Unique, and so distinct from its surroundings as to suggest rather
the handicraft of man than a whim of Nature, it looms up at the
entrance to the Narrows, a symmetrical column of solid grey stone.
There are no similar formations within the range of vision, or
indeed within many a day's paddle up and down the coast. Amongst
all the wonders, the natural beauties that encircle Vancouver,
the marvels of mountains, shaped into crouching lions and brooding
beavers, the yawning canyons, the stupendous forest firs and cedars,
Siwash Rock stands as distinct, as individual, as if dropped from
another sphere.
I saw it first in the slanting light of a redly setting August sun;
the little tuft of green shrubbery that crests its summit was black
against the crimson of sea and sky, and its colossal base of grey
stone gleamed like flaming polished granite.
My old tillicum lifted his paddle-blade to point towards it. "You
know the story?" he asked. I shook my head (experience has taught
me his love of silent replies, his moods of legend-telling). For a
time we paddled slowly; the rock detached itself from its background
of forest and shore, and it stood forth like a sentinel--erect,
enduring, eternal.
"Do you think it stands straight--like a man?" he asked.
"Yes, like some noble-spirited, upright warrior," I replied.
"It is a man," he said, "and a warrior man, too; a man who fought
for everything that was noble and upright."
"What do you regard as everything that is noble and upright, Chief?"
I asked, curious as to his ideas. I shall not forget the reply; it
was but two words--astounding, amazing words. He said simply:
"Clean fatherhood."
Through my mind raced tumultuous recollections of numberless
articles in yet numberless magazines, all dealing with the recent
"fad" of motherhood, but I had to hear from the lip of a Squamish
Indian chief the only treatise on the nobility of "clean fatherhood"
that I have yet unearthed. And this treatise has been an Indian
legend for centuries; and, lest they forget how all-important those
two little words must ever be, Siwash Rock stands to remind them,
set there by the Deity as a monument to one who kept his own life
clean, that cleanliness might be the heritage of the generations
to come.
It was "thousands of years ago" (all Indian legends begin in
extremely remote times) that a handsome boy chief journeyed in his
canoe to the upper coast for the shy little northern girl whom he
brought home as his wife. Boy though he was, the young chief had
proved himself to be an excellent warrior, a fearless hunter, and an
upright, courageous man among men. His tribe loved him, his enemies
respected him, and the base and mean and cowardly feared him.
The customs and traditions of his ancestors were a positive religion
to him, the sayings and the advices of the old people were his
creed. He was conservative in every rite and ritual of his race.
He fought his tribal enemies like the savage that he was. He sang
his war-songs, danced his war-dances, slew his foes, but the little
girl-wife from the north he treated with the deference that he gave
his own mother, for was she not to be the mother of his warrior son?
The year rolled round, weeks merged into months, winter into spring,
and one glorious summer at daybreak he wakened to her voice calling
him. She stood beside him, smiling.
"It will be to-day," she said proudly.
He sprang from his couch of wolf-skins and looked out upon the
coming day: the promise of what it would bring him seemed breathing
through all his forest world. He took her very gently by the hand
and led her through the tangle of wilderness down to the water's
edge, where the beauty spot we moderns call Stanley Park bends
about Prospect Point. "I must swim," he told her.
"I must swim, too," she smiled, with the perfect understanding of
two beings who are mated. For, to them, the old Indian custom was
law--the custom that the parents of a coming child must swim until
their flesh is so clear and clean that a wild animal cannot scent
their proximity. If the wild creatures of the forests have no fear
of them, then, and only then, are they fit to become parents, and
to scent a human is in itself a fearsome thing to all wild creatures.
So those two plunged into the waters of the Narrows as the grey dawn
slipped up the eastern skies and all the forest awoke to the life of
a new, glad day. Presently he took her ashore, and smilingly she
crept away under the giant trees. "I must be alone," she said, "but
come to me at sunrise: you will not find me alone then." He smiled
also, and plunged back into the sea. He must swim, swim, swim
through this hour when his fatherhood was coming upon him. It was
the law that he must be clean, spotlessly clean, so that when his
child looked out upon the world it would have the chance to live its
own life clean. If he did not swim hour upon hour his child would
come to an unclean father. He must give his child a chance in life;
he must not hamper it by his own uncleanliness at its birth. It was
the tribal law--the law of vicarious purity.
As he swam joyously to and fro, a canoe bearing four men headed up
the Narrows. These men were giants in stature, and the stroke of
their paddles made huge eddies that boiled like the seething tides.
"Out from our course!" they cried as his lithe, copper-colored body
arose and fell with his splendid stroke. He laughed at them, giants
though they were, and answered that he could not cease his swimming
at their demand.
"But you shall cease!" they commanded. "We are the men [agents] of
the Sagalie Tyee [God], and we command you ashore out of our way!"
(I find in all these Coast Indian legends that the Deity is
represented by four men, usually paddling an immense canoe.)
He ceased swimming, and, lifting his head, defied them. "I shall
not stop, nor yet go ashore," he declared, striking out once more
to the middle of the channel.
"Do you dare disobey us," they cried--"we, the men of the Sagalie
Tyee? We can turn you into a fish, or a tree, or a stone for this;
do you dare disobey the Great Tyee?"
"I dare anything for the cleanliness and purity of my coming child.
I dare even the Sagalie Tyee Himself, but my child must be born to a
spotless life."
The four men were astounded. They consulted together, lighted their
pipes, and sat in council. Never had they, the men of the Sagalie
Tyee, been defied before. Now, for the sake of a little unborn
child, they were ignored, disobeyed, almost despised. The lithe
young copper-colored body still disported itself in the cool
waters; superstition held that should their canoe, or even their
paddle-blades, touch a human being, their marvellous power would be
lost. The handsome young chief swam directly in their course. They
dared not run him down; if so, they would become as other men.
While they yet counselled what to do, there floated from out the
forest a faint, strange, compelling sound. They listened, and
the young chief ceased his stroke as he listened also. The faint
sound drifted out across the waters once more. It was the cry of
a little, little child. Then one of the four men, he that steered
the canoe, the strongest and tallest of them all, arose, and,
standing erect, stretched out his arms towards the rising sun
and chanted, not a curse on the young chief's disobedience, but
a promise of everlasting days and freedom from death.
"Because you have defied all things that come in your path we
promise this to you," he chanted; "you have defied what interferes
with your child's chance for a clean life, you have lived as you
wish your son to live, you have defied us when we would have stopped
your swimming and hampered your child's future. You have placed
that child's future before all things, and for this the Sagalie Tyee
commands us to make you forever a pattern for your tribe. You shall
never die, but you shall stand through all the thousands of years to
come, where all eyes can see you. You shall live, live, live as an
indestructible monument to Clean Fatherhood."
The four men lifted their paddles and the handsome young chief
swam inshore; as his feet touched the line where sea and land met
he was transformed into stone.
Then the four men said, "His wife and child must ever be near him;
they shall not die, but live also." And they, too, were turned into
stone. If you penetrate the hollows in the woods near Siwash Rock
you will find a large rock and a smaller one beside it. They are
the shy little bride-wife from the north, with her hour-old baby
beside her. And from the uttermost parts of the world vessels come
daily throbbing and sailing up the Narrows. From far trans-Pacific
ports, from the frozen North, from the lands of the Southern Cross,
they pass and repass the living rock that was there before their
hulls were shaped, that will be there when their very names are
forgotten, when their crews and their captains have taken their
long last voyage, when their merchandise has rotted, and their
owners are known no more. But the tall, grey column of stone will
still be there--a monument to one man's fidelity to a generation yet
unborn--and will endure from everlasting to everlasting.