by Ivan Doig
At Neah, Swell’s brother Peter came and wished me to go with him and select a suitable spot to bury Swell....
I did as he desired—marked out the spot and dug out the first sand.
And this further: Peter also brought up the large Tomanawas boards—the Makahs’ cedar tableaus of magic which would stand as the grave’s monument—of Swell’s for me to paint anew....
There, then, is Swan, or at least a shinnying start on him. A penman from Boston asked to trace afresh the sacred designs of a murdered Northwest chieftain. I can think of few circumstances less likely, unless they are my own. The onlooker who has set himself this winter’s appointment back into the last century and across geography to the Olympic Peninsula and elsewhere along the coastal tracery of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and indeed into the life of a person born ten dozen years before him.
Day Two
...Capt John was here today, Swan writes from a century ago, and I related to him a dream I had last night, in which I saw several Indians I formerly knew who are dead. John scud it was a sign the “memelose” or dead people are my friends and I would soon see that they would do something to show their friendship....
Fifteen past nine. Out in the dark the Sound wind visits favorite trees, is shaken off, hankers along the valley in stubborn search. The gusting started up hours ago, during the gray fade of daylight that is December evening, and by now seems paced to try to last the night. Until the wind arrives with dusk, these past days have been at rest: sunless but silent and dry. The neighborhood’s lion-colored cat, inspector general of such weather, all morning tucked himself atop the board fence outside the north window as I began to read Swan. Out of his furry doze each several minutes a sharp cat ear would twitch, give the air a tan flick just to be certain it still could. Then the self-hug into snooze again.
The breakers, now Swan the third day after his dream, tore up the beach and rooted out immense numbers of clams which were thrown up by the surf. I gathered a few buckets full and soon the squaws and Indians came flocking up like so many gulls and gathered at least fifty bushels....
Nine-nineteen. I see, by leaning to hear into the wind, that the night-black window which faces west off the end of my desk collects the half of me above the desktop and its spread sheaf of copied diary pages into quiet of my own.
Nine-twenty. Capt John told me, this the morning following the beach bonanza, that the cause of the great quantity of clams on the beach yesterday was the dead people I dreamed about the other night and they put the clams there to show their friendship....
Nine twenty-one. Last night at this time, winter began. I noticed the numbered throb of the moment—the arrival of season at precisely 21:21 hours of December 21—which took us through solstice as if we, too, the wind and I and the fencetop cat and yes, Swan and the restless memories of departed Makahs, were being delivered by a special surf. The lot of us, now auspiciously into the coastal time of beginnings. Perhaps I need a Captain John to pronounce full meaning from that.
No, better. I am going to have Swan’s measuring sentences, winterlong.
Day Three
A phrase recalled this morning from John McNulty when he wrote of having journeyed to his ancestors’ Ireland: that he had gone “back where I had never been.”
Our perimeters are strange, unexpectedly full of flex when we touch against them just right. A winter such as this of mine—or any season, of a half-hour’s length or a year’s, spent in hearing some venturer whose lifespan began long before our own—I think must be a kind of border crossing allowed us by time: special temporary passage permitted us if we seek out the right company for it, guides such as Swan willing to lead us back where we have never been.
So Swan on one side of the century-line, myself on the other. Bearded watchful men both, edge-walkers of the continent, more interested in one another’s company than the rest of the world is interested in ours, but how deeply alike and different? That is one of the matters Swan is to tell me, these journal days when I stretch across to his footings of time.
James G. Swan had hastened west in the same scurry as many thousands of other mid-nineteenth-century Americans. Their word isn’t much known today, but at the time they were called Argonauts, the seekers drawn to the finds of gold in California streambeds as if they had glimpsed wisps of the glittering fleece that lured Jason and his Greeks. Like Jason’s, the journey for many of them was by ship, the very impatience for wealth to come evidently weighting the sailing vessels to slowness. Swan stepped aboard the Rob Roy in Boston harbor in late January of 1850 and climbed off at San Francisco a half-year later.
What exact cache of promises and excuses this man of New England left behind him can’t be known in detail, but they likely amounted to considerable. Something of the bulk and awkwardness of my own, I suppose, when I veered from Montana ranching to college and a typewriter. Swan was thirty-two years old when he set foot on the Pacific Coast. By the time of his birth in 1818—Turgenev’s year, Karl Marx’s year—in the north-of-Boston village of Medford, the Swan family name already had been transplanted from Yorkshire to Massachusetts for eighteen decades, evidently the devout achieving sort of New England clan which began to count itself gentry from the moment the Indians could be elbowed out of sight into the forest. (Swan himself was known to mention the family point of pride that his great-grandfather had been a landowner on the N.W. side of Bunker Hill, the Revolutionary War battleground.) Merchants, doctors, educators, lawyers populate the erect generations. Swan’s own older brothers stayed standard, Samuel as physician, Benjamin a minister.
But not James. He evidently reached down the excuse that occasional seafarers had cropped up in the family—his own father, said to have been lost in a gale while captaining a brig back from Africa in 1823; a legendarily adventurous uncle who had sailed in an early fur-trading vessel to the Pacific Northwest—and in his midteens started in on the try of a waterfront life in Boston.
Dallying around the docks, first as a clerk with a shipping firm and eventually as a merchandiser of ships’ supplies, must have suited the young Swan comfortably enough. With forests of sail sweeping back and forth before his eyes and the new steam vessels shuddering to life around him, this adventurer of the waterfront shows no sign that he made any ocean voyage of his own until he was twenty-three. Then he embarked on a Boston-to-Liverpool jaunt with a chore or two of his employer’s business attached and seems to have been content to do it just the once.
That once to Britain, however, jarred Swan’s writing hand into motion, and by my terms the wan sheaf of paper that has survived comes as ancient and entrancing and intriguingly hued as a cave painting. The thirty brownish tatty-edged long manuscript pages are by a decade the earliest of all Swan’s surviving paperwork, and must be a version he copied from a pocket notebook—it would have been the start of that habit, too—as soon as he returned to America. Any comparable paperwork having to do with my family would be drily governmental, in the Scottish archives, and likely would show sundry Doigs irretrievably in arrears on croft taxes or enlisting one of our number to die an infantry death in Madras or the Crimea. A bonus of archival magic, it is for me, that the pages of Swan’s life from his own hand begin here on the second of March 1841 and recite the two months in which he sailed the Atlantic and rambled interestedly around Britain.
The wilderness of waters which surround us on his crossing; the storm which tossed a fellow passenger beneath the table and his breakfast after him, his head was covered with a shower of fried eggs which looked for all the world like doubloons stuck in his hairk arrival to Liverpool and St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish have been walking in procession the whole day...all rigged out with green sashes and sprigs of shamrock, a species of weed similar to the chick weed. Weather, conveyance, schedule, meals, roadside fields, birds of those fields, even Swan’s morning disposition: I was very stupid today, the sixteenth of March, from the want of sleep last night and for the first time since I left home I felt
really homesick & would have been glad to have been home but as soon as I walked out I felt much relieved & hope to get my thoughts on a business train after a good nights rest. All, all come on report at the nib of his pen. So, too, the social impress of Britain of Dickens’s time. Liverpool astounds and horrifies this Bostonian with the hurly-burly of its streets: female scavengers...go round with baskets and collect all the manure & offal in the city which they put in heaps & offer then for sale. Their heaps are bought by the gardeners for a few pence to enrich the garden beds—It struck me as the filthiest work I had ever seen a woman engaged in & more especially as they used nothing but their hands to work with. Then the proverbial fishwives, a queer lot of beings & probably the lowest of the human race. Quickly the unsurprising exclamation: Liverpool is a shocking dirty place & I am sick enough of it. But Edinburgh is beguiling, the streets are laid out with a good deal of taste, and the trip southward a lark: In the carriage with me were a party of Irish Gentlemen & Ladies....They all took me for a Scotchman & as I had just left Scotland I could talk to them finely. London proves to be downright wondrous, Walked two hours this morning in one direction & every step of the way the street was crowded with people & vehicles. His young American eyes have not seen the like except possibly on a Boston market day when a drawbridge over the Charles River would hold up traffic, the crowd then is just the same as the streets are here all the time from sunrise to sunset. He glimpses the young queen, Victoria, trundling out of the Buckingham Palace grounds on her way to church: had a good sight of her face as she was looking out the carriage window she had on a little blue silk bonnet. He is drawn back and back to the stupendous dome of St. Paul’s, even though the Easter service there seems to him mumbled over in a very bad manner. Tours the new museum of wax figures shown by an old French woman & her son—the Tussauds—who are making a deal of money out of this affair. Rides the night mail train from London back to Liverpool: they go with the greatest velocity sometimes 50 miles an hour— about as fast as you could travel on the planet at the time—only stopping to get water.
Swan-among-the-Britons arrives at the last line of his journey having viewed a great deal to admire & much to censure, and that already is the exact Swan style I have begun to find amid his accumulating day-by-day pages on my desk, here at our shared ledge of the American landscape: banquet of details, ready snifters of opinion.
Something else of moment happened to Swan that year of 1841. He married rather above himself. Matilda Loring, of a prominent Boston printing and publishing family, a small, neatly built woman with a firm line of jaw, became his bride on the twenty-sixth of October.
Of the courtship and its aftermath Swan’s archival heap of paper is all too conspicuously silent. But from the circumstances, this reads as one of those marriages in which it is unclear whether the wife chided because the husband took on the world’s whiskey as a personal challenge or the husband fled into the bottle because the wife was a shrike. What is plain enough even in the thumbing scan of his life I have been doing these first days is that Swan continued to court the bottle long after, in the eighth year of marriage to Matilda, he pointed himself west across America.
I hunger to have overheard just how he said that pivoting decision. Swan and Matilda were living apart by the year 1849—he in a Boston boardinghouse handy to his waterfront life; she in Chelsea with the two children of the divided household, four-year-old Ellen and seven-year-old Charles—and did Swan simply come onto the porch one day and offer, Matilda, I have been thinking I will go to California?
The many weeks to round Cape Horn in 1850, the long climbing voyage along the Pacific shores, arrival: then Swan, to judge by his readiest recollection, was like a good many of us ever since in not quite knowing what to make of California. Dozens, scores of deserted ships clogged the San Francisco harbor he sailed into, a fleet of Marie Celestes left ghostly by crews which had swarmed to the goldstrikes.
Swan, too, completed the pilgrimage up the Sacramento to the mining camps, but only as a purser on a river steamer. I find that he hesitated in that job, and at a maritime firm’s dockside office in San Francisco, for only a matter of weeks, then signed onto a schooner bound for Hawaii to take aboard a cargo of potatoes.
Why Swan so promptly went sailing off for spuds is not at all clear to me, but his ear must have heard sweet somethings out there in the Pacific. The abrupt jaunt into the ocean does seem to have been instructive. (A proclamation from this period of his life: I never yet found that information was useless to any one.) He managed to linger at Lahaina on the Isle of Maui for twenty-five days, and one of his rare surviving letters to Matilda gives the islands and islanders a dozen pages of the same blunderbuss observation Liverpool and London had received: on great occasions or when the white men will pay the expenses they get up a feast called a Lu wow....This Lu wow consists of a series of Baked dishes such as Dogs Hogs Turkeys fowls fish Fruits and Greens....Their native dances being prohibited are only given by stealth or by express invitation of the whites. They are called Hoolah hoolah. I was desirous of seeing one....The natives all call themselves mickonaree or missionary which is the term they use to express their ideas of Christianity... there are but very few really sincere & devout persons among them, and are mostly like one I saw in Mr. Bolles store, who was cutting up some capers, when Mr B remarked, I thought you was a missionary Yes said the fellow pointing to his mouth “me mickonary here, all rest no mickonary.”
Back from that sudden Hawaiian sojourn, Swan at once settled again into a dockside way of life in San Francisco, again as a clerk for a ship-outfitting firm, through the rest of 1850, and through 1851, and through most of 1852. Evidently he found life sufficiently interesting by just being away from Massachusetts and alongside the rougher torrent of California waterfront traffic. His routine indeed seems to have been all but identical to the career left behind him in Boston except that he could do it at about half speed and without regard for hometown opinion: laxities which have been high among the rewards of the West ever since there was an America.
Then, late in 1852, down from the Oregon country to San Francisco arrived Charles J. W. Russell.
A self-described oyster entrepreneur, this visitor from the shaggy North was better portrayed by Swan as possessing a good deal of the romancing spirit of the Baron Munchausen. Russell had materialized in Oregon Territory in dream of some real estate scheme at the mouth of the Columbia River, found that he was a number of generations ahead of his time with that notion, and instead ended up at Shoalwater Bay, some few miles north of the Columbia, where he began dispatching shiploads of oysters to San Francisco. Even at the distance of 130 years the gent has a sheen. Russell in his swanky spielster’s way invited Swan to the oystering enterprise, and Swan seems to have accepted as rapidly as he could get the words out of his mouth.
I have prowled the Washington coastline where Swan plopped ashore at the end of 1852, and a misted, spongy, oozeful kind of place it is. On the western rim of bay what appears from a distance to be a line of white-gabled houses proves to be the foaming surf of the Pacific. The salt water reaches hungrily in through this entrance, and in a momentous splatter of inlets and fingers, the bay lying stretched from north to south for twenty-five miles and nearly ten across its greatest width, mingles with the inflow of half a dozen sizable rivers and who knows how many creeks and seeps. This mix yields a maximum of tan marshes and gray muddy tideflats, twenty-seven of these Shoal-water sloughs having been granted names by mapmakers and almost as many more not thought worth the effort. Yet around its eastern extent the squishy bay surprises a visitor with sudden firm timber-topped cliffs about a hundred feet high. Banks of a sandy clay, Swan once categorized them, intermingled with strata of shells and remains of ancient forest-trees that for ages have been buried.
All in all, a vast estuarine pudding in a clay bowl. One of the few ascertainable advances since Swan’s time has been the amendment of the big shallow bay’s name from Shoalwater to the less embarrassing
Willapa.
When Swan showed up here, more than likely shaking the rain off his hat brim, Shoalwater Bay’s sum of civilization totted up as a few huts, a temporary crew of sawyers cutting pilings, a shifting population of members of the Chinook and Chehalis tribes, and fourteen white “residents” who pottered away at oystering or homesteading. Fourteen kinds of Swan, it could be pertinently said. The flotsam group of whites hired the Indians to do the bulk of the oyster harvesting; the Indians held their own leisured ebb-and-flow view of life. Put at its more generous, this colony on the eastern shore of Shoalwater Bay in the early 1850s—Bruceport, it was dubbed, in memory of the schooner Robert Bruce which caught fire and burned to a hulk there—amounted more to an episode of prolonged beachcombing than a serious effort at enterprise. And Swan, stretching ever more distance between himself and those 220 years of New England rectitude in his family line, Swan fit with the idling oysterers like a pinky in an opera glove.
Much of the lulling appeal of that beachside life, as Swan recounts it, was simply the stomach’s common sense. The bay in those days set a kind of floating feast, offering as it did clams, crabs, shrimp, mussels, sand lobster, salmon, sturgeon, trout, turbot, sole, flounder, and, of course, oysters. The facet of Swan that was an interested and inventive cook—his victuals often make a sudden savory appearance in his pages; among the Indian delicacies he tried and liked are seal liver and cold raccoon—couldn’t help prizing this easy bounty. Just once in these plump years did Swan undergo a hungry time, and that was during one hectic onset of winter spent under a shared roof with an old whaling captain named Purrington. The captain was famous for cooking every thing that had ever lived. We had eaten of young eagles, hawks, owls, lynx, beaver, seal, otter, gulls, pelican, and, finally wound up with crow; and the crow was the worst of the lot. The captain once tried to bake a’skunk, but not having properly cleaned it, it smelt so unsavory when the bake-fettle was opened that he was forced to throw’skunk and kettle into the river, which he did with a sigh, remarking what a pity it was that it smelled so strong, when it was baked so nice and brown.