DECEMBER-JANUARY

The Boston Bird

HOOYEH (The Crow)

Day One

His name was James Gilchrist Swan, and I have felt my pull toward him ever since some forgotten frontier pursuit or another landed me into the coastal region of history where he presides, meticulous as a usurer's clerk, diarying and diarying that life of his, four generations and seemingly as many light-years from my own. You have met him yourself in some other form — the remembered neighbor or family member, full of years while you just had begun to grow into them, who had been in a war or to a far place and could confide to you how such vanished matters were. The tale-bringer sent to each of us by the past.

That day, whenever it was, when I made the side trip into archival box after box of Swan's diaries and began to realize that they held four full decades of his life and at least 2,500,000 handwritten words. And what life, what sketching words. This morning we discovered a large wolf in the brook dead from the effects of some strychnine we had put out. It was a she wolf very large and evidently had five whelps. Maggs and myself shinned her and I boiled the head to get the skull. ... Mr. Fitzgerald of Sequim Prairie better known as "Skip!" walked off the wharf near the Custom House last night and broke his neck. The night was very dark, and he mistook the way. ... Jimmy had the night mare last night and made a great howling. This morning he told me that the memelose were after him and made him crazy. I told him the memelose were dead squid which he ate for supper very heartily. ... Mr Tucker very ill with his eye, his face is badly swelled. This evening got Kichook's Cowitchan squaw tomilk her breast into a cup, and I then bathed Mr Tucker's eye with it. ...

I recall that soon I gave up jotting notes and simply thumbed and read. At closing hour, Swan got up from the research table with me. I would write of him sometime, I had decided. Do a magazine piece or two, for I was in the business then of making those smooth packets of a few thousand words. Just use this queer indefatigable diarist Swan some rapid way as a figurine of the Pacific Northwest past.

Swan refused figurinehood, and rapid was the one word that never visited his pencils and pens. When, eight, ten years ago, I took a segment of his frontier life and tried to lop it into magazine-article length, loose ends hung everywhere. As well write about Samuel Pepys only what he did during office hours at the British admiralty. A later try, I set out carefully to summarize Swan — oyster entrepreneur, schoolteacher, railroad speculator, amateur ethnologist, lawyer, judge, homesteader, linguist, ship's outfitter, explorer, customs collector, author, small-town bureaucrat, artist, clerk — and surrendered in dizziness, none of the spectrum having shown his true and lasting occupation: diarist. This, I at last told myself, wants more time than I ever can grant it.

Until now. Here is the winter that will be the season of Swan. Rather, of Swan and me and those constant diaries. Day by day, a logbook of what is uppermost in any of the three of us.

It is a venture that I have mulled these past years of my becoming less headlong and more aware that I dwell in a community of time as well as of people. That I should know more than I do about this other mysterious citizenship, how far it goes, where it touches.

And the twin whys: why it has me invest my life in one place instead of another, and why for me that place happens to be western. More and more it seems to me that the westernness of my existence in this land is some consequence having to do with that community of time, one of the terms of my particular citizenship in it. America began as West, the direction off the ends of the docks of Europe. Then the firstcomers from the East of this continent to its West, advance parties of the American quest for place (position, too, maybe, but that is a pilgrimage that interests me less), imprinted our many contour lines of frontier. And next, it still is happening, the spread of national civilization absorbed those lines. Except that markings, streaks and whorls of the West and the past are left in some of us.

Because, then, of this western pattern so stubbornly within my life I am interested in Swan as a westcomer, and stayer. Early, among the very earliest, in stepping the paths of impulse that pull across America's girth of plains and over its continental summit and at last reluctantly nip off at the surf from the Pacific, Swan has gone before me through this matter of siting oneself specifically here: West.

The companion I feel an urgency to spend this winter with, meet day by day on the broad seasonal ground of time, here along the continental edge that drew us both.

If Swan attracts me in the way that any oracle among the coastal Indians of the Pacific Northwest inevitably attracted him — that here flashes the bard of a vivid tribe, worth all amount of attention — it is the diaries which throw his particular needle-sharp glints.

The diaries dazzle and dazzle me, first simply by their total and variety: Out of their gray archival boxes at the University of Washington library, they could be the secondhand wares of an eccentric stationer dreamed up by Charles Dickens. Some are mere notebooks with cheap marbled covers, and occasionally even a school exercise book sidles into the collection, but most are formal annual volumes (for the purpose of registering events of past, present, and future occurrence, announces the opening page of the 1860 version) and a good number of them display deft clasps to snug themselves closed from outsiders' eyes. It exaggerates marginally to say no two Swan diaries look closer alike than cousins, but I haven't yet turned up three of any single kind. Black-covered and green, tan and faded maroon, what they do present in common is that nearly all are small enough to fit into the palm of a hand, or a busy pocket. Those that won't are actual ledgers, such as the aristocrat of the congregation, 1866, some nine inches wide and twelve high, weighing four and a quarter pounds and displaying an elaborately hinged and embossed spine and a cover panel of leather into the middle of which has been tooled in rich half-inch letters J. G. Swan. I can scarcely wait for 1866 — lay it open to the first of its 380 lordly pages, and handwriting neat as small embroidery instantly begins to recite: Diary and private journal of James G. Swan, being a continuation of daily record commencing July 1862 at the Makah Indian Agency Neah Bay, Washington Territory — but what browsing I have done into any of the diaries has been seductive. Opening the pages of Swan's years is like entering a room filled with jugglers and tumblers and swal-lowers of flame, performance crowding performance. Went to see Capt John this morning, found him better. All the Indians except his squaws and children have left the lodge. John is alone in one corner, surrounded by a mat screen. He tells me that the small pox will collect in his head and when it leaves him it will come out of the top of his head like a puff of smome. To prevent it spreading he has a large hole left open in the roof directly over his head, through which the sickness is expected to escape. ... Last evening when the gentlemen from the Cutter were here,...