Siwash

“ The history of the Siwash is tradition, as it is with all aborigines. The early tales of the Norsemen, the Gaul, the Celt, are mere matters of history, perhaps distorted, but withal, history. The lower the order of the race, the lower its mental capacities, the more truth there is in the lore—the tales of its past. The incidents of their lives which collectively become their history, are handed down from father to son, from generation to generation, plain and unembellished. ”

“ The Siwash is the creature of the circumstances of climate in a very great degree, and he could never escape it—never will till the last of his race is lost in oblivion. His mode of life, the almost continual living in a squatting, cramped position in his canim from generation to generation, shows in his broken, ungraceful proportions today; and it cannot be doubted but that in the humid atmosphere of Puget Sound and the abbreviated territory in which he has lived are to be found the potent factors that have united to make him at this day the essence of ugliness in human mould. ”

“ Of all things, Indian, the hardest to determine would be the age of the pure blood Siwash or klootchman. They may be about 30 or may be 75, they all look alike after reaching the usual majority in years.
Outside the supplying of daily wants the only other task of the pure-blood Siwash is the building of his cedar canoes. Seldom is it that the whites get an opportunity of seeing this work in progress. It is most always done on or near the beach in out-of-the-way places and the old-fashioned Indian-made hand adz is as religiously adhered to as it ever was. ”

“ Suddenly, about the first Wednesday after the third Friday in April, the ordinary Siwash man discovers that some girl whom he has known all year isn't a girl at all, but a peachblow angel who is just stopping on earth to make a better man of him and show him what a dull, pifflish thing Paradise would be without her. Life becomes a series of awful blank spots, with walks on the campus between them. He can't get his calculus because he is busy figuring on a much more difficult problem; he is trying to figure whether three dances with some other fellow mean anything more to Her than charity. ”

“ He is studious only in his stolidity and inactivity. He never travels within the meaning of the word, and there’s probably not a dozen of the full-blooded Indians who have been fifty miles from salt water. It was not infrequent for the plains’ Indians beyond the great coast range of mountains to descend to the sea, but that the Siwash should ascend to and beyond the summit of those lofty and snow-clad hills—never.
Out of his canoe he is a fish out of water, a sloth away from his natural surroundings. He is like a seal on shore, a duck on dry land, ungainly and awkward. ”

“ I haven't talked with a Siwash man for a month, and all of these Hale and Jarhard and Stencilmania fellows give me an ashy taste in my mouth when I talk with them. It's about as much fun talking college days with a fellow from another school as it is to talk ranching with a New England old maid; and when I get hold of a Siwash man you can bet I hang on to him as long as my talons will stick. You just sit right there and start another Wheeling conflagration while I tell you how we killed Hogboom to make a Siwash holiday. ”

“ Siwash George swore. "What's the name of this buck?"
"Ignace Stone—calls himself Ignace Mountain. He belongs over on the Smokey."
"He'll be bad, hey?" Louis queried.
"Bad?" echoed Siwash George. "Oh, no, he ain't bad. This don't look like it, does it? He's plumb gentle—like a crazy wolf! Look at poor old Charlie. He socks that knife to him up to the haft every crack!"
So that was the mission of the lame Indian, ostensibly looking for trapping ground! For months, probably—it was hard to say how long—he had been on the trail of Nootka Charlie and his faithless wife. ”

“ Across the vale between them stretched a mighty bridge of stone, joining peak to peak, and on this the Siwash laid his offering of salmon and dressed skins. Here, too, the tribal festivals were kept. The priestess of the arch-Mentonee, who fed the fire on the tribal altar "unimpassioned by a mortal throb"—had won the love of the wild tamanouses of the mountains, but she was careless alike of coaxing and threats, and her heart was as marble to them. ”

“ I stooped over the Indian, and he came close, but with his rifle still ready for business.
"So, you bloody Siwash," he said, "you'd knife Charlie in his blankets, would you! I got a notion to burn you alive. Oh, you can hear me, all right!" And he poured a swift flood of some tribal tongue at him.
Ignace's eyelids flickered, and the lax mouth quivered weakly. "Hyas sick!" he muttered, and his head dropped farther.
In a sudden, frightful gust of rage, old Siwash George forgot prudence. He stepped forward and kicked the Indian in the face.
"Sick, are ye?" he roared. "Kill my partner, would ye? ”

“ That was the great ambition of almost every Siwash boy. When we weren't thinking of girls and exams in the blissful spring days, we were stalking some summer job to its lair and sitting down to wait for it. There wasn't anything that a Siwash boy wouldn't tackle in the summer vacation. The farmer boys had a cinch, of course. They were skilled laborers; and, besides, they came back in the fall in perfect condition for the football squad. Some of the town boys became street-car conductors. The new railroad that was built into Jonesville about that time was a bonanza for us. ”

“ White people do not always believe it.
There lived a great Siwash hunter in the land in the west near the great river full of salmon, where it comes into the sea. His arrows gave him much meat; his great canoe and his spear gave him much fish. He had very many strings of shell money; the Siwash people call it hiaqua.
No one ever loved hiaqua as much as this great hunter loved it. He had many strings of it around his neck. He was rich; but when he waited in the trees in the forest for the elk or the deer to come that he might shoot them, he was always counting the shells on these strings. ”

“ I guess she showed him all right, too, for after a couple of weeks he surrendered and then the queerest rivalry Siwash had ever seen began. Frankling, son of the locomotive works, authority on speckled vests and cotillons, was scrapping with Ole Skjarsen, the cuffless wonder from the lumber camps, for the affections of the prettiest girl in college. No wonder we got so interested that spring that most of us forgot to fall in love ourselves. ”

“ Many a head jerked curiously to the side to meet his stare, and more than one remark was dropped anent the old Siwash with so strange a look upon his face. No end of men remembered afterward that they had been struck by his extraordinary figure, and forever afterward prided themselves upon their swift discernment of the unusual. ”

“ One short war, a mere uprising on Puget Sound in early days, and that instigated by natives living beyond the edges of the Puget Sound forest, and all was over. Ever after the Siwash was an indifferent, uncomplaining creature. He drew one or two short annuities and government aid was practically withdrawn, and that, too, after his heritage of woods and waters had been taken from him. But one hears no plaint of disturbed and unmanageable Indians. He is content to live on so long as there is space for his cedar canoe to glide on the water and an open beach whereon he may erect a temporary tent. ”

“ You can't always tell at first sight. But then, I don't know but that college fraternities exercise as much care and judgment in picking brothers as women do in picking husbands. Many a woman has married a fine mustache or a bunch of noble clothes and has taken the thing that wore them on spec. That's one more than we ever did. You could fool us with clothes; but the man who came to Siwash with a mustache had to flock by himself. He and his whiskers were considered to be enough company for each other.
There were plenty of frats in Siwash to make [Pg 141] things interesting in the fall. ”

“ His is an invention unprotected, yet he will never trouble himself about letters patent, for no white man can ever imitate his work successfully. There is something about it that seems to have a most unusual attraction for the finest and best, for a Siwash is seldom met with winter or summer, on a fishing expedition without one or more of the best fish the water contains. ”

“ More than once, a Siwash man who had been conservative enough to worship the same girl right through his college course and who had proposed to her on the last night of school, when the open season for thou-beside-me talk began, has found that all the time some chap has been writing her a letter a day and that she has only regarded the Siwash man as a [Pg 231] kind friend, and so on. Never will I forget when Frankling got stung that way! ”

“ He hit Klingel first. Hogboom hit him second, third, fifth and thirty-fourth. Then the two teams closed together and for five minutes a cyclone of dust, dirt, sweaters, collars, arms, legs, hair and bright red noses swept up and down the field. The grandstand went crazy. The five hundred Kiowa rooters grabbed their canes and started in. They met about seven hundred Siwash patriots and then the whole universe exploded.
The police interfered and about half an hour later the last Siwash student was pried off the last Kiowan. It was the most disgraceful riot in the history of the college. ”

“ No one ever hears of a Siwash dying unless occasionally on the reservations. A papoose dies once in a while during a change from the ordinary modes of life brought about by annual migrations to the hop fields.
LA BELLE KLOOTCHMAN
The Siwash is the very reverse of a Nomad. ”

“ The Siwash, a race to whom instinct is superior to thought, are perhaps the strongest example of a people whose history is least faulty. What grandsire has told to father is retold to son in a language whose vocabulary is so limited as not to permit of changing of the original subject matter. ”

“ We cannot risk suspicion of any sort. Let us hope that Siwash will bring us definite and good news of Henry Gunning, and that what I hear at 10:30 to-night may mean a speedy finish to our big scheme.”
Clement echoed the sentiments. He hoped, in fact he felt certain, that what Siwash Mike would have to say about the vanished Henry would give him (Seadon) facts which, in addition to the other [Pg 129] damning material he had, would enable him to settle the accounts of these rogues swiftly and for all time when he spoke of them in his talk with Heloise Reys to-morrow morning. ”

“ Not among the least of the trials and dangers which beset the early pioneer, were those which arose by reason of the contact with Indians. The average Siwash was a peaceable being, but the worst danger came from the deceitful and savage northern tribes and east of the mountain clans. From Nootka sound, Queen Charlotte and Vancouver islands, came swarms of the red devils in their nimble canoes and left havoc and destruction among many a pleasant home and settlement. Across the Cascade passes came bands of painted warriors spreading terror and death on every side. ”

“ Outfitting two days later at a small place the steamer stopped at, the guide said we needed another man to help pack our kit over portages, and so forth, but the only fellow available was a Siwash of whom he disapproved. My guide would not have him at any price; he was lazy, a drunkard, a liar, and even worse, for on one occasion he came back without the sportsman he had taken up country on a shooting trip, and his story was not convincing, to say the least. These disappearances are always awkward, of course, as you both know. We preferred, anyhow, to go without the Siwash, and off we started. ”

“ As far as they’re concerned we’re entirely unaware that Siwash is on the train. There’s no reason or time for them to prepare traps. We’ll simply carry the day with surprise tactics—and, in any case, is there any possible other course of action open to us if we are to rescue that girl effectively and without loss of time?”
There was no other way. Now that Siwash had warned the rogues—as they thought he had done by telegraph from North Bay there was precious little time to lose—the only way to get to Neuburg, and the girl Heloise, was to follow Siwash, to him. ”

“ The first vessel of which the Indians, on the upper Sound at least, had any memory at the time the whites began to flock among them was certainly Vancouver’s.
TYPICAL SIWASH FACE
The Siwash of Puget Sound (a general term applied to males of all the tribes) and the Indians of the entire North Pacific coast, like every native of every country possessing significant features of topography, flora, and most of all [11] climate, is bent to his surroundings. ”

“ You’d make a good vault to store footballs in, but you’re too stationary for a fullback. Now I’ll give you one more chance—”
And maybe Hogboom wouldn’t go some with that chance!
In a month we had a team that wouldn’t have used past Siwash teams to hold its sweaters. It was mad all the time, and it played the game carnivorously. Siwash was delirious with joy. The whole school turned out for practice, and to see those eleven men snapping through signals up and down the field as fast as an ordinary man could run just congested us with happiness. ”

“ He looked off over the chuck wagon, through the tops of the scrub pines in which the camp was set, drawing his thin, white eyebrows, considering the case.
"Winter comin' on and hay to buy," said Siwash.
"That's what I've been thinkin' and studyin' over. Shucks! I don't need that horse. I tell you what I'll do, Duke"—turning to Lambert, brisk as with a gush of sudden generosity—"if you can ride that old pelter, I'll give him to you for a present. And I bet you'll not git as cheap an offer of a horse as that ever in your life ag'in." ”