander McGregor his partner who offered me a room in his house to write in and to spread my bedding making me more comfortable than I have been at any time since leaving Masset.

  Swan as western venturer. Now that he is triumphantly at Skidegate, he puts me in mind of the history-bearer whom Bernard DeVoto once wrote of, the early frontiersman James Clyman. Clyman that uncanny accompanist to America’s westward mood: born on George Washington’s land in Virginia in 1792, westering with the fur trappers and explorers, battling Indians in the Black Hawk war in the same company as Abraham Lincoln, traveling the Oregon Trail in the 1844 emigration, rambling in California when gold was struck in 1848—ultimately settling to a ranch in the Napa Valley and living on until 1881, the presidency of Chester A. Arthur and almost to the time of this Queen Charlottes adventure of Swan’s. In the way Clyman was, Swan too stands to me now as something of a template, an outlining human gauge: but of western possibilities rather than western past. Swan literally is a being of our continental edge, rimwalk-ing its landscape and native cultures. If I could put questions to Swan across time I think they would try to reach toward invisible inward lines, those riggings of curiosity and gameness-for-damn-near-anything, hung deeper in him than anyone else I have encountered. Difficult to phrase, not say answer, but: what is the tidal pull of an earlier way of life, of the timescape of first people such as the Makahs and the vanished Haida villagers? What instruction does their West offer any of ours? And, since the diaries of the Queen Charlotte days say all but this: what, when reputation and thrill and all other incomplete reasons have been said, truly sends a man of sixty-five seeking along an unknown treacherous coast? What mightier impulses wade in the bloodstream? Questions which perhaps can never be fully met with words, and so keep me straining to hear beyond, into the deeps of a Swan.

  Swan hurries a note of success to Baird at the Smithsonian...20 days on the trip...head winds and rain all the time....With the exception of the temperature being mild—54° the weather has been like the winter weather off Cape Flattery....

  His mood now after the watery three weeks of exploration and the complication of the cracked canoe is a rainbow of triumph and relief, glad that I have ended this tedious and perilous journey from Masset to this place without accident. Old Edinso has purposely delayed our travel...but I felt safe with the old fellow as he is very skillful in handling a canoe. In the mellowness of the moment Swan even allows Edinso to use his tent overnight and tells Johnny Kit Elswa to give the Indians the balance of the rice which was enough for a good meal, a lot of biscuit, tea, sugar and some bacon.

  By the time Edinso sets off up the coast to Masset in the cracked canoe a day or so later, however, Swan abruptly is inscribing him as the biggest old fraud I ever have had dealings with....His fresh pique has been furnished by Johnny, who has had a thoughtful conversation with Edinso’s canoe crew. They say the old man’s lame back was all sham.

  Day Seventy-Seven

  Warm breeze again today, nearly a chinook. Since morning I have changed shirts three times, each time to lighter material; now, at 2:30, it is sixty-four degrees. Winter is turning into winter/spring. Absolute proof: I have begun sneezing, an allergy has thawed. Captain John of the Makahs once explained to Swan why he and the other Neah Bay natives recited several sentences after sneezing: they were asking the Great Spirit to spare them. If they did not utter this brief petition, the top of their heads would be blown off when they sneezed. I may yet prove Captain John right.

  With Edinso and the cracked canoe and the west shore weather all out of his system, Swan draws a deep breath and begins to calculate the brief remainder of his Queen Charlottes summer. The steamer Princess Louise, taking on a cargo of dogfish oil at the Skidegate refinery, will convey his mail to Victoria. His fish tanks delivered to Masset by the providential otter hunter will be shipped from there by the Hudson’s Bay Company. A crew of Indians has been sent off for black cod, the final fish specimen. The summer’s last task is to garner more art from the Haidas, along Skidegate Inlet and the eastern shore of Moresby Island where the tribal villages still were living places.

  It is the morning of the twenty-eighth of August when Rev. Mr. Robinson the Methodist Missionary came from Skidegate village with Ellswarsh and his wife, Sam his dumb boy and Ellen his youngest girl a child of about seven years....Two years ago this family with an elder daughter Soodatl were in Port Townsend and occupied a room near my office where Ellswarsh worked making silver bracelets and other articles of jewelry. The children were very fond of me and came to my office every day and they had not forgotten the kind treatment they received from me.

  Then the words Swan needs: Ellswarsh invited me to go to his house at Skidegate village where he had some things to show me.

  After breakfast, the first morning of September, Johnny rowed me to Skidegate village. The distance is about two miles....As soon as our salutations were over, a mat was spread on the floor and two chairs placed, one for me and one for Johnny. Then clean water in a wash bowl with soap and a clean towel to wash our hands and faces. By the time we had finished, the Indians began to come in with things to sell...

  The pocket diary becomes a blizzard of buying: carved spoon...scana mask...crow mask...Embroidered dance shirt of blue blanket, red figure, very fine...But as it was Saturday and I wanted to look around the village I concluded to defer other purchases till Monday.

  One matter Swan decides he has deferred long enough: his feelings toward James Deans. Now that Swan is finished sharing canoe and campfire with him several weeks of wrath are unloaded.

  I find that Mr. James Deans who accompanied me from Masset and represented that he is in the emplo
y of Dr. Powell has proved himself a great nuisance by interfering with my Indian trade and purchase of curiosities. He represented to parties here that he was in my employ and made bargains with Indians to take me about in canoes which I repudiated. He is filthy in his habits, and untruthful to a degree. I have not suffered him to go with me since I arrived here, and wish I never had seen the man.

  This wish will be multiplied in a month or so when he discovers that Powell’s Indian Department, considering Deans’s assignment no longer valid when he missed the Otter and the first several weeks in the Queen Charlottes, will not reimburse Swan for any of the expenses of the free-lancing Deans.

  Sunday, the second of September, the Indians dispatched for black cod return with twenty-five of the fish. Specimens the bodies may be, but I had the tongues cut out and fried, and a chowder made of the heads, and roes and livers fried. They were all first rate....

  Monday, the third of September, brings a new bargain. Ellswarsh to come tomorrow morning and take me in his large canoe to Skedanse village, Cumshewas, Laskeek and other places of the eastern coast of the Queen Charlottes, the living shore of Haida culture.

  Days Seventy-Eight, Seventy-Nine, Eighty

  I noticed one of the great slimy slugs, so common on the North West coast, crawling on the floor near my bed, and on throwing it into the fire, Ellswarsh ashed me if white men eat slugs. I said no, we do not....He said that Indians did not eat them, but that chinamen do....He was at Fort Essington last year, at the cannery at Skeena mouth. The chinamen who worked at the cannery made a soup of the slugs and crows which were boiled together in a big iron fettle. Those chinamen, said he, are different people from Indians, we dont eat slugs and crows, they would make us sick...but the chinamen like em, they eat all the crows and slugs and all the soup, and scrape the kettle with their spoons, chinamen no good.

  This is a new hind of a mess and I make note of it as slugs and crows may yet find a place on the bill of fare at the Driard House in Victoria, or Delmonico’s in New York.

  High good humor from Swan in this final chapter of his Queen Charlottes exploit. Slugs and soup and Chinamen, I almost expect cabbages and kings next on the triplicate pages. The collecting jaunt to the eastern shore has begun with Ellswarsh and three paddlers pulling in for Swan and Johnny Kit Elswa the morning of the fourth of September, and hard weather at their heels. The party canoes out of Skidegate Inlet and around the first point of coast southward, meets the full whap of storm, scuttles for shore. Wind blew so violently that it was difficult to pitch my tent but having succeeded with the united aid of the whole party I found myself very comfortable, and I invited Ellswarsh to share my tent and table. (And mentally invited the memory of Edinso to look on and howl?) Johnny Kit Elswa and the canoemen occupy a second tent and take their meals in the open air by the camp fire. Unluckily for Swan the first of those meals features some red berries which they mixed with grease....They were sour and...cleaned me out good.

  Freshly scoured from the inside out, Swan wakes the next morning to a fair wind. This rare chance to hoist a sail brings the canoeists early to the village of a chief named Skedance. He gave us a hearty welcome and soon had a breakfast ready, composed of dried halibut and fish oil, fish eggs, boiled dried salmon, and boiled dried dulse mixed with fish eggs and red huckleberries. So far off his feed from the previous night’s experiment with berries-and-oil is Swan that he passes up this imaginative smorgasbord for bread and tea. His mood anyway is to bargain. After breakfast Skedance showed me a fine chest or box elaborately carved, but did not name any price. He showed me some other things, and I bought of him two dancing hats, a bow and arrows made of copper, used as ornaments while dancing and a carving in wood resembling an eagles foot holding a salmon.

  Think of Swan by now as a person who has shopped through the supermarket and at the end of the last row begins to fill the basket as a reward to himself. In the next week at the villages of Skedans and Laskeek, Swan procures example after example of the Haida magic of knifestrokeonto-wood-or-stone. I bought quite a lot, he understates on his final day of bargaining, the tenth of September; his total trove to the Smithsonian, together with the fish specimens, was an eventual twenty-nine freight boxes’ worth.

  Swan’s days, weeks, months of unveiling the Queen Charlottes have ended. He deserves to deliver his own last words. I have had a rough time since I left Masset but have gained in health and knowledge and leave the islands with regret. The refinery superintendent at Skidegate has told him the supply steamer departs for Victoria in a matter of days. So I began to prepare to go on her as there will not be another steamer here till next spring and although I would like to remain all winter to see the medicine dances and masquarade performances I...must avail myself of this opportunity to return to civilization.

  Day Eighty-One

  Swan’s first set of hours at sea for Victoria:

  I dreamed last night that little Jangi, Jimmys boy, was in bed with me and told me that we should have a pleasant day and a fair wind, both of which we have had. In fact this has been one of the most delightful days I ever saw.

  I found on waking, that I did not have Jangi but a wooden image of an Indian Skaga or doctor which I had put on the back, side of my berth, which probably caused my dream.

  Days Eighty-Two, Eighty-Three

  Victoria, in almost-spring sun.

  Not at all like the dry and dowdy little Queen whose name it wears, this capital of British Columbia. Rather, the city is in the manner of the youngest daughter of some Edwardian country-house family, attractive and passionately self-absorbed and more than a little silly.

  Victoria imagines among other things that it is a sward of Olde England somehow rolled out like turf over Western Canadian bedrock. Consequently you can sip tea in the massive Empress Hotel while across the street, seaplanes yatter in and out of the Inner Harbor with shaggy civil servants from up-island or logging company men off to soon-to-be-deforested shores. A block away the Parliament building presides in grand daffy Empire style, a sprawl of gray stone beneath a central dome; the entirety of this castle of government outlined with lightbulbs so that at night it blazes like a profile in a fireworks display. I never look at it without expecting the dome to begin spewing up skyrockets.

  Such preoccupation with glitter is not new. British troops and sailors stationed at Victoria in the last century would drill in such solemnly spectacular style that the watching Haidas went home and asked a missionary to teach them such fine maneuvers. To gauge from Swan’s entries of his occasional visits to Victoria he noticed that the town was a bit high-faluting: Had my hair cut. Paid 75¢ a Victoria swindle. For its part Victoria likely found Swan a little too Americanly robust in his drinking and his opinions. (Wrote to Dr Powell a letter of apology for my actions while in Victoria, runs one diary entry of earlier years.) But according to the holdings of the Provincial Archives all seems forgiven on both sides when Swan arrived back from the Queen Charlottes in late September of 1883. The Victoria Daily Colonist pronounced that “Mr. Swan’s researches have been conducted with assiduity and attended with success” and began running a series of articles written by him about his exploit. Better yet the British Columbia legislature invited Swan to speak, and he instructed the lawmakers for more than an hour about their little-known northern archipelago. Two notable features were his snub of Deans—I had no occasion for the services of a white man, and consequently took none in any capacity— and his runaway enthusiasm for black cod, which took up nearly half his address.

  The British Columbians voted him their appreciation, and here I give him my ovation as well. Swan’s west shore adventure defeated some of the North Pacific’s most difficult weather. From the Haidas of the eastern shore villages he purchased—which is to say preserved, brought forward for posterity’s study—a wealth of Haida craft and art. With his combination of pencil and pen and eventual typewriter he added to the lore known of the Haidas, at a time when it was not at all certain that the tribe itself woul
d survive. Most of all he did his dare of himself: went off to one more West, lived according to the place’s own terms, and came home to tell about it. I think of my last miles of walking out of the Rockies from the Marshall Wilderness and of hikes completed in the Olympic Mountains and along the Cape Alava shore, and believe I know some whisper of Swan’s satisfaction.

  The other journeyers of 1883, I turn elsewhere in the Provincial Archives to trace.

  Deans died at Victoria in 1905. The lasting effects of his jaunt with Swan seem to have been some lame poetry (“On a Queen Charlotte Island Mountain Torrent”: Up in the mountains high/Springs a small river/Down through the forests high/Rushing for ever) and an enthusiasm for Indian legends and artifacts. “He was always digging for Indian trophies....He was looked upon, therefore, by many as a complete crank, an eccentric.”

  Edinso lived until 1897. His age was uncertain, but probably he was at least eighty-five when death at last caught him. A white settler at Masset remembered of Edinso’s last years that “the old chief would wander around the village with an old blanket around him and a staff in his hand and an old stub clay pipe in his mouth. The old fellow would call on my mother at the Hudson’s Bay house, come in the back door of the kitchen and sit on his haunches beside the stove and tell her yarns of the ancient glories of the Haidas.” The Colonist’s last word on Edinso was the declamation that “it is doubtless partly owing to his influence and example that the Haidas have taken so readily to civilized ways and become one of the most law abiding tribes on the Coast.”