The Canoe and the Saddle/Chapter II
A Klalam Grandee
[edit]The Duke of York was ducally drunk. His brother, King George, was drunk — royally. Royalty may disdain public opinion, and fall as low as it pleases. But a brother of the throne, leader of the opposition, possible Regent, possible King, must retain at least a swaying perpendicular. King George had kept his chair of state until an angular sitting position was impossible; then he had subsided into a curvilinear droop, and at last fairly toppled over, and lay in his lodge, limp and stertorous.
In his lodge lay Georgius Rex, in flabby insensibility. Dead to the duties of sovereignty was the King of the Klalams. Like other royal Georges, in palaces more regal than this Port Townsend wigwam, in realms more civilized than here, where the great tides of Puget’s Sound rise and fall, this royal George had sunk in absolute wreck. Kings are but men. Several kings have thought themselves the god Bacchus. George of the Klalams had imbibed this ambitious error, and had proved himself very much lower than a god, much lower than a man, lower than any plebeian Klalam, Indian, — a drunken king.
In the great shed of slabs that served them for palace sat the Queen, — sat the Queens, — mildeyed, melancholy, copper-colored persons, also, sad to say, not sober. Etiquette demanded inebriety. The stern rules of royal indecorum must be obeyed. The Queen Dowager had succumbed to ceremony; the Queen Consort was sinking; every lesser queen, — the favorites for sympathy, the neglected for consolation, — all had imitated their lord and master.
Courtiers had done likewise. Chamberlain Gold Stick, Black Rod, Garter King at Arms, a dozen high functionaries, were prostrate by the side of prostrate majesty. Courtiers grovelled with their sovereign. Sardanapalus never presided, until he could preside no longer, at a more tumble-down orgie.
King, royal household, and court all were powerless, and I was a suppliant here, on the waters of the Pacific, for means of commencing my homeward journey across the continent toward the Atlantic. I needed a bark from that fleet by which King George ruled the waves. I had dallied too long at Vancouver’s Island, under the hospitable roof of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and had consumed invaluable hours in making a detour from my proper course to inspect the house, the saw-mill, the bluff, and the beach, called Port Townsend. These were the last days of August, 1853. I was to meet my overland comrades, a pair of roughs, at the Dalles of the Columbia on the first of September. Between me and the rendezvous were the leagues of Puget’s Sound, the preparation for an ultramontane trip, the passes of the Cascades, and all the dilatoriness and danger of Indian guidance. Moments now were worth days of common life.
Therefore, as I saw those winged moments flit away unharnessed to my chariot of departure, I became wroth, and, advancing where the king of all this region lay, limp, stertorous, and futile, I kicked him liberally.
Yes! I have kicked a king!
Proudly I claim that I have outdone the most radical regicide. I have offered indignities to the person of royalty with a moccasined toe. Would that that toe had been robustly booted! In his Sans Souci, his Œil de Boeuf, his Brighton Pavilion, I kicked so much of a first gentleman of his realm as was George R., and no scalping-knife leaped from greasy seal-skin sheath to avenge the insult. One bottle-holder in waiting, upon whose head I had casually trodden, did indeed stagger to his seat, and stammer truculently in Chinook jargon, “Potlatch lum! — Give me to drink,” quoth he, and incontinently fell prone again, a poor, collapsed bottle-holder.
But kicking the insensible King of the Klalams, that dominant nation on the southern shores of Puget’s Sound, did not procure me one of his canoes and a crew of his braves to paddle me to Nisqually, my next station, for a blanket apiece and gratuities of sundries. There was no help to be had from that smoky barn or its sorry inmates, so regally nicknamed by British voyagers. I left them lying upon their dirty mats, among their fishy baskets, and strode away, applying the salutary toe to each dignitary as I passed.
Fortunately, without I found the Duke of York, only ducally drunk. A duke’s share of the potables had added some degrees to the arc of vibration of his swagger, but had not sent it beyond equilibrium. He was a reversed pendulum, somewhat spasmodic in swing, and not constructed on the compensation principle, — when one muscle relaxed, another did not tighten. However, the Duke was still sober enough to have speculation in his eyes, and as he was Regent now, and Lord High Admiral, I might still by his favor be expedited.
It was a chance festival that had intoxicated the Klalams, king and court. There had been a fraternization, a powwow, a wahwah, a peace congress with some neighboring tribe, — perhaps the Squaksnamish, or Squallyamish, or Sinahomish, or some other of the Whulgeamish, dwellers by Whulge, — the waters of Puget’s Sound. And just as the festival began, there had come to Port Townsend, or Kahtai, where the king of the Klalams, or S’ Klalams, now reigned, a devil-send of a lumber brig, with liquor of the fieriest. An orgie followed, a nation was prostrate.
The Duke was my only hope. Yet I must not betray eagerness. A dignitary among Indians does not like to be bored with energy. If I were too ardent, the Duke would grow coy. Prices would climb to the unapproachable. Any exhibition of impatience would cost me largess of beads, if not blankets, beyond the tariff for my canoe-hire. A frugal mind, and, on the other hand, a bent toward irresponsible pleasure, kept the Duke palpably wavering. He would joyfully stay and complete his saturnalia, and yet the bliss of more chattels, and consequent consideration, tempted him. Which shall it be, “lumoti” or “pississy,” — bottle or blanket? revel and rum, or toil and toilette? — the great alternative on which civilization hinges, as well among Klalams as elsewhere. Sunbeams are so warm, and basking such dulcet, do-nothing bliss, why overheat one’s self now for the woollen raiment of future warmth? Not merely warmth, but wealth, —wives, chiefest of luxuries, are bought with blankets; with them canoes are bought, and to a royal highness of savages, blankets are purple, ermine, and fine linen.
Calling the Duke’s attention to these facts, I wooed him cautiously, as craft wooes coyness; I assumed a lofty indifference of demeanor, and negotiated with him from a sham vantage-ground of money-power, knowing what trash my purse, would be, if he refused to be tempted. A grotesque jargon called Chinook is the lingua-franca of the whites and Indians of the Northwest. Once the Chinooks were the most numerous tribe along the Columbia, and the first, from their position at its mouth, to meet and talk with strangers. Now it is all over with them; their bones are dust; small-pox and spirits have eliminated the race. But there grew up between them and the traders a lingo, an incoherent coagulation of words, — as much like a settled, logical language as a legion of centrifugal, marauding Bashi Bazouks, every man a Jack-of-all-trades, a beggar and blackguard, is like an accurate, unanimous, disciplined battalion. It is a jargon of English, French, Spanish, Chinook, Kallapooga, Haida, and other tongues, civilized and savage. It is an attempt on a small scale to nullify Babel by combining a confusion of tongues into a confounding of tongues, — a witches’ caldron in which the vocable that bobs up may be some old familiar Saxon verb, having suffered Procrustean docking or elongation, and now doing substantive duty; or some strange monster, evidently nurtured within the range of tomahawks and calumets. There is some danger that the beauties of this dialect will be lost to literature,
- “Carent quia vate sacro.”
The Chinook jargon still expects its poet. As several of my characters will use this means of conveying their thoughts to my reader, and employ me only as an interpreter, I have thought it well to aid comprehension by this little philological preface.
My big talk with the Duke of York went on in such a lingo, somewhat as follows: —
- “Pottlelum mitlite King Jawge; Drunk lieth King George,” said I. “Cultus tyee ocook; a beggarly majesty that. Hyas tyee mika; a mighty prince art thou, — pe kumtux skookoom mamook esick; and knowest how robustly to ply paddle. Nika tikky hyack klatawah copa Squally, copa canim; I would with speed canoe it to Squally. Hui pississy nika potlatch pe hui ikta; store of blankets will I give, and plenteous sundries.”
- “Nawitka siks; yea, friend,” responded the Duke, grasping my hand, after two drunken clutches at empty air. “Klosche nika tum, tum copa hyas Baasten tyee; tender is my heart toward thee, O great Yankee don. Yaka pottlelum — halo nika — wake cultus mann Dookeryawk; he indeed is drunk — not I — no loafer-man, the Duke of York. Mitlite canim; got canoe. Pe klosche nika tikky klatawah copa Squally; and heartily do I wish to go to Squally.”
Had the Duke wavered still, and been apathetic to temptation of blankets, and sympathetic toward the joys of continued saturnalia, a new influence now brought to bear would have steadied him. One of his Duchesses, Only duchessly intoxicated, came forth from the ducal lodge, and urged him to effort.
“Go, by all means, with the distinguished stranger, my love,” said she, in Chinook, “and I will be the solace of thy voyage. Perchance, also, a string of beads and a pocket-mirror shall be my meed from the Boston chief, a very generous Man, I am sure.” Then she smiled enticingly, her flat-faced grace, and introduced herself as Jenny Lind, or, as she called it, “Chin Lin.” Indianesque, not fully Indian, was her countenance. There was a trace of tin in her copper color, possibly a dash of Caucasian blood in her veins. Brazenness of hue was the result of this union, and a very pretty color it is with eloquent blushes mantling through it, as they do Mantle in Indian cheeks. Her forehead was slightly and coquettishly flattened by art, as a woman’s should be by nature, unless nature destines her for missions foreign to feminineness, and means that she shall be an intellectual roundhead, and shall sternly keep a graceless school, to irritate youthful cherubim into original sinners. Indian maids are pretty; Indian dames are hags. Only high civilization keeps its women beautiful to the last. Indian belles have some delights of toilette worthy of consideration by their blonde sisterhood. O mistaken harridans of Christendom, so bountifully painted and powdered, did ye but know how much better than your diffusiveness of daub is the concentrated brilliance of vermilion stripes parting at the nose-bridge and streaming athwart the cheeks ! Knew ye but this, at once ye would reform from your undeluding shams, and recover the forgotten charms of acknowledged pinxit.
At last, persuaded by his own desires and the solicitations of his fair Duchess, the Duke determined to transport me. He pointed to a grand canoe on the beach, — that should be our Bucentaur, and now he must don robes of ceremony for the voyage. For, indeed, both ducal personages were in deshabille. A dirty shirt, blue and short, was the Duke’s chief habiliment; hers, a shirt longer, but no cleaner.
Within his palace-curtains now disappeared the second grandee of the Klalams, to bedeck himself. Presently I lifted the banging mat that served for door to his shed of slabs, and followed him. His family and suite were but crapulous after their less than royal potations. He despatched two sleepy braves to make ready the canoe, and find paddles.
“Where is my cleanest shirt, Chin Lin?” he asked.
“Nika macook lum; I buy grog with um,” replied the Duchess.
“Cultus mamook; a dastardly act,” growled the Duke, “and I will thwack thee for ’t.”
Jenny Lind sank meekly upon the mud-floor, and wept, while the Duke smote her with palm, fist, and staff.
“Kopet! hold!” cried I, rushing forward. “Thy beauteous spouse has bought the nectar for thy proper jollity. Even were she selfish, it is uncivilized to smite the fair. Among the Bostons, when women wrong us, we give pity or contempt, but not the strappado.” Harangues to Indians are traditionally in such lofty style.
The Duke suffered himself to be appeased and proceeded to dress without the missing article. He donned a faded black frock-coat, evidently a misfit for its first owner in civilization, and transmitted down a line of deformed wearers to fall amorphous on the shoulders of him of York. For coronet he produced no gorgeous combination of velvet, strawberry-leaves, and pearls; but a hat or tile, also of civilization, wrinkled with years and battered by world-wandering, crowned him frowzily. Black dress pantaloons of brassy sheen, much crinkled at the bottom, where they fell over moccasins with a faded scarlet instep-piece, completed his costume. A very shabby old-clo’ Duke. A virulent radical would have enjoyed him heartily, as an emblem of decay in the bloated aristocracy of this region. Red paint daubed over his clumsy nose, and about the flats surrounding his little, disloyal, dusky eyes, kept alive the traditional Indian in his appearance. Otherwise he might have been taken for a decayed priest turned bar-tender, or a colporteur of tracts on spiritualism, or an exconstable pettifogger in a police court. Commerce, alas! had come to the waters of Whulge, stolen away his Indian simplicity, and made him a caricature, dress, name, and nature. A primitive Klalam, clad in skins and undevoured by the flames of fire-water, he would have done well enough as a type of fish-fed barbarism. Civilization came, with step-mother kindness, baptized him with rum, clothed him in discarded slops, and dubbed him Duke of York. Hapless scarecrow, disreputable dignitary, no dukeling of thine shall ever become the Louis Philippe of Klalam revolutions. Boston men are coming in their big canoes over sea. Pikes have shaken off the fever and ague on the banks of the muddy Missouri, and are striding beyond the Rockys. Nasal twangs from the east and west soon will sound thy trump of doom. Squatters will sit upon thy dukedom, and make it their throne.
Tides in Whulge, which the uneducated maps call Puget’s Sound, rush with impetus, rising and falling eighteen or twenty feet. The tide was rippling winningly up to the stranded canoes. Our treaty was made; our costume was complete; we prepared to embark. But lo! a check! In malignant sulks, King George came forth from his mal-perfumed lodge of red-smeared slabs. “Veto,” said he. “Dog am I, and this is my manger. Every canoe of the fleet is mine, and from this beach not one shall stir this day of festival!”
Whereupon, after a wrangle, short and sharp, with the Duke, in which the King whipped out a knife, and brandished it with drunken vibrations in my face, he staggered back, and again lay in his lodge, limp and stertorous. Had he felt my kick, or was this merely an impulse of discontented ire?
How now? Could we not dethrone the sovereign, and confiscate his property? There are precedents for such a course. But savage life is full of chances. As I was urging the soberish Duke to revolutionary acts, or at least to a forced levy from the royal navy, a justifiable piracy, two canoes appeared rounding the point.
“‘Come unto these yellow sands,’ ye brass-colored braves,” we cried. They were coming, each crew roving anywhither, and soon, by the Duke’s agency, I struck a bargain for the leaky better of the two vessels.
No clipper that ever creaked from statu quo in Webb’s shipyard, and rumbled heavily along the ways, and rushed as if to drown itself in its new element, and then went cleaving across the East River, staggering under the intoxicating influence of a champagne-bottle with a blue ribbon round its neck, cracked on the rudderpost by a blushing priestess, — no such grand result of modern skill ever surpassed in mere model the canoe I had just chartered for my voyage to Squally. Here was the type of speed and grace to which the most untrammelled civilization has reverted, after cycles of junk, galleon, and galliot building, — cycles of lubberly development, but full of instruction as to what can be done with the best type when it is reasoned out or rediscovered. My vessel was a black dug-out with a red gunwale. Forty feet of pine-tree had been burnt and whittled into a sharp, buoyant canoe. Sundry cross-pieces strengthened it, and might be used as seats or backs. A row of small shells inserted in the red-smeared gunwale served as talismans against Bugaboo. Its master was a withered ancient; its mistress a haggish crone. These two were of unsavory and fishy odor. Three young men, also of unsavory and fishy odor, completed the crew. Salmon mainly had been the lifelong diet of all, and they were oozier with its juices than I could wish of people I must touch and smell for a voyage of two days.
In the bargain for canoe and crew, the Duke constituted himself my courier. I became his prey. The rule of tea-making, where British ideas prevail, is a rough generalization, a spoonful for the pot and one for each bibber. The tariff of canoe-hire on Whulge is equally simple, — a blanket for the boat, and one for each paddler. The Duke carefully included himself and Jenny Lind among the paddling recipients of blankets. I ventured to express the view that both he and his Duchess would be unwashed supernumeraries. At this he was indignant. He felt himself necessary as impresario of the expedition.
“Wake closche ocook olyman siwash; no good that oldman savage,” said he, pointing to the skipper. “Yaka pottlelum, conoway pottlelum; he drunk, all drunk. Wake kumtux Squally; no understand Squally. Hyas tyee Dookeryawk, wake pottlelum, — kumtux skookoom mamook esick, pe tikky hyack klatawah copa Squally; mighty chief the Duke of York, not drunk, understand to ply paddle mightily, and want to go fast to Squally.”
“Very well,” said I, “I throw myself into your hands. My crew, then, numbers six, the three fishy youths, Olyman siwash, Jenny Lind, and yourself. As to Olyman’s fishy squaw, she must be temporarily divorced, and go ashore; dead weight will impede our voyage.”
“Nawitka,” responded the Klalam, “cultus ocook olyman cloocheman; no use that oldman woman.” So she went ashore, bow-legged, monotonous, and a fatalist, like all old squaws.
“And now,” continued the Duke, drawing sundry greasy documents from the pocket of that shapeless draggle-tail coat of his, “mika tikky nanitch nika teapot; wilt thou inspect my certificates?”
I took the foul papers without a shudder, — have we not all been educated out of squeamishness by handling the dollar-bills of civilization? There was nothing ambiguous in the wording of these “teapots.” It chanced sometimes, in days of chivalry, that spies bore missions with clauses sinister to themselves, as this: “The bearer is a losel vile, — have you never a hangman and an oak for him?” The Duke’s testimonials were of similar import. They were signed by Yankee skippers, by British naval officers, by casual travellers, — all unanimous in opprobrium. He was called a drunken rascal, a shameless liar, a thief; called each of these in various idioms, with plentiful epithets thrown in, according to the power of imagery possessed by the author. Such certificates he presented gravely, and with tranquil pride. He deemed himself indorsed by civilization, not branded. Men do not always comprehend the world’s cynical praise. It seemed also that his Grace had once voyaged to San Francisco in what he called a “skookoom canim copa moxt stick; a colossal canoe with two masts.” He did not state what part he played on board, whether cook, captain, stowaway, or Klalam plenipo to those within the Golden Gate. His photograph had been taken at San Francisco. This he also exhibited in a grandiose manner, the Duchess, Olyman siwash, and the three fishy siwashes examining it with wonder and grunts of delight.
Now it must not be supposed that the Duke was not still ducally drunk, or that it was easy to keep him steady in position or intention. Olyman siwash, also, though not patently intoxicated, wished to be, — so did the three unsavory, hickory-shirted, mat-haired, truculent siwashes. Olyman would frequently ask me, aside, in the strange, unimpassioned, expressionless undertone of an Indian, for a “lumoti,” Chinook jargon for la bouteille, meaning no empty bottle, but a full. Never a lumoti of delay and danger got Olyman from me. Our preparations went heavily enough. Sometimes the whole party would squat on the beach, and jabber for ten minutes, ending always by demanding of me liquor or higher wages. But patience and purpose always prevail. At last, by cool urgency, I got them all on board and away. Adieu Port Townsend, then a town of one house on a grand bluff, and one saw-mill in a black ravine. Adieu intoxicated lodges of Georgius Rex Klalamorum! Adieu Royalty! Remember my kick, and continue to be h’happy as you may.