Winter Brothers (23 page)

1874, a Bancroft diary again but the biggest and gaudiest of this group: about the size and fatness of a thick paperback book, and bound in purple with angled streaks, like the pinstripe suit of a colorblind gangster. Swan is gaudy himself. Another inheritance is to be claimed in Massachusetts and for the first time he travels east by train. (Only seven days now, the journey from Pacific to Atlantic.) As before, Swan lavishes money and gifts on his daughter Ellen as if he were practicing to be rich; also dips down to Washington, D.C., to call on Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian; and up to sightsee New York with son Charles. Swan is back in Port Townsend by late September, spends the autumn getting interested in Dolly Roberts, closes the year on that queer note of the New Year's Eve sodding of the grave of the Port Townsend jeweler, Bulkeley.

1875: the year of Swan's collecting trip to Alaska aboard the
Wolcott
but also the year the matter of Dolly Roberts comes to nothing. In this diary's calendar pages the publisher, who chose anonymity, decorated each month with some scene of gods or gamins. Swan must have looked with rue upon Miss August, a robust unbloused lady around whom a troupe of cupids perform acrobatics on trapeze lines of flowers.

 

Sick, robust, drunk, dry, infatuated, thwarted, railroad-hopeful, railroad-undone, off now to Alaska and now to Utah and now to Boston, perpetually yearning north toward the Haidas, still ambassadoring occasionally among the Makahs and Clallams from his own white tribe, esteemed author at last for his Makah memoir and dabbler as ever amid piddling paperwork. I take back the slander that Swan's Port Townsend years are more dozeful than his time at Neah. Not as much of it a life I would trade for, though. The periodic illness, the steady lure of too much whiskey, the seesaw finances, all or any would be as perpetual earthquakes compared to my even days. (Nor does Dolly Roberts, sweetly though she trills, sound like the best prospect I can imagine.) But I do envy Swan the historical moment, just there before America marked that centennial which he went collecting for. (Although historical moments may be less different from our own than we like to think: the quote recovered from a notebook I put it in during the Bicentennial hoopla of three years ago: humorist Mose Skinner in 1875, on the eve of the American centennial, proposing a ceremony to match the popular mood: “Any person who insinuates in the remotest degree that America isn't the biggest and best country in the world, and far ahead of every other country in everything, will be filled with gunpowder and touched off.”) Both of my grandfathers, in Scotland and Illinois, were born amid the years spanned by these half-dozen diaries, and with them the family's western impulse. It seems a time when the American landscape had not yet been swathed so hard (although the frontier populace was busy enough at it); a time yet of a green tentativeness about the country, and particularly the West, as if we were still deciding what to make of it, or what it might make of us.

 

This odd community of time I mentioned at the start of this book of days. Since then I have spent a pair of simultaneous spans with James Gilchrist Swan, the first two months of this coastal winter and the quarter-century after he detached himself from Boston for the Pacific shore. By now I know of him, what?

That he has failed at two major tasks, teaching to the Makah children and butlering for the transcontinental railroad. The oyster venture at Shoalwater, he seems never to have got engrossed enough in for his abandonment to qualify as failure. His collecting of specimens for the Smithsonian is “attended with success,” as Baird periodically hurrahs him, but as a way of earning is a slow dollar indeed. Swan fends rather than amasses. With his Port Townsend collection of not-quite-livelihoods he reminds me of a householder with a leaky roof, distractedly positioning a washbasin under this drizzle, a battered pot under that one, until the plinks somehow are all, or at least mostly, caught.

That he is a spree drinker, dry for weeks, months—at Neah for years—at a stretch. No constant souse can have written his thousands of diary entries, hundreds and hundreds of letters, frequent newspaper articles, the Smithsonian treatises, and
The Northwest Coast.

That he is mildly forgetful, having a tendency to leave behind a book or a spare pair of pants in a hotel room. The big Neah Bay ledger diary once goes into a fluster:
This evening I lost or mislaid my spectacles in a singular manner for which I cannot account. I had given two of the boys some medicine and entered it in my book which was the last time I had them on. A few minutes afterward I could find them nowhere. The boys and myself hunted for over an hour without success.
Next day:
I took down my prescription book and to my great pleasure found my spectacles which I had placed in the book had unthinkingly shut....

That he is not a chronically jokey man, but laughs at the frontier's humor probably more than a sound Bostonian ought to. The Olympic Peninsula settler who has a prized rooster named Brigham Young is cheerfully in Swan's pages, as is the sailor—
a Dago or a Russian Finn
—who notices the carcasses of skinned fur seals on the shipdeck and asks,
Captain will I throw them cartridges overboard?
Swan can ping a nice note of irony, as when he stepped from the Neah Bay schoolhouse to watch a Makah tamanoas ceremony
and was much edified to notice that two of my scholars Jimmy, who had just recovered from a severe attack of cold, and George, were performing on the beach entirely naked....

That, in the frequent way of solitary persons, he loves song. His regular choiring began long before Dolly Roberts was there to share a hymnbook, and at times he vocalizes in the living room of one friend or another, an occasion he is apt to record as
a grand frolic.
I imagine his voice as a bit nasal and, the twenty-five frontier years notwithstanding, notably Yankee in accent.

That he can get very full of himself, particularly when his own evidence on a matter is contradicted. During a dispute with a Smithsonian scientist who maintained that fur seals all birthed their young at the Pribilof Islands off the Alaskan coast, Swan tetchily writes to Baird:
I do not believe all the fur seals of the North Pacific Ocean assemble on the Pribiloff Islands any more than I believe all the flies of this coast alight on one or two carcases of dead animals....
(Current science suggests Swan somewhat misjudged the seals' independence; the Pribilofs are considered to be the single birthing grounds.) But other times he can drift into a dress-blue funk:
the great care and anxiety I feel
...Evidently not for long, and perhaps most often when he has to count another birthday (
I trust that the remainder of my life may be passed more profitably than it has so far...
), but he does know gloom.

That all the regularity in him is channeled down his right arm into his pen. He may pass from job to job to job with the liquid hops of a squirrel, but his diary account of his days and his record of effort to learn from the Indians are the steadiest kind of achievement. Constantly I am impressed with Swan's care to be exact; the steady spatter of arithmetic through the diary pages as he measures and totals things, for instance, and the fact that as early as his stint at Shoalwater he made it policy that whatever lore was given him by a tribal member, he would check by later asking others about it, one by one. A scrupulous correspondent, Swan is perpetually eager for mail and often answers instantly, putting the reply on the same mailboat. No question: the stickum that holds his life together is in his inkwell.

That he has a quality I do not know what to call except gallantry. An ingredient of it must be New England manners. In the diary he misters even as old a friend as Webster, and is an instinctive caller on friends, welcomer of strangers, visitor of the ill (white or Indian), sharer of magazines and books and undoubtedly bottles. But it goes beyond that, into the attitude he seems to hold that the human race is a kind of fascinating commonwealth. Swan does not have this perfected; the Indians periodically exasperate him into an inked mutter of
savages.
Consistently, however, he respects their skills and lore and is able to see and judge them, and for that matter his own white tribalists of Port Townsend and the Strait country, as individuals rather than a corps. Which must be the most valuable possible discernment for a diarist.

What escort he has been. The ancient woman Suis whom Swan in his Shoalwater years had questioned about the natives' names; she spoke to him of the carrying influence of ancestors,
first people.
For those of us on this long coast now, successor tribe to Suis's in our pale thousands and thousands, Swan is of our own first people. (Making those of us of this moment, in T. H. White's term, the after-people: the ones for whom “music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship...the human contribution to the universe” are inheritance to try to add to.) Swan is doubly valuable to me because the people of my own blood are gone now, buried in Montana, the storytellers, reciters of sayings, carriers of the Scots lowland voice that is scarcely traceable on my tongue, and Swan filling his days and mine with his steady diary lines is an entrancing winterer—a tale-bringer, emissary from the time of the first people—such as I have not been around in the years since. He seems a kind of human bonus, a dividend to me for making this chronological passage. And there still is a month of him to collect.

Capt John came to my house this afternoon,
the sixteenth of November of 1878,
and told me the following queer yarn. He says that at the time Ah a yah's son died at Hosett, Peter, whose sister is mother of the boy, and Ah a yah were putting the body in a box for burial. They had that portion of the lodge screened with mats and fastened the door so that no one but themselves should be present. A woman however who was in the lodge unobserved made a hole in the mat screen and looked through. She first heard the dull sound of something chopping, and saw Peter and Ah a yah cut off both the boys arms below the elbows and then put the body in the box and bury it.

Some time the past summer the Indians found near a small brook which runs near Ah a Yah's house two human fore arms & hands or rather the bones, one end of which rested in a tin plate and the hands rested on a stick held by two forced sticks, so they could be roasted before a fire, the remnants of which were plainly seen. The marrow which had melted into the plate had mostly been removed but some remained which was hard and white.

These were lethal doings, Captain John solemnly explained to Swan. With the substance in the plate Peter had cast a spell—bad medicine—which took the life of a boy of the tribe.

I listened very attentively to the recital of this fabulous tale just to find out to what lengths Johns superstitions will lead him but the idea of Peter roasting the arms of his own nephew to extract grease to work bad medicine to kill his enemies, is too monstrous and absurd for me to believe without better proof than Capt John.

 

Captain John's busy tongue: the mysteries of Peter: Swan's recording pen. Unmistakably, life at Neah Bay.

Swan returned to Cape Flattery in mid-August of 1878, once more kited on the wind of Henry Webster's political fortunes. Newly appointed as collector of customs for Puget Sound, Webster named Swan his inspector at Neah Bay, a job at last exactly Swan's size and fit. The first several months of each year a small fleet of schooners in the fur seal trade now worked out of Neah Bay. Swan was to make sure their sealskins were the harvest of Makah canoe crews launched from the vessels, rather than any catch from the natives of alien British Columbia across the Strait. Another trader at Neah dealt in the oil of the small sharks called dogfish, a useful lubricant for sawmill machinery. Swan similarly was to see that the dogfish oil remained all-American, or had the proper import fee paid. As to the Makahs themselves, original merchants of Cape Flattery, they were to be regularly cautioned against trading dutiable goods with the British Columbia tribes. Those few tax sentry tasks made the sum of Swan's new job. Otherwise, he was free to read, write, and, finally, collect one single salary he could live on.

 

His new prosperity wasn't fancy; as assistant customs collector, he received about a hundred dollars a month. But it could not help but be steadier than his life had been in Port Townsend the past few years. The diaries of 1876–77 show a number of gaps, the dangerous silences when Swan is either ill or in whiskey; one month-long void follows the note that he has been enjoying
Scotch whiskey punch
with some chums. Then he begins to regain himself when Neah Bay becomes a prospect again, in late 1877. His welcome back to Neah the next year was generous. A former Puget Sound steamboat captain named Charles Willoughby now held the job as agent of the Makah Reservation, and Willoughby promptly dealt Swan into the doings of the agency by calling on him to interpret to the Makahs. Swan in turn thought well of the Willoughby style of administration, as when an election process was set up to choose tribal leaders:
One feature in the election was that several women voted by permission of the Agent
—this a dozen years before any state permitted women the vote, and forty before the nation did—
thus establishing a precedent in this tribe of
womans suffrage which is right, as the women of the tribe always have a voice in the councils. This is the first election ever held by the Indians here, and will be followed by similar elections in Waatch Tsooess & Hosett.

Another amendment to Makah life Swan's pen liked not at all.
While at the Lighthouse yesterday, Capt Sampson informed me that whales have been quite plenty around the vicinity of the Cape this Spring but the Indians have not been after them as they devote themselves exclusively to sealing. I think the business as now conducted is a positive detriment to these Indians. They neglect all other avocations during the sealing season, from January to June, and the money they receive for the'skins they secure is either gambled away or is spent for flour, bread, sugar &c, is distributed in potlatches to their friends.