Winter Brothers by Ivan Doig Page A

would do credit to any adventurous modern nation. South, north and east, the Makahs looked from their pinnacle of land toward some tribal neighbor they were at issue with.
    The slowest-simmering of these rivalries extended southward, about a half-day’s canoe journey down the coast to the territory of the Quillayute tribe. The Makahs suspected the Quillayutes of having massacred one of their whaling crews which had been blown downcoast by storm. Time and again this dark tale reached Swan at Neah Bay, occasionally with the added note that the murdered canoemen had been glimpsed as owls
with shells hanging from their bills similar to those worn by Makahs in their noses.
    Suspicion of the Quillayutes remained a matter of muttering, however. With the Elwhas, east along the strait, the galling issue was their killing of Swell, and it rankled hard and often. (Nor does it seem to have been assuaged by the harvest of those two Elwha heads at Crescent Bay.) In Swan’s diary months Neah Bay jousts repeatedly with Elwha over the dead young chieftain. Early on, Swan and a Makah canoe crew returning from Port Townsend brought back with them an Elwha chief who wanted to talk peace. The Elwha breakfasted with Swell’s brother Peter,
everyone seemed to be pleasant and friendly
but the point was sledged home to the Elwhas:
It is generally understood that if they will kill Charlie entire peace will be restored.
    Weeks later, other Elwhas showed up to parley some more, to no further result. Months later, a Makah elder abruptly announced that he was going to set fire to Swell’s burial monument because the white men had not arranged vengeance for his murder.
    Of a sudden, inspiration evidently lit by that torching speech, the Makahs now scored a move:
Today Peter stole a squaw from Capt. Jack, one of Clallam Indians who was here on a visit. The squaw was part Elwha and Peter took her as a hostage to enforce pay from the Elwhas for robbing and killing a year and a half ago.
    The ransom fell through, one of the Makah tribal elders allowed the woman to escape.
Peter came to me today with a very heavy heart in consequence of the squaw having absconded.
    Just then the attention of the Makahs pivoted abruptly northward, across the Strait, which customarily was the worst direction to have to expect trouble from; the northern Indians beyond Vancouver Island were numerous and powerful canoe-people with a history of raiding almost casually down onto the smaller tribes of the Strait and Sound. The north could mean the Tsimshians and the Tlingits, and most dread of all, the Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, almost to Alaska. Swan once had watched a canoe party of Haidas depart Port Townsend under the uneasy jeers of the local Clallams and Chimakums. For farewell, a Haida woman ripped a handful of grass and blew the shreds in the face of a Chimakum chieftain. That, she said: that is how easily our warriors could kill you.
    This once, however, the threat did not loom from the far-north marauders, but from a nearer and smaller tribe, the Arhosetts on the west side of Vancouver Island. A Makah and an Arhosett chief had wrangled about some trading goods:
Sah tay hub getting angry because the Arhosett Indian would not agree to his terms, stabbed him with his knife.
    Here was a bladed version of Swell’s death, with the Makahs this time on the delivering end, and Swan records Neah Bay’s jitters about the Arhosetts voyaging down on them in revenge:
a whooping and yelling all night occasionally firing off guns to show their bravery. No enemy however appeared.
    Tension now on two fronts, and during a potlatch at Neah Bay a number of tribesmen from the outlying smaller Makah villages declared they wanted peace at least with the Elwhas.
But Peter said that he would never be satisfied until he received pay in some shape for the murder of his brother....
    Next, however, intelligence reached the Makahs and of course Swan’s pen that the