AN EDUCATED INDIAN
AN EDUCATED INDIAN
There is not a rural panacea or health resort from Southern California to Vancouver island that will afford a tithe of the good solid enjoyment with the revivifying influence so beneficial to constitutions or shattered nerves.
Six o’clock in the morning finds the fields redolent of odor, musical with sound and swarming with pickers. Poles laden with wet vines are falling here, there and everywhere. There are buckets, baskets, boxes, babies and blankets in endless admixture, while white, black and Indian are taking stations. Droppingpolls, like snowflakes falling, are heaping in miniature mountains in every row. So it goes. Day in, day out, from morn to night, throughout the season, until the last pole has been plucked and the last load rolled into the mammoth kiln.
Indians make the best pickers, and among the Indians the klootchman ranks supreme. She picks hops while the lazy, indolent brave plays cards or lounges in the shadow of his rakish tepee. His great delights are in card playing and pony racing. Those of the interior will travel for days across the mountains every autumn, not to pick hops but to horse race on Sunday. Sunday is their big day, a day of carousing, gambling and racing. On those days all the villages in the valley are overrun with the pickers in holiday garb of fancy colors. Then assemble a cosmopolitan crowd not greatly unlike such as gather at fair time in the far famed Nijni Novgorod from the steppes of Tartary or Siberia. The Yakimas and Klickitats and other interior tribes, male and female alike, are scampering about on long haired ponies, while the more sedate Puyallups, Nisquallys, Tulalips, and dozens of other coast tribes trudge hither and thither, grunting and muttering and poking their fingers and noses into anything and everything which can be eaten or worn. Night drives them to their various camps, some scattered miles away in various parts of the valleys, and the following Sunday the scene is repeated.
STONE HATCHETS OF PUGET SOUND TRIBES
STONE HATCHETS OF PUGET SOUND TRIBES
Near Puyallup in a long reach of level ground the Indians have raced for years at hop picking time, and so great is the rivalry and excitement of the sport that the whole interim from one autumn till the next is given up in preparation and training of horse flesh with which to outrun rival steeds on the race course. Sometimes but two, at other times six or eight horses will enter in a single race. The race is always a running race and the Indians mount without any reference to weight, handicap, jockey or saddle. A big Indian will be seen mounted on a diminutive wooly pony, and will sail over the course like a meteor, his long black locks streaming in the wind. Bets of ponies, lodges, blankets, saddles, knives, money and everything and anything tangible and movable will be staked on the result of a race and paid with as much nonchalance as a thousand pounds Sterling would be paid on Epsom Downs. Often there are seen at these Sunday races 3,000 people. Such days and places are the paradise of the gambler, contraband whiskey vendor and trashy whites generally. They congregate like vultures at a carrion feed.Only a goodly number of United States deputy marshals prevents downright and open handed robbery and vice.
The close of the picking season always finds the principal towns flooded with returning pickers and the dock fronts lined with long, lank Indian canoes. The Indians are spendthrifts, and they plant the profits of the picking season as generously as princes of the realm. Their canoes are laden with bric a brac from the Boston man’s store as long as the money lasts or as long as there is room to store them.
QUINIAULT SEA OTTER LOOKOUT
QUINIAULT SEA OTTER LOOKOUT
They always bring with them from their mysterious northern lands the fruits of the chase on land or sea, and the workmanship of rude hands, for barter with the whites. Mats of reeds, images, miniature canoes, bladders of fish oil, slabs of seal meat, dried elk and bear, seal skins, beaver skins, pelts, sea otter skins, and such like, form their chief staples in trade. These are generally bartered on the trip down, for eatables, while waiting for the maturing of the hop fields, as they are most always here weeks before the time for picking.
The coast Indians come generally in fleets of a dozen to twenty or thirty big canoes, numbering fifty or one hundred pickers, who are generally presided over by some scion of a royal line or by some head man elected to chieftainship, much as the whites elect their officials. If there is any tribal restrictions or dictatorial authority by the chief at home, it is dropped when they start on their long water journeys, sometimes of many hundred miles, to the hop fields.
The going and coming of the Washington hop pickers is as regular as the annual migration of water fowl or the rotation of the seasons, and are ever a source of attraction and interest.
The Siwash have a legendary theory and story of the crucifixion. Hezekial Butterworth picked it up while on one of his vacation jaunts to the west, and tells it very prettily, though it has been told by a score of writers and is one of the first to come to the knowledge of the white man:
Long, long ago, say the Siwashes, in the splendid sunsets of the Whulge, or Puget Sea, there came a canoe of copper sailing, sailing. The painted forest lords and feathered maidens saw it from the bluffs—in the sunrise at times, or in the moonsets, but ever in the red sunsets, sailing, sailing. The gleam of copper in the red sunset is more beautiful than gold; and ever and anon on the blue wave was seen the burnished gleam of the copper canoe. On it came, and the solitary voyager in the copper canoe landed at last on the Whulge, under the crystal dome of Mount Rainier, and he shadowed among the cool firs of the headlands there the boat that flashed out the rays of sunset light.
He called together the tribes. They came in canoes from everywhere. He began to teach and preach. “I come among you as a preacher of righteousness,” he said, or thoughts like these. “All that men can possess in this world, or any other, is righteousness. If a man have that, he is rich, though he be poor, and his soul shall rise, rise, rise, and live forever.
“Oh Siwashes,” he preached, “the unseen power that thinks and causes you to act is the soul. It does not die when the breath vanishes. It goes away with the unseen life and inhabits the life unseen. You have never seen the soul, or life, but death is only the beginning of a longer life, and the soul with righteous longings shall be happy forever.
“But war is wrong—the spear, the arrow, and the spilling of human blood. Man may not kill his brother. The soul was meant for peace.”
He preached these or like doctrines, a beautiful gospel, like the Sermon on the Mount.
The warlike tribes rejected the word. They nailed the Saviour who came gleaming over the violet sea in the copper canoe, to a tree, and he died there. They took down his body, but, wonder of wonders! it rose from the dead, andappeared to all the tribes, and the risen Saviour preached the same doctrine of righteousness and immortality as before. The legend may have been derived from the preaching of some forest priest in some distant place, for the Catholic missionaries were on the coast of California before 1700.
Picturesque and profoundly romantic and imaginative is the Siwash legend of the two grand old mountains, Rainier and Hood, one in Washington, one in Oregon, with the mighty Columbia rolling between. It is the legend of a stupendous battle royal, between mighty monarchs, and is as well the sequel to the cascades and rocks that break the broad current of the noble stream. The foundation for the legend is probably due to the fact that within the limits of the Indian tradition or history of the past, Mt. Rainier was in active eruption.
Long ago, almost beyond the time when Indian tradition and legend extend the spirits of the mountains fought a long and bloody battle. Rocks were hurled from the summits at the heads of the rival sentinels of the cascades and a great commotion was caused throughout all the land. The Siwash of the Sound say their tradition teaches them that it was the evil and unruly spirits on Mt. Hood that brought about the great battle. They would not keep still but were bent on raising mischief, and they did it. When the great spirits of Rainier could not stand it any longer and could not sleep, they rose in rebellion with a mighty noise that shook the mountains and the sea and began a war on the noisy demons of Mt. Hood. Great rocks were picked up and hurled back and forth, some so heavy that they could not be thrown the great distance and they fell short landing in the mighty Columbia with a great splash and making the earth tremble from their violence. This quieted the spirits of Mt. Hood, since which they have had peace; but the waters were dammed up and the cascades were formed.
A long time ago an English whaling bark, after many months of hardship on the voyage, was caught in a heavy gale off Vancouver island coast. After a gallant effort to save the ship and ride out the storm, the captain and crew took to the life-boat, and though a long way from land and with the tempest howling about them, struck bravely out for safety. Nothing was ever heard or seen of the sinking ship. But one of the brave crew reached land to live to tell the awful tale of shipwreck and death which engulfed his companions. It was while trying to make land through the surf of Queen Charlotte sound, that the captain and crew went down. The empty and battered boat was cast upon the shore and with it one half-drowned sailor who, after a time was able to rise from the sand and stagger about.
It was during the stormy winter of 1843, a time long antedating the first general appearance of the settlers. In all the northwest there was scarcely a clearing or hamlet. An occasional white-winged sail dotted the water horizon or came to anchor in some quiet bay or harbor of the Straits of Fuca, or the still less frequented waters of Queen Charlotte sound. Ever and anon a Hudsons Bay company’s trapper or voyager emerged from the bush upon the shore to remain a few days and then would be gone again prosecuting his search after skins. That was all there was to the civilization of the inhospitable northwest. The land all about belonged to the simple children of nature the Indian, the beaver and the bear. Such was the situation when the hero of our story was thrown almost drowned upon the beach of Queen Charlotte sound. Scarcely had the half-drowned mariner reached dry land than he was set upon by a party of Indians and taken prisoner. He was escorted to the village of the head chief and the usual council of war held by the braves to determine his fate. The prisoner knew no word of the Chinook jargon or the King George Indian tongue and could not gain the slightest inkling of the drift of the pow-wow. For a time he felt that he was reserved for a fate ten times worse than death at sea, and he cursed fate that he was not permitted to go down with his companions and leave his bones to whiten and bleach in the cavernous depths of old ocean. But he was not to be burned at the stake, norkilled and eaten. The Indians at the close of their council made no demonstration or dangerous move, and he soon learned that he was to remain a prisoner and slave. His English boat was pulled upon the beach and left to rot away. Time passed on and days run into months and months swelled into years. The sailor soon fell into the style of living of the natives and was adopted into the tribe, learned their strange tongue and customs, sat in their councils, went with them on their long canoe voyages to the south and towards the north, followed them in their hunts for the bear, beaver and elk; engaged in their wars with their enemies, dressed in their simple style, and was in every way save by blood an Indian.
For five long years the prisoner lived with his captors on the shores of Queen Charlotte sound, but there came a time when savage life palled and the longing to see the face of a white man and speak his natural language grew too strong to be shaken off. All the time he had lived with the Indians he had not seen a white person. So in 1848 the sailor whose true name was William Jarman, sought an opportunity to escape from the village of his adopted people. He headed his canoe to the south and quickly and quietly paddled away toward the waters of Puget Sound, hoping to fall in with some trapper on the beach, or mayhap catch a sail in the waters towards which he was going. Without mishap he got as far south as Point Wilson, now Point Wilson light house, near Port Townsend, but had the misfortune here to be overtaken by the very people with whom he had lived so long. Broken and bewildered by his recapture, poor Jarman was escorted back to the village in triumphant glee by his swarthy friends, now turned to foes. The policy of the Indians again proved to be to keep him among them as an unwilling prisoner and for four years more Jarman remained a captive and prisoner. Afraid that he would again attempt to escape the Indians took him to Queen Charlotte island, and he was not permitted to return to the main land. Notwithstanding the close surveillance kept upon him the sailor at the end of four years, a second time managed to get away and this time made good his escape. By the time he reached the Sound on his second escape many settlers had arrived and Jarman found company and protection. Such was his wild and uncouth appearance that his later friends gave him the sobriquet of “Blanket Bill.” He took up his residence on the Sound, lived at Seattle, Port Townsend and Whatcom, or about the settlements which as time passed on grew to those towns. Blanket Bill after his nine years of wonderful life among the savages never could quite get over the habits and peculiarities he had learned, and consequently he became a notorious character among the white settlers on the Sound. He was living up to a very short time ago somewhere in the bounds of Whatcom county.