Dungeness

by Polinsky, Karen;

  The female auklet travels a hundred miles or more in a day to find food. When her craw becomes too weighed down to handle the wind off the water, she unloads her catch. From time to time these regurgitated fish have been known to rain down on top of the feathered hats of the ladies strolling in Port Townsend.

  Hungry, I opened up my satchel to rummage for crackers.

  “Ahhh.”

  With a hollow klonk a weird object tumbled into the bottom of the canoe. I held it up to examine it. A cedar figure six inches tall; a crone with a wincing forehead, stained purple. The right arm is extended. Her wrist is flexed, fingers outstretched like the petals of a flower. The center of her right palm harbored a tiny hole. From all respects a terrifying toy, tenderly worked by a skilled craftsman.

  “Ahhh,” I cried out again and dropped it.

  Jake scooped it up with his paddle from the bottom of the craft. Peering at it, he remarked, “It could be a shaman’s fetish. Or, maybe a paddler wasting time at the lighthouse, waiting for the currents to change or the tide to come up, carved it to pass the time. It’s an Aia’nl.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A folkloric figure, not all that well-known. A spirit, in the shape of an old woman, who can simultaneously observe the past, present, and future. See her peering through that hole in her hand?”

  Jake handed it over. I held it out at arm’s length. With a thrilling jolt the object communicated all of the terror of the previous night into my singed fingers.

  “Let me see it,” said George.

  He leaned back on his haunches to examine it on top of his knee. “It’s hard to say. A well-preserved artifact? Though it might have been carved this morning. Where did you get it?”

  “How should I know? I opened my bag. It fell out.”

  My father remarked, “It’s evil. Quick. Toss it over the side.”

  I retrieved the doll from George. I brushed his calloused palm. Usually so cool, but now it was burning. “No.” I said. “I’m keeping it.”

  I wrapped it up in a handkerchief and stuffed it inside the satchel. Who was the old woman with the purple brow? A vision, or real? With three salty fingertips I touched the three incisions. Jake called her the Aia’nl. She seemed to be searching for me. Why? To kill me? To save me? The weird doll whispered, “I am yours.” Like the lamp on top of the lighthouse tower, the Aia’nl would illuminate my quest.

  Wooden figure of a man with European overcoat carved in the 1800s from the Myron Eells Artifact Collection owned by Jamestown. Photo courtesy of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe.

  Two Views of a Massacre

  c. 1828

  The first massacre in the history books is not the violence at Dungeness, but a revenge mission by white soldiers hired by the Hudson’s Bay Company, or HBC. At Diamond Point, on the extreme northwest tip of Discovery Bay, the HBC murdered at least two-dozen men, women, and children. The attack was a punitive strike against the S’Klallam, retribution for the killing of a Scottish fur trapper. Ironically, after the incident, leaders on both sides defended their actions in nearly identical terms: HBC Chief Factor John McLoughlin and the S’Klallam chief both claimed that a violent reaction was necessary to keep their people safe.

  Just the Facts

  The murdered fur trapper Alexander McKenzie, chief trader for the Canadian Northwest Company, should not be confused with Scottish Sir Alexander MacKenzie the first white to successfully cross the North American continent.

  This less fortunate and long-forgot trader with the same name had business in Victoria. On foot he made his way to Port Gamble to find the S’Klallam chief to hire a canoe to guide his party across the Strait to British Columbia. The chief appointed his son, and one other boy, to convey the group of five to the British outpost.

  The crossing, delayed first by a storm and then by the shifting tides, took two days. In Victoria, McKenzie went about his business. A little more than a week later, when the canoe shoved off for the return crossing, it held one more passenger: McKenzie’s wife, a Chinook. The Native woman had been waiting for McKenzie in Victoria. At first, the S’Klallam youth, afraid that the Chinook might see them as accomplices in a kidnapping, refused to take her. When McKenzie insisted, they agreed. Without further mishap, the canoe returned to Port Gamble.

  However, once the canoe party returned home, McKenzie, displeased with something the boys had done, refused to pay. McKenzie and his men departed. That night, S’Klallam warriors ambushed and killed all five white men. Their bodies, clubbed to death, were left in a clearing. McKenzie’s Chinook wife was captured.

  That summer, HBC’s chief factor McLoughlin ordered his men to get the girl and punish the tribe. As a result of the HBC mission, up to twenty-seven S’Klallam villagers died. None of those killed played any role in McKenzie’s murder.

  The S’Klallam Version

  The chief never denied that S’Klallam warriors, at his urging, ambushed and killed McKenzie. When the fur trapper refused to pay, he felt he had to act. The chief believed that if he allowed the insult to stand, the S’Klallam would continue to be exploited by the white traders. In his mind, a show of force was required.

  McKenzie and his men, wearing backpacks, appeared in the S’Klallam village. They asked to be conveyed to Fort Langley in Victoria. The chief agreed to find two dependable boys.

  Then, according to S’Klallam witnesses, McKenzie demanded, “Do you have any food? I’m so hungry I could eat a dog.”

  As a joke, the chief offered to sell the white men an emaciated beast sniffing the fur-trapper’s boot. To the chief’s surprise, McKenzie assented, and the dog was killed, skinned, strung up on a tree limb, and flayed.

  The chief, astonished but still attempting to be cordial, remarked to McKenzie, “Looks like venison.” The chief was even more surprised when the white men refused to eat it. Was the dog killed to impress the Indians with the cruelty of the white men, or merely as a crude jest? On this point the chief’s curiosity was never satisfied. The next day, when the men left, the sad corpse of the dog, untouched, dangled from a bent bough.

  About two weeks later, the whites and the two young men returned, this time with an added person in their party, McKenzie’s Chinook wife. McKenzie told the chief, “These boys are worthless. I don’t intend to pay.”

  After McKenzie and his men departed, the boys displayed their bruises. One of them had suffered an injury to the lower spine when one of McKenzie’s men kicked him with his boot to make him work faster.

  That night, the chief convened a special council. He asked, “What would the Bostons do if we had done this thing to them?” He told a group of S’Klallam raiders to track McKenzie. At nightfall, they followed him to the dark edge where the trees bleed into the shore, and hunkered down into the shadows.

  One of McKenzie’s men, still awake, noticed the ducks rising, how they seemed to carry the light of the moon on their wings as they lifted up off the Strait. The man remarked aloud, to no one in particular, “Ducks don’t fly at night. Except, for a reason.” Without troubling to take off his boots, he laid down and tossed a blanket over his head.

  The Indians crept up. In the silvery light, the blades of their hunting knives, which had been pressed up against their thighs, came to life. The screams of the first victim woke up the others, who raised a ruckus, but not for long. McKenzie was overtaken with a club, his wife captured.

  The White Point of View Takes Over

  HBC’s Chief Factor, McLoughlin, put together a corps of sixty employees, government soldiers, and volunteers to avenge McKenzie’s murder. When asked why, McLoughlin gave the same reason as the S’Klallam chief. He explained to his soldiers that if their expedition failed, not one of his people would ever feel safe again.

  One of the soldiers, a Hudson’s Bay clerk named Frank Ermantinger described the mission in his journal on the seventeenth of June as “a fiasco beset by quarrels.” For example, a last-ditch effort to keep the incursion secret turned out to be �
��a burlesque,” to use Ermantinger’s word. On July 1 when the soldiers arrived, a US gunboat, The Cadboro, called in to support the HBC mission, sounded a greeting with its gun. Because the S’Klallam, mostly women and children had no previous contact with white soldiers, were ill-prepared for what happened next.

  At daylight white militias in canoes stumbled upon two S’Klallam longhouses on the edge of the village at Diamond Point. One soldier, and then another, perhaps believing that the village harbored those who had murdered McKenzie, fired. “Two families, I believe, were killed. Three men, two or three women, a boy and a girl.” According to Ermantinger, these Natives believed that HBC blankets, soaked with water, were impervious to HBC lead. They crawled underneath the blankets, and died. In the opening foray, one white soldier was injured in the crossfire of company guns.

  Chief Trader McLeod and his officers could not agree whether the real objective of the mission was to punish the S’Klallam raiders, or to ransom McKenzie’s Indian wife, known as the Princess of Wales. Either way, the expedition would have to negotiate. Very soon, the tribal leaders arrived in their painted canoes. They climbed aboard the Cadboro. In the middle of the talks, two Indians, fearing for their lives for reasons unknown, leaped off the ship. When they ignored the order to halt, the canoe on the deck exploded. One Indian died instantly; another, wounded, was seized.

  A moment later Captain Simpson appeared on the deck. Furious, he informed HBC Chief Trader McLeod that no one but the ship’s captain could issue the command to fire. But . . .

  “Since this business has begun,” Simpson said, they might as well “make the most of it.” By this he meant that McLeod should issue the order for The Cadboro to fire on the S’Klallam village. McLeod agreed; the village burned.

  An estimated twenty-seven died. McKenzie’s killers were never identified. The following day, McLeod traded the wounded warrior for McKenzie’s wife. He declared the mission a success. Later, the action was reviewed and found wanting. As a result, McLeod failed to achieve a promotion.

  25

  Port Townsend

  c. 1889

  As the night clouds tumbled by, the silver-dollar moon illumined the sheer cliffs rising to a height of well over a hundred feet. Jake and George, perspiring and sighing, pulled around the tip of Point Wilson. The sandy embankment, edged with fir, suggested a vast wilderness rather than the thriving port with brick fronts, pastel cupolas, and white steeples, just around the bend. For now, nestled in the tree line against a bluing sky, a single man-made feature emerged: the square top of a tiny castle.

  Six years previously, Episcopal pastor John B. Alexander erected the brick tower to impress his bride-to-be. He failed. By the time he returned to Scotland to fetch her, she had married someone else. A remote mini-castle with a view of the San Juan Islands was not enough to persuade her, or any other lassie, to linger long in that lonely landscape.

  Rounding the tip of Point Hudson, the Strait enters the Puget Sound. Jake maneuvered our canoe over and around square boulders and other glacial erratics dropped by the mile-thick ice sheet that retreated 15,000 years ago. After another ten minutes of paddling, the bluff dropped down to a beach, where canoes of every length and width fronted the tent-like shelters of the itinerant Indians that stopped to trade or repose for a while.

  As we passed by, an elder wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat, with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, crouched down to poke at a rack of blood-red salmon. The night wind fed the dancing flame. Two small boys urged a white dog to leap through a steel hoop. A firecracker, or maybe a pistol, exploded; one man swore and several others laughed. The scene on the beach was an altogether festive one. By now I was starving; I pestered my father to order Jake to put in at Point Hudson. But no, he told me, our goal was Union Wharf.

  In a weeklong bash the port city was celebrating the Act of Congress and rubber stamp by President Benjamin Harrison that established the state of Washington and an international boundary with neighboring Canada. But as Blake had observed: Port Townsend, also known as the Key City, didn’t need an Act of Congress to throw a party.

  Port Townsend Bay hosted half-a-dozen two- and three-masted schooners, naval ships, steamships, and tugs. Half-a-dozen brigs had dropped anchor in the harbor. At the beachfront docks, a clutter of sailboats, rowboats, and canoes created a chaotic scene. Water Street, the entry to the downtown’s commercial area, featured in brick, granite, and marble all of the enterprises required in a settlement with development potential: hotels, banks, cafes, and saloons. The Hastings Tower, with its ornate front, wedding cake trim, and a toothpick rail, looked as if it would be more at home in Paris or London than in a western town on the rim of the continent. Up on the bluff, the cottages and more stately homes of the well-to-do, punctuated by two church steeples, staunchly held their ground against the burbling up of sin from the teeming waterfront.

  As Jake Cook eased the canoe onto the beach alongside the base of the busy dock, Carl readied the sacks of potatoes and onions. I could do nothing but maintain an upright posture in the creaky canoe and stare. The glitter and throng, horns and bells, hooves and boot heels, howling hounds and sailors singing, the stars and the firecrackers, were so distracting that I forgot to be afraid.

  Drunken mariners and street boys in scraves pressed past gentlemen in frock coats teetering on top of their canes. A bobble of plumage caught my eye. Parrots cloaked in satin, trilling and teasing, one in royal purple, the other emerald green. In the twilight, the ladies laughing loudly, slid by.

  “Don’t look,” Carl ordered.

  “At what?” I yelled back.

  A brilliant POP, followed by an astringent whiff, made Carl leap.

  I giggled.

  As Jake handed up my satchel. The festive atmosphere seemed to make him more serious than ever. To Carl, he said, “I’ll take the canoe round to the beach below Point Hudson. Meet me there. It won’t take thirty minutes for you to deliver her uptown.” Jake treated me as if I were an errand of the most trivial variety; once dispensed with and promptly forgot.

  Carl said nothing and rubbed his chin. He didn’t have to say the word for me to guess what he was thinking: “Whiskey.”

  Standing alone on the dock, George knew not what to do or say. He wiped his palms, blisters oozing, on his thighs. I stepped up, seized his injured hand, and kissed it with a healing tenderness. Well, not exactly. Licked it, more like. An awkward gesture, but at least it was something.

  “Goodbye, George.” I stated.

  I lifted up on my toes and rubbed my forehead, nose, and chin on his hard hairless chest, while my severe father looked on.

  With his index finger George lifted up my chin.

  “Don’t forget.”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  His driving ambition? My past? Our future? The weird doll? Blinking back tears, I nodded, as if I knew. George, attempting to smile, instead grimaced and turned away.

  Carl had agreed to meet Judge Swan at a bar for sailors known as the Blue Light. I held tight to the cuff of his greatcoat as we stepped away from the pier. I had no parting words for Jake, though I doubt that he noticed or cared. He was too busy taking care of business.

  We shoved past the drunken crowd. Halfway there, I stopped. Obstructing the foot traffic, a young man, exceedingly pale and slender, stood on a wooden shipping crate gesticulating madly. His glistening top hat made him look leaner and taller, like a slash of black ink.

  With a bow he announced, “The Ballad of Harriet Hastings. A classic verse, composed on an unpaid bill on top of a bar last night by me.”

  “Look, father,” I said, tugging on his sleeve.

  “What?” asked Carl.

  “It’s a poet.” Actually, his silk scarf and stagey style reminded me more of an actor. He was, without a doubt, the most handsome man I had ever seen. Agog, I waited to see what he would do next.

  “Millie. Come away. A scammer and a con, that’s what he is.”

&n
bsp; I refused.

  Carl sighed.

  The poet-actor announced an original verse, very fresh, entitled: Hattie, She Did It for Daddy.

  A frowzy woman, whirling a soiled silk parasol though it was dark outside, cackled. Curious, the frenzied crowd drew in. Two weeks before Hattie Hastings from Port Angeles had been cuffed for smuggling drugs across the Strait. The young miss at the center of the scandal was excessively attractive. In addition, Hattie Hastings is “no dope,” the poet punned.

  According to the Port Townsend Morning Leader, Hastings, though caught with the goods, at the hearing convinced the judge (Swan, I found out later) that she was, in fact, no criminal, but instead a dutiful daughter doing all she could for her impoverished family.

  The poet declaimed:

  Too pretty for jail

  Too purt to skip bail.

  The paper called Hasting’s testimony “gushing and sloppery,” Judge Swan released her into the custody of the Deputy United States Marshal Lee Baker:

  With a price on her head,

  Marshal put her to bed.

  with a flourish, the poet concluded—

  The cop and the smuggler

  snuggled.

  The crowd guffawed.

  “Not bad,” remarked Carl. “Then again, not good.”

  Then he noticed the tears on my face. Apparently, I wasn’t immune to the poet’s craft. “It’s sad!” I exclaimed. “She wasn’t a bad girl, not really. If she committed a crime, she did it to please her father. In the city anything can happen. Oh, Carl. I promise, no matter what, I’m sticking to the straight and narrow.”

  “Don’t fret.” Carl laughed, wiping my face with his cuff.

  When the poet-actor passed the hat, the happy mob slid away. I begged Carl for a nickel but he would not give way.