CHAPTER XL

INDIANS IN THE HOP FIELDS

There’s dusky maids In pinks and plaids, Maids from the forest free; In bright attire, Aglow, afire, On Ballast island by the sea.

There’s the chief of his clan With his ughly klootchman; The gay young dude and his bride, With bows and quiver, And dog fish liver, And the ictas of his curious tribe.

Camped below, In the beauteous glow, Such a “gypsy” crew so novel and bold; In their long canoes, And moccasin shoes, From the land of the Totem pole.

Dotted all over, Like pigs in clover, The wickyups cover Ballast isle; Brown flitched salmon, Pappooses agammon, Pots and kettles in curious pile.

When picking’s o’er We’ll have no more The smell that comes from Ballast isle; Glad then my eyes My spirits rise, For they’ve gone back to their paradise.

[Ballast isle is the camping spot near Seattle of the Indians during their stop over to and from the hop fields.]

Hop picking on bright days in the valleys of Western Washington is the delight of the native. It is for him and all his kith and kin, a joy unspeakable. He comes from near and far. He will travel hundreds of miles in his big canim with his full household and all his earthly possessions to enjoy the delightful season as much for his real love for it as for the money that he knows will always come at the close. Then the hop field is redolent of perfume and melody. The fields are alive with pickers; the air is joyous with sound. There is a richness and coloring in the surrounding which form a perpetual delight. There is a novelty to the beholder and a rurality of scene so peculiar, that makes one feel as if they were in some enchanted country. If you have never witnessed a season of hop picking you have missed a rare old time-treat which has its equal only in the maple woods of the East during sugar making time, or in the co’n shuckin’ days of old Kentuck, “when the mast am fallin’ and the darkies am a singin’ and raccoon and possum am simmerin’ in the pot.”

In addition to its scenic beauties and pleasant surroundings a hop field is a sanitarium for the invalid, and a resting place for the weary and overworked.

Ranking next to the delightful exhilarating smell of the fresh pine woods of Puget Sound is the rich agreeable odor of the hop fields. The hazy half humid air of the lazy September days, the variegated coloring of thousands of native pickers chattering in their gutteral Chinook; the heavy foliaged banks of deep, intensely green fields of vines, with the equally deep green of the conifera woods in the background; the white canvas tents, the lines of curling smoke ascending heavenward; the half agreeable smell of frying salmon, the universal meal of the brownskinned Indians; the mingling and assimilation of a thousand rural and novel et ceteras, form pictures and attractions seen no where else on earth save in a Washington hop field. They are delights which enjoyed once, never are obliterated from the pleasant memories of the beholder.

There is not a rural panacea or health resort from Southern California to Vancouver island that will afford a tithe of the good solid enjoyment with the revivifying influence so beneficial to constitutions or shattered nerves.

Six o’clock in the morning finds the fields redolent of odor, musical with sound and swarming with pickers. Poles laden with wet vines are falling here, there and everywhere. There are buckets, baskets, boxes, babies and blankets in endless admixture, while white, black and Indian are taking stations. Dropping polls, like snowflakes falling, are heaping in miniature mountains in every row. So it goes. Day in, day out, from morn to night, throughout the season, until the last pole has been plucked and the last load rolled into the mammoth kiln.

Indians make the best pickers, and among the Indians the klootchman ranks supreme. She picks hops while the lazy, indolent brave plays cards or lounges in the shadow of his rakish tepee. His great delights are in card playing and pony racing. Those of the interior will travel for days across the mountains every autumn, not to pick hops but to horse race on Sunday. Sunday is their big day, a day of carousing, gambling and racing. On those days all the villages in the valley are overrun with the pickers in holiday garb of fancy colors. Then assemble a cosmopolitan crowd not greatly unlike such as gather at fair time in the far famed Nijni Novgorod from the steppes of Tartary or Siberia. The Yakimas and Klickitats and other interior tribes, male and female alike, are scampering about on long haired ponies, while the more sedate Puyallups, Nisquallys, Tulalips, and dozens of other coast tribes trudge hither and thither, grunting and muttering and poking their fingers and noses into anything and everything which can be eaten or worn. Night drives them to their various camps, some scattered miles away in various parts of the valleys, and the following Sunday the scene is repeated.

Near Puyallup in a long reach of level ground the Indians have raced for years at hop picking time, and so great is the rivalry and excitement of the sport that the whole interim from one autumn till the next is given up in preparation and training of horse flesh with which to outrun rival steeds on the race course. Sometimes but two, at other times six or eight horses will enter in a single race. The race is always a running race and the Indians mount without any reference to weight, handicap, jockey or saddle. A big Indian will be seen mounted on a diminutive wooly pony, and will sail over the course like a meteor, his long black locks streaming in the wind. Bets of ponies, lodges, blankets, saddles, knives, money and everything and anything tangible and movable will be staked on the result of a race and paid with as much nonchalance as a thousand pounds Sterling would be paid on Epsom Downs. Often there are seen at these Sunday races 3,000 people. Such days and places are the paradise of the gambler, contraband whiskey vendor and trashy whites generally. They congregate like vultures at a carrion feed. Only a goodly number of United States deputy marshals prevents downright and open handed robbery and vice.

The close of the picking season always finds the principal towns flooded with returning pickers and the dock fronts lined with long, lank Indian canoes. The Indians are spendthrifts, and they plant the profits of the picking season as generously as princes of the realm. Their canoes are laden with bric a brac from the Boston man’s store as long as the money lasts or as long as there is room to store them.

They always bring with them from their mysterious northern lands the fruits of the chase on land or sea, and the workmanship of rude hands, for barter with the whites. Mats of reeds, images, miniature canoes, bladders of fish oil, slabs of seal meat, dried elk and bear, seal skins, beaver skins, pelts, sea otter skins, and such like, form their chief staples in trade. These are generally bartered on the trip down, for eatables, while waiting for the maturing of the hop fields, as they are most always here weeks before the time for picking.

The coast Indians come generally in fleets of a dozen to twenty or thirty big canoes, numbering fifty or one hundred pickers, who are generally presided over by some scion of a royal line or by some head man elected to chieftainship, much as the whites elect their officials. If there is any tribal restrictions or dictatorial authority by the chief at home, it is dropped when they start on their long water journeys, sometimes of many hundred miles, to the hop fields.

The going and coming of the Washington hop pickers is as regular as the annual migration of water fowl or the rotation of the seasons, and are ever a source of attraction and interest.