by Gar LaSalle
Not far away from the site of the slayings, Isaac’s party found Sam’s body, twisted in an outstretched contortion at the base of ravine. Apparently he had fallen off an embankment, likely in the fog the morning he fled, breaking his neck, dying, Isaac hoped, with swift mercy.
Over the large grave they had scraped in the clearing behind the cabins, Isaac prayed for forgiveness from the Lord who had spared him but had taken these sad, frightened lambs.
He regretted his curses against Sam. He put himself in Sam’s situation on that horrible day, tried thinking in the same way as Sam must have thought. The quiet, competent fellow had never been malicious or lazy, and Isaac forgave him for his cowardice.
Remembering his own terrible fear on that day, Isaac wondered whether God had heard the curses he uttered against the poor man, hope God had not answered those curses at the same time as He was granting him his own deliverance, and thought about God’s strange way of showing mercy to him in that exchange. He told himself that his own selfishness had to have had some purpose - perhaps a counterweight in some a strange form of Providential balancing perhaps - with a purpose that he might not ever understand.
He would accept that, forgiving himself as he did so. It was the will of Providence after all.
Chapter Twelve
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Anah
A half day before Ben Crockett saw the long boats on the strait, two other Northerner boats, commanded by Little Raven, split off to find water and look for more to plunder.
Anah with his six long boats continued north, carrying fourteen captives, to the mouth of the Campbell River on Vancouver Island. There he quickly sold the captives, all young healthy women, to a trapper who served as an intermediary to a prostitution slaver.
The trapper, Rene Marté, and his companion, a huge, one-eyed Negro known as Cull, had developed a number of similar business arrangements, including smuggling stolen contraband goods to the Tlingit and Haida. Their prearranged contract allowed Anah to obtain powder and winter supplies as well as the alcohol he would use to barter and stoke the rising anger of numerous tribal allies he hoped to recruit.
Anah understood the power of alcohol and guarded it as carefully as a weapon, distributing it just before an assault. But he also always carried a small flask for himself into his initial parlays because that seemed to make things easier.
In Port Gamble, near a new sawmill enterprise that had imported forty Irish men and women to work it, Little Raven’s raiders found an encampment of local natives, mostly Salish and Chimakum, who had converged on the small mill community. The Indian groups had come in gradually over the summer to see the mill, many out of curiosity, some for trading, and others for handouts.
By August, over four hundred natives surrounded the mill. The mill foreman had sent repeated requests to the forts at Port Townsend, Bellingham, and as far south as Olympia to see if some soldiers could be dispatched to break up the encampment and avoid what the foreman perceived as an inevitable calamity.
The foreman had reason to be concerned, for he had heard several rumors that the coastal Salish, rich in some parts of the Puget Sound and numerous in diverse, small bands throughout the Olympic peninsula, were being recruited by the powerful tyee known as Leschi and by other tribes to join in another attack on the Elliott Bay community and the white settlements further south. But thus far, the Salish had resisted.
Still, incursions by settlers throughout the region were disturbing to the Salish because of the audacity of the whites and the arrogant contempt they all seemed to display at every official encounter. It was rumored that Leschi, in particular, was angry about a land and reservation treaty that had been consummated at Medicine Creek a few years earlier, which, Leschi protested, he had never signed.
To further aggravate the hostilities, it was widely known that Stevens, the Washington territorial governor, had declared a war of extermination the previous year against the regional aboriginal tribes, thereby giving justification to both sides for senseless violence. As the white settlers increased in numbers, the disputes also increased, resulting in numerous deaths, reported and unseen.
A few Jesuit and Oblate missionaries had established a presence and had converted a good number of the clans in the preceding fifteen years, but most of the Salish had resisted that, as well. Thus, they hadn’t been exposed to the Christian concepts that likely prevented conflict from erupting in areas where the missionaries had built churches.
When Little Raven’s raiding party found the encampment surrounding the mill, it was already in a state of agitation, with arguments erupting between families over a variety of issues and old grudges as well as a few new ones, including the presence of the mill that many argued would soon attract more white settlers.
That was fine for some, who anticipated the advantages of trade. But others argued that their freedom would be taken from them, as had happened to those living in the eastern part of the sound and in Vancouver. The whites were experts at that, they knew.
The arguments were loud and hot.
Little Raven, despite an infirmity that year from a stroke that had left him with a clumsy left arm, still had his keen sense of strategy and immediately perceived opportunity in the making. Although the Northerners were likely not known by these Salish, he ordered the Haida and Skidegate in the long boats to remove their face paint, don clothing stolen from various raids against the settlers, and leave their long boats hidden in an attempt to conceal their identities as they moved through the Salish encampment.
They settled into a secluded area on the long beach near a stream, to rest and quietly observe.
Because so many clans and tribes were present, tribal languages and dialects spoken in the area were diverse, and, thus, many resorted to the Chinook trade jargon to communicate with one another. Observing this as an advantage, Little Raven, adorned with telltale double labrets on his lower lip and prominently tattooed, kept himself covered. He forbade his warriors to speak in their native Makan and had the least conspicuous of his Haida warriors be the spokesperson, conversing exclusively in Chinook when any interaction was necessary.
Thus, the Northerners’ presence in the camp went unnoticed for several days. On the fifth day, however, a Makah woman, slaved to a Salish tyee, passed on the outskirts of the Northerners’ encampment to retrieve fresh water. There she encountered a young Haida man bathing in the stream.
At first, she was aroused by the warrior’s well-proportioned, naked physique and, while observing from a thicket upstream, found herself flushing and faint. But after a few minutes, the young warrior turned to the front, and she recognized the significance of his tattoos. As a little girl, she had witnessed a terrifying raid by Haida against her Tatoosh clan.
He was a killer.
Each one of his tattoos told a story, and the way he bathed himself, watching with narcissistic pride as the water fell over his young, muscular body, instantly reminded her of a vicious experience imposed by similar arrogant men, likely from his clan, who had left her family decimated and enslaved.
She hurried back to her own encampment and passed this information to the tyee of her small group, TsasiTa Na, also known as “Trader Johnny.”
Johnny, well known to white settlers in the area, was a shrewd and enterprising man and, always looking for profit, decided to keep news of the Northerners from the other Salish. Instead, he sold it to the mill foreman.
When the already frightened foreman heard the news, without waiting for full details, he immediately sent off a native messenger with a hastily scribbled letter to Port Townsend, where it so happened the steamer gunboat U.S. Massachusetts was docked, provisioning itself for a redeployment the next week to San Francisco.
Arriving two days later, the message was misinterpreted by the commandant of the naval ship, who ordered an immediate departure to rescue the mill from what he perceived as an im
minent attack by “several hundred Northerner Indians.”
By the time the Massachusetts arrived the next day, the native encampment was in turmoil over other issues. That morning, several shots had been fired in anger by Salish men who had squabbled during a bone-dice throw, and two men were wounded.
The mill workers, hovering nervously in their houses, heard angry shouts and yelling. Thoroughly terrified now, the mill foreman ordered all the employees to crowd themselves into a block house he had constructed for defensive purposes.
When the Massachusetts finally steamed into the Port Gamble bay at three o’clock in the afternoon, the foreman signaled from the block house that the camp was now under siege and had been fired upon.
The captain of the gunboat decided that the best way to break up the attack was to fire warning shots into the encampment woods nearby. Two fell short, killing several men, women, and children.
The Salish natives fled in several directions, but Little Raven’s Haida, seeing their opportunity evaporate, gathered their equipment and ran up the beach to where they had hidden their canoes, hastily pushing themselves into the high, late afternoon surf.
Because theirs was the only activity on the northernmost beach, it was easily observed from the Massachusetts. The commandant of the steamer, Captain Henry S. Melton, finally seeing an opportunity to destroy Northerner long boats within firing range, turned his starboard guns on the two canoes.
He ordered canister and grapeshot rather than shells, anticipating that the scattered discharge would provide better hits than shells from the eighteen-pounders.
Both of the fleeing cedar long boats were riddled badly in the cannonade but moved out of range of the Massachusetts, which by then had turned its attention back to the Indians on shore.
When the mess was complete, thirty-eight Salish and Chimakum on shore had been killed or wounded by the fusillades.
In the canoes, Little Raven was wounded in his back and belly by canister shrapnel and suffered a slow, agonizing trip back north. By the time they reached the Campbell River, he was dead, along with six other Skidegate and Haida.
And on the day of the Port Gamble massacre, Anah dreamed of his sisters again. This time they were blowing into the nostrils of Little Raven telling him to come back to the house because it was cold outside. But Little Raven refused to get up at their beckoning.
It was pouring down in a warm fall rain when the canoes arrived in their rendezvous place. Anah saw the drained, white body of Little Raven and, overcome by his angry grief, tore away his shirt, then ran into the woods and stayed there, naked for several days.
In lulls between cloudbursts, the Haida, preparing a makeshift funeral ceremony for Little Raven and the other warriors, could hear Anah in the distance, howling in a way that none had ever heard before. When he finally returned, he was covered with dried blood and the stigmata of self-flagellation and mutilation, fresh knife cuts along his legs and arms. He had pierced himself with branches through his ribs and chest. And he had a look on his face that never left him thereafter, a terrifying black mask of a stare, signaling to all an absence of any hope of mercy.
In the ceremonies, he vowed in front of the other lead men that he would have the head of a big white tyee to act as a footstool for Little Raven in the next life.
Chapter Thirteen
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Isaac
ATTACK THWARTED!
Heroic Naval action prevents another outrage
Northerners routed in bloody engagement
— The Colonist - October 16th, 1857
We are host to friends and prospective settlers.
God’s blessings shared.
—Isaac Evers’ Diary, October 16th, 1857
News of the Port Gamble conflict reached Whidbey the a few days later with descriptions of destruction of Northerner canoes and warriors.
The commandant of the Massachusetts reported a great victory and predicted that the bloody beating he had administered would finally end Northerner aggression, so demoralized were the survivors of the cannonade.
Official reports to General Harney stated that the Indians around the mill, “mostly Northerners, had been given ample and repeated opportunity to disburse but had refused to do so,” forcing Captain Melton to open fire.
The captain did not mention that long boats had escaped and he minimized the number of casualties that the natives had suffered. The ship’s marines had placed several of the wounded Salish, unable to flee into the forests, into irons, and the captain made a big show of transporting them out of the region and depositing them on a small island southeast of Victoria, presumably to perish. Without interpreters, he never realized that none of his captives were Northerners.
When the Whidbey settlers heard the initial reports about the events in Port Gamble, most assumed the raiding would stop, at least for the rest of the year, because the weather would soon preclude canoe travel on most of the sound.
Their reassurance was based further on common knowledge that the Northerners had always avoided direct confrontation with better-armed foes, and the presence of a fast steamer gunboat like the Massachusetts, independent of the wind, surpassed the ability of the raiders to move quickly in any weather.
If the gunboat patrolled the sound, as they had assumed it would henceforth, the Indians would desist. They did not know that the Massachusetts was bound for San Francisco in one week. They also did not fully appreciate how important revenge for wrongdoing was to the Haida and all other tribes.
Isaac returned from his burial detail to a settlement much relaxed from the week before. The Whidbey families had seen no other long boats. The regional newspaper, The Colonist, had reported that a large contingent of northern marauders had been clapped in irons and taken away.
Hearing the stories related to the Port Gamble battle, Isaac smiled at heaven, which had surely sent an answer to his repeated requests to General Harney, Governor Stevens, and the numerous legislative contacts he had in Olympia.
Isaac had good reason for his requests. For the past two years, since the uncoordinated attack by several tribes on the Elliott Bay community, most of the naval patrolling had been done with small, slow-sailing gunships that concentrated on the south sound, where numerous tribes still were considered hostile.
The thirty-four-gun Decatur sloop-of-war that had saved the Elliott Bay Settlement during the attack had long since departed the Northwest waters. The United States Navy did not have enough ships deployed on its long West Coast to patrol all the waters it now owned, and General Harney, without ever creating any formal agreement, had decided he would leave the major responsibility for containing the most hostile of the aborigine tribes to the British navy, which by contrast, had established a formidable presence in Victoria.
Yet the Brits seldom ventured into southern Puget Sound ports. The sporadic violence that every settler anticipated as a risk of pioneering could not be predicted, and thus, it was almost impossible to halt. And so, the Port Gamble events and the reassurances that had come from them did, indeed, seem like a godsend.
But Providence had not established a real balance.
Four weeks later, in mid-November, immediately after a three-day deluge, with high winds that toppled men and trees alike, two Indian visitors, an elderly man and woman, landed on Isaac and Emmy’s western-facing beach, just south of the small community on the plateau.
Dressed in pioneer garb, each wearing long pants and red calico long-sleeved shirts, they bore no visible markings on their faces or hands. Speaking in Chinook, they found a local Salish native, Jim Thomas, who occasionally worked for Emmy. They queried him about where they might find the local physician, Dr. Joseph Edwards.
Edwards, trained and apprenticed in Philadelphia, had settled on Whidbey three years before and had established a widespread reputation for compassionate homeopathic care. He deliv
ered his potions and repaired broken bones with enough success that some even sought his opinion on other, nonmedical matters, travelling from as far as Elliott Bay and Bellingham on occasion for his consultation.
He, like Isaac, had developed a good amount of influence on legislative processes in Olympia, and both men had more than once been mentioned as possible gubernatorial candidates to displace Stevens, the mercurially tempered politician who had commissioned war in eastern Washington against several tribes and had infuriated even friendly native populations with his inflammatory rhetoric.
But Edwards was not at home that day, having departed in the morning for the south of the island to sit up with a young woman confined in the last stages of a first and very difficult pregnancy.
Normally, Edwards would have relegated the delivery to a competent island woman, Jenny Searing, who had a good amount of midwife and wet nurse experience. But this baby was malpositioned in its mother’s belly and just wasn’t descending as it should, so Edwards was going to try to rotate it for a head-first presentation to minimize the risk of delivering a breechling or stillborn infant.
Jim Thomas explained to the old couple that he had seen the doctor depart, carrying medical equipment with him on his Morgan filly.
They seemed disappointed with his answer, and when he asked what they needed, the couple responded with a question about whether any other big tyees like Edwards lived in the area.
Pointing toward Isaac and Emmy’s home, Thomas told them that a very important tyee lived in the house on the bluff, then went about his fish net mending.
The couple departed back down the beach.
The wind from the western strait always blows easterly in the early evening on the prairie plateau. On that evening, it kicked up earlier than usual and then settled down by seven.
Isaac was in the woodshed when the Indian couple appeared at his picket fence. His big old Labrador, Rowdy, began barking loudly, bringing Emmy to the door.