Winter Brothers (11 page)

Perhaps deciding that it would be easier to negotiate with enemies than allies of Cedakanim's sort, the Arhosetts held back to see what might be forthcoming from Neah Bay. Agent Webster suggested to the Makahs that they offer the Arhosetts a peace settlement of, say, twenty blankets; the U.S. government would provide half the total.

Given the prospect of getting out of a possible war at the cost of only ten blankets of their own, the dramatic Makahs took the chance to preen a bit, find out just how much pride had been sweated out of the Arhosetts. Swan was nominated the Neah Bay plenipotentiary
to go over to the Arhosetts and find out if they are willing to settle the affair by a payment to them of blankets, and if so the Arhosetts were to be invited to come over and get them, but we were not to carry anything at first to them but merely to find out the state of their feelings.

As it turned out, the luckless Arhosetts did not even have the face-saving moment of receiving an envoy from the Makahs. Swan peremptorily sent word to them through Cedakanim, the Clyoquot chief who had faced them down with his wealth of blubber, and eventually two abashed Arhosetts arrived at Neah Bay to say they would settle for the blankets.

Peace ensued for two weeks, until the Elwhas protested that a cousin of Peter had wounded with a knife the brother of Swell's killer, Charlie. Peter responded that he was sorry. Sorry that Charlie's brother only had been wounded instead of killed,
for he would do it himself if he could get a chance.

Peter being Peter, the chance was got. This culminating entry by Swan:

Tried to get Indians to go to Pt. Angeles for Mr. Webster but all are afraid as Peter on his trip down killed an Indian at Crescent Bay. The Indian was an Elwha and some years ago killed Dukwitsa's father. Peter obtained a bottle and a half of whiskey from a white man at Crescent Bay and while under its influence was instigated by Duktvitsa to kill the Elwha which he did by stabbing him. Peter told me that after he had stabbed the man several times he broke the blade of the knife off in the man's body.

As might be expected, that stabbing invited battle. As might not be expected, the skirmish lines shaped themselves not be twcen the Makahs and the Elwhas, but the Makahs and the United States. These years at Cape Flattery had been passing with remarkable tranquility between the natives and the white newcomers, as Swan was quite thankfully aware:
I have been reading this evening the report of the Comr. of Indian Affairs and it seems singular to be able to sit here in peace and quiet on this the most remote frontier of the United States and read of the hostilities among the tribes between this Territory and the Eastern settlements.
Peter's knife punctured that state of affairs. Swan's daily narrative begins to show move, countermove, counter-countermove:

Mr. Webster arrested Peter this evening and took him on board the sch.
A. J. Westen
to be taken to Steilacoom
, the territorial army headquarters.

...A canoe with a party of Indians followed the schooner and this evening it was reported that they had rescued Peter and conveyed him to Kiddekubbut. I think this report doubtful.
But later
ascertained it was true...Old Capt. John and 16 others came this forenoon to make me a prisoner and keep me as long as Mr. Webster keeps Peter but when they found that Peter had escaped they came to tell me not to be afraid. I said I was not afraid of any of them and gave them a long lecture. John said I had a skookum tumtum.

...The steamer
Cyrus Walker
with a detachment of # soldiers under Lieut. Kestler arrived at Neah Bay about midnight of Tuesday....The steamer with Mr. Webster on board proceeded to Kiddekubbut and succeeded in arresting 14 Indians:
Peter and thirteen others.

Peter now vanishes from the Neah Bay chronicle, to Swan's considerable relief.
I have tried for the past three years to make Mr. Webster believe what a bad fellow Peter is
, the diary splutters in farewell to the Makah warlock.

 

A fiery enough record, these few years of Makah bravado and occasional bloodshed as chronicled by Swan. Yet while this sequence of ruckus was occurring out on the poop deck of the continent at Cape Flattery, the United States of America and the Confederate States of America were inventing modern mass war at Antietam and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. If it is a question as to which civilization in those years was more casual with life, the Makahs don't begin to compete with the Civil War's creeks and bayous of blood. Nor has their martial inventiveness kept pace with our own. Driving here from Seattle this morning, I stopped at the west end of the highway bridge which sweeps across Hood Canal on barge-sized concrete pontoons and looked along the channel to where a military base is being built for nuclear-missile-bearing Trident submarines. The killing capacity of Swan's tetchy Makahs compares to that of a Trident as a jackknife to bubonic plague.

 

Some hours in Neah Bay fitting its geography onto Swan's era—a breakwater, built in the name of World War II security, now stretches from the west headland of the bay to Waadah Island; the Bureau of Indian Affairs buildings top the eastern point where Webster's trading post stood—and I turn toward the ocean.

Cape Flattery is, as I have said, as far west as you can step on the mainland forty-eight states of America. But along the Cape's Pacific extremity there are thrusts of cliff actually out above the ocean; ultimate sharp points of landscape as if a new compass heading had been devised for here, west of west.

From a logging road I climb down the forest trail to the tip of the Cape's longest finger of headland. At the trailhead the Makah Tribal Council has nailed up alarming signs...
Rugged High Cliffs...Extremely Dangerous Area...enter at own risk.
The final brink of the trail lives up to them by simply snapping off into midair.

There, some eighty or hundred feet above the Pacific, rides an oceanlooker's perch, an oval of white hardpack clay about twenty feet wide and twice as long. A clawnail hardness for this last talon of cliff.

I have clambered up all the great capes of this Northwest coast: Cape Disappointment at the mouth of the Columbia, to step to the Pacific horizon as Lewis and Clark did; Oregon's Cape Falcon with its howling fluency of wind, and south of it Cape Meares and Cape Lookout, and south from them Cape Foulweather and Cape Perpetua and Cape Blanco. But none of those, none, proffers the pinnacle-loneliness of this tip of Cape Flattery. Behind, on all sides, the continent shears away, dangles me to air and the rocky water below. “Those whales,” a Makah tribesman has told me of the spring migrating pattern past this spot: “Sometimes they come right in under the cliffs. They scrape those barnacles off themselves on the rocks.”

Surf pounds underfoot with surprisingly little noise but wind makes up for it. I crouch carefully, not to be puffed off the continent, and peer out the half-mile or so to Tatoosh, the lighthouse island here at the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
While at Tatooche,
Swan entered in his diary on July 18, 1864,
I counted 18 vessels in sight.

Now machines instead of humans operate the Tatoosh light, visitors are none, and the tiny white cluster of lighthouse, residential quarters, water tower, and a collapsing shed give off visual echoes of emptiness. Tatoosh simply rests out there like a fat stepping-stone off the end of the continent. The next foothold beyond it is Asia.

In the 1860s the Makah tribesmen told Swan that below these cliffs, in hours of calm water, they sometimes hunted seals. Caves drill back in very far at the base of the cliffs and so a Makah would approach by canoe, swim or wade in with a lighted torch and a knife, and stalk back along the tunneled floor until he came onto drowsing seals. The blaze of the torch confused the animals, and the hunter took the chance of their confusion to stab them.

There was risk, Swan noted.
Occasionally the torch will go out, and leave the cavern in profoundest darkness.

Profoundest darkness, and naked knife-bearing men who would wade into it. Even if you do not know that story, to stand atop this last rough end of the continent is to have it come to mind: what the dwellers of this coast could do before they found other, easier routes.

Cape Flattery must have stood the neck hair on Swan a few times, too. This morning I find that in one of the several articles he wrote about the Makahs he listed in firm schoolteacherly style the superstitions of the tribe, then let burst from him this uncommonly uneasy language:

The grandeur of the scenery about Cape Flattery, and the strange contortions and fantastic shapes into which its cliffs have been thrown by some former convulsion of nature, or worn and abraded by the ceaseless surge of the waves; the wild and varied sounds which fill the air, from the dash of water into the caverns and fissures of the rocks, mingled with the living cries of innumerable fowl...all combined, present an accumulation of sights and sounds sufficient to fill a less superstitious beholder than the Indian with mysterious awe.

 

Yesterday's weather faded and faded, had gone into gray by sundown. This morning is delivering sleet, blanking the coastline of the Strait down to a few hundred yards of mingled sky and water and rock. A worker from a construction crew stepped from the room next to mine and squinted into the icy mush. He shook his head and declared: “I need this like I need another armpit.”

 

The feel of Cape Flattery as an everlasting precipice of existence is strong as I repeat routes of Swan's here. When he established himself in the schoolhouse at Neah Bay in 1863, ready to reason the peninsular natives into the white culture's version of education, he made himself in that moment the westernmost frontiersman in the continental United States. Jones, the Reservation farmer at the moment, moved briefly into the schoolhouse with Swan while his own quarters were being built, but it was Swan who nestled for good into the room atop the school's tall square tower, a mile or so beyond that shared magpies'-nest household at Webster's.

Out here on his pinnacle of the coast, he becomes now the Pacific Republic of Swan, newly independent. Population: one; Caucasian and male. Resources: ink, books, and an occasional newspaper off a passing ship. Languages: Bostonian, Chinook, Makah. Politics: Lincoln Republican, solder-the-Union-back-together-with-bayonet-steel. Industry: very light, allotted mainly to educational manufacture. Foodstuffs: an exuberant variety ranging from halibut-head chowder to something termed beef hash à la Makah. Flag: a river of words against a backdrop of black fir forest.

 

Delightfully situated
as he now was,
with windows facing the north, west, and east, and a glass door opening south
, in a matter of months after the move to his schoolhouse aerie came news from across the continent which reminded Swan how far he had flung himself. On the tenth of February 1864:

...letter from my brother Benj L Swan stating that on Sunday Nov 29 my mother died aged 84 years
7
mos &
27
days and that on Wednesday Dec 2d my dear wife Matilda W Swan died of consumption.

 

The double deaths staggered Swan for days. As I read the lines, the same scimitar of bay before me as Swan stared to during the writing of them, his distress and realization thud and thud like a slow surf:

nearly paralyzed with grief

had fondly thought that I might once again go home and be joined with my dear wife and children, but it was ordered otherwise

aching, breaking heart

but little sleep last night went to bed at two and got up at six

Severe pain in my teeth today. Sick in body and mind.

Sick in body and mind, and of all air and earth that touch the two. Any of us who have been hit with such news of death know Swan's disorder, and its remedy: routine. After some days of remorseful entries, undoubtedly whetted sharper by the memory of that permanent good-bye to Matilda in 1850, Swan turns to schoolroom worries again.
Today,
the fifteenth of February 1864,
quite a number of children were in attendance but David and some others came in about trade which I do not desire and frightened the children away....I have been to Baadah every Saturday at Mr Webster's request to issue goods to Indians in payment for work done on the reservation. This has caused the others to think. I am the trader and they continually come to me to sell oil, skins and blankets much to my annoyance.

Annoyance is a broad step up from misery, and as the months of 1864 pass, Swan's words brighten, the classroom perplexity (
slow work teaching these Indians. They appear intelligent enough in most respects but appear to take but little interest in learning the alphabet
) giving way to the glint of the Makahs themselves.

Julia and another squaw came up today
, the tenth of April,
and stated that the Hosett Indians had discovered that Kayattie one of the old men...had caused the late spell of bad weather which has kept the Indians from fishing or whaling. A Squaw and a boy had overheard him at his incantations and had reported to the others, whereupon the whole village turned out and proceeded to Kayatties lodge and told him if he did not immediately stop and make fair weather they would hang him. Kayattie promised to do so. John who told me the story very gravely added his belief that now we should have fine weather. I told him it was all cultus talk, but he said no, that the Indians in former times were capable of making it rain or blow when they pleased. There was one of the Kwillehuytes who made bad
weather...during the halibut season and the Kwillehuytes hung him, and immediately the weather became fine.

Billy Balch, Kyallanhoo & the others who have been absent since Tuesday returned this forenoon,
the tenth of June.
They were blown off out of sight of land for one day, and afterwards made land at Oquiet, and remained till this morning. There was a large crowd of their friends and relatives collected together this morning thinking they were lost, and some of the squaws seemed sorry that they did not have a chance to howl.