study of nature; yet the two constantly blended throughout the whole
voyage. I can only select a few instances from that trip of six weeks
whose every hour was new and strange.
Our captain, taciturn and self-reliant, commanded Muir's admiration from
the first. His paddle was sure in the stern, his knowledge of the wind
and tide unfailing. Whenever we landed the crew would begin to dispute
concerning the best place to make camp. But old Tow-a-att, with the mast
in his hand, would march straight as an arrow to the likeliest spot of
all, stick down his mast as a tent-pole and begin to set up the tent,
the others invariably acquiescing in his decision as the best possible
choice.
At our first meal Muir's sense of humor cost us one-third of a roll of
butter. We invited our captain to take dinner with us. I got out the
bread and other viands, and set the two-pound roll of butter beside the
bread and placed both by Tow-a-att. He glanced at the roll of butter and
at the three who were to eat, measured with his eye one-third of the
roll, cut it off with his hunting knife and began to cut it into squares
and eat it with great gusto. I was about to interfere and show him the
use we made of butter, but Muir stopped me with a wink. The old chief
calmly devoured his third of the roll, and rubbing his stomach with
great satisfaction pronounced it "_hyas klosh_ (very good) glease."
Of necessity we had chosen the rainiest season of the year in that
dampest climate of North America, where there are two hundred and
twenty-five rainy days out of the three hundred and sixty-five. During
our voyage it did not rain every day, but the periods of sunshine were
so rare as to make us hail them with joyous acclamation.
We steered our course due westward for forty miles, then through a
sinuous, island-studded passage called Rocky Strait, stopping one day to
lay in a supply of venison before sailing on to the village of the Kake
Indians. My habit throughout the voyage, when coming to a native town,
was to find where the head chief lived, feed him with rice and regale
him with tobacco, and then induce him to call all his chiefs and head
men together for a council. When they were all assembled I would give
small presents of tobacco to each, and then open the floodgate of talk,
proclaiming my mission and telling them in simplest terms the Great New
Story. Muir would generally follow me, unfolding in turn some of the
wonders of God's handiwork and the beauty of clean, pure living; and
then in turn, beginning with the head chief, each Indian would make his
speech. We were received with joy everywhere, and if there was suspicion
at first old Tow-a-att's tearful pleadings and Kadishan's oratory
speedily brought about peace and unity.
These palavers often lasted a whole day and far into the night, and
usually ended with our being feasted in turn by the chief in whose house
we had held the council. I took the census of each village, getting the
heads of the families to count their relatives with the aid of
beans,--the large brown beans representing men, the large white ones,
women, and the small Boston beans, children. In this manner the first
census of southeastern Alaska was taken.
Before starting on the voyage, we heard that there was a Harvard
graduate, bearing an honored New England name, living among the Kake
Indians on Kouyou Island. On arriving at the chief town of that tribe we
inquired for the white man and were told that he was camping with the
family of a sub-chief at the mouth of a salmon stream. We set off to
find him. As we neared the shore we saw a circular group of natives
around a fire on the beach, sitting on their heels in the stoical Indian
way. We landed and came up to them. Not one of them deigned to rise or
show any excitement at our coming. The eight or nine men who formed the
group were all dressed in colored four-dollar blankets, with the
exception of one, who had on a ragged fragment of a filthy, two-dollar,
Hudson Bay blanket. The back of this man was towards us, and after
speaking to the chief, Muir and I crossed to the other side of the fire,
and saw his face. It was the white man, and the ragged blanket was all
the clothing he had upon him! An effort to open conversation with him
proved futile. He answered only with grunts and mumbled monosyllables.
Thus the most filthy, degraded, hopelessly lost savage that we found in
this whole voyage was a college graduate of great New England stock!
"Lift a stone to mountain height and let it fall," said Muir, "and it
will sink the deeper into the mud."
At Angoon, one of the towns of the Hootz-noo tribe, occurred an incident
of another type. We found this village hilariously drunk. There was a
very stringent prohibition law over Alaska at that time, which
absolutely forbade the importation of any spirituous liquors into the
Territory. But the law was deficient in one vital respect--it did not
prohibit the importation of molasses; and a soldier during the military
occupancy of the Territory had instructed the natives in the art of
making rum. The method was simple. A five-gallon oil can was taken and
partly filled with molasses as a base; into that alcohol was placed (if
it were obtainable), dried apples, berries, potatoes, flour, anything
that would rot and ferment; then, to give it the proper tang, ginger,
cayenne pepper and mustard were added. This mixture was then set in a
warm place to ferment. Another oil can was cut up into long strips, the
solder melted out and used to make a pipe, with two or three turns
through cool water,--forming the worm, and the still. Talk about your
forty-rod whiskey--I have seen this "hooch," as it was called because
these same Hootz-noo natives first made it, kill at more than forty
rods, for it generally made the natives _fighting_ drunk.
Through the large company of screaming, dancing and singing natives we
made our way to the chief's house. By some miracle this majestic-looking
savage was sober. Perhaps he felt it incumbent upon him as host not to
partake himself of the luxuries with which he regaled his guests. He
took us hospitably into his great community house of split cedar planks
with carved totem poles for corner posts, and called his young men to
take care of our canoe and to bring wood for a fire that he might feast
us. The wife of this chief was one of the finest looking Indian women I
have ever met,--tall, straight, lithe and dignified. But, crawling about
on the floor on all fours, was the most piteous travesty of the human
form I have ever seen. It was an idiot boy, sixteen years of age. He had
neither the comeliness of a beast nor the intellect of a man. His name
was _Hootz-too_ (Bear Heart), and indeed all his motions were those of a
bear rather than of a human being. Crossing the floor with the swinging
gait of a bear, he would crouch back on his haunches and resume his
constant occupation of sucking his wrist, into which he had thus formed
a livid hole. When disturbed at this horrid task he would strike with
the claw-like fingers of the other hand, snarling and grunting. Yet the
beautiful chieftainess was his mother, and she _loved_ him. For sixteen
years she had cared for this monster, feeding him with her choicest
food, putting him to sleep always in her arms, taking him with her and
guarding him day and night. When, a short time before our visit, the
medicine men, accusing him of causing the illness of some of the head
men of the village, proclaimed him a witch, and the whole tribe came to
take and torture him to death, she fought them like a lioness, not
counting her own life dear unto her, and saved her boy.
When I said to her thoughtlessly, "Oh, would you not be relieved at the
death of this poor idiot boy?" she saw in my words a threat, and I shall
never forget the pathetic, hunted look with which she said:
"Oh, no, it must not be; he shall not die. Is he not my son,
_uh-yeet-kutsku_ (my dear little son)?"
If our voyage had yielded me nothing but this wonderful instance of
mother-love, I should have counted myself richly repaid.
One more human story before I come to Muir's part. It was during the
latter half of the voyage, and after our discovery of Glacier Bay. The
climax of the trip, so far as the missionary interests were concerned,
was our visit to the Chilcat and Chilcoot natives on Lynn Canal, the
most northern tribes of the Alexandrian Archipelago. Here reigned the
proudest and worst old savage of Alaska, Chief Shathitch. His wealth
was very great in Indian treasures, and he was reputed to have cached
away in different places several houses full of blankets, guns, boxes of
beads, ancient carved pipes, spears, knives and other valued heirlooms.
He was said to have stored away over one hundred of the elegant Chilcat
blankets woven by hand from the hair of the mountain goat. His tribe was
rich and unscrupulous. Its members were the middle-men between the
whites and the Indians of the Interior. They did not allow these Indians
to come to the coast, but took over the mountains articles purchased
from the whites--guns, ammunition, blankets, knives and so forth--and
bartered them for furs. It was said that they claimed to be the
manufacturers of these wares and so charged for them what prices they
pleased. They had these Indians of the Interior in a bondage of fear,
and would not allow them to trade directly with the white men. Thus they
carried out literally the story told of Hudson Bay traffic,--piling
beaver skins to the height of a ten-dollar Hudson Bay musket as the
_price_ of the musket. They were the most quarrelsome and warlike of the
tribes of Alaska, and their villages were full of slaves procured by
forays upon the coasts of Vancouver Island, Puget Sound, and as far
south as the mouth of the Columbia River. I was eager to visit these
large and untaught tribes, and establish a mission among them.
[Illustration: CHILCAT WOMAN WEAVING A BLANKET
Chief Shathitch was said to have over one hundred of the elegant Chilcat
blankets, woven by hand, from the hair of the mountain goat]
About the first of November we came in sight of the long, low-built
village of Yin-des-tuk-ki. As we paddled up the winding channel of the
Chilcat River we saw great excitement in the town. We had hoisted the
American flag, as was our custom, and had put on our best apparel for
the occasion. When we got within long musket-shot of the village we saw
the native men come rushing from their houses with their guns in their
hands and mass in front of the largest house upon the beach. Then we
were greeted by what seemed rather too warm a reception--a shower of
bullets falling unpleasantly around us. Instinctively Muir and I ceased
to paddle, but Tow-a-att commanded, "_Ut-ha, ut-ha!_--pull, pull!" and
slowly, amid the dropping bullets, we zigzagged our way up the channel
towards the village. As we drew near the shore a line of runners
extended down the beach to us, keeping within shouting distance of each
other. Then came the questions like bullets--"_Gusu-wa-eh?_--Who are
you? Whence do you come? What is your business here?" And Stickeen John
shouted back the reply:
"A great preacher-chief and a great ice-chief have come to bring you a
good message."
The answer was shouted back along the line, and then returned a message
of greeting and welcome. We were to be the guests of the chief of
Yin-des-tuk-ki, old Don-na-wuk (Silver Eye), so called because he was in
the habit of wearing on all state occasions a huge pair of silver-bowed
spectacles which a Russian officer had given him. He confessed he could
not see through them, but thought they lent dignity to his countenance.
We paddled slowly up to the village, and Muir and I, watching with
interest, saw the warriors all disappear. As our prow touched the sand,
however, here they came, forty or fifty of them, without their guns this
time, but charging down upon us with war-cries, "_Hoo-hooh, hoo-hooh_,"
as if they were going to take us prisoners. Dashing into the water they
ranged themselves along each side of the canoe; then lifting up our
canoe with us in it they rushed with excited cries up the bank to the
chief's house and set us down at his door. It was the Thlinget way of
paying us honor as great guests.
Then we were solemnly ushered into the presence of Don-na-wuk. His house
was large, covering about fifty by sixty feet of ground. The interior
was built in the usual fashion of a chief's house--carved corner posts,
a square of gravel in the center of the room for the fire surrounded by
great hewn cedar planks set on edge; a platform of some six feet in
width running clear around the room; then other planks on edge and a
high platform, where the chieftain's household goods were stowed and
where the family took their repose. A brisk fire was burning in the
middle of the room; and after a short palaver, with gifts of tobacco and
rice to the chief, it was announced that he would pay us the
distinguished honor of feasting us first.
It was a never-to-be-forgotten banquet. We were seated on the lower
platform with our feet towards the fire, and before Muir and me were
placed huge washbowls of blue Hudson Bay ware. Before each of our native
attendants was placed a great carved wooden trough, holding about as
much as the washbowls. We had learned enough Indian etiquette to know
that at each course our respective vessels were to be filled full of
food, and we were expected to carry off what we could not devour. It was
indeed a "feast of fat things." The first course was what, for the
Indian, takes the place of bread among the whites,--dried salmon. It
was served, a whole washbowlful for each of us, with a dressing of
seal-grease. Muir and I adroitly manoeuvred so as to get our salmon
and seal-grease served separately; for our stomachs had not been
sufficiently trained to endure that rancid grease. This course finished,
what was left was dumped into receptacles in our canoe and guarded from
the dogs by young men especially appointed for that purpose. Our
washbowls were cleansed and the second course brought on. This consisted
of the back fat of the deer, great, long hunks of it, served with a
gravy of seal-grease. The third course was little Russian potatoes about
the size of walnuts, dished out to us, a washbowlful, with a dressing of
seal-grease. The final course was the only berry then in season, the
long fleshy apple of the wild rose mellowed with frost, served to us in
the usual quantity with the invariable sauce of seal-grease.
"Mon, mon!" said Muir aside to me, "I'm fashed we'll be floppin' aboot
i' the sea, whiles, wi' flippers an' forked tails."
When we had partaken of as much of this feast of fat things as our
civilized stomachs would stand, it was suddenly announced that we were
about to receive a visit from the great chief of the Chilcats and the
Chilcoots, old Chief Shathitch (Hard-to-Kill). In order to properly
receive His Majesty, Muir and I and our two chiefs were each given a
whole bale of Hudson Bay blankets for a couch. Shathitch made us wait a
long time, doubtless to impress us with his dignity as supreme chief.
The heat of the fire after the wind and cold of the day made us very
drowsy. We fought off sleep, however, and at last in came stalking the
biggest chief of all Alaska, clothed in his robe of state, which was an
elegant chinchilla blanket; and upon its yellow surface, as the chief
slowly turned about to show us what was written thereon, we were
astonished to see printed in black letters these words, "To Chief
Shathitch, from his friend, William H. Seward!" We learned afterwards
that Seward, in his voyage of investigation, had penetrated to this
far-off town, had been received in royal state by the old chief and on
his return to the States had sent back this token of his appreciation of
the chief's hospitality. Whether Seward was regaled with viands similar
to those offered to us, history does not relate.
To me the inspiring part of that voyage came next day, when I preached
from early morning until midnight, only occasionally relieved by Muir
and by the responsive speeches of the natives.
"More, more; tell us more," they would cry. "It is a good talk; we never
heard this story before." And when I would inquire, "Of what do you wish
me now to talk?" they would always say, "Tell us more of the Man from
Heaven who died for us."
Runners had been sent to the Chilcoot village on the eastern arm of Lynn
Canal, and twenty-five miles up the Chilcat River to Shathitch's town of
Klukwan; and as the day wore away the crowd of Indians had increased so
greatly that there was no room for them in the large house. I heard a
scrambling upon the roof, and looking up I saw a row of black heads
around the great smoke-hole in the center of the roof. After a little a
ripping, tearing sound came from the sides of the building. They were
prying off the planks in order that those outside might hear. When my
voice faltered with long talking Tow-a-att and Kadishan took up the
story, telling what they had learned of the white man's religion; or
Muir told the eager natives wonderful things about what the great one
God, whose name is Love, was doing for them. The all-day meeting was
only interrupted for an hour or two in the afternoon, when we walked
with the chiefs across the narrow isthmus between Pyramid Harbor and the
eastern arm of Lynn Canal, and I selected the harbor, farm and townsite
now occupied by Haines mission and town and Fort William H. Seward. This
was the beginning of the large missions of Haines and Klukwan.
THE DISCOVERY
MOONLIGHT IN GLACIER BAY
To heaven swells a mighty psalm of praise;
Its music-sheets are glaciers, vast and white.
Sky-piercing peaks the voiceless chorus raise,
To fill with ecstasy the wond'ring night.
Complete, with every part in sweet accord,
Th' adoring breezes waft it up, on wings
Of beauty-incense, giving to the Lord
The purest sacrifice glad Nature brings.
The list'ning stars with rapture beat and glow;
The moon forgets her high, eternal calm
To shout her gladness to the sea below,
Whose waves are silver tongues to join the psalm.
Those everlasting snow-fields are not cold;
This icy solitude no barren waste.
The crystal masses burn with love untold;
The glacier-table spreads a royal feast.
Fairweather! Crillon! Warders at Heaven's gate!
Hoar-headed priests of Nature's inmost shrine!
Strong seraph forms in robes immaculate!
Draw me from earth; enlighten, change, refine;
Till I, one little note in this great song,
Who seem a blot upon th' unsullied white,
No discord make--a note high, pure and strong--
Set in the silent music of the night.
IV
THE DISCOVERY
The nature-study part of the voyage was woven in with the missionary
trip as intimately as warp with woof. No island, rock, forest, mountain
or glacier which we passed, near or far, was neglected. We went so at
our own sweet will, without any set time or schedule, that we were
constantly finding objects and points of surprise and interest. When we
landed, the algæ, which sometimes filled the little harbors, the
limpets and lichens of the rocks, the fucus pods that snapped beneath
our feet, the grasses of the beach, the moss and shrubbery among the
trees, and, more than all, the majestic forests, claimed attention and
study. Muir was one of the most expert foresters this country has ever
produced. He was never at a loss. The luxuriant vegetation of this wet
coast filled him with admiration, and he never took a walk from camp
but he had a whole volume of things to tell me, and he was constantly
bringing in trophies of which he was prouder than any hunter of his
antlers. Now it was a bunch of ferns as high as his head; now a cluster
of minute and wonderfully beautiful moss blossoms; now a curious
fungous growth; now a spruce branch heavy with cones; and again he
would call me into the forest to see a strange and grotesque moss
formation on a dead stump, looking like a tree standing upon its head.
Thus, although his objective was the glaciers, his thorough knowledge
of botany and his interest in that study made every camp just the place
he wished to be. He always claimed that there was more of pure ethics
and even of moral evil and good to be learned in the wilderness than
from any book or in any abode of man. He was fond of quoting
Wordsworth's stanza:
"One impulse from a vernal wood
Will teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can."
Muir was a devout theist. The Fatherhood of God and the Unity of God,
the immanence of God in nature and His management of all the affairs of
the universe, was his constantly reiterated belief. He saw design in
many things which the ordinary naturalist overlooks, such as the
symmetry of an island, the balancing branches of a tree, the harmony of
colors in a group of flowers, the completion of a fully rounded
landscape. In his view, the Creator of it all saw every beautiful and
sublime thing from every viewpoint, and had thus formed it, not merely
for His own delight, but for the delectation and instruction of His
human children.
"Look at that, now," he would say, when, on turning a point, a wonderful
vista of island-studded sea between mountains, with one of Alaska's
matchless sunsets at the end, would wheel into sight. "Why, it looks as
if these giants of God's great army had just now marched into their
stations; every one placed just right, just right! What landscape
gardening! What a scheme of things! And to think that He should plan to
bring us feckless creatures here at the right moment, and then flash
such glories at us! Man, we're not worthy of such honor!"
Thus Muir was always discovering to me things which I would never have
seen myself and opening up to me new avenues of knowledge, delight and
adoration. There was something so intimate in his theism that it
purified, elevated and broadened mine, even when I could not agree with
him. His constant exclamation when a fine landscape would burst upon our
view, or a shaft of light would pierce the clouds and glorify a
mountain, was, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow!"
Two or three great adventures stand out prominently in this wonderful
voyage of discovery. Two weeks from home brought us to Icy Straits and
the homes of the Hoonah tribe. Here the knowledge of the way on the part
of our crew ended. We put into the large Hoonah village on Chichagof
Island. After the usual preaching and census-taking, we took aboard a
sub-chief of the Hoonahs, who was a noted seal hunter and, therefore,
able to guide us among the ice-floes of the mysterious Glacier Bay of
which we had heard. Vancouver's chart gave us no intimation of any inlet
whatever; but the natives told of vast masses of floating ice, of a
constant noise of thunder when they crashed from the glaciers into the
sea; and also of fearsome bays and passages full of evil spirits which
made them very perilous to navigate.
In one bay there was said to be a giant devil-fish with arms as long as
a tree, lurking in malignant patience, awaiting the passage that way of
an unwary canoe, when up would flash those terrible arms with their
thousand suckers and, seizing their prey, would drag down the men to the
bottom of the sea, there to be mangled and devoured by the horrid beak.
Another deep fiord was the abode of _Koosta-kah_, the Otter-man, the
mischievous Puck of Indian lore, who was waiting for voyagers to land
and camp, when he would seize their sleeping forms and transport them a
dozen miles in a moment, or cradle them on the tops of the highest
trees. Again there was a most rapacious and ferocious killer-whale in a
piece of swift water, whose delight it was to take into his great,
tooth-rimmed jaws whole canoes with their crews of men, mangling them
and gulping them down as a single mouthful. Many were these stories of
fear told us at the Hoonah village the night before we started to
explore the icy bay, and our credulous Stickeens gave us rather broad
hints that it was time to turn back.
"There are no natives up in that region; there is nothing to hunt;
there is no gold there; why do you persist in this _cultus coly_
(aimless journey)? You are likely to meet death and nothing else if you
go into that dangerous region."
All these stories made us the more eager to explore the wonders beyond,
and we hastened away from Hoonah with our guide aboard. A day's sail
brought us to a little, heavily wooded island near the mouth of Glacier
Bay. This we named Pleasant Island.