The Adventures of John Jewitt. John Rodgers Jewitt
which, seen from the deck of our little craft, looked so like that of Southern Norway, that I have never seen the latter without recalling the outer limits of British Columbia. On the few flat spits where the sun reached, the gigantic cedars[8] and broad-leaved maples[9] lighted up the scene, while the dogwood,[10] with its large white flowers reflected in the water of some river which, after a turbulent course, had reached the sea through a placid mouth, or a Menzies arbutus,[11] whose glossy leaves and brown bark presented a more southern facies to the sombre jungles, afforded here and there a relief to the never-ending fir and pine and spruce.
A more solitary shore, so far as white men are concerned, it would be hard to imagine. From the day we left until the day we returned, we sighted only one sail; and from Port San Juan, where an Indian trader lived a lonely life in an often-beleaguered blockhouse, to Koskeemo Sound, where another of these voluntary exiles passed his years among the savages, there was not a christened man, with the exception of the little settlement of lumbermen at the head of the Alberni Canal. For months at a time no keel ever ploughed this sea, and then too frequently it was a warship sent from Victoria to chastise the tribesmen for some outrage committed on wayfaring men such as we. The floating fur-trader with whom we exchanged the courtesies of the wilderness had indeed been despitefully used. For had he not taken to himself some savage woman, who had levanted to her tribe with those miscellaneous effects which he termed "iktas"? And the Klayoquahts had stolen his boat, and the Kaoquahts his beans and his vermilion and his rice, and threatened to scuttle his schooner and stick his head on its masthead. And, moreover, to complete this tale of public pillage and private wrong, a certain chief, to whom he applied many ornate epithets, had declared that he cared not a salal-berry for all of "King George's warships." So that the conclusion of this merchant of the wilds was that, until "half the Indians were hanged, and the other half badly licked, there would be no peace on the coast for honest men such as he." Then, under a cloud of playful blasphemy, our friend sailed away.
For if civilisation was scarce in the Western Vancouver of '63, savagedom was all-abounding. Not many hours passed without our having dealings with the lords of the soil. It was indeed our business—or, at least, the business of the two men and the Indian "boy"—to meet with and make profit out of the barbarous folk. Hence it was seldom that we went to sleep without the din of a board village in our ears, or woke without the ancient and most fish-like smell of one being the first odour which greeted our nostrils. In almost every cove, creek, or inlet there was one of these camps, and every few miles we entered the territory of a new tribe, ruled by a rival chief, rarely on terms with his neighbour, and as often as not at war with him. More than once we had occasion to witness the gruesome evidence of this state of matters. A war party returning from a raid on a distant hamlet would be met with, all painted in hideous colours, and with the bleeding heads of their decapitated enemies fastened to the bows of their cedar canoes, and the cowering captives, doomed to slavery, bound among the fighting men. Or, casting anchor in front of a village, we would be shown with pride a row of festering skulls stuck on poles, as proof of the military prowess of our shifty hosts.
These were, however, unusually unpleasant incidents. More frequently we saw little except the more lightsome traits of what was then a very primitive savage life, and the barbarous folk treated us kindly. A marriage feast might be in progress, or a great "potlatch," or merrymaking, at which the giving away of property was the principal feature (p. 82), might be in full blaze at the very moment we steered round the wooded point. Halibut and dog-fish were being caught in vast quantities—the one for slicing and drying for winter use; the other for the sake of the oil extracted from the liver, then as now an important article of barter, being in ready demand by the Puget Sound saw-mills. Now and then a fur-seal or, better still, a sea-otter would be killed. But this is not the land of choice furs. Even the marten and the mink were indifferent. Beaver—which in those days, after having been almost hunted to death, were again getting numerous, owing to the low prices which the pelts brought having slackened the trappers' zeal—would often be brought on board, and a few hides of the wapiti, the "elk" of the Western hunter, and the black-tailed deer which swarm in the Vancouver woods, generally appeared at every village. The natives are, however, essentially fish-eaters, and though in every tribe there is generally a hunter or two, the majority of them seldom wander far afield, the interior being in their mythology a land of evil things, of which wise men would do well to keep clear. Even the black bear, which in autumn was often a common feature of the country, where it ranged the crab-apple thickets, was not at this season an object of the chase. Like the deer and the wolves, it was shunning the heat and the flies by summering near the snow which we could notice still capping some of the inland hills, rising to heights of from five thousand to seven thousand feet, and feasting on the countless salmon which were descending every stream, until, with the receding waters, they were left stranded in the upland pools. So cheap were salmon, that at times they could be bought for a cent's worth of "trade goods," and deer in winter for a few charges of powder and shot. A whale-hunt, in which the behemoth was attacked by harpoons with attached inflated sealskins, after a fashion with which I had become familiar when a resident among the Eskimo of Baffin Bay, was a more curious sight. Yet dog-fish oil was the staple of the unpicturesque traffic in which my companions engaged; while I, a hunter after less considered trifles, landed to roam the woods and shores for days at a time, gathering the few flowers which bloomed under these umbrageous forests, though in number sufficient to tempt the red-beaked humming-bird[12] to migrate from Mexico to these northern regions, its tiny nest being frequently noticed on the tops of low bushes.
The Aht Indians.
But, after all, the most interesting sight on the shore was the people who inhabited it. They were the "Indians," whom my friend Gilbert Sproat afterwards described as the "Ahts,"[13] for this syllable terminates the name of each of the many little tribes into which they are divided. Yet, with a disregard of the laws of nomenclature, the Ethnological Bureau at Washington has only recently announced its intention of knowing them officially by the meaningless title of "Wakashan." They are a people by themselves, speaking a language which was confined to Vancouver Island, with the exception of Cape Flattery, the western tip of Washington, where the Makkahs speak it. In Vancouver Island, a region about the size of Ireland, three, if not four distinct aboriginal tongues are in use, in addition to Chinook Jargon, a sort of lingua franca employed by the Indians in their intercourse with the whites or with tribes whose speech they do not understand. The Kawitshen (Cowitchan) with its various dialects, the chief of which is the Tsongersth (Songer) of the people near Victoria, prevails from Sooke in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, northwards to Comox. From that point to the northern end of the island various dialects of the Kwakiool (Cogwohl of the traders) are the medium in which the tribesmen do not conceal their thoughts. The people of Quatseno and Koskeemo Sounds, owing to their frequent intercourse with Fort Rupert on the other side of the island, which at this point is at its narrowest, understand and frequently speak the Kwakiool. But after passing several days entirely alone among these people, I can vouch for the fact that this dialect is so peculiar that it almost amounts to a separate language. However, from this part, or properly, from Woody Point southwards to Port San Juan, the Aht language is entirely different.
The latter locality,[14] nearly opposite Cape Flattery, on the other side of Juan de Fuca Strait, the most southern part, and the only one on the mainland where it is spoken, is the special territory of the Pachenahts. When I knew them, they were, like all of their race, a dwindling people. A few