Tulalip, From My Heart

by Dover, Harriette Shelton

  He finally noticed a gambler on board the ship. He was dressed up fancy. He had a high silk hat and a shiny vest made of flowered taffeta. He came along on the deck, and my grandfather and his cousin were standing there just talking. His cousin was working on the deck, adjusting the sail. There were different sails on that ship. So my grandfather was standing on the railing, just talking to his cousin, who had already done what he was supposed to do. This man came along shouting at them. He hollered at my grandfather’s cousin, giving him orders, but they had just turned their heads and were looking at him, trying to understand what he was yelling about, when the wind changed a little. The boom swung and hit the man as he was walking along the edge. The railing didn’t extend all of the way to the edge of the ship, and he was knocked off of the ship. My grandfather said he could hardly stand the man. He was swearing at them. I guess he didn’t want to see them standing there. He was probably telling them to get down below when he was swept off. My grandfather and his cousin bent their heads. Some people came along who were passengers, and they watched him fall overboard. My grandfather was terrified. He thought, “They are going to throw us overboard because it’s our fault.” But a few of the white people looked at my grandfather and smiled and said, “Well, he got what he deserved.” He was a gambler and he earned a lot of money from several of them. They found out too late, but they should have known he was a professional gambler. Some of the men trailed a rope, but he passed it, switching around, and just missed it. The mate said, “Oh, let him go.” Nobody wanted him back on board.

  My grandfather said he was happy to come home, and then this happened. His friend-supervisor came up and told him, “It is not your fault. He had no business coming along there giving you folks orders, or telling you to stay downstairs. He was just a passenger kicking you folks around, and it was none of his business.” My grandfather had some bad dreams about it afterward. He felt that even though his supervisor said it wasn’t their fault, everybody should be careful swinging the booms.

  After days and days and days of sailing, he finally caught up with his mother and the Snohomish Indians. They were still around the Puyallup Valley, not Nisqually. They must have left there, and I think they went there to pick hops. Somebody had a big field of hops. Some of the earliest pioneers planted hops, and the Indians would come and work and pick hops in the fall. And so my grandfather found his people. He said his mother already had her hair cut short because she thought he was dead. Indian women used to cut their hair like that when they were in mourning. They cut their long braids when somebody in their family died. His mother was in that camp with her hair all cut. She couldn’t believe it when she saw him. Then, after she cried, she got kind of mad at him. She told him to go out and get to work. They all went out to pick hops.

  My aunt, my mother’s older sister, married a white man when she was almost sixteen years old. She had no choice because Indian girls didn’t have a choice in marriage anyway. Her father let her go to a white man in what became Bellingham. He was an assistant to the superintendent of the mines there. It was an Indian marriage.2 They didn’t have a preacher. When my aunt became pregnant a couple of years later, he took another wife, and that second wife was her aunt. She was a year older, about seventeen or eighteen. So those two girls became the wives of this white man.

  I asked my mother why did my grandfather allow his daughter and his sister to go to that white man and be the wives of this one man? Why? My mother said, “I think it was because he was worried about what would happen to them. It was a changing world all over, wherever the Indians went here on the Sound. Wherever they were used to going, there were white people. They were not exactly settled; they were camping or looking around, and there were quite a number of them who, shall we say, were brawling drunkards. Once in a while on Guemes Island, a few white men landed, looking around for homesteads. So my grandfather felt that his young daughter and his young sister should be someplace where they would be safe.

  Here, then, were my aunt and her aunt married to this man whose last name was Fitzhugh. His first name was Edmund Clare. I have seen his picture. He was a very handsome man. He had a nice two-story house. My mother and father talked about what nice homes quite a lot of those white people built. My aunt and her aunt had a big kitchen, dining room, a big living room, and a couple of big rooms.

  One time they were giggling around like girls do, and their husband came home. They hadn’t noticed the time on the clock in the dining room because they were just talking. He came home, and they started stirring up a kitchen fire. My aunt and my mother and my grandmother all knew that meals were to be prepared on time. The same time every day. Have the food prepared and hot. Don’t take something from yesterday, warm it over, and say, “There you are.” So my aunt and her aunt, here they were giggling around, doing housework, and their husband came home, and here they were just stirring up the fire. He came in and slapped them both. I suppose he had his own words, but he did slap them.

  The next day, when he was coming home, my aunt said, “I’m going to kill him.” He came in and he was mad at them, although they had the food almost ready. One of them brought him the dishes and set the place. He had nice things. He had dishes and a beautiful coffee pot that he wanted on the table in a certain place. He came in and sat down at the dining table.

  I used to hear this story when I was growing up, when I was a teenager, and I remember it so well. I think Indians remember words and descriptions. My aunt picked up some stove wood and said, “I’m going to kill him.” Her aunt was standing by the cook stove. “What are you going to do?” She said, “I’m going to kill him.” She walked into the dining room and hit him on the head with the stove wood. My aunt was about my height. I’m five feet tall, so she was really small, but she was strong. She hit him on the head and he fell to the floor. Her aunt came to the door, and as he hit the floor, he moaned. They just stood there petrified. Her aunt said, “You killed him!” She said, “I don’t care!” She went over and hit him again somewhere on his face or on his head. She didn’t know where. She started to hit him on the side. Her aunt grabbed her and said, “Stop it!” She realized what she had done. He was dead. They ran into the kitchen, and their shawls were hanging on the back of the kitchen door. They grabbed their shawls and covered their heads and went out through the back door.

  They said, “Let’s go down and look and see if we have any uncles down by the campground.” His house was near Bellingham—in the early, first Bellingham. They walked through the back of the house, through the woods, down to the outskirts of Bellingham (the southern portion—because they went across a point) and got to another bay where some of their uncles were. They said, “We are in trouble. We killed him.” An uncle said, “Get in the canoe right away.” So they got in the canoe, and their uncles and relatives covered them up with blankets and started paddling. Nobody said much of anything. They stayed covered up until they got back to Guemes Island.

  My aunt told her relatives, “Nobody is going to make me go back. Nobody. I don’t care what happens to me. I’m not going back. Nobody is going to slap me around.” So they were hidden out.

  My aunt had a son. They named him Mason Fitzhugh. He was taken away by Mr. Fitzhugh, his father, when he was small. Each of his wives had one child before they left him. He took the boy when he was two years old. He said, “I’m taking him to Olympia.” He was taking him to a settlement because he didn’t want him to be an Indian. He would learn English. He would not grow up to be like an Indian. My aunt never knew where he went or where he took him. She cried and begged and said, “Where did you go? Where did you take him?” Right after that, my aunt left him, but he already had the baby and he had already taken him away. She was only eighteen or nineteen years old.

  Mr. Fitzhugh didn’t die, but he left when my aunt beat him up. A sailing ship came into Bellingham. Some of my mother’s cousins and uncles were standing around at the dock in Bellingham, and they saw Fitzhugh leave on the sailing ship. Th
e girls really had beaten him up. He had a black eye; his jaw and face were swollen and black and blue, and somebody was walking with him. He was walking with pain. He walked with a terrible limp. He had a cane and his head was all wrapped up. He wore a high hat and a satin waistcoat. He seemed to be well-educated and must have come from a reasonably wealthy family because he could read and write.

  Mason Fitzhugh, his son, later came to live in the San Juan Islands. What happened to him was just as traumatic as any novel you could read.

  Mason didn’t remember his mother. He grew up in Olympia, where he had a terrible time because he was half Indian. He was taken in by a doctor who kept him in his home. The man died. He and his wife didn’t have any children, but there was Mason. His wife didn’t like him. She never wanted him there in the first place. She used to chase him back into the kitchen, and she didn’t buy him any shoes. He outgrew some shoes he had, and he didn’t have any moccasins because he never, ever saw the Indians. In the winter times, he ran out and carried in kindling wood, and he didn’t have any shoes, and it was so bitterly cold. He stayed in the kitchen, and they gave him food.

  When he was fifteen or sixteen years old, he got a job on a sailing ship and went to Bellingham. He got off there and saw some Indians, and he went up to talk to them. The ship carried cargo for a store or a trading post there. Every day Indians went down there and watched as the freight was unloaded and sometimes they got a job, and they watched the people come and go. Here came this young boy. They saw him on the ship. They had thrown the lines that tie up the ship to the dock. Indians were sort of helping, and they figured he was an Indian. He said, “My name is Mason Fitzhugh and my mother is an Indian. I don’t know who she is or where she is. She should be somewhere in this country.” Some of them were related to my aunt, and they said, “Oh, we know who you are.” So he got off of the ship and stayed with some relatives and he did find his mother. He stayed with his mother.

  My great aunt had the most terrible life. First of all, she was married to Edmund Clare Fitzhugh, the one they beat up and left. I think they said he did come back to Whidbey Island, but he didn’t stay long. He had a white wife. I read in a history of Whatcom County that he was killed in the Civil War.

  My great aunt married another white man. You would think she had learned something, but I think once she was married to a white man, no Indian would have married her. His name was Phillips. He was the husband she shot and killed. I used to get so worked up when I heard about it, because it seemed she had such a terrible life. But she did have her older boy, Mason. Then she had a baby. She and Phillips had a farm.3 They had what my mother called a “lime kill,” and he had a partner.

  He got mad at her about something, and he threatened her. “You just better watch out if you talk to that man, the partner. I’m going to kill you.” When he went out of the kitchen, he stopped and told her again, “You just watch yourself, because I’m going to kill you.” There was a rifle behind their kitchen door. She reached for the rifle. Her husband was already turning—ready to go back out to the field or the barn. Mason just came out of the barn where he had been working, and Phillips told her again. “Watch yourself. I will kill you and I will kill him. I will kill your son.” My aunt reached behind the door, and she called to him. She didn’t want to shoot him in the back. He turned around. She said, “I’m going to kill you,” and she shot and killed him.

  She was carrying a baby on her back. The authorities took her to jail in Port Townsend, which was an older town. She and her baby, Thomas Phillips, were put in jail to await trial. The Indians talked to a priest and told him that she has a small baby. He said he couldn’t do anything. She did wrong.

  My great aunt went on trial in Port Townsend. She told them she had so many threats from her husband it was kind of a hell on earth, you might say. She didn’t have enough nerve to leave because, anyway, she couldn’t go home. The judge let her go. He said she had been punished enough. She had already served three or four months in the jail.

  Mason Fitzhugh came here once, all of the way from the San Juan Islands, to visit when I was a school girl, a teenager. He stayed at our house overnight. He and my mother and father talked. He has a granddaughter on San Juan Island. She has a big farm out there—a homestead. He married someone who was half Indian too. There is a group of Indians who live on the San Juans who know they are half Indian. I’m not sure what tribe they belong to; I think they call themselves San Juan Indians.4 I met some of them in Judge Boldt’s court.5

  Little bits of history like that tell you the Indians who married the white man had a bad time, but many of them were reasonably happy.

  1 Lagoon Point on Whidbey Island.

  2 A ceremony in which gifts are exchanged between the parties at a dinner.

  3 Located in Port Susan.

  4 They are not federally acknowledged as a tribe.

  5 She testified for United States v. Washington, Phase One, in 1972.

  5 / Remember (What We Told You)

  BY 1855, the time of the treaty, there was a small Catholic school here in Tulalip Bay located at Priest Point.1 There were other missionaries, but I think—by far—the Catholic priests came here first. When I say they came here first, I mean they came even before or just along with the white trappers. The pioneers came right after the trappers. So, these priests were moving across what became the United States, Canada, and Mexico long ago.

  Father Pierre de Smet was a well-known priest in the Middle West. My father and others of his generation talked about him. They never saw him; they just heard about him. He traveled all over the Middle West—in the Dakotas, in Montana, and Idaho. I think he even touched on Washington Territory. He baptized little children and grown Indians who wanted to be baptized. He did a lot to pacify the Indians. Father de Smet would walk, walk, walk. I guess he went on horseback once in a while.

  Father Eugene Chirouse and Father Paul Durieu were the first priests in this area. Chirouse was born in France. When he was fifteen years old, he read about the American Indians, and he told his grandmother he was going to dedicate his life to the church and that he would try and reach America. (He was an orphan but he had a grandmother.) He wanted to work with American Indians. Of course, they were all pleased over that idea.

  Sometimes the religions just make me mad. But when I think of the dedication and the sacrifices of the priests and missionaries, I know their sacrifices were unbelievable. They walked across this country. They had to get across rivers; it snowed, it hailed, the wind blew, and there was the blistering hot sun.

  Father Chirouse lived at the Mission at Priest Point. He wore a long, black garment to the ankles, with long sleeves. It was supposed to be made of heavy, black woolen serge. He had left Montreal years before and his cassock was worn out. It had been patched and was all tattered. So some of the Indian women made him one from white, heavy cotton material that they got at the Nisqually trading post, which was an English trading post north of Olympia. An Indian lady made it just like the black one, but it was white. He wore it until he got a message that the bishop was coming from Portland to visit him in Olympia.

  Olympia was where the roads ended, but it wasn’t much of a place. Here he had a white cassock and nobody wears those but the Pope. His is supposed to be all black. He worried and worried. They started out for Olympia. Some Indians paddled the canoe for him. Some other Indians went along in another canoe. It was summer. They stopped to eat on the beach and make tea, or he would drink water. The Indians made their own kind of tea and had lunch. Then the Indians said, “We’ll fix his robe.”

  They picked a lot of wild blackberries—real ripe ones—several bucketsful. They had a small tub, and they smashed them all up and put his robe in. They really soaked it up. They had started out early, so they were days ahead, and it was a good thing because they had to wait a whole day for his cassock to dry. When he put it on, he said it was black, pretty black.

  They were getting close to Olympia. About a day or two
days later a storm came up, and they had to round a point and they tipped over. There he was in the water. The Indians helped him to get to the shore. But the saltwater washed his robe—not white; it was sort of a light lavender or purple. Somebody in Rome can wear a cassock that color but not him. When he met the bishop, he explained it—and besides, he was still wet. But, you know, things like that happened to them. I was just thinking, “Oh, bless their hearts. They were so brave.” Somebody else might say, “Oh, to hell with it. I’ll just wear whatever the Indians have—a blanket.”

  My mother and father talked about one of the youngest nuns—the last—who came to Tulalip Indian School.2 She came here in the 1860s. My brother remembered hearing about her. She was called Sister Leopoldine, which is the feminine of Leopold. The sisters had read about Father Chirouse and his mission. When she first got here, she was very young and she played baseball with the intermediate boys. She could bat a ball, even though it wasn’t much of a ball, and run from base to base. The Sister Superior would see them out there on the playfield at recess time and come out there and tell her, “Sister Leopoldine, you stop that running around like that. You are showing your ankles.” The young Indian students said, yes, you could see her ankles when she was running. She had black shoes and black stockings. Here she was running with those big heavy skirts, and she got into trouble over and over again. Sister Superior would come out there and tell her, “Now stop it! You can just walk around there real fast.” She would say, “Yes, mother.”

  The school Fathers Chirouse and Durieu established on Tulalip Bay existed from about 1857 to 1902. It kept getting bigger. Father Chirouse received something like 5,000 dollars from the federal government about 1870. He was to educate the Indian children, but part of the Mission School burned down in 1902. There was a big building for the boys—the Boys Building; then there was a similar building for the girls, where they stayed, since it was a boarding school. Children stayed there eight months a year—probably less than that, because I think they went home in early summer for the late spring fishing.