Winter Brothers (32 page)

Think of Swan by now as a person who has shopped through the supermarket and at the end of the last row begins to fill the basket as a reward to himself. In the next week at the villages of Skedans and Laskeek, Swan procures example after example of the Haida magic of knifestrokeonto-wood-or-stone.
I bought quite a lot,
he understates on his final day of bargaining, the tenth of September; his total trove to the Smithsonian, together with the fish specimens, was an eventual twenty-nine freight boxes' worth.

Swan's days, weeks, months of unveiling the Queen Charlottes have ended. He deserves to deliver his own last words. I
have had a rough time since I left Masset but have gained in health and knowledge and leave the islands with regret.
The refinery superintendent at Skidegate has told him the supply steamer departs for Victoria in a matter of days.
So I began to prepare to go on her as there will not be another steamer here till next spring and although I would like to remain all winter to see the medicine dances and masquarade performances I...must avail myself of this opportunity to return to civilization.

Swan's first set of hours at sea for Victoria:

I dreamed last night that little Jangi, Jimmys boy, was in bed with me and told me that we should have a pleasant day and a fair wind, both of which we have had. In fact this has been one of the most delightful days I ever saw.

I found on waking, that I did not have Jangi but a wooden image of an Indian Skaga or doctor which I had put on the back, side of my berth, which probably caused my dream.

Victoria, in almost-spring sun.

Not at all like the dry and dowdy little Queen whose name it wears, this capital of British Columbia. Rather, the city is in the manner of the youngest daughter of some Edwardian country-house family, attractive and passionately self-absorbed and more than a little silly.

Victoria imagines among other things that it is a sward of Olde England somehow rolled out like turf over Western Canadian bedrock. Consequently you can sip tea in the massive Empress Hotel while across the street, seaplanes yatter in and out of the Inner Harbor with shaggy civil servants from up-island or logging company men off to soon-to-be-deforested shores. A block away the Parliament building presides in grand daffy Empire style, a sprawl of gray stone beneath a central dome; the entirety of this castle of government outlined with lightbulbs so that at night it blazes like a profile in a fireworks display. I never look at it without expecting the dome to begin spewing up skyrockets.

Such preoccupation with glitter is not new. British troops and sailors stationed at Victoria in the last century would drill in such solemnly spectacular style that the watching Haidas went home and asked a missionary to teach them such fine maneuvers. To gauge from Swan's entries of his occasional visits to Victoria he noticed that the town was a bit high-faluting:
Had my hair cut. Paid 75¢ a Victoria swindle.
For its part Victoria likely found Swan a little too Americanly robust in his drinking and his opinions. (
Wrote to Dr Powell a letter of apology for my actions while in Victoria,
runs one diary entry of earlier years.) But according to the holdings of the Provincial Archives all seems forgiven on both sides when Swan arrived back from the Queen Charlottes in late September of 1883. The Victoria
Daily Colonist
pronounced that “Mr. Swan's researches have been conducted with assiduity and attended with success” and began running a series of articles written by him about his exploit. Better yet the British Columbia legislature invited Swan to speak, and he instructed the lawmakers for more than an hour about their little-known northern archipelago. Two notable features were his snub of Deans—
I had no occasion for the services of a white man, and consequently took none in any capacity—
and his runaway enthusiasm for black cod, which took up nearly half his address.

The British Columbians voted him their appreciation, and here I give him my ovation as well. Swan's west shore adventure defeated some of the North Pacific's most difficult weather. From the Haidas of the eastern shore villages he purchased—which is to say preserved, brought forward for posterity's study—a wealth of Haida craft and art. With his combination of pencil and pen and eventual typewriter he added to the lore known of the Haidas, at a time when it was not at all certain that the tribe itself would survive. Most of all he did his dare of himself: went off to one more West, lived according to the place's own terms, and came home to tell about it. I think of my last miles of walking out of the Rockies from the Marshall Wilderness and of hikes completed in the Olympic Mountains and along the Cape Alava shore, and believe I know some whisper of Swan's satisfaction.

 

The other journeyers of 1883, I turn elsewhere in the Provincial Archives to trace.

Deans died at Victoria in 1905. The lasting effects of his jaunt with Swan seem to have been some lame poetry (“On a Queen Charlotte Island Mountain Torrent”:
Up in the mountains high/Springs a small river/Down through the forests high/Rushing for ever)
and an enthusiasm for Indian legends and artifacts. “He was always digging for Indian trophies....He was looked upon, therefore, by many as a complete crank, an eccentric.”

Edinso lived until 1897. His age was uncertain, but probably he was at least eighty-five when death at last caught him. A white settler at Masset remembered of Edinso's last years that “the old chief would wander around the village with an old blanket around him and a staff in his hand and an old stub clay pipe in his mouth. The old fellow would call on my mother at the Hudson's Bay house, come in the back door of the kitchen and sit on his haunches beside the stove and tell her yarns of the ancient glories of the Haidas.” The
Colonist'
s last word on Edinso was the declamation that “it is doubtless partly owing to his influence and example that the Haidas have taken so readily to civilized ways and become one of the most law abiding tribes on the Coast.”

The famous man of the bunch is the carver, Charlie Edenshaw (as his name has come down in history). “...We now know he was a prodigy among a race of artists,” runs one encomium. Examples of his work in ivory and coal-black stone called argyllite proudly grace the display cases of the Provincial Museum, and in his name the Canadian government has erected a memorial longhouse at Masset.

Of Johnny Kit Elswa there is a print of the studio photo posed with Swan before they left Victoria for the north, and not a trace more.

 

I decided to make one more delve, to the Ethnology Division of the Provincial Museum to go through their collection of photos taken in the Queen Charlottes in the nineteenth century. A photographer made a stay at Masset and Skidegate the year after Swan, and the village skylines of carved columns counted by Swan rise vividly, the Masset carvings more fluid with images, the Skidegate monuments more often topped with single great bird figures. One bold Skidegate eagle seems ready to flap away with the sixty-foot column in his claws.

As I flip the last of these hundred-faced horizons, ethnologist Alan Hoover happens by from his office. “I've got something to show you.” He leads me to a back room shelved full of tribal masks and baskets, reaches into a drawer, turns, grins, opens his fist to me.

“Jesus,” I breathe. “Jesus, Jesus. It's Jumbo.”

Across the palm of Alan Hoover's hand the ivory elephant's head lies like a meld of silver and gold. The trunk has been carved and accented by Charlie Edenshaw so that it looks like the downspout of a faucet; a glorious fat aqueduct of a snoot. Jumbo's eyes are the large teardrop shape often seen in Haida art, without iris or pupil, at once blank as blindness and seeing all. His tusks curve up and across the trunk and like it are plump and blunt. This is plainly an elephant of gaiety rather than rampage, and the carver put even more play to him by substituting for flaplike ears a sweeping coiffure of elegant waves and tucks, very much as if Jumbo had decided to wig up for an appearance at the court of Louis XIV.

What came into Swan's head when he first looked upon this suave beast of Charlie Edenshaw's at Masset ninety-six years ago I cannot know. But I find myself absurdly remembering a sardonic quote read somewhere: “‘Every man for himself!' cried the elephant as he danced among the chickens.” Or perhaps not absurd, for this is a wondrous ivory Haida Jumbo who can be imagined dancing with serene care, when he chooses, in any company whatsoever, capable as well of minuet and magical circling prance within a firelit longhouse.

Swan to Baird:

I think that your attention has not been called to the fact that there is a balance due me of $1,147.82....Those Englishmen in Victoria cannot understand why I could not have closed my accounts with them at the close of the year 1883....

And Baird to Swan:

I notice what you say about coming east some time with your Haidah Indian, and overhauling the collections, and putting them properly in order. I have no doubt that it would be of great advantage to us, but the question is as to the means to compass it....

Familiar shuttlecock, which the corresponding pair has been carrying on since Swan's completion of the Makah memoir two decades earlier. But Swan is arriving to the time of his life when the familiar begins to evaporate rapidly. Over the next few years he does a few dabs of local collecting for Baird and the Smithsonian, tries every so often to pry up some support there for another Queen Charlottes journey, then on the twentieth of August of 1887, the diary entry with a black box stroked around:

The news comes today of the death of Professor Baird who died yesterday at Woods Hole Mass—I set my flags at half mast in token of my respect for his memory.

The Smithsonian itself passes from Swan next. By the end of 1889 he has written:

Professor Baird's death was a great blow to me from which I have not recovered. There is a new deal and no sympathy in Washington. A new king has arisen over Egypt who knows not Joseph.

 

These half-dozen years from the Queen Charlottes achievement to that disgusted sign-off of the Smithsonian emerge from the diary pages to me as written echoes. Line upon startling line the pen's
sty-itch skritch
now murmurs reprise of Swan's earlier Port Townsend life. Dolly Roberts has married a naval lieutenant and become Dolly Biondi, but Swan is drawn briefly to another well-made young lady:
Grand opening ball at Learneds Opera House. Took Harriet Appleton and danced for the first time in my life at a ball. Had a good time & got home at 2 AM.
He is back at the usual sheaf of paperwork jobs; his letterhead recites
Attorney at Law and Proctor in Admiralty United States Commissioner Commissioner of Oregon for the State of Washington Notary Public Hawaiian Consul
and there are constant matters in the ungirdled Port Townsend style:
Capt Moore of US Rev Cutter
Wolcott
came this morning to as{ my advice about his Chinese steward who smuggled some opium on board when the cutter was last in Victoria, and yesterday he brought it ashore in the Captain's soiled linen and attempted to sell it to the steward of the
Rush,
now lying in port. There were 8 pounds of this opium which he seized & confiscated and now has the Chinaman in Irons. I told Capt Moore that I thought if he kept the Chinaman in irons for 10 days, it would be punishment enough as the loss of the opium worth $100 added to being 10 days in irons would be a sufficient vindication of the law and...I did not think it necessary to put the Government to the expense of a trial.
He jaunts to Boston and family another time, goes to Matilda's grave, with more sentiment than scruple of fact plucks a geranium leaf as
a memento of my dear wife.
He occasionally visits Neah Bay, or Neah Bay will visit him:
Sch
Lottie
arrived from Neah this morning. All Jimmys family came up on the schooner. I took Jangi to Peysers store and gave him a complete outfit. He returned to the vessel as proud as an eagle.
Swan remains ready, at the nudge of a pen nib, to share with any correspondent his Indian lore:
Reed letter from Mrs Mary B Leary Seattle requesting me to give her an Indian word suited for the new City Cemetery—I suggested “Washelli” the Makah word for west wind, and quoted from “Hiawatha” to show that the west is the “region of the hereafter,” and that “Washelli Cemetery” would mean the “Cemetery of the land of the hereafter.
” His palate is as enthusiastic as ever:
Capt Dalgardno called on me this evening and we celebrated New Years with a pitcher of punch stuffed olives and potted duck and felt much refreshed.
And so is his sporadic thirst for alcohol, for again, on the first of June of 1885, there is another court order adjudging and decreeing that “James G. Swan is an Habitual Drunkard...As ever he keeps this hooded, like a falcon never allowed to flap up into view from his writing wrist: his page this day reports instead that
This morning I eat a hearty breakfast of salt cod and potatoes which caused a violent fit of indigestion.

Yet something fresh does speak within the diary lines, and it is that Swan the pioneer is shading into Swan the Pioneer. I have watched this happen before, among the two Montana generations older than mine: homesteaders or cowboys or sheepmen who endured decades enough that longevity began to intensify their outline, as a tree against an evening sky will become more and more darkly stroked, distincter than reality. Part of the process is simply to outlive the other figures from your time and Swan definitely has been doing so; his pages at times read like a visitation book as he makes calls on sinking Port Townsend acquaintances. Part of it as well is to have honed a skill sharper than those of your neighbors, and Swan has become rightly recognized for his knowledge of the coastal native cultures. As President Hayes had done in 1880, the famed anthropologist Franz Boas in July of 1889 pays his respects to Swan as a rare ambassador to the tribes. (Their introduction occurred in Victoria:
Met Dr Franz Boaz and went with him to see a lot of Haidas which had just arrived. They were all drunk but civil.)
And yet another part of the capping of the
P
of “pioneer” simply is—what else would it be in Swan's case?—literal: he joins and is an enthusiastic member of an old-timers' group called Washington Pioneers.