Widow Walk

by Gar LaSalle

  Chapter Five

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Pickett and Ingalls

  We have increased the vigilance in our patrols of the region, due to the thwarted attack on the Elliot Bay settlement by a loose coalition of aboriginal people, and also due to fears from local citizens about similar raids planned against this Bellingham milling community.…

  Regarding the request by the regional tax collector, Isaac Evers, urging the territorial government’s subsidization of settlers onto San Juan Island to bolster our claim to that strategic location, the rumors persist that the British covet the same and may increase their efforts to secure it. Plan to investigate further.

  — 1857 Report by Captain George E. Pickett to General William S. Harney, Commander, U.S. Army, Oregon Territory

  The swell and chop pounded the small sloop, turning his stomach into an inelegant distraction. George Edward Pickett wondered why he hadn’t left the espionage to others and instead, had let himself be talked into the trek across the strait into Victoria again.

  Accompanied by his best friend, Lt. Colonel Rufus Ingalls, Quartermaster General for the Department of Oregon, and two of his casual companions, the brothers Will and Darby McIntyre, Pickett had made the trip again in civilian garb. But this time he was immediately recognized by two of his officer counterparts in the Royal Infantry Brigade stationed in Victoria.

  Despite their reassurances that he could enjoy the boom town without exposure, by the third night, he was certain he had been saluted by a few drunken noncommissioned officers he passed on the streets. His attempted espionage, his ruse to disguise a junket, had been thwarted.

  Pickett had other reasons to be concerned. Although none of his own superior officers was likely to hear about this trip, Ingalls being exceptionally discreet, Pickett had reason to be concerned about the ill effects of nasty gossip. Despite the protection from hostiles that the fort afforded to the Bellingham community, because of repeated episodes of disorderly conduct by the soldiers under his command, the county’s townspeople already had a substantial contempt for the military establishment stationed there. So, even unfounded rumors about the drunken or wanton behavior of the officer in charge of the outfit would make it all the more difficult for him to get the cooperation necessary for the sturdy challenge of maintaining peace between the white settlers and the natives in the region.

  They were always at each other’s throats, each using the slightest of incidents as provocation for escalated violence. He hated the mess the violence created.

  Pickett fretted about that during the long heaving ride back south and debated whether the small pleasure he had found cavorting in the makeshift pubs was likely to do much harm to his reputation. He thought about his comportment and decided it had not been scandalous.

  He was an officer and a gentleman, after all.

  He had learned to hold his liquor in a genteel manner as a young West Point plebe, and he had practiced that control in the lonely years after the death of his first wife and daughter while stationed in Texas several years before his commission to the Northwest. Thus, the gossip in Victoria, at least, would not be based on any public displays of rowdiness on his part.

  He realized during the crossing, however, much to his chagrin, that the McIntyre brothers’ antics in the main street bordellos might be confused with his own more civil behavior. At least they hadn’t been arrested. But he knew they were loud, and grew louder still if drinking in each other’s company.

  He would hear about it soon enough, he decided, because gossip from Victoria and Olympia was a favorite pastime for all the citizens of the region.

  Victoria, a town whose rowdiness would have embarrassed the Queen, its royal namesake, had outgrown order after gold had been discovered near the Fraser River in ’56. Within a few months after the rich find, the town’s population had quickly reached five thousand, swelling to become an international tent city whose population equalled that of the entire Puget Sound to the south.

  In less than a year of the Fraser strike, thirty thousand travelers had passed through Victoria, and the town’s promise of sexual favors, gambling, and instant wealth, built on rampant speculation, had seduced the naïve and stripped the foolish. The desperate hunger of the wayfarers passing through made it dangerous for anyone not adept at defending himself.

  Pickett, trained in pugilistic and knife fighting, knew he could handle himself well, but kept a small six-barreled pepperbox pistol concealed in his vest, nevertheless.

  On this trip, he’d only used it on one occasion, while into his spirits and departing from a large tavern tent. He had brushed against a surly drunkard who took offense and pulled a knife. Pickett had reached for the pistol’s reassurance. Fortunately, the Brits kept good order and enough sober military presence that a constable intervened before Pickett had to put the inebriated aggressor down.

  He hadn’t gone to Victoria for female companionship, despite the prodding of Ingalls, who had often expressed that sexual intercourse was the solution to everything.

  Pickett was over women for now, feeling a bitter unluckiness. The two times he had fallen in love and committed to marriage, each wife had passed on a few months after childbirth.

  The thought of that happening again to him, such an emotional toll with all the unmanly weeping that transpired afterwards, overwhelmed him.

  And despite a powerful ache from his groin up to his stomach, his heart just needed peace.

  He could not bring himself to play undignified games without love in sight; nor could he condone the thought of paying for the discharge of his baser passions. So, on this occasion, he behaved as he usually did, drinking with his companions to lighten, for a bit, the duty of his office, but keeping to himself mostly, a decorated knight without a Guinevere in a savage land.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  A few years before this trip, in the late winter of ’55 and several years after the death of his first wife, George Pickett had found the person whom he considered his love of a lifetime. She was a slender thing, slight enough that his round, robust features dominated the visage of the two of them when they stood side by side so that she almost disappeared, it seemed.

  Perhaps that is why the quietly performed marriage between a U.S. infantry captain and an Indian teen largely went unnoticed in the Bellingham community. Or perhaps it was that Pickett normally kept to himself anyway, guarding his privacy and rarely staying at the fort he had built.

  In the winter of ’56, within ten months of marrying his “little Indian savage,” as he liked to tease her in the Chinook jargon with which they communicated, she delivered a healthy, slight-framed boy. Four months later, she died in one night from a convulsive fever that followed a fit of dyspepsia.

  Leaving the baby with a family living close to the home he had built for his family, Pickett wept repeatedly for days on a self-granted leave.

  Ingalls and other friends couldn’t console him.

  When he returned eight weeks later, he was sober and resolute with a sense of duty that stayed with him during the remaining time he spent in the Northwest. Those who served under his command knew him to be gentle and serious, carrying a grave sense of purpose devoted to maintaining peace while following orders with enough flexibility that it was sometimes misinterpreted as permissiveness by those prone to pushing their luck.

  In April of ’57, after reporting rumors to the U.S. Commander, William S. Harney, of a possible move by the Esquimalt-based British Navy, Pickett received orders to make preparations to move his command. The dispute between the Brits and the United States over Puget Sound border territory seemed to be intensifying again.

  With the Oregon Treaty of 1846, a prolonged and bitter international and presidential election dispute over the U.S. and British North American borders had been resolved, or so it seemed. But immediately after the signing of the treaty, Northwest and British Co
lumbia residents found an ambiguity in it that established one new point of contention: the wording in the document had not named the boundary waterway to which the term “strait” referred. The Brits claimed it meant the Rosario Strait, which would have included San Juan Island with Vancouver Island as British territory.

  But the Oregon territorial citizens believed it had meant the Haro Strait, which would have placed San Juan Island in U.S. possession.

  Recognizing the strategic value of controlling by fort and gun the most direct pathway into the harbor-rich Puget Sound, Harney ordered Pickett to maintain the Bellingham garrison, prepare to take command of troops from nearby Port Townsend, and upon further orders, establish a new position—robust fortifications on this northernmost of a chain of islands that ran down the Puget Sound as far south as Tumwater.

  In addition to maintaining an advantage over the British, Harney reasoned, hostile indigenous people, loosely aggregated into various tribes, occupied every one of the many islands. The five thousand United States citizen settlers who had moved into the Puget Sound area over the past eight years needed protection from the marauding Northerners who, in recent years, had raided white and native settlements as far south as Olympia. Harney knew that control of San Juan Island would be important to the success of that responsibility as well.

  The British Hudson’s Bay Company had abandoned its outpost in Steilacoom, one hundred nautical miles south, twenty-one years earlier, but it still maintained a presence on San Juan, which was immediately across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Vancouver, most certainly for the same strategic reasons that Harney had recognized.

  The establishment of the fort might likely infuriate the Brits, but Harney believed the issue needed to be resolved. The venerable Harney had never been afraid of confrontation or controversy, whether from an enemy or a superior officer. He also knew that Captain George Pickett would discharge his duty with honor.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  While in Victoria, Pickett had listened in the taverns for discussion from the Brit marines about the San Juan controversy, or for any signs they were preparing for any new expeditions. But neither he nor Ingalls had heard any rumors, so he surmised that perhaps the dispute was dying down. Perhaps he would not have to move his garrison after all, he speculated. And further orders from Harney had not arrived.

  Lost in thoughts as they traveled back to Bellingham on this late fall day, he briefly noticed the waters south of Vancouver were full of life that just was not present in the Chesapeake he had known back home in Virginia.

  He observed in the distance, hundreds of sea lions chasing salmon, and boiling pockets of dogfish furiously feeding on squid. Seagulls and cormorants hovered over the tumultuous feeding.

  It was beautiful, he thought, a rich, endless, beautiful bounty.

  As they neared port in Bellingham, Pickett briefly turned to Ingalls and thought about their friendship and the events of the past few days. He wondered if he had diminished Ingalls’s regard for him in any way. He always worried about things like that.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Ingalls, who sat on the starboard side of the rig, had been observing Pickett staring off into the distance. He knew his friend Pickett well and also how difficult the past year had been for him. Ingalls had cajoled the young captain into this trip, hoping it would pull the man out of his doldrums. And Ingalls knew what was troubling him. He was still in mourning.

  George Pickett and Rufus Ingalls had been friends since their days at West Point. Ingalls, three years older than Pickett, had the privilege of seniority at the academy and the opportunity to discipline Pickett and other plebes during the hazing that accompanied initiation.

  Observing the accommodating manner in which Pickett responded to the top-down pranks the upper classmen bestowed on frightened newcomers, Rufus marked him to be a good fellow. Thereafter, he always enjoyed Pickett’s company and jollity, in comparison to the stiff responses and self-important strutting of most of the other plebes.

  And, although Pickett’s playfulness and casual attitude earned him demerits, pushing his ranking down to dead bottom in his class by the time he graduated, it made the rigidity of the environment tolerable for fellows like Rufus Ingalls, who at that time looked upon military professionalism as a secure convenience rather than a calling.

  Over time, he grew to admire Pickett’s ability to always balance levity and abandon with a sense of gentle propriety. And Pickett never seemed to lose that sense of playfulness.

  In the ’46 Mexican War’s battle of Chapultepec, his regard for Pickett was forever solidified after witnessing Pickett rescue the U.S. flag from a wounded colleague, the young Captain James Longstreet, and, under fire from both Mexican Army regulars and desperate young men from the regional Mexican military academy, Ingalls saw Pickett climb a ladder up the bell tower of the fortress, tear down the enemy’s colors, and replace it with the Stars and Stripes.

  That rallied the Americans and seemed to deflate the Mexicans. In the midst of the wicked fight, Pickett, still waving the flag furiously, had turned to Ingalls and winked, saying, “Some fight, eh, Rufus?”

  Ingalls always remembered that.

  He thought about just how serious everyone had been in Mexico, seeing this as the opportunity for combat honor, overrating Santa Anna and the Mexicans, and underestimating themselves and the resolve that came from their conscious participation in the expansion of the country’s borders, the destiny of a righteous nation.

  He thought about the days in Mexico City, after they took Churubusco, all the young men in the cantinas; the happy Pickett, sporting his new bars from the field promotion he’d received from that flourish; the flush and swell of all the stories still running through their minds.

  Ingalls had kept in touch with Pickett after that, and when he found himself appointed Quartermaster for General Harney in Astoria, Oregon, he sought out his friend who had been assigned to establish the distant Bellingham fort.

  They sported together, Ingalls always enduring Pickett’s playful teasing, and had shared a few unsuccessful expeditions against the more hostile natives of the region.

  Ingalls had been there when Pickett met his second wife, a pretty brown thing called Morning Mist.

  On that occasion just two years ago, Pickett and Ingalls had accompanied a British foray into the eastern side of the lower Hecate Strait, to observe how the Brits conducted their military business with the aborigines of that region.

  The British territorial governor, Douglas, had arranged treaties with several clans, but ultimately had abandoned any form of negotiation. Instead, he had employed the same tactic as had his British counterparts with the aborigines in New Zealand—expropriating large tracts of land as white settlers moved in.

  Ingalls, appalled by this practice, had nevertheless been intrigued by the interactions between the British and the northwest natives because he had personally witnessed a distinct variation in the behaviors of the aboriginal natives and wondered how the Pacific Northwest natives might react to such scurrilous behavior.

  Both he and Pickett shared the belief that such actions would only increase the resentment of the natives against the whites, possibly provoking more Northerner raids. The tactics reminded them of the worst diplomatic mistakes they had witnessed earlier in their careers.

  So many broken treaties and misplaced trust in promises, he rued. The pattern hadn’t changed in years. The violent reactions of the aborigines to the expropriation of their homeland was almost always the same and predictable.

  While stationed in Texas after the Mexican war, for example, both he and Pickett had encountered southwestern native ferocity in the Arapahoe, Comanche, and Kiowa and had chased them across dry plains in various actions after particularly terrible atrocities against the whites.

  But this situation seemed to be different in so many ways.

  Both he and
Pickett shared the view that on the balance, in the Northwest at least, most of the abuse went from white to red, rather than the other way around. Ingalls had marveled at the difference between the scruffy, lean, and vicious Apache from the Northwest Coastal Indians, who were mostly fat and docile from the ready and rich food supplies that their fishing and foraging presented to them. It was as if the Northwest Indian’s placidity had made them easy marks.

  Because of their past experience in the Southwest, it surprised neither Ingalls nor Pickett that at least a few bands of Northwest Coast Indians, the Haida and Kwakiutl especially, responded to the British and American incursion into their territory distinctly differently than that of aborigines from many other more peaceful Northwest tribes.

  The destructive acts by the Northerners they had witnessed seemed consistent with their own understanding of what they, like most of the whites they knew, considered the primordial spirit of aborigines — violent, child-like and instinctive.

  When he or Pickett confronted natives around Bellingham and Astoria with stories of raiding, rape, and savagery, which only served to provoke the whites into further harsh retribution, the docile ones, like the Lummi and Nooksak, always pointed northward, blaming Alaskan and Russian aboriginal “Northerner” outlaws for descending into the softer south for prey and plunder.

  On that particular Vancouver expedition with the British, he and Pickett observed British negotiations with the peaceful tribes of the Tsimshian and Stikene. The tactics used by the Brits were particularly interesting and ultimately disturbing.

  The Hudson’s Bay translator, a Metís half-French half-native, named Antoine Bill, whose Suquamish mother’s clan had no fondness for any of the northern coastal tribes, seemed to be telling the native “tyee” chieftains that their “X” marks on the treaty documents were simply a sign of friendliness to the Brits, who were there only to keep order and safety for all people.