darksome, and utterly lonely, urging on with no outlook, encountering
no landmark,--at last, as I stormed a ragged crest, gaining a height
that overtopped the firs, and, halting there for panting moments,
glanced to see if I had achieved mastery as well as position,--as I
looked somewhat wearily and drearily across the solemn surges of
forest, suddenly above their sombre green appeared Tacoma. Large and
neighbor it stood, so near that every jewel of its snow-fields seemed
to send me a separate ray; yet not so near but that I could with one
look take in its whole image, from clear-cut edge to edge.
All around it the dark evergreens rose like a ruff; above them the
mountain splendors swelled statelier for the contrast. Sunlight of
noon was so refulgent upon the crown, and lay so thick and dazzling in
nooks and chasms, that the eye sought repose of gentler lights, and
found it in shadowed nooks and clefts, where, sunlight entering not,
delicate mist, an emanation from the blue sky, had fallen, and lay
sheltered and tremulous, a mild substitute for the stronger glory. The
blue haze so wavered and trembled into sunlight, and sunbeams shot
glimmering over snowy brinks so like a constant avalanche, that I
might doubt whether this movement and waver and glimmer, this blending
of mist with noontide flame, were not a drifting smoke and cloud of
yellow sulphurous vapor floating over some slowly chilling crater far
down in the red crevices.
But if the giant fires had ever burned under that cold summit, they
had long since gone out. The dome that swelled up passionately had
crusted over and then fallen in upon itself, not vigorous enough with
internal life to bear up in smooth proportion. Where it broke into
ruin was no doubt a desolate waste, stern, craggy, and riven, but such
drear results of Titanic convulsion the gentle snows hid from view.
No foot of man had ever trampled those pure snows. It was a virginal
mountain, distant from the possibility of human approach and human
inquisitiveness as a marble goddess is from human love.
Yet there was nothing unsympathetic in its isolation, or despotic in
its distant majesty. But this serene loftiness was no home for any
deity of those that men create. Only the thought of eternal peace
arose from this heaven-upbearing monument like incense, and,
overflowing, filled the world with deep and holy calm.
Wherever the mountain turned its cheek toward the sun, many fair and
smiling dimples appeared, and along soft curves of snow, lines of
shadow drew tracery fair as the blue veins on a child's temple.
Without the infinite sweetness and charm of this kindly changefulness
of form and color, there might have been oppressive awe in the
presence of this transcendent glory against the solemn blue of noon.
Grace played over the surface of majesty, as a drift of rose-leaves
wavers in the air before a summer shower, or as a wreath of rosy mist
flits before the grandeur of a storm. Loveliness was sprinkled like a
boon of blossoms upon sublimity.
Our lives forever demand and need visual images that can be symbols to
us of the grandeur or the sweetness of repose. There are some faces
that arise dreamy in our memories, and look us into calmness in our
frantic moods. Fair and happy is a life that need not call upon its
vague memorial dreams for such attuning influence, but can turn to a
present reality, and ask tranquillity at the shrine of a household
goddess. The noble works of nature, and mountains most of all,
"have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence."
And, studying the light and the majesty of Tacoma, there passed from
it and entered into my being, to dwell there evermore by the side of
many such, a thought and an image of solemn beauty, which I could
thenceforth evoke whenever in the world I must have peace or die. For
such emotion years of pilgrimage were worthily spent. If mortal can
gain the thoughts of immortality, is not his earthly destiny achieved?
For, when we have so studied the visible poem, and so fixed it deep in
the very substance of our minds, there is forever with us not merely a
perpetual possession of delight, but a watchful monitor that will not
let our thoughts be long unfit for the pure companionship of beauty.
For whenever a man is false to the light that is in him, and accepts
meaner joys, or chooses the easy indulgence that meaner passions give,
then every fair landscape in all his horizon dims, and all its
grandeurs fade and dwindle away, the glory vanishes, and he looks,
like one lost, upon his world, late so lovely and sinless.
While I was studying Tacoma, and learning its fine lesson, it in turn
might contemplate its own image far away on the waters of Whulge,
where streams from its own snows, gushing seaward to buffet in the
boundless deep, might rejoice in a last look at their parent ere they
swept out of Puyallop Bay. Other large privilege of view it had. It
could see what I could not,--Tacoma the Less, Mt. Adams, meritorious
but clumsy; it could reflect sunbeams gracefully across a breadth of
forest to St. Helen's, the vestal virgin, who still kept her flame
kindled, and proved her watchfulness ever and anon. Continuing its
panoramic studies, Tacoma could trace the chasm of the Columbia by
silver circles here and there,--could see every peak, chimney, or
unopened vent, from Kulshan to Shasta Butte. The Blue Mountains
eastward were within its scope, and westward the faint-blue levels of
the Pacific. Another region, worthy of any mountain's beholding,
Tacoma sees, somewhat vague and dim in distance: it sees the sweet
Arcadian valley of the Willamette, charming with meadow, park, and
grove. In no older world where men have, in all their happiest moods,
recreated themselves for generations in taming earth to orderly
beauty, have they achieved a fairer garden than Nature's simple labor
of love has made there, giving to rough pioneers the blessings and the
possible education of refined and finished landscape, in the presence
of landscape strong, savage, and majestic.
All this Tacoma beholds, as I can but briefly hint; and as one who is
a seer himself becomes a tower of light and illumination to the world,
so Tacoma, so every brother seer of his among the lofty snow-peaks,
stands to educate, by his inevitable presence, every dweller
thereabouts. Our race has never yet come into contact with great
mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development
of the finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of
nature compel. That is an influence of the future. The Oregon people,
in a climate where being is bliss,--where every breath is a draught of
vivid life,--these Oregon people, carrying to a new and grander New
England of the West a fuller growth of the American Idea, under whose
teaching the man of lowest ambitions must still have some little
indestructible respect for himself, and the brute of most tyrannical
aspirations some little respect for others; carrying the civilization
of history where it will not suffer by the example of Europe,--with
such material, that Western society, when it crystallizes, will
elaborate new systems of thought and life. It is unphilosophical to
suppose that a strong race, developing under the best, largest, and
calmest conditions of nature, will not achieve a destiny.
Up to Tacoma, or into some such solitude of nature, imaginative men
must go, as Moses went up to Sinai, that the divine afflatus may stir
within them. The siwashes appreciate, according to their capacity, the
inspiration of lonely grandeur, and go upon the mountains, starving
and alone, that they may become seers, enchanters, magicians,
diviners,--what in conventional lingo is called "big medicine." For
though the Indians here have not peopled these thrones of their world
with the creatures of an anthropomorphic mythology, they yet deem them
the abode of Tamanoüs. Tamanoüs is a vague and half-personified type
of the unknown, of the mysterious forces of nature; and there is also
an indefinite multitude of undefined emanations, each one a tamanoüs
with a small t, which are busy and impish in complicating existence,
or equally active and spritely in unravelling it. Each Indian of this
region patronizes his own personal tamanoüs, as men of the more
eastern tribes keep a private manitto, and as Socrates kept a daimôn.
To supply this want, Tamanoüs with a big T undergoes an avatar, and
incarnates himself into a salmon, a beaver, a clam, or into some
inanimate object, such as a canoe, a paddle, a fir-tree, a flint, or
into some elemental essence, as fire, water, sun, mist; and tamanoüs
thus individualized becomes the "guide, philosopher, and friend" of
every siwash, conscious that otherwise he might stray and be lost in
the unknown realms of Tamanoüs.
Hamitchou, a frowzy ancient of the Squallyamish, told to Dr. Tolmie
and me, at Nisqually, a legend of Tamanoüs and Tacoma, which, being
interpreted, runs as follows:--
Hamitchou's Legend
"Avarice, O Boston tyee," quoth Hamitchou, studying me with dusky
eyes, "is a mighty passion. Now, be it known unto thee that we Indians
anciently used not metals nor the money of you blanketeers. Our
circulating medium was shells,--wampum you would name it. Of all
wampum, the most precious is Hiaqua. Hiaqua comes from the far north.
It is a small, perforated shell, not unlike a very opaque quill
toothpick, tapering from the middle, and cut square at both ends. We
string it in many strands, and hang it around the neck of one we
love,--namely, each man his own neck. We also buy with it what our
hearts desire. He who has most hiaqua is best and wisest and happiest
of all the northern Haida and of all the people of Whulge. The
mountain horsemen value it; and braves of the terrible Blackfeet have
been known, in the good old days, to come over and offer a horse or a
wife for a bunch of fifty hiaqua.
"Now, once upon a time there dwelt where this fort of Nisqually now
stands a wise old man of the Squallyamish. He was a great fisherman
and a great hunter; and the wiser he grew, much the wiser he thought
himself. When he had grown very wise, he used to stay apart from every
other siwash. Companionable salmon-boilings round a common pot had no
charms for him. 'Feasting was wasteful,' he said, 'and revellers would
come to want.' And when they verified his prophecy, and were full of
hunger and empty of salmon, he came out of his hermitage, and had
salmon to sell.
"Hiaqua was the pay he always demanded; and as he was a very wise old
man, and knew all the tide-ways of Whulge, and all the enticing
ripples and placid spots of repose in every river where fish might
dash or delay, he was sure to have salmon when others wanted, and thus
bagged largely of its precious equivalent, hiaqua.
"Not only a mighty fisher was the sage, but a mighty hunter, and elk,
the greatest animal of the woods, was the game he loved. Well had he
studied every trail where elk leave the print of their hoofs, and
where, tossing their heads, they bend the tender twigs. Well had he
searched through the broad forest, and found the long-haired prairies
where elk feed luxuriously; and there, from behind palisade fir-trees,
he had launched the fatal arrow. Sometimes, also, he lay beside a pool
of sweetest water, revealed to him by gemmy reflections of sunshine
gleaming through the woods, until at noon the elk came down, to find
death awaiting him as he stooped and drank. Or beside the same
fountain the old man watched at night, drowsily starting at every
crackling branch, until, when the moon was high, and her illumination
declared the pearly water, elk dashed forth incautious into the glade,
and met their midnight destiny.
"Elk-meat, too, he sold to his tribe. This brought him pelf, but, alas
for his greed, the pelf came slowly. Waters and woods were rich in
game. All the Squallyamish were hunters and fishers, though none so
skilled as he. They were rarely in absolute want, and, when they came
to him for supplies, they were far too poor in hiaqua.
"So the old man thought deeply, and communed with his wisdom, and,
while he waited for fish or beast, he took advice within himself from
his demon,--he talked with Tamanoüs. And always the question was, 'How
may I put hiaqua in my purse?'
"Tamanoüs never revealed to him that far to the north, beyond the
waters of Whulge, are tribes with their under lip pierced with a
fishbone, among whom hiaqua is plenty as salmonberries are in the
woods what time in mid-summer salmon fin it along the reaches of
Whulge.
"But the more Tamanoüs did not reveal to him these mysteries of
nature, the more he kept dreamily prying into his own mind,
endeavoring to devise some scheme by which he might discover a
treasure-trove of the beloved shell. His life seemed wasted in the
patient, frugal industry, which only brought slow, meagre gains. He
wanted the splendid elation of vast wealth and the excitement of
sudden wealth. His own peculiar tamanoüs was the elk. Elk was also
his totem, the cognizance of his freemasonry with those of his own
family, and their family friends in other tribes. Elk, therefore, were
every way identified with his life; and he hunted them farther and
farther up through the forests on the flanks of Tacoma, hoping that
some day his tamanoüs would speak in the dying groan of one of them,
and gasp out the secret of the mines of hiaqua, his heart's desire.
"Tacoma was so white and glittering, that it seemed to stare at him
very terribly and mockingly, and to know his shameful avarice, and how
it led him to take from starving women their cherished lip and nose
jewels of hiaqua, and to give them in return only tough scraps of
dried elk-meat and salmon. When men are shabby, mean, and grasping,
they feel reproached for their grovelling lives by the unearthliness
of nature's beautiful objects, and they hate flowers, and sunsets,
mountains, and the quiet stars of heaven.
"Nevertheless," continued Hamitchou, "this wise old fool of my legend
went on stalking elk along the sides of Tacoma, ever dreaming of
wealth. And at last, as he was hunting near the snows one day, one
very clear and beautiful day of late summer, when sunlight was
magically disclosing far distances, and making all nature
supernaturally visible and proximate, Tamanoüs began to work in the
soul of the miser.
"'Are you brave,' whispered Tamanoüs in the strange, ringing, dull,
silent thunder-tones of a demon voice. 'Dare you go to the caves where
my treasures are hid?'
"'I dare,' said the miser.
"He did not know that his lips had syllabled a reply. He did not even
hear his own words. But all the place had become suddenly vocal with
echoes. The great rock against which he leaned crashed forth, 'I
dare.' Then all along through the forest, dashing from tree to tree
and lost at last among the murmuring of breeze-shaken leaves, went
careering his answer, taken up and repeated scornfully, 'I dare.' And
after a silence, while the daring one trembled and would gladly have
ventured to shout, for the companionship of his own voice, there came
across from the vast snow wall of Tacoma a tone like the muffled,
threatening plunge of an avalanche into a chasm, 'I dare.'
"'You dare,' said Tamanoüs, enveloping him with a dread sense of an
unseen, supernatural presence; 'you pray for wealth of hiaqua.
Listen!'
"This injunction was hardly needed; the miser was listening with dull
eyes kindled and starting. He was listening with every rusty hair
separating from its unkempt mattedness, and outstanding upright, a
caricature of an aureole.
"'Listen,' said Tamanoüs, in the noonday hush. And then Tamanoüs
vouchsafed at last the great secret of the hiaqua mines, while in
terror near to death the miser heard, and every word of guidance
toward the hidden treasure of the mountains seared itself into his
soul ineffaceably.
"Silence came again more terrible now than the voice of
Tamanoüs,--silence under the shadow of the great cliff,--silence
deepening down the forest vistas,--silence filling the void up to the
snows of Tacoma. All life and motion seemed paralyzed. At last
Skai-ki, the Blue-Jay, the wise bird, foe to magic, sang cheerily
overhead. Her song seemed to refresh again the honest laws of nature.
The buzz of life stirred everywhere again, and the inspired miser rose
and hastened home to prepare for his work.
"When Tamanoüs has put a great thought in a man's brain, has whispered
him a great discovery within his power, or hinted at a great crime,
that spiteful demon does not likewise suggest the means of
accomplishment.
"The miser, therefore, must call upon his own skill to devise proper
tools, and upon his own judgment to fix upon the most fitting time
for carrying out his quest. Sending his squaw out to the kamas
prairie, under pretence that now was the season for her to gather
their winter store of that sickish-sweet esculent root, and that she
might not have her squaw's curiosity aroused by seeing him at strange
work, he began his preparations. He took a pair of enormous elk-horns,
and fashioned from each horn a two-pronged pick or spade, by removing
all the antlers except the two topmost. He packed a good supply of
kippered salmon, and filled his pouch with kinni kinnick for smoking
in his black stone pipe. With his bow and arrows and his two elk-horn
picks wrapped in buckskin hung at his back, he started just before
sunset, as if for a long hunt. His old, faithful, maltreated,
blanketless, vermilionless squaw, returning with baskets full of
kamas, saw him disappearing moodily down the trail.
"All that night, all the day following, he moved on noiselessly by
paths he knew. He hastened on, unnoticing outward objects, as one with
a controlling purpose hastens. Elk and deer, bounding through the
trees, passed him, but he tarried not. At night he camped just below
the snows of Tacoma. He was weary, weary, and chill night-airs blowing
down from the summit almost froze him. He dared not take his
fire-sticks, and, placing one perpendicular upon a little hollow on
the flat side of the other, twirl the upright stick rapidly between
his palms until the charred spot kindled and lighted his 'tipsoo,' his
dry, tindery wool of inner bark. A fire, gleaming high upon the
mountain-side, might be a beacon to draw thither any night-wandering
savage to watch in ambush, and learn the path toward the mines of
hiaqua. So he drowsed chilly and fireless, awakened often by dread
sounds of crashing and rumbling among the chasms of Tacoma. He
desponded bitterly, almost ready to abandon his quest, almost doubting
whether he had in truth received a revelation, whether his interview
with Tamanoüs had not been a dream, and finally whether all the hiaqua
in the world was worth this toil and anxiety. Fortunate is the sage
who at such a point turns back and buys his experience without worse
befalling him.
"Past midnight he suddenly was startled from his drowse, and sat bolt
upright in terror. A light. Was there another searcher in the forest,
and a bolder than he? That flame just glimmering over the tree-tops,
was it a camp-fire of friend or foe? Had Tamanoüs been revealing to
another the great secret? No, smiled the miser, his eyes fairly open,
and discovering that the new light was the moon. He had been waiting
for her illumination of paths heretofore untrodden by mortal. She did
not show her full, round jolly face, but turned it askance as if she
hardly liked to be implicated in this night's transaction.
"However, it was light he wanted, not sympathy, and he started up at
once to climb over the dim snows. The surface was packed by the
night's frost, and his moccasins gave him firm hold; yet he travelled
but slowly, and could not always save himself from a _glissade_
backwards, and a bruise upon some projecting knob or crag. Sometimes,
upright fronts of ice diverted him for long circuits, or a broken wall
of cold cliff arose, which he must surmount painfully. Once or twice
he stuck fast in a crevice, and hardly drew himself out by placing his
bundle of picks across the crack. As he plodded and floundered thus
deviously and toilsomely upward, at last the wasted moon gan pale
overhead, and under foot the snow grew rosy with coming dawn. The dim
world about the mountain's base displayed something of its vast
detail. He could see, more positively than by moonlight, the
far-reaching arteries of mist marking the organism of Whulge beneath;
and what had been but a black chaos now revealed itself into the
Alpine forest whence he had come.
"But he troubled himself little with staring about; up he looked, for
the summit was at hand. To win that summit was wellnigh the attainment
of his hopes, if Tamanoüs were true; and that, with the flush of
morning ardor upon him, he could not doubt. There, in a spot Tamanoüs
had revealed to him, was hiaqua,--hiaqua that should make him the
richest and greatest of all the Squallyamish.
"The chill before sunrise was upon him as he reached the last curve of
the dome. Sunrise and he struck the summit together. Together sunrise
and he looked over the glacis. They saw within a great hollow all
covered with the whitest of snow, save at the centre, where a black
lake lay deep in a well of purple rock.
"At the eastern end of this lake was a small, irregular plain of snow,
marked by three stones like monuments. Towards these the miser sprang
rapidly, with full sunshine streaming after him over the snows.
"The first monument he examined with keen looks. It was tall as a
giant man, and its top was fashioned into the grotesque likeness of a
salmon's head. He turned from this to inspect the second. It was of
similar height, but bore at its apex an object in shape like the
regular flame of a torch. As he approached, he presently discovered
that this was an image of the kamas-bulb in stone. These two
semblances of prime necessities of Indian life delayed him but an
instant, and he hastened on to the third monument, which stood apart
on a perfect level. The third stone was capped by something he almost
feared to behold, lest it should prove other than his hopes. Every
word of Tamanoüs had thus far proved veritable; but might there not be
a bitter deceit at the last? The miser trembled.
"Yes, Tamanoüs was trustworthy. The third monument was as the old man
anticipated. It was a stone elk's head, such as it appears in earliest
summer, when the antlers are sprouting lustily under their rough
jacket of velvet.
"You remember, Boston tyee," continued Hamitchou, "that Elk was the
old man's tamanoüs, the incarnation for him of the universal Tamanoüs.
He therefore was right joyous at this good omen of protection; and his
heart grew big and swollen with hope, as the black salmon-berry swells
in a swamp in June. He threw down his 'ikta'; every impediment he laid
down upon the snow; and, unwrapping his two picks of elk-horn, he took
the stoutest, and began to dig in the frozen snow at the foot of the
elk-head monument.
"No sooner had he struck the first blow than he heard behind him a
sudden puff, such as a seal makes when it comes to the surface to
breathe. Turning round much startled, he saw a huge otter just
clambering up over the edge of the lake. The otter paused, and struck
on the snow with his tail, whereupon another otter and another
appeared, until, following their leader in slow and solemn file, were
twelve other otters, marching toward the miser. The twelve approached,
and drew up in a circle around him. Each was twice as large as any
otter ever seen. Their chief was four times as large as the most
gigantic otter ever seen in the regions of Whulge, and certainly was
as great as a seal. When the twelve were arranged, their leader
skipped to the top of the elk-head stone, and sat there between the
horns. Then the whole thirteen gave a mighty puff in chorus.
"The hunter of hiaqua was for a moment abashed at his uninvited ring
of spectators. But he had seen otter before, and bagged them. These he
could not waste time to shoot, even if a phalanx so numerous were not
formidable. Besides, they might be tamanoüs. He took to his pick and
began digging stoutly.
"He soon made way in the snow, and came to solid rock beneath. At
every thirteenth stroke of his pick, the fugleman otter tapped with
his tail on the monument. Then the choir of lesser otters tapped
together with theirs on the snow. This caudal action produced a dull,
muffled sound, as if there were a vast hollow below.