THE OLD-MAN-HOUSE TRIBE
The history of the Old-Man-House (or as the Indians called it
Tsu-Suc-Cub) if fully known would unfold a story as interesting as
romance. At this late day its time and surroundings are so shrouded in
the mists of the past that but only a glimpse can be had. Its habitats
like itself have long years since withered and returned to dust. Probably
the best and most authentic account of its history and purpose is the
story told by Indian Williams, or as the Indians called him, Sub-Qualth,
about 80 or 85 years old at that time, and long since joined to his
fathers. Old Williams told his story through an intelligent interpreter
also of the Old-Man-House reservation, whose name had been christianized
to that of H. S. Alfred.
In the Tsu-Suc-Cub lived eight great chiefs and their people. Space in
the big house was allotted to each chief and his people and this was
religiously consecrated to them and never encroached upon by others. To
old Chief Sealth was given the position of honor; Chief Kitsap came next,
Sealth’s aged father ranked third, and Tsu-lu-Cub came fourth. These four
Sub Qualth remembered and they represented one-half of the Tsu-Suc-Cub.
The next four Sub Qualth did not remember but his father, who was a
cousin of Chief Sealth had told him their names. There was Bec-kl-lus,
Ste-ach-e-cum, Oc-ub, and Lach-e-ma-sub. These were petty chieftains with
subordinate tribes and authority and each had a carved totem supposed
to properly delineate and perpetuate the deeds of valor of himself and
people.
In 1859 there were many of these carved posts remaining and yet standing
in fairly good preservation with the big logs still resting on them 16 to
20 feet above the ground. Three of them remained in position in 1870, but
during the next fifteen years all were torn down, or falling from decay,
were carried off and lost to the historian.
The posts in the front were about 25 feet apart, making the length of
the structure over 1,000 feet frontage with the width of the main room
fully 60 feet inside. The big corner post was of cedar, as were all of
them for that matter, and was of immense size, showing that the tree from
which it was cut must have been seven feet through. Clear and distinctly
cut on the front of the big totem stood out first and foremost the big
Thunderbird in the proportions in which it had fixed itself in the minds
of the particular tribe. On the same totem was carved the full sized
figure of a man with bow and arrows, representing the old Chief Kitsap,
the most noted chief for great strength and prowess on the Sound, save
possibly old Sealth.
[Illustration: ALL THAT’S LEFT OF OLD-MAN-HOUSE]
What a home it must have been. Although the family residing there was
large, yet never a resident of Washington lived in a home more spacious.
It covered the length and breadth of sandy beach like a king’s palace
that it was. Three hundred and eighty-four or ninety-four yards, as Wm.
Deshaw remembered, did it stretch away up and down the beach of the
narrow Agate passage. Twenty yards or more in breadth it extended back
to the edge of the little bluff where its long timbers rested as on a
footstool, and high enough for the tallest Indian brave.
The outlines of the old pile are still readily traceable along the ground
although it has been nearly thirty years since the Indians gave it up as
a place of abode and took to constructing little huts and lean-tos along
the beach and on the gentle slopes above. The attractive relic of the
old structure and the one that lends the best idea of the old building’s
original shape, is one of the log rafters still resting in position on
two immense uprights just as it did in the days when the allied tribes
hoisted its great weight into the air. It is a cedar log 63 feet long,
12 inches in diameter at the smaller end and probably 23 or 24 inches at
the larger end. The uprights, to lend color to the great proportions the
old building must have attained, are of immense cedar trees that must
have been four feet through. The one nearer the water is 12 feet high and
the other fully eight feet. The big timbers were first split asunder and
the inside hollowed out and hewn away until a piece probably 10 or 12
inches thick had been left to form the upright. They have been hoisted
into position with the convex or bark side turned to face the interior of
the house and tamped into the ground until they became solidly set and
able to support the great weight that was put on above. Back of the row
of uprights that stood at the rear and furthest from the beach, extended
another row of stringers or girders to the bank, supporting also a roof,
and this greatly enlarged the area of the building. Up and down the beach
are numberless posts and foundation blocks of the old house and all in a
good state of preservation, as is the single big rafter and two uprights
yet in position. These latter are only worn and rotted where they came
in contact once with the other or where they enter at the surface of the
ground.
An alder bush, a salal bush, and a weed or two have found a foothold in
an old wind crack of the rafter and now add to its quaint and picturesque
appearance. All else has been torn down or fallen down by the lapse of
time and has either floated off with the tide or been burned up in their
earthen fires.
Five hundred, six hundred, and as high as seven hundred Indians lived
in the big palace here at one time. They lived here long after the
white people came among them. The site had been their great village for
probably hundreds of years before. Successive chiefs have sat in council
here and great war dances and night orgies held through generations of
time under the chiefs of the Sealth.
Great banks of crushed and broken and roasted clam shells that whiten
the beach and cover the bottom of the sea as with a porcelain lining far
out into deep water, attest this better than could have musty scroll
or parchment. The entire sea beach extending back onto the high ground
is but a bed of decayed clam shells, and even as high up as the Indian
farmer’s little garden, soil had to be carted in and put upon it, in
which the seed germs could take hold and grow. Below it was a bed of
lime-like earth, the offal and remains of many thousands of Indian feasts.
Besides the vast amount of crumbled shell mounds there are other and
smaller mounds about the site that look as if they might have served the
purpose of an elevated fire place. The whole area is overgrown with a
thick carpet of short sand grass which even now makes it a most inviting
place for campers or picnic parties. Beyond the few things mentioned
above there is nothing to remind one now of the interesting past
hereabouts.
An interesting character still resides, 1895, at the Old-Man-House
reservation. He is William Deshaw, whom the tides of time cast upon the
beach at Agate point, Kitsap county, 27 years ago.
[Illustration: WILLIAM DESHAW, THE PIONEER AND INTIMATE FRIEND OF CHIEF
SEALTH
From a Life Sketch]
Deshaw, a rank copper-head to this day, is part of the flotsam and jetsam
that came into the Sound along with the early tide of emigration. He was
born in Galveston, Texas, in 1834, and was part of the early drift of
Arizona, New Mexico and California. He went into the Sacramento valley
a year before the others struck the coast and true to his nature of
moving out on the flood tides soon left there and came this way. He has
been shot full of arrow holes, and has among numerous other trophies
five Indian scalps in his trunk of his own taking. That he ever remained
here so long is entirely due to the climate. Let the rains of one long
winter on Puget Sound percolate down a man’s back and he seldom gets
away after that. He takes to it, as it were, like the moss on the roof,
and becomes a fixture of the location. And so it was with the old Texan.
He drifted in here for a stay of a month or two and he is here yet. He
soon got mixed up with the natives, became a squaw man and never after
that could he pull himself away. And why should he leave? He had wedded
into the royal house of Sealth; wedded a princess, a grand-daughter of
the chief of the allied tribes of the Duwamish, Samamish, Squamish,
etc., and probably forgot about his old-time habit of drifting. Mrs.
Deshaw, nee Princess Mary Sealth, has been dead these many years, and
now lies buried in the little reservation churchyard on the hill across
the narrow strip of tide water. There are, however, two fine looking
girls and some boys left of the union, and in their society the old man
is happy and contented. Speaking of the little “God’s acre” on the hill
near the reservation church reminds us very vividly that within its
sacred precincts rests almost all that there is of the races and tribes
of Sealth. Eighteen new mounds have been added during the past year. Yet
a little while and there will not be a solitary individual left alive to
remind those of to-day that such a people ever lived. Father Time has
wrought some rapid changes with the allied tribes since the whites came
among them. The evil and contaminating influences that have ever followed
civilization into the dominion of the simple natives, coupled in this
case with their severe and taxing superstitions, have combined to quickly
wipe them out of existence.
So quickly have the changes been wrought that whole families have
disappeared almost in the night-time. A Siwash with a wife and eight or
ten apparently healthy children might wake up to-morrow to find himself
a widower without family. Men there are now at the Old-Man-House who
have buried their third wife and living with the fourth. Klootchmen were
pointed out who have married five different times and only the fifth
man living. Chief of Police Jimmy Sealth is the fourth husband of his
present wife, who is not over 30 years of age. She lost her first, second
and third husbands successively, and with the first one buried seven
children. The record of the second and third marriages was not given.
Jimmy Sealth, no relation of the old chief, who besides being chief of
police, was sheriff, prosecuting attorney, judge and general factotum
on the reservation, has been married two or three times and buried two
children by his first wife. In one little family plot in the reservation
churchyard 23 graves were counted side by side. The dead are not alone
buried side by side—they are piled in one on top of another in many
cases, although there is a waste of wilderness on every side of the
burying ground.
Disease has fallen with a heavy hand upon the allied tribes, but even
in the memory of the first white man superstition has done almost as
much in the labor of thinning out the population. Graves there are at
the Old-Man-House that have been wet with the blood of human sacrifice
within the memory of their great Ta-mahn-a-wis, William Deshaw. One man
there is on the Old-Man-House reservation who has slain 11 children in
the practice of their Skal-lal-a-toot, or hoodooism, and whose blood
saturated the tomb of their hy-as-tyees.
Such in a few words is the rather sympathetic story of a people who
hereabouts were the first in the land. A people whose Ta-mahn-a-wis men,
or great medicine men, foretold the coming of the white people days and
days before the Indians themselves saw the ships of Vancouver sailing
from out the heavy cloud banks and high up in the air, for from such
a source did the three ships appear to the simple natives as told now
in some of their traditions. The Old-Man-House, or Port Madison Indian
reservation lies about 15 miles northwest of Seattle and not far from the
Port Madison mills, one of the big lumber camps of Puget Sound, now idle
and almost tenantless, a result as much probably of extensive litigation
as anything else. It is a mill town owned exclusively by the mill
company, which furnishes all the employment of the place to its 300 or
400 inhabitants when the mill is busy. Now that there is nothing to do in
the mill there is no occasion for remaining there and the mill men with
their families have moved elsewhere and the rows of pretty whitewashed
cottages are empty and voiceless.
The mill property is situated in a pretty little bight of the Sound,
once a favorite nook of the Indians, hid away from view until one is
right upon it. It is located nearly at the northernmost end of Bainbridge
island, and the mill town at one time besides supporting a considerable
mill population, was the county seat of Kitsap county. But during a few
years past, however, the most officious and omnipresent individual over
there was the court’s officer, who held the keys to the mill and looked
after the property for the court pending final adjudication of the case
on behalf of all litigants.
The Indian reservation lies about three miles distant from the mill and
separated from it by Agate passage, a narrow thread of water 900 feet
across at half tide.
The way over to the reservation is nothing more than a narrow trail
hewn out of the woods a few feet up from the beach, and was apparently
first cut by the men who strung the old Puget Sound telegraph and cable
company’s wire to the lower Sound.
[Illustration: GRAND POTLATCH—OLD-MAN-HOUSE.]
At the extreme limit of Bainbridge island is Agate point and directly
across, the reservation. On the point is the old trading store of
William Deshaw, first started in the early sixties, and has been a
trading store ever since. Deshaw has been left in undisturbed possession
ever since and there he is to-day, probably his only accumulation being
his now motherless but happy family of half-breed boys and girls.
Every nook and corner hereabouts appears remindful of the musty past,
everything is interesting to look upon or ruminate over. Deshaw’s old
trading store is a museum of antiquities, and its restless, gray-haired
and slippered proprietor is the one living specimen and most interesting
of all there is on exhibition. Sixty years old, yet he is apparently as
full of vitality as he ever was. There is just as much fire in his small
gray eyes and as much of a spring in the step as there was when he was
taking the scalp-locks of the bloodthirsty Comanche and Apaches.
The old gentleman hearing our approach one Wednesday morning came
shambling out onto his front porch and was soon in the midst of an
interesting talk on the Indians with whom for so long he has been
associated. Although the better part of his life he has spent among the
tribes that first held possession of the wooded shores of the Sound here,
he is by no means an Indian lover, especially of the renegade set which
now has possession of Old-Man-House village. He has without doubt during
the last 25 years talked twice as much Chinook and pure Siwash as English
yet he uses the strongest expletives of the English tongue in speaking of
his present Indian neighbors. “Lo, the poor Indian,” finds no sympathy in
his breast. He thinks it a great pity that 14,800 acres of land should be
kept exclusively for a few shiftless and unworthy Indians to live upon it
to the exclusion of the white people, and so it appears. They have had
these lands for generations yet there is just the narrowest border of
clearing along the waters that bears any resemblance to cultivation, and
that for the most part is due to the labor of a few white men rather than
to the Indians.
“They never would work,” says Deshaw, “and never will. Kindness is wasted
upon them; every kind act done them is returned with an injury.”
Probably the otherwise kind-hearted old man would not talk so but for
the fact that the old Indians, those who gave allegiance to old Chief
Sealth, have all been crowded out and either dead or driven away and
become lost in other tribes by renegade Indians. These last are “cultus”
people, who have been run out of and off other reservations and becoming
wanderers and veritable Indian tramps have at last found a stopping place
at Old-Man-House.
Deshaw says there are about 60 inhabitants on the reservation, big,
little, old, young and indifferent, but the agent would probably give
a larger number. Of these, he counts but six that are truly men of the
allied tribes, once ruled by old Chief Sealth. These men are Big John,
now chief, Charley Shafton, Charley Uk-a-ton, Charley Ke-ok-uk, one of
the two honest Indians on the reservation, according to Deshaw, George
Thle-wah and Jacob Huston, one of the old-time Indians, but a slave.
None of these are of the family or descendants of the old chief though
the families of Big John and Jacob have always been considered among the
nobility of the allied tribes. Not even all the six Indians mentioned are
good Indians, for Deshaw reckons but five on the reservation who care
for a home or make any effort toward providing for their necessities in
the way the white men have taught them. They prefer to keep to their old
customs and superstitions; would rather troll for salmon and send their
klootchmen to dig for clams than plant potatoes or milk a cow. Two or
three years without the watchful care of the government and the very few
whites who take interest enough to look after them, and they would drift
back into a barbarism as deep as that of 50 years ago. The government
pays a man to reside upon the reservation in the capacity of Indian
farmer to see to it that the men with families and homes do something
toward raising gardens and gather the fruit that ripens in the little
orchards. The Indian agent proper does not reside there but anon visits
the spot in his official capacity. That personage lives at Tulalip,
Lummi, Old-Man-House reservation, Muk-il-shoot and one other. The present
Indian farmer, J. Y. Roe, and his wife, have been upon the reservation
a little over a year and are full of sympathy for the wards they watch
over. They have done much to improve the situation on the reservation and
give up all their time and a portion of the small pittance they receive,
$50 a month, to do the work. Among the improvements in the village on the
reservation the farmer has accomplished is the building of a new court
house or town hall and “skookum” house, and a number of other things in
the way of improvements to the small gardens and orchards.
The reservation forms a large body of land which ends in a beautiful
peninsula between Squim bay and the narrows. The site of the reservation
village which is also the site of the famous Old-Man-House, fronts the
water on the south in a gentle slope, covered with half grown evergreens
and the narrowest border of cleared lands set to orchards, flower
gardens and vegetables. The most conspicuous figure of the village is
the Catholic church, a perfect little model in its way, and as white and
gleaming in the sun as a snowy peak. It will bear the utmost scrutiny for
it is just the same in or out, far or near. By far the most interesting
thing to be found there at this day is the relic of the Old-Man-House,
which can just be made out from the porch of the old trading store on
the opposite side of the bay. It is down close to the water’s edge and
about midway in the little clearing. But how can one be expected to glean
anything from its past and old associations without the presence of the
big Tah-mahn-a-wis man along. So Mr. Deshaw shambled away after his big,
rusty key, locks up his store and goes off for a whole day with us,
perfectly unconcerned as to the propriety of good business methods.
At the waters’s edge on the reservation side of the narrows lives the
Indian farmer, a sub-agent, and his spouse, a very easy-going, plodding,
pleasant natured old couple. Old-Man-House is usually as serene and quiet
as a Sabbath day, in fact every day is a Sunday in this respect.
There is a school, but no business, no nothing but what would prove
to a white person a monotonous and unbearable existence. There is one
irregular and vagrant looking street connecting with a little beaten
trail that leads to the cemetery on the hill. Here is the populous part
of the village. We lead the way into the inclosure and through the
windings between the thickly made mounds, a large portion of which have
a little emblem of the crucifixion raised above them. The old Texan
with us has known, in their day, most of the Indians who are sleeping
the last quiet sleep here and hesitates not to indicate who were the
cultus and who were the good Indians. “That fellow,” he would say, “was
as big a rascal as ever lived,” or of another, “he was a good Indian
and a hard worker.” Directly he leads the way up near the north side of
the inclosure where a large marble monument marks the resting place of
some big tyee. There are a dozen small mounds in the same little plot
and ranged on either side of it, but the only inscription is on the big
monument and it reads:
SEATTLE
Chief of the Suquamps and allied tribes
Died June 7, 1866
The firm friend of the whites, and for him
the city of Seattle was named by
its founders
On the reverse is inscribed the following:
Baptismal name, Noah Sealth. Age probably
80 years.
That is the only bit of history there is about or on the monument. The
little plot is not enclosed, and the weeds have full possession. The
dozen or more graves in the same plot are of the family of the old chief,
but the Texan fails now to call them by name. He however takes exception
to the inscription as being incorrect, and in part superfluous. He
objects to the name Sealth or Seattle, but says the Indian pronunciation
was as near Se-at-tlee as the English language can reproduce it. The word
Sealth, says Deshaw, was the translation of the old settlers who lived
on Elliott bay. The old chief himself spoke the name for him a thousand
times or more as given above, as did the people of the Old-Man-House. The
Indians never knew the old chief by the name of Noah, that word being
used probably but once, and that at the time of his baptism into the
Catholic faith.
There are graves of other old-time chiefs in the little churchyard,
the most conspicuous one being that of Alex. George, whose little
monument is surrounded by twenty-two other graves, all enclosed in a neat
white-washed picket fence. They are all of the immediate family of the
dead chieftain.
On the way back to the village we stop and inspect the garden and orchard
of the boss gardener of the Indians, John Kettle. Besides himself and
wife, he has about a score of dogs of every hair and color, which set up
a perfect pandemonium as we approach. Kettle is one of the old slaves,
a Clayoquot sound, or West coast Indian, who was sold to a chief of the
allied tribes when a boy by some other tribe who had captured him and
brought him into the Sound country. Kettle seemed pleased at the interest
shown his garden and orchard and said he had 160 acres of fine land, and
some day would be a rich Indian.
[Illustration: THE OLD-MAN-HOUSE VILLAGE AS IT APPEARS TO-DAY]
Kettle when brought into the allied tribes’ camp could not speak a
word of their language nor could they understand him. He was almost
starved. The old chief who bought him was with the family eating from a
big kettle of roasted or boiled clams. When Siwash and Chinook failed,
the old chief motioned to his slave to eat clams. John didn’t wait for
a second bidding, and soon finished the kettle of clams. Then another
kettle filled with the bivalves was prepared for him. John had heard the
Indians speak the word kettle several times when dipping into the pot
and he took the word to mean clams. So John began to call out as best he
could,“kettle, kettle.” “Umph,” cried the old chief in Siwash, “he wants
more clams. I have it, that will be his name, John Kettle,” and from that
day to this the new slave was called John Kettle. The fellow is not over
35 years old, but his wife, who has been married five or six times and
had a cultus husband every time, and who has been beaten all through her
life, looks as if she might be John Kettle’s grandmother instead of his
spouse.
The first “Boston” house built on the reservation is still standing and
occupied by one of the chief men of the village. It was built entirely
at the expense of William Deshaw as his first free offering towards a
reform in the mode of life of the Old-Man-House Indians. This was a
reform very much desired by the government at that time, but towards the
accomplishment of which it did very little according to Mr. Deshaw.
The Old-Man-House agency was, according to this authority, very much
of a sinecure to the early agents, a half dozen of whom he thinks,
probably never set foot on the agency. Deshaw for several years acted as
a sub-agent for these appointees and virtually had the say in everything
at Old-Man-House or that concerned the allied tribes. He got to be such
a trusted lieutenant that he would be intrusted with large sums of money
to spend for the Indians and at one time had $18,000 which the government
gave him and with which he bought supplies in Portland. This was during
the incumbency of the late George D. Hill of Seattle as Indian agent.
Hillory Butler of Seattle was another agent for whom Mr. Deshaw looked
after things at Old-Man-House.
The first great duty with which the government charged Mr. Deshaw was
the breaking up of the Old-Man-House and the isolation of the 600
or 800 Indians in separate households with the idea of inculcating
civilized ideas of living. It was a hard task and one fraught with many
disappointments before it was accomplished. The Indians were a curious
lot. To-day they were your friends; to-morrow they were ready to plug you
full of lead from an old Hudsons bay company’s musket. Finally he got one
or two to make the first attempts at separate residence and by degrees
got them all out of the building and ruined it from further inhabitancy.
But in almost every instance the Indians wanted the work all done by the
sub-agent and refused to lend a hand themselves.
Old Chief Sealth was a great power at Old-Man-House and lived for several
years after Mr. Deshaw went among them. He became very friendly with the
sub-agent and accepted his advice in everything and tried to make his
people live up to the orders of the great father at Washington City.
According to Deshaw, the old chief was greatly reverenced and to as great
degree feared by the Indians. Sealth gave all the assistance in his
power to Deshaw in an effort to break up the heathenish practices of the
Ta-mahn a-wis men and destroy the superstition of their scal-al-a-toots,
but these evils were never eradicated and to this day, but for the
ridicule cast upon them by the whites, thy would still practice them
openly.
The habit of burying their dead in trees and elevated places was in vogue
long after Deshaw went among them, but was never done openly or with the
consent of the old chief. Even the baneful practice of slaying the dead
chief’s horse or dog and his slaves on the grave was religiously carried
out for several years after Deshaw’s appearance whenever the Indians
could do it with safety.
Deshaw tells of one prominent Indian now living on the reservation,
Huston, who was a slave at that time and who was with his klootchman and
his little daughter doomed to suffer death on the grave of their master,
Chief Ska-ga-ti-quis. Huston got wind of what the Indians were about to
attempt and, with his klootchman and 12-year-old girl, slipped away in
a canoe to the other side of the narrows and took refuge in Deshaw’s
trading store. Seventeen big and brawny bucks with Hudsons bay company
muskets followed the refugees over and stormed the store. They rushed in
clamorous and gesticulating and swinging their guns, and demanded their
prisoners, saying they were going to kill them over Ska-ga-ti-quis’
grave. The prisoners were hid away in a little side building. Deshaw
began parleying with the blood-thirsty fellows and directly several of
them carelessly lay their guns on the counter. Deshaw, without attracting
attention, moved up close to them and quickly pulled the guns over and
allowed them to fall on the floor back of the counter. Almost at the same
time old Chief Sealth, who had heard of the trouble at the store, quickly
got into a canoe, paddled across and went rushing into the store. The old
chief possessed a powerful voice and herculean strength.
“Whoo, whoo, do I hear; what do I hear,” he cried several tunes upon his
entry, but the Indians began falling back and said never a word. Then the
old chief’s little grand-daughter, one of Mr. Deshaw’s daughters, yet
living, went up to the old gray head and in her Indian and childish way
said, “Grandpa, they are going to kill the Hustons over Ska-ga-ti-quis’
grave.”
Then, “whoo, whoo,” puffed the old chief, and grabbing up a musket,
prepared to slay every Indian in sight, but the Indians knew the old
fellow’s temper too well and shot out of the doorway in a twinkling, and
went pell-mell into the water and scrambled into their canoes. The old
chief rushing after them grabbed up a big cedar rail, after dropping the
gun (it was entirely too light for him), and tried to reach them with
that, but they got away and across back to the village. The old chief
kept right after them, and once on his own side called the whole village
together and made the people a speech.
He could be heard distinctly on the opposite side of the channel
haranguing them on the evil of killing their slaves.
“Mr. Deshaw, the big white medicine, did not want it done, Governor
Stevens did not want it, Colonel Simmons did not want it, and the great
chief at Washington City did not want it, and it must stop.” Such was the
speech, as now remembered and translated by one of those most interested
in the occurrence. The speech seemed to have a good effect, at least for
the time. Guards were placed over the Hustons, and they remained out of
sight for a week or more, and no attempt was again made to take and kill
them in so barbarous a way.
Until quite recently several very aged Siwash resided at the
Old-Man-House reservation. There was Jacob, aged about 75 years, a
grandson of the old Chief Kitsap; old man Williams, aged about 85;
William Kitsap, grandson Of old Chief Kitsap, and H. S. Alfred, both
educated Indians. Old William’s daughter married a Kitsap county pioneer
who as the years went by grew rich and prominent and his half-breed
progeny promise to become honorary and intelligent members of society.
When old Williams was a boy his people were very numerous and happy,
and dwelt on the borders of the salt water from Vashon island to Port
Townsend On the beach in front of Tsu-Suc-Cub, were drawn up at all times
hundreds of canoes, so many that all the beach was covered with them.
Many thousands of Indians gathered and lived in the big Tsu-Suc-Cub, and
the country round about it. There were so many that chiefs Sealth and
Kitsap were very big Indians, and were not afraid of any warlike tribes.
Sealth the first, and Chief Kitsap once headed an expedition against
the Cape Flattery and Victoria Indians, but this was at so early a date
that William himself was too young to take part. His father was a brave
and helped fight the enemy. At the head of great numbers of war canoes
they raided the villages of the tribes on both sides of the straits, and
at Victoria harbor a great battle was fought. The older Chief Sealth,
or as he is sometimes spoken of, Sealth the First, it was said could
drive an arrow through the side of the biggest canoe, and his strength
was most wonderful. This expedition was an epoch in the Indian history
of the Puget Sound natives. It was successful and the raids that had
annually been made by the tribes from the north on the southern Indians
of the Sound ceased, and it was due to the bravery of the two chiefs
Sealth First and Second, that it was so. To the latter was due the
glory of patting a stop to the invasions of Puget Sound Indians by the
tribes east of the mountains. Sealth the Second, he for whom the city of
Seattle was named, exercised late in his life so powerful an influence
over near-by tribes that he was able to consolidate six tribes into one,
which took the name of Duwamish or the allied tribes. He was an orator;
an arbitrator rather than a great warrior, and with the exception perhaps
of a great campaign to head off the invading Indians from east of the
mountains which he executed at one time most successfully, never was
engaged in any great battle. Not only was that affair well planned, but
it proved a great and decisive battle. No whites were living on Puget
Sound at the time. There are no recorded facts regarding it. It was told
by the father to the son, and was one of the cherished memories which the
whites first heard when they arrived.
Old Williams was asked who did the carving on the totems and why no work
of the kind had been done since the whites came among them. The old
fellow said that long ago there were many skilled carvers of totems and
fine canoe builders and their implements were made from flints, agates
and elk horn, fashioned into the shape of rude hatchets and knives.
Many, many years before, while the old Indian was but a little boy,
one of the chiefs of that day secured a piece of iron or steel from a
Spanish trader, and for years after this piece of iron was turned to
good account by the canoe builders in the tribes in making their canoes.
Before the year 1800, or about that time, as arrived at by computing the
time given in his aboriginal way by old William, only horn and agate
hatchets and shell instruments were used in the work of totem carving or
canoe building. These rude instruments were fastened on to rude handles
wound around and bound around, and were deftly handled in carving and
fashioning the softer woods as alder and maple into totems, canoes or
bows and arrows.
Then came Vancouver, and from him old Kitsap procured a good supply of
knives and iron which for fifty years after were used and in the keeping
of the tribesmen, replacing the older instruments of their ancestors.
[Illustration]