Sarah Canary (23 page)

‘Boston man
hyas pilton.’
Sam stared unconcernedly off in the direction of the beach.

‘I know,’ said B.J.

‘Take the little canoe,’ said Sam. ‘I have crossed the canal in it many times.’

‘What do you think?’ asked Purdy.

‘I think it’s semaphore,’ B.J. said. ‘I’m getting most of it.’

Chin ignored him, ‘The wind is so strong,’ he said carefully. ‘It is dangerous to be on the water when the wind is strong.’ Tigers controlled the wind. Dragons controlled the water. A wise man did not get caught between the two. A wise man did not get caught between the white men and the Indians either.

Purdy nodded. ‘I want the Chinook canoe,’ he told Sam again. ‘The
hyas canim.’

‘It’s not for sale. Just the little one.’

Purdy was getting angry. ‘I don’t want to buy it. I just want to rent it. I’ve rented it before.
Mika wake tickey momak?
We have offered you much
chickerman.
Why are you wasting our time?’

‘Belle Starr lives with Indians,’ B.J. said. ‘I don’t know if she has to. She’s married to one of them.’

Sam spat from between the gap in his teeth. He had to smile to do this. The wind carried the spit away. Then the wind dropped suddenly. The blanket barely shivered in Sam’s hand. It made a noise like a small clap. The wind came back.

‘Is this a good thing?’ B.J. asked. ‘Would Indians want this?’

Sam stopped smiling. ‘Is that man with you?’ Chin turned to look where Sam was looking, down to the beach. Harold was there, standing in the space between the two larger canoes. He glanced up at them briefly. Then, as they watched, he began to push the little canoe out into the water, splashing along behind it.

‘Why is that man stealing my canoe?’ Sam asked, while Chin shouted at Harold to stop, but the words came out in Cantonese and Harold couldn’t have heard them anyway. Harold was knee-deep in the bay now, tipping the canoe almost horizontal in order to climb inside. Once he was settled, sitting toward the back, he pulled a paddle from the bottom. The wind was behind him and blew his hair into his face. It pushed the little boat quickly forward across the lines of the waves to the choppy circles of deep water.

~ * ~

vi

In 1854, the new governor of the Washington Territory, Major Isaac I. Stevens, stopped in Seattle village to address the Indian population. Good times were coming for them, he said. All the blessings of civilization plus free vegetable seeds from the Department of Agriculture. He invited Chief Seattle to respond.

The chief, who was more than a foot taller than Stevens, made a very long speech, resting his hand the whole time on the governor’s head. According to eyewitness accounts, Stevens looked pained. The Battle of Seattle took place two years later.

The original name of Seattle village was Duwamps. The early white settlers felt that this sounded too much like someone being sick to his stomach and did not want it on their letters and packages. They changed the name to Seattle in honor of the chief. It was a gesture that upset him enormously.

Among Seattle’s early landmarks was the Mad House, a house of prostitution run by John Pennell. Although there were a few white women, most of Pennell’s prostitutes were Indians from the Dwamish tribe. Pennell had purchased the women from their chiefs with Hudson Bay blankets. The Hudson Bay Company wanted money and sometimes land for their blankets, so Pennell’s offer was a real bargain. The blankets were of the first quality, but Pennell did not even demand the most beautiful of the Indian women in exchange, although all the Dwamish had lush and glossy hair, an effect they enhanced, according to tribal custom, with frequent urine rinses and fish oil rubs, until they came to the Mad House and such treatments were forbidden. Pennell’s clientele was so squeamish.

By 1873, the Mad House had closed and the Chinese occupied that section of Seattle. Most of the Puget Sound Indians wore white men’s clothing, lived in houses, and found employment in white men’s homes and mills and on white men’s boats. They had adopted white methods of fishing; they retained their own canoes but outfitted them with sails and oars; they played games of skill with bows and arrows, but baseball was a more popular pastime. Their condition was characterized by their white contemporaries as a state of half-civilization.

In this same year, on the California-Oregon border, the Modoc War ended with the trial of Captain Jack and five other Modoc leaders. For six months, fifty Modoc warriors had engaged a thousand US soldiers in a conflict whose every twist was thoroughly covered for the Eastern newspapers by correspondents on the scene. These reports were a continual source of humiliation for the Army. On June 1, 1873, Captain Jack allowed himself to be captured, explaining that his legs had given out. He and the five codefendants were charged with the murders of two peace commissioners: General Canby, the only General to be killed in an Indian war, and the Reverend Mr Thomas. The trial was conducted without defense council and in a language none of the defendants really spoke. The sentence was death.

Public opinion favored clemency toward Barncho and Slolux, the youngest of the captured Modocs. President Grant commuted their sentences to life imprisonment, stipulating that they not be told of this until the hangings one month later. Six men rode to the gallows seated on four coffins. Barncho and Slolux spent five years on Alcatraz Island and then were released. Captain Jack, Schonchin John, Black Jim, and Boston Charley were executed. Their Modoc names, the names they had in their own language, are not remembered.

William Cody won his new name while working as a buffalo hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railroad. For eighteen months he supplied buffalo meat to the railroad hands. They called him Buffalo Bill, a title, he said in his autobiography, of which he was never ashamed. He had killed 4,280 buffaloes.

In 1871, a small technological breakthrough in the process of tanning buffalo hides resulted in the final massacre of the prairie buffalo. By 1873, a traveler to Fort Dodge described the north bank of the Arkansas River as ‘a continual line of putrescent carcasses’ so that the very ‘air was rendered pestilential.’ Buffalo hunter Frank Nixon boasted of having killed one hundred and twenty buffalo in forty minutes, an average of one every twenty seconds, and to kill one hundred from a single stand was not uncommon.

The buffalo were not reproducing at the rate of one every twenty seconds. It was soon necessary to follow them into the Comanche lands of the Panhandle, a place where white men were forbidden to go. In 1873, the 7th Regiment, disassembled over the last two years and sent to protect the South against the Ku Klux Klan, was reunited to serve again on the plains under the leadership of George Armstrong Custer.

~ * ~

Chief Seattle’s address to the territorial governor of Washington is supposed to have ended with these words: ‘. . . At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.’

~ * ~

12

A Rainy Day on Hood Canal

Too distant to arrest the feet

That walk this plank of balm—

Before them lies escape less sea—

The way is closed they came.

Emily Dickinson, 1873

The blanket in the doorway to Sam Clams’s house was made of cotton from fireweed, duck feathers, and the hair of a white dog. A Salish woman’s wealth had once been counted in these dogs, but the breed was extinct now and the blankets were rare. B.J. knew a lot about Indians, because the Indian agent had been interned periodically at Steilacoom. He had told B.J. that Indians were less sensitive to physical pain than white men; he had described religious ceremonies, ceremonies of
black tamah-nous,
in which they cut and bit themselves, and he said that they could endure easily numbers of fleas that would drive a white man out of his mind.

Their susceptibility to other kinds of pain was a subject on which the agent was less sure. They were seldom insane; Dr Carr had told B.J. that. There were exceptions, of course: a Clallam Indian who was struck in his youth by a falling tree so that some of his brains spilled out; a Twana who had a long series of troubles with different wives and developed a quiet, self-deprecating insanity, eventually running away and hiding in the forest.

There were occasional suicides, always women. The Indians described sorrow as the sensation of being stuck with a needle in the heart. The white men named villages and rivers after men, because it did not hurt white men to hear the names of the dead. The Indian heart was made of mud, the Indians had told the agent. The white man’s heart was made of stone.

B.J. noted two iron spearheads leaning against the doorway and decided that Sam Clams was probably a seal hunter and might be a wealthy man if he didn’t hold to the old potlatch way of thinking that giving things away made men important, if he understood that money was now wealth. ‘Pay me
chickerman
,’ Sam had said, so he probably did understand, and, anyway, the days when Indians could be paid with a cotton handkerchief for a day’s work were over. Seal hunting was becoming a profitable business and the white men kept as much of it to themselves as they could.

Look at me, the blanket in the doorway told B.J. insistently. I am trying to tell you something.

Before things changed, the blanket said, twisting about in Sam’s fist, animals were much more like people than they are now. In this time, Coyote had a daughter who was known for her speed. She wished to marry Raven, a man from another village, and he wished to marry her, but Coyote opposed the union, saying that Raven was not her equal. He was not as fast as Coyote. He was not as skilled with
syuid,
the language of power. Why should she marry someone less than her father?

I’ve heard this story, B.J. told the blanket in his mind. Only instead of Coyote, it was a king, and instead of being known for her speed, she was known for her goodness, and instead of wishing to marry a Raven, she wished to marry a woodcutter. Except for that, it was the same story.

B.J. wondered for a moment if the blanket itself was talking or if Sam was secretly directing the blanket in coded patterns for B.J. The Indians on the plains communicated with blankets and smoke. Why not blankets and wind? B.J. looked more closely at Sam’s hand. A tattoo of three semicircles decorated his wrist. His hand did not appear to move.

Suddenly the blanket escaped from Sam’s fingers and flew at B.J.’s face, making him gasp. Pay attention now, it said sharply. Stop thinking and listen to me. Just listen.

Coyote wished to marry his daughter himself, the blanket said. He would tell his daughter she must marry a certain man from the Yakima tribe and then he would disguise himself as this man, B.J. could scarcely imagine such perfidy, but he had the impression that the blanket rather admired it.

Sam caught the blanket again. The story became quieter. Coyote’s daughter ignored his wishes and married Raven. And then Coyote took some pine and made a box big enough for two people. He put his daughter and his son-in-law in the box and he nailed it shut. He towed the box out into the ocean behind his canoe and cut it loose.

He thought the box would sink. But it did not. Coyote tried to push the box under the water. It rose again to the top. Coyote stepped out of the canoe and danced on the box. When he danced on one end, that end dipped under the water. When he danced on the other end,
that
end dipped. But the box would not sink. Coyote jumped up and down on the box. He jumped high into the air and a great wave moved the box from beneath him. Coyote fell into the water. His canoe had already floated away.

The Changer came by in another canoe. Where is your daughter, Coyote?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing?’

‘
Syuid
,’ Coyote answered. ‘I am making fog.’ And he made a great fog to hide himself from the Changer and he made this fog by correctly naming the part of his body through which he urinated.

His male member? B.J. asked in silent surprise.

That is not the correct name, said the blanket. The blanket was laughing at him.

‘I know,’ said B.J.

‘You can’t hide from me, Coyote,’ said the Changer, and he woke the Thunderbird, who flapped his wings and spit lightning and blew Coyote’s great fog away. Then, without the fog, the Changer saw Coyote and the Thunderbird saw the box. The Thunderbird thought the box was a whale. The Thunderbird ate whales and so he sent a lightning bolt from his mouth to kill the whale, but the lightning went wide into the water. The Thunderbird circled lower to try again, but there was no whale, only a box, and the Thunderbird was now close enough to see this. The Thunderbird took the box in his talons and carried it into the sky. The sky was much closer to the earth than it is now. It was not so high. The Thunderbird left the box on the ground of the skyworld.

Day came by and found the box. He opened it and saw the man and the woman. He took the man out. He didn’t want the woman, so he left her inside and nailed the box shut again. Day had five beautiful daughters, and he told Raven they would all be his wives if Raven came home with him. Day left to chase an elk and told Raven to wait for him to come back. Raven sat on the box and waited until it grew dark. Then Night came to Raven. ‘I have five beautiful daughters,’ Night told him. ‘Come with me and they will all be your wives.’ So Raven followed Night home on the bright paths that Night used. Being so dark himself, he couldn’t see to find his way on dark paths.