The canoe and the saddle; or, Klalam and Klickatat

Front matter

IN TACOMA HARBOR.

From painting by Sidney Lawrence, by courtesy of Mrs. George Browne.

"We had rounded a point, and opened Puyallup Bay, a breadth of sheltered calmness, when I was suddenly aware of a white shadow in the water. What cloud, piled massive on the horizon, could cast an image so sharp in outline, so full of vigorous detail of surface? No cloud, but a cloud compeller. It was a giant mountain dome of snow, swelling and seeming to fill the aerial spheres as its image displaced the blue deeps of tranquil water. * * * Of all the peaks from California to Fraser River, this one before me was royalest. Mount Regnier Christians have dubbed it in stupid nomenclature, perpetuating the name of somebody or nobody. More melodiously the siwashes call it Tacoma."

Contents

INTRODUCTION: WINTHROP IN THE NORTHWEST XIX

I. AN ENTRANCE 3

II. A KLALAM GRANDEE - 5

Introduction

WINTHROP IN THE NORTHWEST.

Sixty years ago this last August, an incident touched with the color of new lands and new eras took place on the west slope of the Cascades. In a camp of red-shirted frontiersmen, two young men lay under the same blanket, and talked half the night away in the enthusiasm of youth for the inspiring things planned and doing in the new Territory of Washington. The little community on Puget Sound, with few resources save the courage of inexperience, had undertaken to break the barriers which barred recruits for their commonwealth by building a highway across the range to the Columbia River Valley. And here was the little band of intrepid men sent out to achieve this incredible feat.

One of the youths bivouacking under the stars, although only twenty-two, was the competent engineer and chief of the road-makers. His guest was a wayfarer, unknown but not unwelcome, who had strayed into their camp by the Greenwater at nightfall. The visitor shared their evening meal, joined in their camp-fire jollity, and divided their leader's bed of hemlock boughs. With sunrise, he was up and away, riding fast across the great Naches Pass to meet soldier friends at old Fort Dalles on the Columbia, and thence to hasten eastward, "over the lonely land," as he tells us, to his home on the Atlantic. They parted fast friends, host and guest; but neither knew the name of the other. No visiting cards circulated in the forest of the Greenwater. "It was not etiquette in those days on the frontier," writes the now venerable roadbuilder, "to ask a name when not voluntarily given;" and he did not learn the identity of the young genius he had entertained unawares until, ten years later, he saw the hospitable Boston tilicum and the marvelous snoring of the hooihut-builders set forth on the flashing pages of "The Canoe and the Saddle."

The pleasant story, with its amusing suggestion of frontier custom, carries us back to the last stage of the westward march of our nation. What Winthrop saw here in 1853, and interpreted, was the opening scene in the final act of a drama in which his own forefathers had greatly played their parts two centuries before. The English colonists annexed the Atlantic Coast to Britain by conquering homes for themselves in the wilderness. So now Americans seized the Pacific Northwest, not by xx INTRODUCTION.

armed force, or purchase, or any skill of statecraft, but by the hardihood of the often despised "settler."

The modern study of history is mainly an examination of popular movements. We are discovering that states are founded less by professional statesmanship than by the noiseless impulses of the masses. This has been the story of the entire American advance across the continent. But for the unnoticed migration of the Scotch-Irish settlers into Kentucky and Tennessee before and during the Revolution, Great Britain would probably now occupy the land from the Ohio to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. There would have been no Louisiana Purchase by President Jefferson; no Mississippi Valley states; no great commonwealths beyond the Rockies. A few thousand humble emigrants changed the programme of nations.

What happened in the East was repeated here. While the statesmen at Washington slept, and Britain's great commercial arm, the Hudson's Bay Company, was left to rule the Northwest, Oregon was won for the United States by the dirt-tanned pioneer and his ox-team. Without Oregon, we should doubtless have no Pacific Coast to-day. But Oregon, won, made California inevitable. And now the Oregonians, pushing across the Columbia, had planted the seeds of a new state on Puget Sound. The Territory of Washington had just been created by Congress. Its first Governor, brave and capable Stevens, was coming across the plains and mountains, surveying the route of a northern transcontinental railway. It was a time of great dreams and equal deeds. Let us not mistake the pioneers for backwoodsmen. In the scattered handful inhabiting the new Territory were men strong enough to build a state, and fine enough to stand together for some remarkable enterprises in public service.

One such expression of community effort was this road-building which our author stumbled upon in the Cascades. In its half-humorous but wholly sympathetic way, his book rightly makes much of it. The "Citizens' Road" is entitled to be remembered less for the service it actually rendered than as an example of pluck and resourcefulness against apparently insuperable difficulties. When the delay and red tape of Captain George B. McClellan held back even the paltry sum of $20,000 which Congress had voted to build a hundred miles of mountain highway, the struggling settlers decided with amazing nerve to undertake it with their own money and labor. The Boston Hooihut is an epitome of the history of the West.

This West, with its promise of great forces and its freedom from threadbare conventions, made a powerful appeal to the young seeker after a career. "The free life these men lead," he says of his friends of the Army, "has great charms for me." And again: "This Oregon is a

INTRODUCTION.

xxi noble country! It offers a grand field for a man who is either a world in himself, or can have his own world about him."

Looking back sixty years, it may now be said that Winthrop was probably better fitted to study and portray the West than any other Eastern man who attempted to describe it. He came prepared to understand and value it. His books and still more his private letters and journals show him wholly free from that tenderfoot superiority of tone

THEODORE WINTHROP.

found in most of the contemporary writings of Eastern men who visited the frontier. His personal charm, even more than the letters of introduction which he brought, made him welcome among the leaders in the new settlements. The few still living who knew him tell of his magnetism. They recall the jovial appreciation with which he met alike the hardships and the inspiration of the frontier.

But what especially fitted Winthrop to depict the West was his profound and well-reasoned Americanism. In an age when sectionalism was fast driving toward civil war, his point of view is broadly xxii INTRODUCTION.

national. His pride in his country as a whole had only been deepened by education and foreign travel. He had come home from Europe feeling the value to humanity of the struggle and opportunities presented by the conquest of the new continent. In the rough battle with the forest, in the stumpy farms on the little clearings, in the crude road that would link the infant settlements with the outside world, he recognized the very processes that had laid strong the foundations of the republic to which later he so gladly gave his life. Ungainly as was the present, this descendant of the great governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut saw in it the promise of a splendid and beneficent future.

"These Oregon people," he says, "carrying to a new and grander New England of the West a fuller growth of the American idea, under whose teaching the man of lowest ambitions must still have some little indestructible respect for himself, and the brute of most tyrannical aspirations some little respect for others; carrying there a religion two centuries farther on than the crude and cruel Hebraism of the Puritans, — with such material, that Western society, when it crystallizes, will elaborate new systems of thought and life. It is unphilosophical to suppose that a strong race, developing under the best, largest, and calmest conditions of nature, will not achieve a destiny."

Most of our writers in the years preceding the Civil War were either occupied with sectional discussions and local traditions, or were looking to Europe and the past for their inspiration. Hawthorne knew no America save that of New England. Emerson sat aloof on the heights of his philosophy. Longfellow's lyre was tuned to the key of mediaeval romance. Whittier was absorbed in the great slavery contest. Lowell was winning fame with his political ballads. For fiction, our people read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and reprints of the English novelists. Our literature had not yet discovered the West. Winthrop's Western books, "The Canoe and the Saddle" and "John Brent," minted new ore.

I recall a meeting with George William Curtis more than twenty years ago, memorable to me because the talk turned to Winthrop, who had been one of my boyhood heroes, and I was delighted to hear about him from one who had known him so well. Some chance remark recalled his name, and Curtis's face lighted. "Ah, there was a man we could ill spare!" he cried. "Winthrop's death was as great a loss to American literature as was that of Keats to English poetry. He was far ahead of his time in thinking continentaliy. Cut off before his prime, his books, brilliant as they are, are the books of a young man. But he had vision and power, and had he lived to improve his art, I have always believed that he might have become the strongest, because the most truly American, of our writers."

INTRODUCTION. xxiii

Much more was said of his friend's genial, thoughtful personality; of his brave defiance of ill health, and of his brilliant talk that ranged from philosophy to puns, and from the heated politics of the East to stories of the frontier. But I shall never forget the feeling with which the great editor told of Winthrop's faith in his country, and of his conviction, when the war clouds broke over Sumter, that in all his varied experiences Life had been fitting him for some part in building the free and United America that was to come.

It is this nationalism that gives "The Canoe and the Saddle" a place quite unique among our books of humor and adventure. As a story of travel among the mountains and forests, it was the first of a long line of books that turned the eyes of the country westward to our great scenery. As a spirited yet truthful contemporary picture of the Indian and pioneer epoch, it records an important era which is fast passing into history; and this service is greatly broadened by the letters and journals now added. But it is more than a travel book, and more than an historical document. It is both a picture and a prophecy. Its especial value for its own day and ours is in its faith in the democracy that was to weld all the sections into a nation.

Perhaps his finest expression of that faith is in his poem, "The East and the West," written shortly before the Civil War, first published in the Atlantic in 1863, and reprinted in the fascinating Memoir by his sister:*

"We of the East spread our sails to the sea, You of the West stride over the land;

Both are to scatter the hopes of the free As the sower sheds golden grain from his hand.

*******

"And you, through dreary and thirsty ways Where rivers are sand, and winds are dust;

Through sultry nights and feverish days

Move westward still, as the sunsets must;

"Where the scorched air quivers along the slopes, Where the slow-footed cattle lie down and die,

Where horizons draw backward, till baffled hopes Are weary of measureless waste and sky.

"Yes! Ours to battle relentless gales,

And yours the brave and patient way;

But we hold the storms in our trusty sails, And for you the life-giving fountains play.

"There are stars above us, and stars for you, Rest on the path and calm on the main;

* "The Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop, Edited by his Sister" (Mrs. Laura Winthrop Johnson), New York, 1884.

xxiv INTRODUCTION.

Storms are but zephyrs when hearts are true, We are no weaklings, quick to complain.

*******

"Man is nobler than men have been,

Souls are vaster than souls have dreamed,

There are broader oceans than eyes have seen,

Noons more glowing than yet have beamed."

Winthrop's visit to the Northwest gave full play to a love of action that was fundamental in his character. This trait counterbalanced his inherited tendency to introspection, perhaps inevitable in a youth whose veins carried the blood of that redoubtable theologian Jonathan Edwards, as well as of the D wights and Woolseys of Yale; it saved him, no doubt, from morbidness, and made him the sane, healthyminded young American that he was. Like many another serious and precocious lad of that period, he had kept a diary during his college career, putting into it, after the fashion of his years, much religious self-analysis. In this journal, soon after his graduation from Yale in 1848, when he was nineteen, he reproached himself for a "selfish boyhood" in which he "did little but read novels," and "had doubts about free will!" But in the same pages we see the other side of his character: "Labor!" he says, "labor is the great thing. I have learned that no effort is thrown away." And now, ten years later, he wrote with keen appraisal of values about the West, where labor was indeed "the great thing," and where academic speculation had as yet no place.

"It is a stout sensation," he says, putting the code of the frontier into words that show his sympathy, "to meet masculine, muscular men at the brave point of a penetrating Boston hooihut, — men who are mates, — men to whom technical culture means naught, — men to whom myself am naught, unless I can saddle, lasso, cook, sing, and chop; unless I am a man of nerve and pluck, and a brother in generosity and heartiness. It is restoration to play at cudgels of jocoseness with a circle of friendly roughs, not one of whom ever heard the word bore, — with pioneers who must think and act, and wrench their living from the closed hand of Nature."

This visit also intensified a mental bent that had found expression even in the games of childhood, when he and his brother William, both of whom were later to respond to Lincoln's first call for troops, used to take the parts of soldiers. Nothing on the frontier interested him more than the work of the Army, in its preservation of public order and its dealings with the Indians. His stay here brought him in touch with many brilliant young officers who were then helping to lay the foundations of new states. He notes the opportunity for self-expression offered by the Army life; he accompanies a detachment to Fort Dalles;

INTRODUCTION. xxv

he regrets that he cannot join the McClellan reconnaissance of the Cascade passes, and help find a practicable route for the much-wanted railway. In this interest we may see the hand of destiny pointing him forward to the eager sacrifice of Great Bethel; and it is impossible not to feel that, had he lived for other battles, his daring, energy and capacity for leadership must have made him an exceptionally useful volunteer officer.

Winthrop was fortunate, while on the Coast, to know the fine and able men whom the Hudson's Bay Company placed in charge of its "forts" in the West. Ogden, Tolmie and Huggins at once gave him their confidence and friendship; and through their eyes he was enabled to get a different view-point from that of the settler. To them especially he was indebted for much information about the Indians and their speech, matters to which he gave close study, and which fill many pages of his book as well as of his letters and diaries. The Indian interested him, not as a subject for sentimentalism, but as a human being, primitive but still endowed with the same instincts and capacities as his white brother, and sadly subject to the same limitations.

Our author risked his life with the Red Men, and probably would have lost it but for the presence of McClellan and his soldiers in the Cascades. He squared the account by making his native guides the subjects of character studies unexcelled in the pages of American humor. The bibulous Duke of York and Loolowcan the Frowzy, as figures in his siwash Odyssey, inspired a mock-heroic style that is both original and enjoyable. I have yet to hear of a reader who can find a dull page in that story of Indians sophisticated by the white man's blankets and whiskey. Even the Chinook Jargon, deadliest of stupidities, yields its amusement for this jester, to whom nothing human was foreign.

Winthrop's life has been well told by his sister, in the Memoir already mentioned, and by George William Curtis, in his delightful appreciation prefixed to Winthrop's novel of New York life, "Cecil Dreame." It is the story of an impressionable youth, molded by the influences of an admirable home, by outdoor life and study of nature, and by foreign travel. At Yale he took honors in languages, history and philosophy; was mediocre in mathematics, but distinguished himself even then as a writer. Graduation was followed by a year of further study, in which he read widely and well; but a sickly constitution drove him into the open, and he went abroad for two years, visiting most of Europe, learning its languages fluently, studying its art, and gathering in Switzerland, Italy and Greece that appreciation of natural beauty that was to serve him so well in his pictures of our western mountains.

On his return to America in 1852, he entered the employ of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, then engaged in carrying fortunexxvi INTRODUCTION.

seekers to California via Panama, and we soon find young Winthrop at the Isthmus. From there ill health drove him north, and after a brief stay in San Francisco, which he well described in his letters, his wanderings brought him to the Northwest. Here his stay on the Columbia was prolonged unexpectedly, by reason of illness, and to this accident we owe the visit to Puget Sound and the resulting book.

The few years that followed were of little note, — the years of a youth trying to find the career that he knows to be his, first at the law and then at literature. Illness still hampered him, but in spite of it, he wrote much, rewrote most of it with care, but published practically nothing. In the spring of 1861, his famous short story, "Love and Skates," was accepted by Lowell for the Atlantic, and there is a rumor that "John Brent" was accepted by one publisher on condition that Winthrop omit the closing incident, since it would offend proslavery readers. This he refused to do, preferring to abide his time. In "John Brent" he says with what is evidently an autobiographic significance: "Observation is the proper business of a man's third decade; the less a spokesman has to say about his results until thirty, the better, unless he wants to eat his words, or to sustain outgrown formulas. Brent discovered this, and went about the world still pointless, purposeless, minding his own business, getting his facts." Even Curtis, as I am informed, did not know Winthrop as an author when he wrote his exquisite sketch of Winthrop as a man and friend.

Then came the call of great issues for which he had been waiting. At the first opportunity for service to his country, he left the widowed mother and his sisters, and went to the front with the celebrated Seventh Regiment of New York. When that regiment returned after its brief defense of the capital, he remained as military secretary to General Benjamin F. Butler, commanding at Fortress Monroe. The rest is soon told: how, in his eagerness to serve, he sought to rally the wavering lines in the engagement at Great Bethel, on June 10, 1861, and fell with a bullet through his heart. He was then thirty-two years old. Only two years before, as if Death had already marked him, Winthrop had written:

"Let me not waste in skirmishes my power, — In petty struggles, — rather in the hour Of deadly conflict may I nobly die!

In my first battle perish gloriously.

"No level life for me, no soft smooth seas, No tender plaintive notes of lulling breeze; I choose the night, so I may feel the gale, Even though it wreck me on my foamy trail."

FAC-SIMILE OF WINTHROP'S MANUSCRIPT.

Page 36.

AN ENTRANCE.

A wall of terrible breakers marks the mouth of the Columbia, Achilles of rivers.

Other mighty streams may swim feebly away seaward, may sink into foul marshes, may trickle through the ditches of an oozy delta, may scatter among sand-bars the currents that once moved majestic and united. But to this heroic flood was destined a short life and a glorious one, — a life all one strong, victorious struggle, from the mountains to the sea. It has no infancy, — two great branches collect its waters up and down the continent. They join, and the Columbia is born to full manhood. It rushes forward, jubilant, through its magnificent chasm, and leaps to its death in the Pacific.

Through its white wall of breakers Captain Gray, with his bark, the Columbia, first steered boldly to discover and name the stream. I will not invite my reader to follow this example, and buffet in the wrecking uproar on the bar. The Columbia, rolling seaward, repels us.

Let us rather coast along northward, and enter the Northwest by the Straits of Fuca, upon the mighty tides of an inland sea. We will profit by this inward eddy of ocean to float quietly past Vancouver Island, and land at Kahtai, Port Townsend, the opening scene of my narrative. The adventures chronicled in these pages happened some years ago, but the story of a civilized man's solitary onslaught at barbarism cannot lose its interest. A drama with Indian actors, in Indian costume, upon an Indian stage, is historical, whether it happened two hundred years since in the northeast, or five years since in the northwest corner of our country.

PORT TOWNSEND IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES.

II A Klalam Grandee

The Duke of York was ducally drunk. His brother, King George, was drunk — royally. Royalty may disdain public opinion, and fall as low as it pleases. But a brother of the throne, leader of the opposition, possible Regent, possible King, must retain at least a swaying perpendicular. King George had kept his chair of state until an angular sitting position was impossible; then he had subsided into a curvilinear droop, and at last fairly toppled over, and lay in his lodge, limp and stertorous.

In his lodge lay Georgius Rex, in flabby insensibility. Dead to the duties of sovereignty was the King of the Klalams.* Like other royal Georges, in palaces more regal than this Port Townsend wigwam, in realms more civilized than here, where the great tides of Puget Sound rise and fall, this royal George had sunk in absolute wreck. Kings are but men. Several kings have thought themselves the god Bacchus. George of the Klalams had imbibed this ambitious error, and had proved himself very much lower than a god, much lower than a man, lower than any plebeian Klalam Indian, — a drunken king.

In the great shed of slabs that served them for palace sat the Queen, — sat the Queens,* — mild-eyed, melancholy, copper-colored persons, also, sad to say, not sober. Etiquette demanded inebriety. The stern rules of royal indecorum must be obeyed. The Queen Dowager had suc-

*As to the spelling of Indian names, see Preface.

cumbed to ceremony; the Queen Consort was sinking; every lesser queen, — the favorites for sympathy, the neglected for consolation, — all had imitated their lord and master. Courtiers had done likewise. Chamberlain Gold Stick, Black Rod, Garter King at Arms, a dozen high functionaries, were prostrate by the side of prostrate majesty. Courtiers grovelled with their sovereign. Sardanapalus never pre-

Mask used in Tribal Dances and Religious Ceremonies. From near Bremerton, Wash.

sided, until he could preside no longer, at more tumbledown orgies.

King, royal household, and court, all were powerless; and I was a suppliant here, on the waters of the Pacific, for means of commencing my homeward journey toward the Atlantic. I needed a bark from that fleet by which King George ruled the waves. I had dallied too long at Vancouver Island, under the hospitable roof of the Hudson's Bay Company, and had consumed invaluable hours in making a detour from my proper course to inspect the house, the saw-mill, the bluff, and the beach, called Port Townsend. These were the last days of August, 1853. I was to meet my overland comrades at the Dalles of the Columbia on the first of September. Between me and the rendezvous were the leagues of Puget Sound, the preparation for an ultra-montane trip, the passes of the Cascades, and all the dilatoriness and danger of Indian guidance. Moments now were worth days of common life.

Therefore, as I saw those winged moments flit away unharnessed to my chariot of departure, I became wroth, and, advancing where the king of all this region lay, limp, stertorous, and futile, I kicked him liberally.

Yes! I have kicked a king!

Proudly I claim that I have outdone the most radical regicide. I have offered indignities to the person of royalty with a moccasined toe. Would that that toe had been robustly booted! In his Sans Souci, his (Eil de Bceuf, his Brighton Pavilion, I kicked so much of a first gentleman of his realm as was George R., and no scalping-knife leaped from greasy seal-skin sheath to avenge the insult. One bottle-holder in waiting, upon whose head I had casually trodden, did indeed stagger to his seat, and stammer truculently in Chinook jargon, "Potlatch lum! — Give me to drink," quoth he, and incontinently fell prone again, a poor, collapsed bottle-holder.

But kicking the insensible King of the Klalams, that dominant nation on the southern shores of Puget Sound, did not procure me one of his canoes and a crew of his braves to paddle me to Nisqually,* my next station, for a blanket apiece and gratuities of sundries. There was no help to be had from that smoky barn or its sorry inmates, so regally nicknamed by British voyagers. I left them

*Fort Nisqually, the Hudson's Bay Company's great trading post on Puget Sound, near the mouth of the Nisqually River, and a few miles west of the present city of Tacoma, played a noteworthy part in early Northwestern history. It was founded in 1833, and at the time of Winthrop's visit, twenty years later, did a large business with the Indians both west and east of the Cascades, as well as with the white settlements lying upon their dirty mats, among their fishy baskets, and strode away, applying the salutary toe to each dignitary as I passed.

Fortunately, without I found the Duke of York, only ducally drunk. A duke's share of the potables had added some degrees to the arc of vibration of his swagger, but had not sent it beyond equilibrium. He was a reversed pendulum, somewhat spasmodic in swing, and not constructed on the compensation principle, — when one muscle relaxed, another did not tighten. However, the Duke was still sober enough to have speculation in his eyes; and as he was Regent now, and Lord High Admiral, I might still, by his favor, be expedited.

It was a chance festival that had intoxicated the Klalams, king and court. There had been a fraternization, a

from San Francisco to Alaska. The buildings were roomy, one-story houses of logs, the principal ones set within a large stockade, which was strengthened for defense with blockhouses, well stocked with firearms and commanding the surrounding plain. The United States government, in 1869, paid the Hudson's Bay Company and its subsidiary, the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, $650,000 for their interests here, thus ending the story of Great Britain's attempt to hold the Northwest as a game preserve.

In 1853, although its fur trade was soon to be cut down by the settlements, the "Fort" was still the most important commercial center in the new Territory. The head factor was Dr. William Fraser Tolmie, and his assistant, Edward Huggins, — both men of sterling character and much respected by the American settlers.

"Nisqually," often assumed to be an aboriginal Indian word, is merely an Indian adaptation of a white man's phrase. Like many others in the vocabulary of the Northwest, this word owes its origin to the French-Canadian servants of the Hudson's Bay Company. Observing the flat countenances and pug noses of the natives on the upper Sound, the half-breed voyageur called these savages nez co.rre. The Indians, probably thinking this a term of honor, appropriated it; and being unable, like the Chinese, to pronounce the letter r, called themselves "nez kalli." This sounded to English and American ears, and soon got into written speech, as "Neskwalli" (Gibbs) or "Nisqually." The Nisqually Indians were a family of small tribes inhabiting the south and east shores of the Sound. The Nisqually River gets its name from them.