INDIANS IN THE HOP FIELDS
There’s dusky maids
In pinks and plaids,
Maids from the forest free;
In bright attire,
Aglow, afire,
On Ballast island by the sea.
There’s the chief of his clan
With his ughly klootchman;
The gay young dude and his bride,
With bows and quiver,
And dog fish liver,
And the ictas of his curious tribe.
Camped below,
In the beauteous glow,
Such a “gypsy” crew so novel and bold;
In their long canoes,
And moccasin shoes,
From the land of the Totem pole.
Dotted all over,
Like pigs in clover,
The wickyups cover Ballast isle;
Brown flitched salmon,
Pappooses agammon,
Pots and kettles in curious pile.
When picking’s o’er
We’ll have no more
The smell that comes from Ballast isle;
Glad then my eyes
My spirits rise,
For they’ve gone back to their paradise.
[Ballast isle is the camping spot near Seattle of the Indians during
their stop over to and from the hop fields.]
Hop picking on bright days in the valleys of Western Washington is the
delight of the native. It is for him and all his kith and kin, a joy
unspeakable. He comes from near and far. He will travel hundreds of miles
in his big canim with his full household and all his earthly possessions
to enjoy the delightful season as much for his real love for it as for
the money that he knows will always come at the close. Then the hop field
is redolent of perfume and melody. The fields are alive with pickers;
the air is joyous with sound. There is a richness and coloring in the
surrounding which form a perpetual delight. There is a novelty to the
beholder and a rurality of scene so peculiar, that makes one feel as if
they were in some enchanted country. If you have never witnessed a season
of hop picking you have missed a rare old time-treat which has its equal
only in the maple woods of the East during sugar making time, or in the
co’n shuckin’ days of old Kentuck, “when the mast am fallin’ and the
darkies am a singin’ and raccoon and possum am simmerin’ in the pot.”
In addition to its scenic beauties and pleasant surroundings a hop field
is a sanitarium for the invalid, and a resting place for the weary and
overworked.
Ranking next to the delightful exhilarating smell of the fresh pine woods
of Puget Sound is the rich agreeable odor of the hop fields. The hazy
half humid air of the lazy September days, the variegated coloring of
thousands of native pickers chattering in their gutteral Chinook; the
heavy foliaged banks of deep, intensely green fields of vines, with the
equally deep green of the conifera woods in the background; the white
canvas tents, the lines of curling smoke ascending heavenward; the half
agreeable smell of frying salmon, the universal meal of the brownskinned
Indians; the mingling and assimilation of a thousand rural and novel et
ceteras, form pictures and attractions seen no where else on earth save
in a Washington hop field. They are delights which enjoyed once, never
are obliterated from the pleasant memories of the beholder.
[Illustration: 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. Dropping polls, 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.