Dungeness by Polinsky Karen;

Author:Polinsky, Karen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION Native American and Aboriginal
Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing
Published: 2017-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

Cha-tic, The Painter

c. 1818-1900

When he was five, James Gilchrist Swan’s sea captain father disappeared at sea. He was raised in Medford, Massachusetts by his mother Mary Tufts Swan. Despite the loss of his father, he thrilled at the tales of his uncle, William Tufts, a world traveler, who, in the first decade of the new century, shipped to the Pacific Northwest coast.

When he came of age, Swan became a businessman and married to please his mother. However, the California gold rush gave him the chance to escape the society of the proper New England parlor, a life that never felt quite real. Swan invested in a ship, and said goodbye to his wife Mathilda, his son Charles, seven, and Ellen, his daughter, just four.

After a short-lived, half-hearted attempt to find gold, Swan became an “oyster entrepreneur” at Shoalwater Bay. This enterprise, as in every subsequent half-cocked business venture—a whaling station, the Port Townsend railway, a new type of factory that made paper out of seaweed—turned into nothing. Each new venture, no more profitable than the last, gave him one more excuse to stay on.

Yet he was educated, articulate, curious, and affable. Such that in the last half-century of his life, Swan served as an Indian agent, a justice of the peace, and as a member of the Hawaiian consul.

In the end his greatest legacy would be the forty-one years he passed inside his notebooks. The journals—in tan, maroon, or black leather, one with a marbled cover, small enough to fit inside a jacket pocket, to balance on his open palm—capture the real James Swan. As a scientist, a stickler for accuracy; always counting, classifying, and measuring. Not just an observer, he was keen to sample new things: for example, tea made from the bark of a young hemlock, a salve made from bear fat and spruce gum, or an eyewash made from salal, all “excellent,” according to the explorer. Above all, his journal reveals him as a sensitive appreciator of this rugged, yet oddly agreeable, altered reality.

In his sketchbook, Swan documents a world and a way of life. In the early days he sketched flora and labeled each specimen with the Indian name, for example, the delicate white flower known to the Makah as tsit-sit-tsao-up-quimp, as well as with the English name, trillium. A little later, he captured the facades in a Makah village as well as the interior of a S’Klallam longhouse. Swan drew tools—a halibut hook, a chisel with a handle carved from a whale rib—and other everyday objects, for example a shallow dipping dish or a basket for steaming clams. As his artistic ability developed he became more and more fascinated by the various pictorial styles of the tribes, as well as the nuance of individual craftsmen. With the same precision he applied to the botanical sketches Swan preserved the art styles of the indigenous. The Makah called him cha-tic, “the painter.”

An astute ethnographer, in all of his work Swan eschewed stereotypes that failed to note the diversity of the Native peoples.

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