Legends of Vancouver by E. Pauline Johnson

Author:E. Pauline Johnson
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Legends -- British Columbia -- Vancouver
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2018-03-26T17:23:22+00:00

Point Grey

“Have you ever sailed around Point Grey?” asked a young Squam­ish tillicum of mine who of­ten comes to see me, to share a cup of tea and a taste of muck-a-muck that oth­er­wise I should eat in solitude.

“No,” I ad­mit­ted, I had not had that pleas­ure, for I did not know the un­cer­tain wa­ters of Eng­lish Bay suf­fi­ciently well to ven­ture about its head­lands in my frail ca­noe.

“Some day, per­haps next sum­mer, I’ll take you there in a sail­boat, and show you the big rock at the south­w­est of the Point. It is a strange rock; we In­dian people call it Ho­mol­som.”

“What an odd name!” I com­men­ted. “Is it a Squam­ish word?—it does not sound to me like one.”

“It is not al­to­gether Squam­ish, but half Fraser River lan­guage. The Point was the di­vid­ing-line between the grounds and wa­ters of the two tribes; so they agreed to make the name ‘Ho­mol­som’ from the two lan­guages.”

I sug­ges­ted more tea, and, as he sipped it, he told me the le­gend that few of the younger In­di­ans know. That he be­lieves the story him­self is bey­ond ques­tion, for many times he ad­mit­ted hav­ing tested the vir­tues of this rock, and it had never once failed him. All people that have to do with wa­ter­craft are su­per­sti­tious about some things, and I freely ac­know­ledge that times in­nu­mer­able I have “whistled up” a wind when dead calm threatened, or stuck a jack­knife in the mast, and af­ter­wards watched with great con­tent­ment the idle sail fill, and the ca­noe pull out to a light breeze. So, per­haps, I am pre­ju­diced in fa­vour of this le­gend of Ho­mol­som Rock, for it strikes a very re­spons­ive chord in that por­tion of my heart that has al­ways throbbed for the sea.

“You know,” began my young tillicum, “that only wa­ters un­spoiled by hu­man hands can be of any be­ne­fit. One gains no strength by swim­ming in any wa­ters heated or boiled by fires that men build. To grow strong and wise one must swim in the nat­ural rivers, the moun­tain tor­rents, the sea, just as the Sagalie Tyee made them. Their vir­tues die when hu­man be­ings try to im­prove them by heat­ing or dis­tilling, or pla­cing even tea in them, and so—what makes Ho­mol­som Rock so full of ‘good medi­cine’ is that the wa­ters that wash up about it are straight from the sea, made by the hand of the Great Tyee, and un­spoiled by the hand of man.

“It was not al­ways there, that great rock, draw­ing its strength and its won­der­ful power from the seas, for it, too, was once a Great Tyee, who ruled a mighty tract of wa­ters. He was god of all the wa­ters that wash the coast, of the Gulf of Ge­or­gia, of Pu­get Sound, of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, of the wa­ters that beat against even the west coast of Van­couver Is­land, and of all the chan­nels that cut between the Char­lotte Is­lands. He was Tyee of the West Wind, and his

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