THE COAST INDIANS AND THEIR WAYS
Two days later the party was once more in Victoria. The sail from New
Westminster to Victoria had been very delightful. After the swift run
down the Fraser River, between high walls of evergreen with their
backgrounds of distant gray mountains, the boat passed out on the
broad waters of the Gulf of Georgia. In every direction, save to the
west, the view was of mountains backed by mountains; and above and
beyond them all was Mount Baker, raising its sharp white cone toward
the heavens. To the south were the deep waters of the Gulf, dancing
and sparkling in the sunlight, and dotted by thousands of islands.
Beyond, and over them all, was seen the mainland of the United States,
with ranges of snow-clad mountains, above and beyond which one would
sometimes catch a glimpse of majestic Ranier. After the mouth of the
river had been left, Fannin called his companions' attention to an
interesting point.
"I want you to watch the water from now on, and notice before long when
the boat leaves the current of the river and enters the waters of the
Gulf. You see the river is constantly carrying down a lot of mud and
silt which must be mighty fine; for, instead of sinking, it runs away
out here into the Gulf before it disappears; and before long you will
see a change in the color of the water where we leave the muddy current
of the Fraser and pass into the clean waters of the Gulf."
Jack and Hugh were on the lookout for this, and finally the point was
reached where the turbid and clear waters met.
Hugh said: "Why, that's just the way the two streams look where the
Missouri runs into the Mississippi. The Mississippi is black and clear;
and the Missouri, of course, is yellow and muddy. You can see the line
plain always there."
"Yes," said Jack, "and I have heard father talk about two streams in
France, I think, where you see the same thing. One of them is the
Rhone, but the name of the other I have forgotten."
A little later the steamer plunged in among the islands. The channel
followed was difficult on account of the strong tides that were
constantly rushing backward and forward through the narrow passage.
Careful piloting is needed here, for at certain stages of the tide it
is difficult even for a strong steamer to stem it; and if the vessel is
not kept straight she may be whirled around, and that may be the last
of her. The sail was a succession of surprises. On many of the islands
were settlers; but with, often, only a house or two in sight. Passing
around a point, Indians could be seen fishing in the troubled waters or
camping upon the shore. There were birds in great multitudes; and not a
few sailing craft were seen passing here and there on errands of their
own.
After their two or three days of hard physical effort and life in camp,
the dinner at the Driard House tasted very good. The next morning they
started out to study the matter of transportation to the North.
Mr. MacTavish and Fannin both said that if a small steamer or launch
could be hired it would enable them to go a great deal farther, and
see things much more easily, at only a slight added expense. Some
days, therefore, were spent in searching the wharves of the town and
in excursions to other places in trying to secure what they wanted,
but without success. There were several small launches, exactly
suited to their purposes, but all these had been engaged for the salmon
fishing on the Fraser. The run of fish was likely to begin in a short
time. That year it was expected to be very heavy, and all the canneries
were making great preparations for the catch. There seemed no way to
get steam transportation. Failing this, the next best thing was to take
a canoe and proceed by that slow means of conveyance as far north as
time would permit. Fannin, whose experience made him a good judge of
what should be done, recommended that they take the steamer to Nanaimo,
distant from Victoria about seventy miles. Near that town there was
an Indian village, where canoes and help could be had, and from where
a start could be made. When this plan had been discussed and agreed
on, it remained only to get together a mess kit, hire a cook, and take
the steamer. A whole day was spent in this work. The cook engaged
was a Virginian, known as "Arizona Charley," a man whose wanderings,
including almost all of the United States, had at last brought him to
Victoria. He proved an excellent man, faithful and willing; and--unlike
most cooks--unusually good-natured. As soon as he was engaged the party
transported their blankets, arms, and mess kit to the wharf; and early
the next morning they were ploughing the Gulf toward the north.
[Illustration: HERE THEY WEAR WHITE MEN'S CLOTHES, INCLUDING SHOES AND
HATS--_Page 93_]
On this voyage, although so short, Jack saw much that was new to him.
As the vessel moved out from the wharf he was leaning on the rail with
Fannin, looking down on the passengers who occupied the lower deck.
"It's hard for me to believe, Mr. Fannin," he said, "that these are
Indians; they do not look much more like the Indians of the plains and
the mountains than a Chinaman does. There the men all wear robes or
blankets. Here they all wear white men's clothes, including shoes and
hats. They seem civilized, quite as much as the Italian laborers that
we are beginning to see so many of in the East."
"Yes," said Fannin, "they've changed greatly since I came into the
country, and changed for the better. They're a pretty important element
nowadays in the laboring population of the country; and for certain
kinds of labor they are well fitted. They make good deck-hands,
longshoremen, and fishermen; and many of them work in the lumber mills
and canneries. They're very strong and are able to carry loads that a
white man couldn't stagger under. Many of them work regularly and lay
up money."
"I should think from what I have seen, and am seeing, that their
natural way of getting around is in canoes. They must be skilful
canoemen, aren't they?" asked Jack. "A day or two ago I saw some little
children not more than three or four years old, paddling with the older
people, and apparently doing it not in fun, but really to help."
"Well," said Fannin, "they learn to paddle before they learn to walk.
I suppose it's because they see their parents do it. It's been my
experience that the games of most children imitate the serious pursuits
of their parents."
"I'm sure that's so," said Hugh. "Among the Indians I've seen it, I
reckon, a thousand times. The little boys pretend to hunt, just as
their fathers do; and the little girls pretend to pack wood and water,
just like their mothers. I've seen a woman trudging down the creek with
a back-load of wood that you'd think would break a horse's back; and
following her would be a little girl hardly big enough to walk, having
her rope over her back, and tied up in it a bundle of twigs. She walked
along, imitating the gait of her mother, and when she got to the lodge
threw down her load just as she saw her mother throw down hers."
"Well, anyhow," said Fannin, "you can see that these children, doing
this sort of work from babyhood until they're grown up, would get to
be mighty skilful at it; and you can understand how they can work at
it, just as you and Hugh here can get on your horses in the morning and
ride until dark; while, if I did that, in the first place, I'd have
to be tied on the horse; and in the second place, I would not be able
to walk for a week afterward. But there's no mistake about it, these
Siwashes are good watermen."
"That's a word I've heard three or four times, Mr. Fannin," said Jack,
"and I'd like you to tell me what it is--what it means--Siwash."
"Well, it means an Indian," said Fannin. "It's a Chinook jargon word,
and yet it don't exactly mean an Indian either. It means a male Indian.
An Indian woman is a klootchman."
"Klootchman!" said Jack. "That sounds Dutch."
"Well," said Fannin, "I don't know what language it is. You know this
Chinook jargon is a language made up of words taken from many tongues.
It's called Chinook; but I don't feel sure that the words in it are
mostly from the Chinook language. I guess Siwash, for example, is a
French word--probably it was originally _sauvage_, meaning savage.
There are lots of French words in the Chinook jargon, though I can't
think of them at the present moment. One of them, though, is _lecou_,
meaning neck; and another is _lahache_, an axe. These are plain enough;
but a good many of the words are taken from different Indian languages,
and are just hitched together without any grammar at all. It's a sort
of a trade language; a good deal, I expect, like the pigeon English
that the coast Chinese are said to use in communicating with white men."
"I suppose," said Jack, "that the Siwashes are mainly fishermen, are
they not? About all I've seen have been on the water paddling around
in their canoes, and whenever we've seen them doing anything, except
paddling, they have been fishing."
"Yes," said Fannin, "you're right about that; they are fishermen, or
at least they derive the most of their subsistence from the water.
Of course they depend chiefly upon the salmon, which they eat fresh,
and dry for winter food; for the salmon are here only in summer. The
Indians do some land hunting. They kill a good many deer, and some
mountain goats, but their chief dependence for food is the salt-water
fish. When the salmon begin to run in June or July, and before they
have got into the fresh water streams, the Indians catch them in
numbers with a trolling spoon. Of course the Indians do considerable
water hunting; that is to say, they kill seals, and porpoises, and now
and then a whale; but what they depend on is fishing."
"It means," said Jack, "that to these Indians the salmon are what the
buffalo is to the Indians of the plains."
"Yes," said Fannin, "that's about it," and Hugh added: "The canoe here
is about the same as the horse back where we live."
"Just about," agreed Fannin.
"Well," said Hugh, "that's all mighty curious, and I'm mighty glad I've
come out here to see it all. I never thought about it much before, but
I always had an idea that all Indians were about the same as those I
knew most about; and that they lived about the same sort of lives. Of
course I can see now just what a fool notion that was to have, but I
did not see it then."
"But, Mr. Fannin," said Jack, "these Indians must have a lot of money.
They are all provided with ordinary clothing, which they must buy; and
they're pretty well fixed apparently, with everything that they need.
Where do they get this money? Do all of them work, and get so much a
day?"
"No," said Fannin, "not by a jugful. Some of them work, and work
pretty steadily; a good many work, and after they have been at it for a
week or a month, they get tired of it, throw up their jobs and go off
in their canoes. They do considerable trading with the whites, however.
They gather a great deal of oil, and this is one of the main articles
of trade. You saw over on Burrard Inlet a whole lot of dog-fish. Well,
the Indians catch lots of these, and take the liver and throw the
carcase overboard. The liver is full of oil, which brings a pretty fair
price. They also kill lots of porpoises, and porpoise oil is salable.
Then, they make a great many baskets; mighty good ones too, they seem
to be. Some of them are water-tight, perfectly good for cooking, or for
water buckets. They also make mats, both of reeds and of the bark of
the cedar, and these are useful and sell well."
"Well," said Jack, "how do they live? We've seen some tents on the
beaches, but I suppose that in the winter time they must have something
more substantial to live in than these tents."
"Yes," said Fannin, "of course they do. Though you must not think that
the winters here are like the winters we have back East. It's pretty
warm here, and we have little or no snow until you get back in among
the mountains. The Siwashes along the coast live in wooden houses.
We'll see a lot of them before long, and then you'll know that they
are better than I can tell you. They are made of big planks split off
the cedar, and roofed with the same. All around the house, near to
the walls, a platform is built, on which the people sit and sleep.
In the middle of the house the ground is bare; and it is there that
the fire is built for cooking and for warmth. There may be a number
of families living in one of these houses, each family having its
sleeping place--its room you might call it--but all of them cooking at
and sitting about the common fire. The roof planks do not quite come
together at the peak of the house and the smoke of the fire goes out
through the hole. Sometimes the roof beams and the posts which hold up
the roof in front and behind are carved and painted.
"Close to some of the houses stand tall carved poles, called totem
poles. One may be carved with a representation of a bear, a beaver, a
frog, and an eagle, each animal resting on the head of the one carved
below it on the pole. They are queer things to see, and if you will be
patient for a few days we'll see them; and maybe we'll get some Indians
to explain them to us. They have something to do with the family
history, and some people say that each of these animals that is carved
on the pole represents an ancestor or ancestors of the man before whose
house the pole stands."
"Well," said Jack, "I'd like to see them. But from what you say, and
from what I have seen, the Indians must be mighty good carvers. The
canoes that we've seen had queer figures on them, and Mr. MacTavish had
some beautiful pieces of carving in black slate that he said came from
Queen Charlotte Islands; but I've forgotten what Indians carved them."
"Oh, yes," said Mr. Fannin, "that is Haida work. All the Indians north
from Victoria are good at carving. Of course the animals and figures
that they represent do not agree with our ideas of how these things
should be represented. Most of the figures are grotesque, but they show
fine workmanship; and if you give any of these Indians a model to copy
he will follow it very closely. Up in the North they will hammer a
bracelet or a spoon for you from a silver dollar; and they will put on
it pretty much any design that you may give them."
[Illustration: CLOSE TO SOME OF THE HOUSES STAND TALL CARVED POLES,
CALLED TOTEM POLES--_Page 98_]
"I see," said Jack, "that all their canoes are carved in front; and the
prows remind one a little bit of the pictures of the old Viking ships;
and then, again, of the still older boats that the Romans had,
only, of course, they were all rowed with oars, while the Indians use
paddles."
"Yes," said Fannin, "these canoes that we have here are not like any
that I know of anywhere else in the world. They're all made out of
a single stick of wood and are of all sizes. There's one up at the
Bella-Bella village, north of here, that's said to be the biggest boat
on the coast. It's one of the old war canoes, is eighty feet long,
and so deep that a man standing in it can't be seen by one standing
on the ground by its side. Such a canoe as that could only be made in
the country where the white cedar grows, a wood that is light, easily
worked and very durable. It's one of our biggest trees and sometimes
grows to a height of three hundred feet, and runs up to ten, eleven, or
twelve feet thick at the butt."
"Well," said Jack, "with a tree of size to work on I can easily see how
a canoe even as big as the one you speak of might be made; but what an
awful long time it must take to whittle it out! I should think that the
generation that began such a boat could not hope to see it finished."
"Well," said Fannin, "it's not quite as bad as that, but it is slow
work; and that is not surprising when you think that they have no
tools to work with except the most primitive ones. After the cedar
stick has been felled, and it has been found that no harm came to
it in its fall, they go to work and shape the stick as well as they
can with their axes, and then hollow it out by fire. In other words,
they build a fire on the top and allow it to burn just so far in any
direction, and so deep. After they have used the fire as far as they
can to advantage, they take a little chipping tool, made of a blade
of steel attached to a wooden handle, and chip the wood off in little
flakes or slivers, reducing the whole to a proper thickness, say an
inch or an inch and a half for a canoe thirty feet long. They have no
models, and the eye is their only guide in shaping the canoes; but the
lines are always correct, and as graceful as could be made by the most
expert boat-builder. When they have shaped the canoe, its gunwales are
slightly sprung apart so as to give some flare to the sides, and are
held in position by narrow braces of timber stretching across the canoe
and sewed to it by cedar twigs. They steam these twigs in the hot ashes
so that they become pliable, and can be easily used for this sewing."
"This cedar must be as useful to these Indians as buffalo hides are to
the plains' Indians," said Jack. "You pointed out to me some mats made
of cedar bark, some hats and some rope, all of the same material. Now
you tell me that the canoes are made of cedar and sewed together with
cedar twigs."
"Yes," replied Fannin, "the cedar does a great deal for these people. I
told you, too, that they built their houses of it."
"There are two different types of canoes on this coast," he continued,
"one belonging to the South and having a square stern and a bottom that
is almost flat, and the Northern canoe, which has a round bottom and an
overhanging stern. The big canoe that I told you about at Bella-Bella
is a Northern canoe. In old times these big canoes were used by the
Northern Indians on their war journeys against their enemies to the
South. They would come down, perhaps seventy or eighty men in a canoe,
attack a village, plunder it, capture a lot of the people for slaves,
and then take to their canoes again, paddling back to their homes.
These Northern Indians were great hands to go off on war parties. They
were a good deal more warlike than these people down here."
"This cedar that you talk about," asked Hugh. "Is there much of it to
be had? I haven't seen anything yet that looked like the cedar that we
see back East."
"No," said Fannin, "what you're thinking of is the red cedar, in some
of its forms, I guess--the juniper. This is the white cedar, and
looks as much as anything like a small tree that folks use for hedges
back East, and call arbor vitæ; only I never saw any of those arbor
vitæs grow anything near as big as the smallest of these cedars here.
Like the Eastern cedar, however, this white cedar is very durable. I
remember seeing in the woods once a fallen log, on which was growing a
Douglas fir two and a half feet in diameter. The seed of the fir had
fallen on the log and sprouted, and, as the fir grew, it sent down its
roots to the ground on either side of the cedar log, so that at last it
straddled it. The fir was about two and a half feet in diameter, and
so it had been growing there a great many years, but the fallen cedar
log was to all appearance as sound as if it had not been lying there
a year. The cedar log was covered with moss and most of its limbs had
rotted off, but when I scraped away the moss and sounded the stick and
cut into it, I could not see that it was at all decayed."
"Well, Mr. Fannin," asked Jack, "how do they mend these canoes when
they break them? Of course they must be running onto the bars and onto
the rocks all the time, and if a hole is punched in a solid wooden
bottom like this it's hard to mend it again."
"That's true," said Fannin, "and they don't mean to let the canoe
grate on rocks or get rubbed on the gravel beach if they can help
it. Notwithstanding its durability, cedar wood splits very easily.
Therefore the Indians take the greatest care of their canoes, not
bringing them up on the shore where they are likely to be worn or
rubbed, but always anchoring them out in deep water; or else, if
they bring them to shore, lifting them out of the water and sliding
them along the bottom planks--that almost every canoe has two pair
of--above the reach of the tide. Although it is so durable, the cedar
wood splits on the smallest provocation; and once or twice I have seen
a canoe that touched roughly on the rocks, or was carelessly knocked
against the beach, split in two and the two halves fall apart. Of
course in such a case it was pretty hard work to mend the canoe."
"I should say it would be," remarked Jack, "and I don't know how they
would do it."
"I'll tell you. They carry the loads up on the high ground to dry, and
then they take the canoe, fit the two pieces together until no light
can be seen through the crack, and then they sew them together with
cedar twigs and plaster the crack over with gum. I've seen a vessel
mended in that way, make a long cruise, but I confess I should not want
to make a very long journey in a boat patched up like that."
"I don't think I would either," said Jack. "I shouldn't think it would
be very safe."
"Mr. Fannin," said Jack, after a pause, "I suppose when we get started
we'll have to paddle all the way?"
"Yes," said Fannin, "you're likely to. Of course, if the wind is fair
these canoes can sail. There's almost always a chock in the bottom well
forward in which a mast can be stepped, and when the wind is fair a
sail is put up or a blanket is used. That helps along amazingly."
"I'm glad that you've told me all this, for now when I talk with people
up here on the coast they'll see that I know a little something and am
not purely a pilgrim."