Tulalip, From My Heart

by Dover, Harriette Shelton

  I understand the pioneers used to feed Angeline. She could walk up one of the streets and eat in a kitchen of Dr. Maynard or somebody else. But they talked about how dirty she was. I always have to find excuses. If you are elderly and have to carry buckets and buckets of water and heat the water with a fire, it’s going to take a half a day or more to get a bath ready. By that time, you wouldn’t be able to stand up anymore. Somehow she wanted to stay there, and here her father and all of the rest moved to Suquamish. I don’t know why she stayed there.

  The beginning of Indian and American relations, shall we say, was when the government decided the Indians had to be civilized and join the white people in the mainstream of civilization. In order to do that, they would have to drop their customs, their languages, and religion—no more of it. For several years, the Indians were a people who were dispossessed and discouraged. One of the things that surfaced was the Ghost Dance in the 1890s for the tribes in the Plains. It was not felt out here that much because there weren’t as many white people out here in the 1890s. In the Middle West, the Indians were experiencing a death rate just like we were, and they were also mixed up like we were. They weren’t supposed to be beating the drum or following Indian religion. But when the Ghost Dance came up, many Plains Indians joined it—even such leaders as Sitting Bull. Old, old people, old leaders—famous chiefs—they joined the Ghost Dance and, of course, they sang certain songs. They danced all night, and the leaders made their speeches.

  Out here, we were supposed to be speaking only the English language. We were supposed to be part of the Catholic Church. When I grew up and got married, my father never set foot in the Catholic church again. He thought it was beautiful, but it didn’t reach him, especially when the priest would tell the Indians, if you don’t come to church, if you don’t follow this, you are going to hell. My father lived through our teachings of the old times.

  When I first remember seeing white people and hearing them speak, I was quite small. I must have been four or five years old—a time when you begin to remember things. At first, they are sort of like pictures moving along. The white people I saw in Marysville and in Everett all had light eyes, gray or blue. It bothered and worried me. I thought something was wrong with them. Their eyes looked so light, and I wondered if their eyes hurt them, or if they could see. It seemed they could see because they were talking with my father in the store with some other people. So I saw white people in Marysville when my father and mother went into town.

  People here went into town on horses and wagons way back then. They went into town perhaps once or twice a month, because it was a long journey. It took about two and a half or three hours for us to go from here to Marysville. The road wasn’t wide then. It was narrow and meandered so much it took a long time to go someplace.

  As I say, seeing white people worried me. I don’t know why I never asked my father about it, if that is what it was. I just worried about it. I thought perhaps their eyes hurt since their eyes looked so light.

  Then, the speaking voices of the women—white women—were very noticeable in comparison to the softer tones of the voices of my grandmother and her generation and my mother and her generation. I can’t tell so much with my generation, because we all went to the Indian boarding school where the teachers and the employees were white. They certainly had different colored eyes—some of them had light eyes and by that time many had darker eyes. It didn’t bother me like it did when I was small.

  My mother never ever went to any school. She grew up in a longhouse on Guemes Island. Father Simon, a Catholic priest, came there and baptized my mother when she was small, but she didn’t remember him. She saw some white people when they traveled to the Puyallup Valley to pick hops. My mother, who had a quiet speaking voice, told about experiences they had with white people when they traveled, while she was growing up, that were really frightening. I told one story in chapter 3. In this chapter I want to tell another one.

  They were traveling by canoe, in a group of several canoes, from Guemes Island to Neah Bay. They were invited to an Indian gathering, a potlatch, and they stopped to eat lunch near the Place with Brown Leaves.1 Far across the bay were two white men. When my mother’s family and her cousins were on the beach and spreading out their lunch, across the small bay all of a sudden the white men fired their rifles. The shots were landing around my mother and her group. Her uncles and the other men said, “Hurry up, hurry up! Everybody get behind the logs. Lie down in the sand.” One of her uncles was the last one to come from the canoes. He called to tell them to keep still and keep out of sight, but my mother looked up just as he was running and jumping over the logs. She could see him. The shots caught him in the jaw and through the head and came out the other side behind his ear. He fell down. My mother’s mother and some others crawled over to help him, to straighten him out because he was still breathing. He tried to say something, but he couldn’t talk, and he died in a very short time. My grandmother went over to her cousin, brother in our relationship, but they told my mother to keep still and stay there. So my mother saw her uncle die. There were still some shots. After a while it quieted down, and the Indians crawled over to the uncle who was dead. My mother said she was heartbroken and terrified because they told her to keep still. They thought the white men were going to walk around or come in their rowboat and kill the rest of them. They didn’t, and the shooting stopped. They spent the whole day, just before noon when this happened, and nobody had time to eat because they had just stopped for lunch. What really bothered them was having no water to drink, since it was still on the canoes, and nobody had time to unload it. There was no drinking water around there, and it was a very warm summer day.

  My mother was always careful with water. When I was a young teenager, I emptied the water bucket for my mother. She kept a bucket of water by the kitchen sink. It was filled every evening with fresh water and all day long it was filled with water. I remember I asked her one time, “Why do we have this water here? Just turn on the faucet.” She spoke to me in a very quiet voice and said to please sit down, and she told me what happened to them when her uncle was killed, and they spent a long, long day—terrified—and without water. Being without food was bad enough, but not having water was on the verge of being painful.

  My father said it was dangerous, sometimes, for Indians to go out to the Sound. Of course, Indians here traveled in canoes. They would go quite a long way in their canoes. Sometimes they met white people, a majority of whom were not especially friendly, but they would call out and greet them in Chinook Jargon, like “Klahoya” or something, and keep going. My father told about another time he was traveling by canoe with relatives and two white men crossing the bay shot at them. It was the same thing that happened to my mother and her people about the year before.

  My mother’s older sister was baptized Julie. She married a white man who came here with some other young men from Illinois. They walked with a big convoy of covered wagons to San Francisco. They walked around there and looked at things and decided panning gold was not the way to go. It was just one mad mob there, so they got on a ship and came up to Puget Sound. They thought it sounded like what they wanted—farming land. His name was Daniel Barkhausen, a German name.

  Dan told us about how they walked up this way, north, from California and somewhere in Oregon. Of course, this whole area then was called Oregon Territory. Later it was called Washington Territory. But he said one place where they were was flat land, with some open areas, and acres and acres of prairies. They were resting at noon when they saw some Indian women, at a distance, walking. Apparently, they were going home. They had big baskets on their backs. One young white man said, “Watch me hit one of those women.” He lifted his gun and, of course, at that time all of them just had the one shot. He fired, and they saw one of the Indian women fall. They heard the others crying. They lifted the woman, tried to move her, and they kept on where they were going. But Dan and his friends stared at that young man. “What have you d
one?” They said, “We better get out of here. When those women get back to their villages, we will be in big trouble.” So they started walking fast. They were jogging along. The other young man thought it was kind of funny. Sure enough, they had not gone far when a group of Indian men on horseback came up to them. Dan said they didn’t run. They said to each other, as the horsemen were coming toward them, “There is no use running. Horses can catch us. If we stand here, they will know that we haven’t done anything.” But the other young man kept on walking. He started to run, but the horsemen surrounded them and said something they couldn’t understand. But Dan said they could understand that these men were asking who shot that woman. Dan said he made up his mind that he was not going to be torn apart, and he pointed at that other man. Both of them pointed at the young man. The Indians grabbed him, and they made a sign and made talk and told Dan and the other young man to keep going. They never knew what happened to their friend. They heard him screaming for a while as if he was in awful pain. Dan said they must have torn him apart.

  My grandfather Wheakadim was fourteen or fifteen years old when he worked as a shepherd down at Nisqually House where Dr. Tolmie was employed with the Hudson’s Bay Company. His father died when he was small. Some of the Indians went there and bought blankets, flour, sugar, and sold furs. When my grandfather decided to stay there, he met a lot of white people. He met a nice man who was his supervisor; he lived in a little cabin. One time they went all of the way to San Francisco to deliver a herd of sheep. They walked day after day, and they had two or three good shepherd dogs that kept the herd together.

  Days and days they were moving. My grandfather was way out there, far away from the wagon where his supervisor was, and several other people were with two or three wagons. They traveled south of the Columbia River. He said it was a big river because they had to go on a barge; it took quite a while, a day and a half, to get the sheep across. When he found out he was that far away from home, he tried to tell his supervisor that he had to go home. His supervisor said, “You don’t want to go home. You might as well go all of the way to San Francisco and enjoy it.” He told his supervisor he was worried because his mother and sister were back in Nisqually. The next morning he was sick, and so his supervisor, being a kind man, told him to ride in the wagon, and he laid him on a pile of hay and sacks of feed for the horses. The supervisor brought him a bottle of clear liquid, poured some into a spoon, and told my grandfather, “You take this,” and gave him a big tablespoon of it. Later on, my grandfather found out it was called castor oil. Of course, the supervisor told him what it was, but he felt so homesick and worried that he opened his mouth and swallowed it. It tasted bad and had the consistency of fish oil, and then he really got sick. He said he lay in that wagon for two or three days. His supervisor, though, was kind in bringing him up. There were hunters along. They would come in with deer, and his supervisor gave him broth and fried bread from his open fire. They had a good cook, but it took several days for my grandfather to get over the castor oil. And that was the only time he had castor oil. He said he would rather be dead, be sick and die, than take castor oil again.

  It took them hour after hour to get their sheep across the Columbia River on barges. They paid the owner to get across. After they were into strange country, my grandfather was quite a distance from the cook wagon and the other wagon, and the others were on horseback. The shepherds walked along with the herd. The three dogs they had were intelligent. You could just whistle once, twice, and they knew which way to run or turn the sheep herd. By another kind of whistle, they knew sheep were straying or going in different directions. So my grandfather was far out, somewhere, going south.

  He heard horses running, and when he stopped, he whistled to his dog and stopped the herd. By that time, he saw horses running at a distance and riding them were twenty-five Indian men. They were coming fast. My grandfather thought to himself, “This is where I die. They are not going to let me live.” He said they came right up to him. I guess they saw that he was a youth, and two of the men called out in a loud voice and pulled up their horses to stop from a full running gallop. So here the horses were, right around my grandfather. The Indian who seemed to be the leading man talked to him in an Indian language. He made signs and asked. He could see that my grandfather was an Indian because he had long, black hair, and that my grandfather understood him. He asked him, “Where do you come from?” My grandfather got so scared that he just said, “I come from . . .” and made signs that he walked many sunsets and sunsets from a place where you have to travel by canoe. They said, “We understand. We have your words,” and they talked together and then they all left. My grandfather said he was so frightened he could hardly stand up after they left because they had tomahawks and long Indian spears and a few of them had single-shot rifles. I guess they were part of the Modoc War.

  Before they got to San Francisco, they came to the Sacramento River, and his friend and supervisor said, “This is where we go on.” So they went on barges with all of their sheep, on down the river. Sometime after that, they got to San Francisco, and you wouldn’t believe the noise.

  His supervisor took him to a hotel. He didn’t know what it was, but it was upstairs, and they walked on things that took them to the top floor. His friend opened the door and showed him his bed, and he said, “This is where you will stay.” There was a bureau, because it had a mirror. For the first time, my grandfather saw himself. He had seen himself in lake water, but his friend stood him in front of the mirror and showed him. It was in the corner of the room. He could stand in the window and look down on the muddy, muddy street. He said there were a lot of men walking up and down that muddy street and teams of horses that were loaded down with goods. The men were screaming and cursing; he heard a lot of cursing for the very first time in his life. Indians could always learn swear words (or anybody can, even children) faster than other words. But my grandfather watched this mad mob all day long.

  He said he finally got hungry and enough nerve to go out. His supervisor told him where to go. I think he took him downstairs and up the street. So he was able to push his way along. One place had swinging doors, and his supervisor told him, “You can’t go in there.” Those doors would fly open, and maybe two or more men would fly out of there, cursing and screaming. They landed in the mud of the street and were fighting. My grandfather was pretty frightened for a while, and then he found they went right by him. He thought they were going to kill him, but they didn’t especially notice him. He found a place to eat. He had already been eating with a knife and a fork and a spoon.

  His supervisor was gone that day. The second day he came back and gave my grandfather a handful of gold money. He told him to take care of it; it’s money. But he said, “I’ll take you to a store, and you can buy what you want for your mother and for anybody else.” He took my grandfather to a couple of stores. He saw bolts of wool and velvet, and he made up his mind that he wanted to bring yards of black and blue velvet for his mother and his sister.

  The Indians called velvet “dázał.” Dázał is a fur of a very rare seal that didn’t come into the Sound, but Snohomish Indians used to trade with Indians in Neah Bay for it. They had a lot of dázał pelts. They appeared in Neah Bay at certain seasons. They had a lot of beautiful black furs, dázał, and they made men’s coats and vests and women’s blouses with it. When the Indians first saw velvet, such as when my grandfather came back with several yards of velvet, he knew what it was; the Indians called it dázał, which was that kind of a rare fur.

  As I said earlier, my grandmother used to wear blouses that were made of velvet, especially on Saturdays and Sundays. She would always put on either navy blue or black velvet blouses and skirts. All the Indian women that I saw back then wore velvet blouses and skirts for Sunday. Along about that time, the velvet, it seemed, began to disappear, because it seemed the priests and the agents—we were supposed to be getting civilized—didn’t actively discourage velvet clothing but they didn’t want
us wearing it. My mother wore just calico all of the time except Saturday and Sunday; my grandmother used to wear calico, too. She always wore blue calico with tiny little figures in it.

  My grandfather’s supervisor-friend said, “You have to have thread.” My grandfather used to help his mother with sewing leather shirts and vests, so he knew about needles. He got a pack or two because, he said, after that needles could get lost like nobody’s business. Somehow they drop. His sister would be working and would lose a needle.

  He came home with yards of black and blue velvet and thread and red ribbon that he thought was pretty. It was about an inch wide. He thought it would look nice on his sister to tie her hair because she had long braids.

  His supervisor told him, “You can get your ship tomorrow and go back home.” My grandfather had already made up his mind to go home, and he wondered how he could get back home. He thought he could walk, but thought he could also be in danger—some white people might shoot him. His friend got him on the ship. It turned out a cousin of his was on that ship, a boy just about his age, who had been a deck hand.

  He had been in the city, too, for a month and had arrived with a load of lumber on a sailing ship. He worked unloading lumber in San Francisco. It was really booming—lumber, lumber, and lumber. His cousin also had yards of velvet and ribbon, thread, and needles. So my grandfather felt better. He thought, “Well, maybe I will get home.”

  The ship left San Francisco. It carried some other people—a white couple who appeared to be married. The women had such pretty dresses of velvet and hats with big feathers. At first, my grandfather and the passengers sometimes stood up on the top deck and looked at the land they were passing. There wasn’t a single town. They couldn’t see any houses for days, hour after hour, day after day.