Winter Brothers by Ivan Doig Read Free Book Online Page B

the swivel—1 gun....Swell brought down
50
bushels of potatoes from Dungeness....Swell’s name Wha-laltl Asabuy....Made a carving today of the Ha hake to ak or the animal that makes the lightning...I cut it on a piece of sandstone from the cliff & intend giving it to Swell....
    Elsewhere Swan testifies of Swell’s intelligence, of his knack for leadership, his prowess as a canoeman; I could almost say, reading not very deep between the lines, his alacrity to meet and learn about the white way of life that had come calling at Cape Flattery. Swell was a stag of a man, his name among the whites deriving from his posh sartorial preference: he sat resplendent
in a new suit of Boston clothes
when Swan made his first canoe trip to Neah Bay with him in mid-September of 1859.
Swell has been among the white men as sailor and pilot,
Swan recorded, and
was the person who assisted in rescuing Capt. Weldon and the crew of the Swiss Boy, which was wrecked in Nittinat Sound in early 1859. He saved them from bondage, and landed them safe among their friends....He is still quite a young man, but if he lives, he is destined to be a man of importance among his own and neighboring tribes.
    They are, then, a set of mutually interested men. The Makah canoeman who has adventured aboard steamships and schooners; the Boston ship’s chandler who has adapted to cedar canoe. A young chieftain who knows the politics of his tribe and is attuning to some of the white version; a middle-aging white man with keenest interest in the coastal Indian cultures. At first they can only have been curiosities, griffin met with centaur, to one another; then, as Swan’s diary agenda shows, exchangers of lore; then, from every evidence of the aftermath of Swell’s slaying, friends. Such a growth of regard sometimes will happen when two people are cupped together in a single happenchance season of closeness—aboard a fishing boat, in a line cabin of a cattle ranch, at a military outpost; in this instance, at an outpost of another sort, the frontier pinnacle that was Neah Bay. Swan was able to know the Makah chieftain for about a year and a half before the life was blasted from Swell in the breakers at Crescent Bay. By that late winter night, the two of them had entered what I would phrase a kind of adopted kinship, stronger than differences of blood can ever be. Winter brothers, perhaps call them.
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    But Swan. What besides tireless ears did a domestic fugitive from Massachusetts have to offer Swell and the other Makahs? That answer too puts itself together from these diary entries, in the remark of a sketch here, a carved gift there; clearest of all in the laconic and intriguing entry for an October day in 1859 that Swan had gone down to a sandstone cliff along the Neah Bay beach and carved a swan into the rockface.
    Artistry. Right there, in the fact that virtually the only skill of hand lacking in Swan was the ability to clutch a dollar, was his ticket into the Makah community. Draw, cut stone, invent patterns of paint, produce creatures from within the covers of his books: he could perform a range of tasks admired by a tribe in love with ornament. What was more, not much daunted Swan:
Went to Billy Balch’s house and finished the Thunder bird. This was the hardest sketch I ever undertook. The lodge was dark and the board covered with smoke & grease and hid by boxes & baskets of food. The Indians removed these & washed the board
with urine & then the only way I could decypher the painting was to mark round the drawing with a red crayon....
    In fire and reek, as the storymasters of sagas would have said, and Swan blithely tracing. The Makahs met him at least halfway in rampant enthusiasm for picturizing, as Swan noted some years later when he wrote at length about his role as a frontier ambassador of art.
I have painted various devices for these Indians and have decorated their ta-ma-na-was masks; and in every instance I was simply