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The Northwest Coast

May 7, 2008

by Bryan Penttila

James G. Swan.The Northwest Coast, Or Three Years’ Residence in the Washington Territory. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857.

On November28, 1852,the brig Oriental bucked across the bar into Shoalwater Bay, an expansive inlet on the southern Washington coastline. Onboard was a Massachusetts-born wayfarer whose curiosity, apathy, and penchant for chronicling would set him apart from most men of his generation. His name was James Gilchrist Swan and this crossing would mark the beginning of his three years’ residence on what we today call Willapa Bay and become the inspiration for one of the first major literary works to emerge from the Washington Territory, The Northwest Coast.

The son of a sea captain, Swan was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1818 and grew up hearing his maternal uncle spin tales about hisadventures in the Pacific Coast fur trade. He grew to become a ship chandlerin Boston, though such a life hardly suited him.Then, like so many starry eyed men of his generation Swan left everything he knew—including his wife and two young children—to venture to the gold fields of California. In 1852, a chance encounter on the docks of San Francisco between Swan and Charles J.W. Russell, a Shoalwater Bay oysterman, led him to relocate to the storied land of his boyhood.

Swan settled on the bay and staked out a homestead. He idly engaged in the oyster trade and worked for a time as a customs inspector. But most of his time was spent exploring the region and getting to know and understand the native inhabitants. In the fall of 1855 he returned to the east, briefly, to do additional research and write a book on his western adventure. The Northwest Coast was published by Harper & Brothers, New York, in 1857.

By his own admission Swan set out to pen “a general and concise account of that portion of the Northwest Coast lying between the Straits of Fuca and the Columbia River.” It is no mere travelogue, however. The Northwest Coast is the story of his personal adventure across a landscape of unknowable promise and irreversible, and sometimes agonizing, change. The book captures the frontier essence of two cultures blending—one ancient and struggling for survival, the other new and opportunistic.

From this epic transition emerge no shortage of memorable characters as only Swan could portray them. There was Captain James Purrington, the former master of a whaling ship, who “was famous for cooking every thing that had ever lived,” including a Christmas dinner of crow and dumplings and a perfectly baked skunk so unsavory that “he was forced to throw (the) skunk and kettle into the river.” And Captain James Scarborough, the deaf Hudson’s Bay ship master who “was looked upon as a sort of oracle by the neighbors, and particularly by those who…had formerly been in the Company’s employ.”

As lively as Swan’s descriptions of his fellow settlers are, it is his work on native culture that makes The Northwest Coast a unique testament. Swan saw beyondone of the frontier’s greatest fantasies, openly condemning “those fictitious tales and poems of imaginary Indian life” all too common in American writings of that time. Instead, he saw the Native Americans of Shoalwater Bay as flesh and blood, and found their culture intriguing.Still, his assessments of some native inhabitants of the bay tend to be unflattering, like that of Cartumhays, a miscreant who the author considered “one of the greatest liars and thieves I ever saw.”

Swan exhibited a keen interest in native lore and language as well. He spent countless hours in canoes and lodges with the Native Americans, winning their confidence and taking in their stories. He learned to speak the Chinook Jargon and includes as an appendix a succinct lexicon of the language. But with this intimacy came anguish, as Swan did all he could to doctor the helpless victims of smallpox outbreaks. It is from these trying times that the most sensitive passages in The Northwest Coast emerge.

Still, the authoris very guarded in his criticism of government policy toward Native Americans. This can perhaps be attributed to the fact that while on Shoalwater Bay (and throughout much of the rest of his life) Swan drew his income from various governmental positions. In Chapter 19, Swan offers an intriguingfirst hand account of a treaty gathering held on the Chehalis River between Isaac Stevens and local tribal dignitaries. In relating the events of the week-long council, Swan makes clear the difficulties of both communication and bureaucracy between the two parties but mentions little of the broader implications.

As a whole, The Northwest Coast is a beautifully written monograph. Swan’s prose is extremely readable and lively, especially compared to the archetypical stuffiness of Victorian-era writing. Portions of the text are slow, however, as Swan’s efforts at retelling the history of the region often take the form of elongated quotes from the journals of explorers. His talents extend beyond that of scrivener as well; many of the prints in The Northwest Coast were rendered from drawings made by the author.

Following the release of The Northwest Coast,Swan returned to the Washington Territory where he settled on the northern Olympic Peninsula. There he held a variety of jobs and spent his later years in quixotic pursuit of riches by speculating in railroads and real estate.He penned several more books throughout his life as well, though none approached the literary caliber of his first. He died in obscurity in Port Townsend in 1893.

Over 150 years after its initial releaseThe Northwest Coast is still in print, available from the University of Washington Press. Swan himself has become something of a Western literary icon and has inspired countless articles, academic citations, and notable books by Lucille McDonald and Ivan Doig. Despite the book’s shortcomings, it is from Swan’s pen that the first few brush strokes of color were added to the watery western fringe of the American landscape.

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