Winter Brothers (2 page)

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 his 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.

At Neah, Swell's brother Peter
came and wished me to go with him and select a suitable spot to bury Swell....

I did as he desired—marked out the spot and dug out the first sand.

And this further: Peter
also brought up the large Tomanawas boards
—the Makahs' cedar tableaus of magic which would stand as the grave's monument—
of Swell's for me to paint anew....

 

There, then, is Swan, or at least a shinnying start on him. A penman from Boston asked to trace afresh the sacred designs of a murdered Northwest chieftain. I can think of few circumstances less likely, unless they are my own. The onlooker who has set himself this winter's appointment back into the last century and across geography to the Olympic Peninsula and elsewhere along the coastal tracery of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and indeed into the life of a person born ten dozen years before him.

...Capt John was here today,
Swan writes from a century ago,
and I related to him a dream I had last night, in which I saw several Indians I formerly knew who are dead. John scud it was a sign the “memelose” or dead people are my friends and I would soon see that they would do something to show their friendship....

Fifteen past nine. Out in the dark the Sound wind visits favorite trees, is shaken off, hankers along the valley in stubborn search. The gusting started up hours ago, during the gray fade of daylight that is December evening, and by now seems paced to try to last the night. Until the wind arrives with dusk, these past days have been at rest: sunless but silent and dry. The neighborhood's lion-colored cat, inspector general of such weather, all morning tucked himself atop the board fence outside the north window as I began to read Swan. Out of his furry doze each several minutes a sharp cat ear would twitch, give the air a tan flick just to be certain it still could. Then the self-hug into snooze again.

The breakers,
now Swan the third day after his dream,
tore up the beach and rooted out immense numbers of clams which were thrown up by the surf. I gathered a few buckets full and soon the squaws and Indians came flocking up like so many gulls and gathered at least fifty bushels....

Nine-nineteen. I see, by leaning to hear into the wind, that the night-black window which faces west off the end of my desk collects the half of me above the desktop and its spread sheaf of copied diary pages into quiet of my own.

Nine-twenty.
Capt John told me,
this the morning following the beach bonanza,
that the cause of the great quantity of clams
on the beach yesterday was the dead people I dreamed about the other night and they put the clams there to show their friendship....

Nine twenty-one. Last night at this time, winter began. I noticed the numbered throb of the moment—the arrival of season at precisely 21:21 hours of December 21—which took us through solstice as if we, too, the wind and I and the fencetop cat and yes, Swan and the restless memories of departed Makahs, were being delivered by a special surf. The lot of us, now auspiciously into the coastal time of beginnings. Perhaps I need a Captain John to pronounce full meaning from that.

No, better. I am going to have Swan's measuring sentences, winterlong.

A phrase recalled this morning from John McNulty when he wrote of having journeyed to his ancestors' Ireland: that he had gone “back where I had never been.”

Our perimeters are strange, unexpectedly full of flex when we touch against them just right. A winter such as this of mine—or any season, of a half-hour's length or a year's, spent in hearing some venturer whose lifespan began long before our own—I think must be a kind of border crossing allowed us by time: special temporary passage permitted us if we seek out the right company for it, guides such as Swan willing to lead us back where we have never been.

 

So Swan on one side of the century-line, myself on the other. Bearded watchful men both, edge-walkers of the continent, more interested in one another's company than the rest of the world is interested in ours, but how deeply alike and different? That is one of the matters Swan is to tell me, these journal days when I stretch across to his footings of time.

James G. Swan had hastened west in the same scurry as many thousands of other mid-nineteenth-century Americans. Their word isn't much known today, but at the time they were called
Argonauts,
the seekers drawn to the finds of gold in California streambeds as if they had glimpsed wisps of the glittering fleece that lured Jason and his Greeks. Like Jason's, the journey for many of them was by ship, the very impatience for wealth to come evidently weighting the sailing vessels to slowness. Swan stepped aboard the
Rob Roy
in Boston harbor in late January of 1850 and climbed off at San Francisco a half-year later.

What exact cache of promises and excuses this man of New England left behind him can't be known in detail, but they likely amounted to considerable. Something of the bulk and awkwardness of my own, I suppose, when I veered from Montana ranching to college and a typewriter. Swan was thirty-two years old when he set foot on the Pacific Coast. By the time of his birth in 1818—Turgenev's year, Karl Marx's year—in the north-of-Boston village of Medford, the Swan family name already had been transplanted from Yorkshire to Massachusetts for eighteen decades, evidently the devout achieving sort of New England clan which began to count itself gentry from the moment the Indians could be elbowed out of sight into the forest. (Swan himself was known to mention the family point of pride that his great-grandfather had been a landowner
on the N.W. side of Bunker Hill,
the Revolutionary War battleground.) Merchants, doctors, educators, lawyers populate the erect generations. Swan's own older brothers stayed standard, Samuel as physician, Benjamin a minister.

But not James. He evidently reached down the excuse that occasional seafarers had cropped up in the family—his own father, said to have been lost in a gale while captaining a brig back from Africa in 1823; a legendarily adventurous uncle who had sailed in an early fur-trading vessel to the Pacific Northwest—and in his midteens started in on the try of a waterfront life in Boston.

Dallying around the docks, first as a clerk with a shipping firm and eventually as a merchandiser of ships' supplies, must have suited the young Swan comfortably enough. With forests of sail sweeping back and forth before his eyes and the new steam vessels shuddering to life around him, this adventurer of the waterfront shows no sign that he made any ocean voyage of his own until he was twenty-three. Then he embarked on a Boston-to-Liverpool jaunt with a chore or two of his employer's business attached and seems to have been content to do it just the once.

That once to Britain, however, jarred Swan's writing hand into motion, and by my terms the wan sheaf of paper that has survived comes as ancient and entrancing and intriguingly hued as a cave painting. The thirty brownish tatty-edged long manuscript pages are by a decade the earliest of all Swan's surviving paperwork, and must be a version he copied from a pocket notebook—it would have been the start of that habit, too—as soon as he returned to America. Any comparable paperwork having to do with my family would be drily governmental, in the Scottish archives, and likely would show sundry Doigs irretrievably in arrears on croft taxes or enlisting one of our number to die an infantry death in Madras or the Crimea. A bonus of archival magic, it is for me, that the pages of Swan's life from his own hand begin here on the second of March 1841 and recite the two months in which he sailed the Atlantic and rambled interestedly around Britain.

The wilderness of waters which surround us
on his crossing; the storm which tossed a fellow passenger beneath the table and his breakfast after him,
his head was covered with a shower of fried eggs which looked for all the world like doubloons stuck in his hairk
arrival to Liverpool and St. Patrick's Day,
the Irish have been walking in procession the whole day...all rigged out with green sashes and sprigs of shamrock, a species of weed similar to the chick weed.
Weather, conveyance, schedule, meals, roadside fields, birds of those fields, even Swan's morning disposition:
I was very stupid today
, the sixteenth of March,
from the want of sleep last night and for the first time since I left home I felt really homesick & would have been glad to have been home but as soon as I walked out I felt much relieved & hope to get my thoughts on a business train after a good nights
rest.
All, all come on report at the nib of his pen. So, too, the social impress of Britain of Dickens's time. Liverpool astounds and horrifies this Bostonian with the hurly-burly of its streets:
female scavengers...go round with baskets and collect all the manure & offal in the city which they put in heaps & offer then for sale. Their heaps are bought by the gardeners for a few pence to enrich the garden beds—It struck me as the filthiest work I had ever seen a woman engaged in & more especially as they used nothing but their hands to work with.
Then the proverbial fishwives,
a queer lot of beings & probably the lowest of the human race.
Quickly the unsurprising exclamation:
Liverpool is a shocking dirty place & I am sick enough of it.
But Edinburgh is beguiling,
the streets are laid out with a good deal of taste,
and the trip southward a lark:
In the carriage with me were a party of Irish Gentlemen & Ladies....They all took me for a Scotchman & as I had just left Scotland I could talk to them finely.
London proves to be downright wondrous,
Walked two hours this morning in one direction & every step of the way the street was crowded with people & vehicles.
His young American eyes have not seen the like except possibly on a Boston market day when a drawbridge over the Charles River would hold up traffic,
the crowd then is just the same as the streets are here all the time from sunrise to sunset.
He glimpses the young queen, Victoria, trundling out of the Buckingham Palace grounds on her way to church:
had a good sight of her face as she was looking out the carriage window she had on a little blue silk bonnet.
He is drawn back and back to the stupendous dome of St. Paul's, even though the Easter service there seems to him
mumbled over in a very bad manner.
Tours the new museum of wax figures
shown by an old French woman & her son
—the Tussauds—
who are making a deal of money out of this affair.
Rides the night mail train from London back to Liverpool:
they go with the greatest velocity sometimes
50
miles an hour—
about as fast as you could travel on the planet at the time—
only stopping to get water.