CHAPTER VIII

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.

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."

"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."