Winter Brothers (3 page)

Swan-among-the-Britons arrives at the last line of his journey having viewed
a great deal to admire & much to censure,
and that already is the exact Swan style I have begun to find amid his accumulating day-by-day pages on my desk, here at our shared ledge of the American landscape: banquet of details, ready snifters of opinion.

Something else of moment happened to Swan that year of 1841. He married rather above himself. Matilda Loring, of a prominent Boston printing and publishing family, a small, neatly built woman with a firm line of jaw, became his bride on the twenty-sixth of October.

Of the courtship and its aftermath Swan's archival heap of paper is all too conspicuously silent. But from the circumstances, this reads as one of those marriages in which it is unclear whether the wife chided because the husband took on the world's whiskey as a personal challenge or the husband fled into the bottle because the wife was a shrike. What is plain enough even in the thumbing scan of his life I have been doing these first days is that Swan continued to court the bottle long after, in the eighth year of marriage to Matilda, he pointed himself west across America.

I hunger to have overheard just how he said that pivoting decision. Swan and Matilda were living apart by the year 1849—he in a Boston boardinghouse handy to his waterfront life; she in Chelsea with the two children of the divided household, four-year-old Ellen and seven-year-old Charles—and did Swan simply come onto the porch one day and offer,
Matilda, I have been thinking I will go to California?

The many weeks to round Cape Horn in 1850, the long climbing voyage along the Pacific shores, arrival: then Swan, to judge by his readiest recollection, was like a good many of us ever since in not quite knowing what to make of California. Dozens, scores of deserted ships clogged the San Francisco harbor he sailed into, a fleet of
Marie Celestes
left ghostly by crews which had swarmed to the goldstrikes.

Swan, too, completed the pilgrimage up the Sacramento to the mining camps, but only as a purser on a river steamer. I find that he hesitated in that job, and at a maritime firm's dockside office in San Francisco, for only a matter of weeks, then signed onto a schooner bound for Hawaii to take aboard a cargo of potatoes.

Why Swan so promptly went sailing off for spuds is not at all clear to me, but his ear must have heard sweet somethings out there in the Pacific. The abrupt jaunt into the ocean does seem to have been instructive. (A proclamation from this period of his life:
I never yet found that information was useless to any one.)
He managed to linger at Lahaina on the Isle of Maui for twenty-five days, and one of his rare surviving letters to Matilda gives the islands and islanders a dozen pages of the same blunderbuss observation Liverpool and London had received:
on great occasions or when the white men will pay the expenses they get up a feast called a Lu wow....This Lu wow consists of a series of Baked dishes such as Dogs Hogs Turkeys fowls fish Fruits and Greens....Their native dances being prohibited are only given by stealth or by express invitation of the whites. They are called Hoolah hoolah. I was desirous of seeing one....The natives all call themselves mickonaree or missionary which is the term they use to express their ideas of
Christianity...
there are but very few really sincere & devout persons among them, and are
mostly
like one I saw in Mr. Bolles store, who was cutting up some capers, when Mr B remarked, I thought you was a missionary Yes said the fellow pointing to his mouth “me mickonary here, all rest no mickonary.
”

Back from that sudden Hawaiian sojourn, Swan at once settled again into a dockside way of life in San Francisco, again as a clerk for a ship-outfitting firm, through the rest of 1850, and through 1851, and through most of 1852. Evidently he found life sufficiently interesting by just being away from Massachusetts and alongside the rougher torrent of California waterfront traffic. His routine indeed seems to have been all but identical to the career left behind him in Boston except that he could do it at about half speed and without regard for hometown opinion: laxities which have been high among the rewards of the West ever since there was an America.

Then, late in 1852, down from the Oregon country to San Francisco arrived Charles J. W. Russell.

A self-described oyster entrepreneur, this visitor from the shaggy North was better portrayed by Swan as
possessing a good deal of the romancing spirit of the Baron Munchausen.
Russell had materialized in Oregon Territory in dream of some real estate scheme at the mouth of the Columbia River, found that he was a number of generations ahead of his time with that notion, and instead ended up at Shoalwater Bay, some few miles north of the Columbia, where he began dispatching shiploads of oysters to San Francisco. Even at the distance of 130 years the gent has a sheen. Russell in his swanky spielster's way invited Swan to the oystering enterprise, and Swan seems to have accepted as rapidly as he could get the words out of his mouth.

I have prowled the Washington coastline where Swan plopped ashore at the end of 1852, and a misted, spongy, oozeful kind of place it is. On the western rim of bay what appears from a distance to be a line of white-gabled houses proves to be the foaming surf of the Pacific. The salt water reaches hungrily in through this entrance, and in a momentous splatter of inlets and fingers, the bay lying stretched from north to south for twenty-five miles and nearly ten across its greatest width, mingles with the inflow of half a dozen sizable rivers and who knows how many creeks and seeps. This mix yields a maximum of tan marshes and gray muddy tideflats, twenty-seven of these Shoal-water sloughs having been granted names by mapmakers and almost as many more not thought worth the effort. Yet around its eastern extent the squishy bay surprises a visitor with sudden firm timber-topped cliffs about a hundred feet high.
Banks of a sandy clay
, Swan once categorized them,
intermingled with strata of shells and remains of ancient forest-trees that for ages have been buried.

All in all, a vast estuarine pudding in a clay bowl. One of the few ascertainable advances since Swan's time has been the amendment of the big shallow bay's name from Shoalwater to the less embarrassing Willapa.

When Swan showed up here, more than likely shaking the rain off his hat brim, Shoalwater Bay's sum of civilization totted up as a few huts, a temporary crew of sawyers cutting pilings, a shifting population of members of the Chinook and Chehalis tribes, and fourteen white “residents” who pottered away at oystering or homesteading. Fourteen kinds of Swan, it could be pertinently said. The flotsam group of whites hired the Indians to do the bulk of the oyster harvesting; the Indians held their own leisured ebb-and-flow view of life. Put at its more generous, this colony on the eastern shore of Shoalwater Bay in the early 1850s—Bruceport, it was dubbed, in memory of the schooner
Robert Bruce
which caught fire and burned to a hulk there—amounted more to an episode of prolonged beachcombing than a serious effort at enterprise. And Swan, stretching ever more distance between himself and those 220 years of New England rectitude in his family line, Swan fit with the idling oysterers like a pinky in an opera glove.

 

Much of the lulling appeal of that beachside life, as Swan recounts it, was simply the stomach's common sense. The bay in those days set a kind of floating feast, offering as it did clams, crabs, shrimp, mussels, sand lobster, salmon, sturgeon, trout, turbot, sole, flounder, and, of course, oysters. The facet of Swan that was an interested and inventive cook—his victuals often make a sudden savory appearance in his pages; among the Indian delicacies he tried and liked are seal liver and cold raccoon—couldn't help prizing this easy bounty. Just once in these plump years did Swan undergo a hungry time, and that was during one hectic onset of winter spent under a shared roof with an old whaling captain named Purrington.
The captain was famous for cooking every thing that had ever lived. We had eaten of young eagles, hawks, owls, lynx, beaver, seal, otter, gulls, pelican, and, finally wound up with crow; and the crow was the worst of the lot. The captain once tried to bake a'skunk, but not having properly cleaned it, it smelt so unsavory when the bake-fettle was opened that he was forced to throw'skunk and kettle into the river, which he did with a sigh, remarking what a pity it was that it smelled so strong, when it was baked so nice and brown.

While Swan carried on his love affair with Shoalwater's food and leisure, he likely flirted often enough with alcohol as well. The bayside residents, white and native, emerge out of his words and those of others as a boozy bunch who did as much roistering as oystering. One Fourth of July, to take the prime frolicsome example, after orations and eating and a
feu-de-joie by the guns and rifles of the whole company
, the Shoalwater patriots stumbled onto the inspiration
to close the performances for the day by going on top of the cliff opposite, and make a tremendous big blaze.
They found a colossal hollow cedar stump, filled it to the brim with dry spruce limbs, touched the pyre off.
It made the best bonfire I ever saw
, Swan recollected with considerable understatement,
and after burning all night and part of the next day, finally set fire to the forest, which continued to burn for several months, till the winter rains finally extinguished it.

A jolly conflagration of four or five months' duration couldn't have been entirely usual, but much other unsober behavior was. And when Swan remarked of one of his Shoalwater compatriots that
like all the rest of the frontier people, he was fond of Old Rye,
the unwritten admission is there that also among those frontier people was numbered James G. Swan.

In the spring of 1853 when the region north of the Columbia River was hived off from Oregon to become Washington Territory, several of the Shoalwater oysterboys had been inspired to file for land claims. Swan selected a site at the mouth of what is now the Bone River (the Querquelin, it was called by the Indians: Mouse River) on the bay's northeastern shore. Reasoning that the absence of a wife by some three thousand miles didn't really unhinge the marital status all that much, he claimed 160 acres for himself and a second 160 for Matilda.

A half-mile manor of frontier conjured from ink.
I was perfectly delighted with the place
, Swan enthuses in one breath, and notes in the next that the unwooded portion stood overgrown with nettles and ferns three feet high. In that divided comment he sounds precisely like my kin who grew up on our pair of Doig homesteads south of Helena, entranced to the end of their lives with memory of the blue-timbered glory of the Big Belt mountains and still furious with the impossible winter snows as well.

Swan and the convivial Captain Purrington eventually set about building a cabin on the new riverside estate. Their cabin work went at a creep, or something less. You can all but see the pair of them, midmorning upon midmorning, sighing regret at the blisters on their hands and settling onto a handy log for the captain to recite another sea story. With winter stalking in fast, they at last cobbled together a shack from the split cedar boards of an abandoned Indian lodge, and Swan inventively masoned a huge fireplace out of clay blocks cut from a nearby cliff. The first real storm of winter made mud of his handiwork,
sluiced a couple of bushels of coals and ashes into the middle of the room
and very nearly set the abode ablaze. Not long after, Swan catches a schooner back to San Francisco, to clerk under a dry roof until spring.

Fresh dollars in his pocket, he is on display again at Shoal-water at the start of summer 1854. For the first of numerous times in his life Swan now wangles a brief, modest niche in the federal payroll. He was appointed assistant customs collector
for that portion of the coast north of the Columbia, including Shoal-water Bay and Gray's Harbor to Cape Flattery; the duties of the office being to report all vessels arriving at or departing from Shoal-water Bay, and to keep a diligent watch on the coast to see that none of the Russian or Hudson Bay Companies' vessels came around either for smuggling or trading with the Indians.

Since this comprised an all-but-empty stretch of shore, with only the lackadaisical oysterers at Shoalwater, a handful of stump farmers and sawmillers up around Grays Harbor, and the tiny tribal settlements at a few river mouths, Swan's precinct seems to have been spectacularly free of major smuggling prospects. The only time he is on record as having had to exert himself was when the Indians, as a joke, lured him several days up the coast to check on a vessel which turned out to be a U.S. Geological Survey steamship. Swan being Swan, he did not much mind the futile jaunt.
So far as related to smuggling, I had walked sixty miles up the beach for no purpose, but I did not regret having started, as I had seen a line of coast which few, if any white men had been over before.

Months slid past, years began to go. Yet not nearly all o£ Swan's time at Shoalwater could have been spent promenading the coast or aiming himself into the bottom of a bottle. He has left us a frontier view greatly wider and deeper than that. The maraud of a smallpox outbreak at Shoalwater which merely made the white men ill but slaughtered the Chinooks and Chehalis. The pride of place when selecting a homestead site. The casual reach of distance as Swan strolled sixty miles of wild coast to gaze upon an innocent steamship. These carry a sense of this rough margin of the west as true as a thumb testing the teeth of a ripsaw. And all of them derive from Swan as serious and published author, in a work I have been quoting from ever since he squished ashore at Shoalwater. (If Swan was diarying regularly in these years, and I judge he was not, although he mentions having written and lost a collection of notes about the Indians, the volumes never have come to sight.)
The Northwest Coast,
he titled the book, then thought he had better elucidate:
Or Three Years' Residence in Washington Territory.