Winter Brothers (31 page)

He sleeps until seven the next morning, which approaches midafternoon in his traveling habits, and
arose refreshed and feeling unusually bright which I attributed to the healthful influence of the fragrant spruce boughs which formed the pound-work. of my couch.

Good health seems rampant: Deans is unnauseated and Edinso's back is better. Indeed, the chief arises so jovial that he
related many anecdotes and incidents of his early life.
His main tale of the day was of how he had discovered the gold—
white stones
—which set off the Gold Harbor rush on the west coast o£ Moresby Island in 1849. Swan, who as early as North Island noted of Edinso that
I find him rather inclined to romance, and listen to his stories cum grano salis,
later learns that this historic prospecting was performed by another Haida.
A Munchausen-ism,
he dutifully edits here into Edinso's fable.

The day's only woe is the weather, which grabs them again.
The rain beat through the tent in a fine mist like an umbrella under an eave gutter...while a small brooklet found its way under my bed.

As the soggy canoe party sits out the hours around the campfire, a stone explodes in the blaze. Swan guesses the detonation
caused by water in a cavity of the stone which converted into steam.
Not so the Edinso version:
it was the Spirits who were angry and had made the recent bad weather. He then threw a
quantity of grease and some tobacco in the fire as a sort of peace offering.

Swan makes an offertory of his own by stenciling a marker
displaying the following legend.

James G Swan US National Museum & US Fish Commission Washington DC with James Deans Indian Department Victoria BC Camped here Aug 23, 24. 25. 1883 Edinso chief of Massett Captain of canoe Johnny Kit Elswa Skilla Tsatl Kundai Hanow SelaKootKung crew of canoe

I nailed this board to a tree where it will be a conspicuous object on landing, to any one who may be so unfortunate as to camp at this place hereafter.

 

Now only a matter of hours from Skidegate Channel if the weather and the canoe bottom both will hold, Swan and party push off to a late start the next morning, 7
oclock instead of
5
which we should have done....
Luckily
we found the water smooth,
and the canoe slid easily.

Johnny had collected some spruce gum yesterday, and...all hands took a piece, and soon the jaws of the whole party were in motion....We found the gum an excellent thing to chew before breakfast, cleaning the mouth, strengthening the stomach and aiding the appetite.

Chawing along in the improved weather, the paddlers idle more than Swan wants, and at one point stop to shoot at seals...
After a delay of three quarters of an hour without killing any we again started and lazily proceeded.
As the pace of paddling drops Swan's temper climbs. By now had come up
a light wind from the SW which was fair.

I asked why sail was not set.

The reply was, “by and by!” and the Indians stopped to light their pipes.

Swan erupts. Weeks of sopping weather, the dubious companionship of Deans, a doddery canoe with a fracture line down its center, Edinso's swings of mood, and now
by and by
and a casual cumulus of tobacco smoke. The ensuing scene in the diary pages is more terse than it possibly could have been: Swan ultimatuming Edinso
that I would not pay for any more time to be thrown away....Finally the men took to their oars to their own accord, and having set two sails for the first time since leaving Massett, we began to advance....

 

Swan may have won the skirmish, but Edinso takes the day. The canoeists enter Skidegate Channel so late they are met by the ebb tide and must put to shore for the night.
Idled away too much time,
Swan grumps to his diary that evening.

The better news is that delay is all he has suffered.
I feel thankful that I am so near my journey, and in good health and that no accident has happened to us.

 

Next day, the twenty-sixth of August, Swan determinedly sergeants everyone into the canoe before daybreak. Indeed, they barely have blinked into morning when, a few hours after their start, Swan is notating their arrival at the
Skidegate Oil Works...very kindly received by Mr. William Sterling the superintendent, who at once ordered a nice breakfast for
us
...
and Mr. Alexander McGregor his partner who offered me a room in his house to write in and to spread my bedding making me more comfortable than I have been at any time since leaving Masset.

 

Swan as western venturer. Now that he is triumphantly at Skidegate, he puts me in mind of the history-bearer whom Bernard DeVoto once wrote of, the early frontiersman James Clyman. Clyman that uncanny accompanist to America's westward mood: born on George Washington's land in Virginia in 1792, westering with the fur trappers and explorers, battling Indians in the Black Hawk war in the same company as Abraham Lincoln, traveling the Oregon Trail in the 1844 emigration, rambling in California when gold was struck in 1848—ultimately settling to a ranch in the Napa Valley and living on until 1881, the presidency of Chester A. Arthur and almost to the time of this Queen Charlottes adventure of Swan's. In the way Clyman was, Swan too stands to me now as something of a template, an outlining human gauge: but of western possibilities rather than western past. Swan literally is a being of our continental edge, rimwalk-ing its landscape and native cultures. If I could put questions to Swan across time I think they would try to reach toward invisible inward lines, those riggings of curiosity and gameness-for-damn-near-anything, hung deeper in him than anyone else I have encountered. Difficult to phrase, not say answer, but: what is the tidal pull of an earlier way of life, of the timescape of
first people
such as the Makahs and the vanished Haida villagers? What instruction does their West offer any of ours? And, since the diaries of the Queen Charlotte days say all but this: what, when reputation and thrill and all other incomplete reasons have been said, truly sends a man of sixty-five seeking along an unknown treacherous coast? What mightier impulses wade in the bloodstream? Questions which perhaps can never be fully met with words, and so keep me straining to hear beyond, into the deeps of a Swan.

 

Swan hurries a note of success to Baird at the Smithsonian...
20 days on the trip...head winds and rain all the time....With the exception of the temperature being mild—54° the weather has been like the winter weather off Cape Flattery....

His mood now after the watery three weeks of exploration and the complication of the cracked canoe is a rainbow of triumph and relief,
glad that I have ended this tedious and perilous journey from Masset to this place without accident. Old Edinso has purposely delayed our travel...but I felt safe with the old fellow as he is very skillful in handling a canoe.
In the mellowness of the moment Swan even allows Edinso to use his tent overnight and tells Johnny Kit Elswa to
give the Indians the balance of the rice which was enough for a good meal, a lot of biscuit, tea, sugar and some bacon.

By the time Edinso sets off up the coast to Masset in the cracked canoe a day or so later, however, Swan abruptly is inscribing him as
the biggest old fraud I ever have had dealings with.
...His fresh pique has been furnished by Johnny, who has had a thoughtful conversation with Edinso's canoe crew.
They say the old man's lame back was all sham.

Warm breeze again today, nearly a chinook. Since morning I have changed shirts three times, each time to lighter material; now, at 2:30, it is sixty-four degrees. Winter is turning into winter/spring. Absolute proof: I have begun sneezing, an allergy has thawed. Captain John of the Makahs once explained to Swan why he and the other Neah Bay natives recited several sentences after sneezing: they were asking the Great Spirit to spare them.
If they did not utter this brief petition, the top of their heads would be blown off when they sneezed.
I may yet prove Captain John right.

 

With Edinso and the cracked canoe and the west shore weather all out of his system, Swan draws a deep breath and begins to calculate the brief remainder of his Queen Charlottes summer. The steamer
Princess Louise,
taking on a cargo of dogfish oil at the Skidegate refinery, will convey his mail to Victoria. His fish tanks delivered to Masset by the providential otter hunter will be shipped from there by the Hudson's Bay Company. A crew of Indians has been sent off for black cod, the final fish specimen. The summer's last task is to garner more art from the Haidas, along Skidegate Inlet and the eastern shore of Moresby Island where the tribal villages still were living places.

It is the morning of the twenty-eighth of August when
Rev. Mr. Robinson the Methodist Missionary came from Skidegate village with Ellswarsh and his wife, Sam his dumb boy and Ellen his youngest girl a child of about seven years....Two years ago this family with an elder daughter Soodatl were in Port Townsend and occupied a room near my office where Ellswarsh worked making silver bracelets and other articles of jewelry. The chil
dren were very fond of me and came to my office every day and they had not forgotten the kind treatment they received from me.

Then the words Swan needs:
Ellswarsh invited me to go to his house at Skidegate village where he had some things to show me.

 

After breakfast,
the first morning of September,
Johnny rowed me to Skidegate village. The distance is about two miles....As soon as our salutations were over, a mat was spread on the floor and two chairs placed, one for me and one for Johnny. Then clean water in a wash bowl with soap and a clean towel to wash our hands and faces. By the time we had finished, the Indians began to come in with things to sell...

The pocket diary becomes a blizzard of buying:
carved spoon...scana mask...crow mask...Embroidered dance shirt of blue blanket, red figure, very fine...But as it was Saturday and I wanted to look around the village I concluded to defer other purchases till Monday.

 

One matter Swan decides he has deferred long enough: his feelings toward James Deans. Now that Swan is finished sharing canoe and campfire with him several weeks of wrath are unloaded.

I find that Mr. James Deans who accompanied me from Masset and represented that he is in the employ of Dr. Powell has proved himself a great nuisance by interfering with my Indian trade and purchase of curiosities. He represented to parties here that he was in my employ and made bargains with Indians to take me about in canoes which I repudiated. He is filthy in his habits, and untruthful to a degree. I have not suffered him to go with me since I arrived here, and wish I never had seen the man.

This wish will be multiplied in a month or so when he discovers that Powell's Indian Department, considering Deans's assignment no longer valid when he missed the
Otter
and the first several weeks in the Queen Charlottes, will not reimburse Swan for any of the expenses of the free-lancing Deans.

 

Sunday, the second of September, the Indians dispatched for black cod return with twenty-five of the fish. Specimens the bodies may be, but
I had the tongues cut out and fried, and a chowder made of the heads, and roes and livers fried. They were all first rate....

 

Monday, the third of September, brings a new bargain.
Ellswarsh to come tomorrow morning and take me in his large canoe to Skedanse village, Cumshewas, Laskeek and other places
of the eastern coast of the Queen Charlottes, the living shore of Haida culture.

I noticed one of the great slimy slugs, so common on the North West coast, crawling on the floor near my bed, and on throwing it into the fire, Ellswarsh ashed me if white men eat slugs. I said no, we do not....He said that Indians did not eat them, but that chinamen do....He was at Fort Essington last year, at the cannery at Skeena mouth. The chinamen who worked at the cannery made a soup of the slugs and crows which were boiled together in a big iron fettle. Those chinamen, said he, are different people from Indians, we dont eat slugs and crows, they would make us sick...but the chinamen like em, they eat all the crows and slugs and all the soup, and scrape the kettle with their spoons, chinamen no good.

This is a new hind of a mess and I make note of it as slugs and crows may yet find a place on the bill of fare at the Driard House in Victoria, or Delmonico's in New York.

 

High good humor from Swan in this final chapter of his Queen Charlottes exploit. Slugs and soup and Chinamen, I almost expect cabbages and kings next on the triplicate pages. The collecting jaunt to the eastern shore has begun with Ellswarsh and three paddlers pulling in for Swan and Johnny Kit Elswa the morning of the fourth of September, and hard weather at their heels. The party canoes out of Skidegate Inlet and around the first point of coast southward, meets the full whap of storm, scuttles for shore.
Wind blew so violently that it was difficult to pitch my tent but having succeeded with the united aid of the whole party I found myself very comfortable, and I invited Ellswarsh to share my tent and table.
(And mentally invited the memory of Edinso to look on and howl?) Johnny Kit Elswa and the canoemen occupy a second tent and take their meals
in the open air by the camp fire.
Unluckily for Swan the first of those meals features
some red berries which they mixed with grease....They were sour and...cleaned me out good.

Freshly scoured from the inside out, Swan wakes the next morning to a fair wind. This rare chance to hoist a sail brings the canoeists early to the village of a chief named Skedance.
He gave us a hearty welcome and soon had a breakfast ready, composed of dried halibut and fish oil, fish eggs, boiled dried salmon, and boiled dried dulse mixed with fish eggs and red huckleberries.
So far off his feed from the previous night's experiment with berries-and-oil is Swan that he passes up this imaginative smorgasbord for bread and tea. His mood anyway is to bargain. After breakfast
Skedance showed me a fine chest or box elaborately carved, but did not name any price. He showed me some other things, and I bought of him two dancing hats, a bow and arrows made of copper, used as ornaments while dancing and a carving in wood resembling an eagles foot holding a salmon.