Winter Brothers by Ivan Doig Read Free Book Online Page A

as
without exception the biggest coward in the tribe and at the same time the biggest braggadocio, but he is shrewd and smart and accomplishes by finesse...as much as some of the others do by their physical prowess
.) The exuberant Billy Barlow, who escorted Swan duck hunting and
wanted me to shoot everything I saw from a crow to an old woman who was at work on the prairie.
Tsowiskay,
an inveterate old savage
implacable against white men; on his death a rarely harsh Swan raps out that
the old fellow is no loss and his death did not affect the other Indians (except his own family) any more than if a dog had died.
Colchote, a war chief who recited his skirmishes with other coastal tribes as if from a list in hand.
    And the one of them all I would give most to have stood beside Swan and heard, an ancient woman, one of Colchote’s slaves, from Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, who recounted for Swan the explorers she had seen arrive from the sea.
She said she remembered when Meares brought a lot of Chinamen to Nootka, and built a schooner:
1788, more than seventy years before. And Vancouver,
whom she called Macowber:
1792. And
she saw the massacre on board Astor’s ship, the
Tonquin,
and spoke of Mr. McKay, the purser, who it was supposed blew the ship up:
1811, the year before Swan was born.
    Two sudden and vital friendships make themselves known here in Swan’s notations of his first visits to Neah Bay. The earliest, and the one that would last for decades, took hold with the single resident of Neah Bay who was not a Makah: the white man Henry Webster, owner of a trading post at the eastern headland of the bay. It is enough to say of him now that Webster assays as a bleak-faced, obstinate frontier entrepreneur who did not get along with Indians notably well. In these beginning months of Swan’s acquaintanceship with him a clash occurred in which, after an argument of some nature, five Indians pummeled Webster with rocks, dragged him along the beach, and threatened to kill him. Another instance Swan reports to the diary page:
The Indians talk very saucy today about shooting Webster.
Neither the battering nor the threats at all dissuaded Webster from staying on at his trading post, or indeed from patiently pulling political strings for a couple of years until he won appointment as the first federal agent for the new Makah Reservation. Swan had that tendency to lean on men chestier than himself—Russell, Isaac I. Stevens—and Webster amply seems to have been of the type. (He also, Swan noted promptly and gladly, was a man who knew how to fill a table.
The old adage that “God sends meat and the devil sends cooks” does not apply to my friend Webster’s culinary department. Epicurus himself would have rejoiced over the nice and palatable dishes of fresh codfish tongues, fried; fresh halibut fins, broiled; fresh salmon, baked; together with side dishes of sea eggs, deep sea oysters and brook trout; with puddings made of the luscious salal and
other rich berries of the season, winding up with cranberry tarts and pies; the whole the product of the ocean and land in the immediate vicinity of the house.)
    The other immediate friend, supple and deft as Webster was granitic, of course was Swell. Rapidly in the diaries it becomes evident how valued a companion the young Makah chieftain proved to be. The pages of Swan’s eight weeks at Neah Bay in late 1859 bustle with the forming connection:
Went to Swell’s house and made a sketch of some Tomanawos boards....Swell told about their land, that they were not satisfied with the way the treaty was written....Went to Swell’s house. He says that the past year there were 30 canoes engaged in the whale fishery 8 men to each canoe but they have not all been out this past year....Swell says that there are in the Makah tribe 220 men
300
women 200 children 100 slaves....Made sketch of Swell....Swell started for Dungeness this morning. Saluted him with