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enterprise I do, shaping words into print. Whether the fact nudges Swan closer into resemblance of me or me to Swan I am not ready to say, but certainly it fetches both of us into the same cottage industry at least some hours of the week. I imagine that Swan, like me, when he held pen in hand for another chapter of
Northwest Coast
or, as later, to begin an article for a frontier newspaper, had his times of wishing he had chosen some sounder cottage job, such as lacemaking or raising chinchillas. I imagine as well that in the next minute or so he was knuckle-deep into the words again. Cottagers have to be like that.
    Harper & Brothers brought out
Northwest Coast
in 1857, and with its lore of baked skunks and patriotic pyromania the tome stands as a jaunty grandfather of us all who face west above our typewriters. But more than that. This book of Swan’s time at Shoalwater conveys, as he would in the diary pages for all the length of his life, his rare knack of looking at the coastal Indians as flesh and blood rather than the frontier’s tribal rubble.
    He does not go all the way, sometimes dwelling overmuch on the simplicities of the bay’s natives, while he and the other oysterboys were not exactly an advanced institute themselves. Oftener than not, however, his remarks carry uncommon sympathy and insight about the Chinooks and Chehalis:
    The Indians can see but little or no difference between their system of Tomanawos and our own views as taught them. For instance, the talipus, or fox, is their emblem of the creative power; the swispee, or duck, that of wisdom. And they say that the Boston people, or Americans, have for their Tomanawos the wheark, or eagle and that the King George, or English people, have a lion for their Tomanawos.
    Or again:
One day, while being more than usually inquisitive, old Suis...after trying to make me understand that the names I was asking about had no meaning, at last said, “Why, you white people have names like ours; some mean something, and others mean nothing. I know your name, Swan, is like our word Cocumb, and means a big bird; and Mr. Lake’s name is for water, like Shoalwater Bay. But what does Mr. Russell’s or Baldt’s, or Champ’s or Hillyer’s, or Sweeney’s, or Weldon’s name mean?
”
    I told her I did not know. “Well,” she replied, “so it is with us. We don’t know what those names you have asked mean; all we know is that they were the names of our ancestors—clip tillicums, or first people.
”
    Thoughtful jots about first people, and the tamanoas of whites. The time of comradeship with Swell and the honor to repaint his funeral boards lay not so far ahead from such lines.
    With Swan you never know where a competence is going to lead, if indeed it ever ambles anywhere. It is his skill with the native lore and languages which now transports him for a while out of the Pacific Northwest. In the mid-1850s, territorial officials of Oregon and Washington began to summon the Northwest tribes into treaty councils. These worked out as was usual in our continental history: The Indians got a chance for soulful rhetoric, and the whites got the land. When this ritualistic process of dispossession reached southwesternmost Washington with a treaty parley at a site on the Chehalis River in February 1855, Swan inevitably was on hand, having been invited by Territorial Governor Isaac I. Stevens to come over from the coast and interpret. Swan’s service lasted beyond the riverbank oratory. When Stevens later was elected territorial delegate to Congress, Swan the scholarly frontiersman was enlisted as his secretary.
    First his follow of Charles J. W. Munchausen-Russell up to Shoalwater, now this traipse back around the continent behind a political patron. Moves of this sort cause me to think Swan must have been something like a jack in life’s deck, not a man of an instinct quite to be king. A bit of a courtier, say.
    In