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Canoe and Saddle
Theodore Winthrop's 1863 book

We have had several requests for a transcript of the Duke of York chapter from Theodore Winthrop's 1863 book, Canoe and Saddle (also called The Canoe and The Saddle). Outside of Washing-ton, the book is hard to find in libraries, but a new edition is available for sale in both hard and softback. We are lucky to have an old edition at the Sedro-Woolley Public Library that dates from the old Carnegie Library collection, but there is no year indicated for publication.
The book resulted from an 11-day trip to Washington territory that 25-year-old Winthrop made for his health in 1853. A Yale graduate and direct descendant of Puritan John Winthrop, Theodore arrived just as Washington became a territory and he encountered no only pristine wilderness but also the most amusing family of Indians in the state's history. The little town of Seattle was just barely forming on Elliott Bay and the main port of entry was Port Townsend. That was also the year that families and loggers established themselves at nearby Port Gamble and built the Puget Mill Company, which would dominate the earliest logging for ship's masts that were in demand around the world.

This photo of Admiralty inlet from Barbara Saunder's excellent website and photo tour of Port Townsend shows where Winthrop and the Duke of York's family traveled by canoe.

If you have ever had the pleasure to visit Port Townsend, you probably saw Chetzemoka Park, which was dedicated in 1904 to the Klallam Indian chief who was a true friend to the early settlers and was a key figure in resolving the 1868 Dungeness Massacre, when a band of the S'Klallam tribe, as it was then called, killed 17 Tsimshian Indians who were paddling by canoe from their home near future Puyallup to Vancouver Island. Daryl C. McClary explains Chetzemoka's role in the incident in this HistoryLink.Org essay [see the website: http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=5743 ]:

With the assistance of S'Klallam tribal chief, Chetzemoka (ca. 1808-1888), called by settlers Duke of York, all the S'Klallams involved in the massacre were identified and arrested by Indian Agent Charles S. King and U. S. Commissioner James Swan. The S'Klallam men were transported to the Skokomish Indian Reservation where they were shackled to balls and chains, and sentenced to hard labor digging stumps. Through the intercession of Chief Duke of York, most of the prisoners were released after about four months and the rest a short time later. The government decided the murders had been a dispute between tribes and therefore not under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

When you read our transcription below of Chapter Two of his book, you may assume at first that Winthrop is merely ridiculing the hijinks of the chief and his family as they imbibe to excess and frolic in the bu-colic wilderness. We read that often in 19th century accounts, when observers tried to put Indians in their place, sepa-rate from the settlers. But when you read on, and go on to read the book, you will find that he is truly interested in their culture. His story illustrates how some Indians chose detente and peaceful coexistence with the "Bostons," as they called the whites. He learned the Chinook Jargon extensively and employs it liberally in his descriptions and dia-logue, and that was the first exposure to the Pacific Northwest trading language that most readers ever had. One also wonders if Chetzemoka/Duke had learned about the hijinks of the various royal courts of Europe and England, which were not exactly exemplary either, and if he was aping the standard set nearly 10,000 miles away.
We also note that many people will think of the town of Winthrop, at the eastern side of Highway 20, when they read Theodore's name. He is so closely identified with the town that some people think he visited there in 1853. He did not. And Guy Waring, the man who put the town on the map, did not name the town for him. Sally Portman, a former librarian in Winthrop, cleared up the confusion in her 1993 book, The Smiling Country, which profiles the history of Methow Valley and Winthrop itself. As she explains, Waring wrote to his-torian and place-names expert Edmund S. Meany in 1910:

Winthrop was a name selected by the late John L. Wilson when a delegate to Congress, for the new post office here around 1890. . . . I knew the late Senator well and asked him how he came to select Winthrop for a name. He could never remember but thought it might well have been in honor of the memory of Theodore Win-throp. [Letter originally printed in the book, Exploring Washington, by Harry Majors]

We preface Chapter Two itself with an excerpt from another introductory essay from Histo-ryLink.Org, a brief story from the late historian, Murray Morgan, and an excerpt from the introduction to the Nis-qually Edition of the book that is available in our library. In those pieces, you will learn much background about the Indians, their chief and Winthrop himself, who fell in battle as an U.S. Army major in the first year of the Civil War.

Chetzemoka Park and the Duke of York From the Kit Oldman essay at HistoryLink.Org

Kit Oldham's 2003 photo of Chetzemoka Park.

A number of names were considered for the new park, including Kulshan, an Indian name for Mount Baker. In the end, the park was named for Chetzemoka, one of the best-known Indian leaders in the early history of Washington. When the first non-Indians settled at Port Townsend in 1851, the Klallam Indians whose lands encompassed the future city were led by Chetzemoka's older brother S'Hai-ak, who granted permission for the settlement. S'Hai-ak drowned soon after, and Chetzemoka succeeded to leadership of the 1,000 or so Klallams.
Like his brother, Chetzemoka was friendly with the new settlers, whom he assisted in many ways, including in their relations with other Indian groups. Chetzemoka lived with about 200 of his people, including his two wives See-hem-itza and Chill'lil and their children, in a village of large cedar plank lodges not far from the new settlement. In a not-so-subtle form of ridicule, likely inspired by their difficulty in pronouncing the Klallam names, the white settlers, as they did with other Indians, bestowed names of British aristocrats on Chetzemoka and his family, calling him the Duke of York, his wives Queen Victoria and Jenny Lind, and his son the Prince of Wales.
The supposed difficulty of pronouncing Chetzemoka was raised when the name was proposed for the park, but a local newspaper assured citizens that "after the word has fallen from your lips the music of its syl-lables will appeal to you." (quoted from City of Dreams, edited by Peter Simpson, Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1986).

J. Ross Browne and Port Townsend By Murray Morgan One difficulty with a federal payroll is that it means federal inspectors. For Port Townsend, one trouble with being port of entry for Puget Sound was J. Ross Browne. After the presidential election of 1856, the faithful followers of James A. Buchanan lined up hopefully. Among the job hunters was a heavy-shouldered young Democrat from New York, J. Ross Browne. He listed his qualifications for government service as including employ-ment as blubber-stripper on an Antarctic whaler, squirrel hunter in the Kentucky backwoods, ferry-keeper, flatboat hand, short-story writer, and all-important-campaigner for Buchanan. He was offered an appointment as special agent for the United States Treasury Department on the Pacific Coast. Browne said later, "At great pecuniary sacrifice (in a prospective sense, for I hadn't a dime in the world), I announced myself as ready to proceed to duty." . . .
One purpose of Browne's visit to Port Townsend was to have an audience with the Duke of York, a chief of the Clallams. Opinions differ about the duke, whose Indian name was Chetzemoka. Local residents considered him strong and intelligent, a friend of the white man, and a pillar of strength for his people. William Welsh, an authority on Port Townsend, says, "His part in the development of the Northwest, and more especially, Port Townsend, has reserved a place for him on the historical honor roll of the region. Beautiful little Chetzemoka Park is named for the gallant Indian who many times saved the settlement from extermination."
But Theodore Winthrop, who rented a canoe from him in 1853, begins his description of the incident with the remark, "The Duke of York was ducally drunk." And Browne, who called on him four years later, said that not only the Duke but his two wives, known to the whites as Queen Victoria and Jenny Lind, had had a snootful.

Theodore Winthrop and Canoe and Saddle From the introductory sketch by Alfred Powers Canoe and Saddle would never have been written if Theodore Winthrop hadn't come down with a mild case of smallpox at The Dalles [Oregon], a place "desolate and wild in the extreme with every green thing parched." This was May 10, 1853, while he was heading out of the country with a small detail of soldiers from Fort Vancouver where he had been the guest of the renowned Captain Bonneville, the commandant. He was accord-ingly left behind. In about three weeks, uncontagiously free to circulate, he returned downriver in a Hudson's Bay boat, and continued on to Portland to buy a horse for a sightseeing ride as far south as the Umpqua [river].
A second time the book came close to havin no existence. In the early part of July he counted on joining an eastbound exploring party sent out to meet westbound Isaac I. Stevens, but, not being on the spot when the outfit was organized, he again found himself without the necessary escort. There was plenty of travel on the Ore-gon Trail in 1853 but it was a one-way traffic moving toward the sunset. Only an occasional group went the other direction, and an overland exit from Oregon a hundred years ago was not exactly the kind of journey for an individual by his lone self.
Circumstances had in a sense marooned him till he could tie up with another party of soldiers or explorers, or possibly a political contingent off for a job powwow with the Great White Father. He didn't care much. A trip to Puget Sound had already been in the back of his mind. he now took it, to have the diverting and hu-morous experiences, and the vast dealings with Indian scalawags, which he put into one of the classics of the Far West.
He was only twenty-five years old, a graduate of Yale. His facility for language seemed to have been sharpened at New Haven [Connecticut], for in a remarkably short time he had the whole vocabulary of the Chi-nook Jargon at his tongue's end. Old John Winthrop, first governor of Connecticut, was his great-grandpa about a half-dozen greats back, but the intervening generations had so diluted and thinned out of the Puritan in him as to leave him with even a great deal of tolerance for Indian monkey business and to let him have a large fund of good humor and nonsense.
On April 29, 1853, he had left San Francisco on the Columbia of the Pacific Mail Steamship line. "We stopped in the night at Port Orford, a small military post and settlement". At the mouth of the Columbia River "the swell and roar of the breakers was grand." Upon his inland passage he took laconic note of four towns, Astoria, Rainier, St. Helens and Portland, as they were, or as they seemed to him, in that spring of 1853. . . .
When, with this Southern Oregon jaunt finished, he missed the Stevens exploring party, he took the ordinary route of pioneer times to Puget Sound, first going down the Columbia in a "small steamer" to the mouth of the Cowlitz and then up it in an Indian canoe. He started in the morning of July 12. He now became more liberal in his remarks about the places he passed. . . .
At this point Canoe and Saddle begins. The information on his traveling up to here is mostly from his letters, with a little from his journal. The few details in the port Townsend entry were unrestrainedly expanded and embellished to make the first chapter of the book with the grandeur of its opening sentence, "The Duke of York was ducally drunk."
In a good many respects Winthrop didn't have the kind of outward personality that is revealed in The Canoe and The Saddle. For one thing, he was not nearly so blithe and debonair in actual disposition as the book makes him out to be. In fact, he could out-melancholy the Indians themselves in ordinary private, unob-served moods when he didn't have to put on a jocund front for their benefit. This much of the Puritan hadn't faded out of him. . . .
When Winthrop died as a soldier, as a major, on June 10, 1861, only two of his prolific efforts had been published, an ornate description of a friend's painting in a thin volume of 42 pages, A Companion to the Heart o the Andes (1859), and a war article, "Our March to Washington," in the June 1861 number of the Atlantic Monthly. The magazine was just out when he was killed.
The printed part of his work was thus scanty. Far different was the manuscript part, now in the New York Public Library and described as "several fat volumes." From this seven books were printed after his death. Where is there another author so little recognized in his lifetime with such a big posthumous output? . . .
Though The Canoe and The Saddle went through numerous so-called editions they were all printed from the same overworked plates made by Ticknor & Fields in November of 1862. The first edition was a 16-month selling at a dollar, bound in black, blind-stamped cloth, with the rusty-red endpapers which Ticknor & Fields must have stocked by the thousands of yards, now known to the trade as banner paper. . . .
The book was not put into new type till 1913, and then in the region it celebrated, when John H. Williams, of Tacoma, got out his big fine edition, which included Winthrop's western journal and letters — the same Williams who wrote about Mt. Rainier in The Mountain That Was God. . . .
The present Nisqually Edition may be the fortieth or sixtieth or eightieth as editions are char-acterized, though it is but actually the third fresh printing. . . . The manuscript of The Canoe and The Saddle in the New York Public Library shows that it had a considerable amount of editing. Most of this was by Winthrop him-self but at least two other persons had a share in doctoring it up. One of these was his niece, in whom the Puritan heritage was stronger than in him. On the last page, for instance, Winthrop said "flirted with the buxom thirteenth of a boss Mormon." She discreetly altered it to"chatted with the buxom thirteenth. The identity of the other adviser is not known.
The original title was Klalam and Klickatat.
Ticknor & Fields put The Canoe and The Saddle fourth among the five manuscripts in the order of publication. Apparently it was fourth in the order of their esteem, and they knew the public of that day well enough so that it was fourth in sales. The judgment of a later public has put it first. It has become one of the clas-sics of the Far West, an enchanting 11-day record of 1853, when the Pacific Northwest was young and wild and ex-citing.

Chetzemoka Park from Barbara Saunder's photo tour.

A Klalam Grandee Chapter II, Canoe and Saddle, Nisqually Edition, by Theodore Winthrop
Originally published posthumously in 1863
The Duke of York was ducally drunk. His brother, King George, was drunk — royally. Royalty may disdain public opinion, and fall as low as it pleases. But a brother of the throne, leader of the opposition, possible Regent, possible King, must retain at least a swaying perpendicular. King George had kept his chair of state until an angular sitting position was impossible; then he had subsided into a curvilinear droop, and at last fairly top-pled over, and lay in his lodge, limp and stertorous.
In his lodge lay Georgius Rex, in flabby insensibility. Dead to the duties of sovereignty was the King of the Klalams [now spelled Klallam for the tribe, Clallam for the county]. Like other royal Georges, in pal-aces more regal than this Port Townsend wigwam, in realms more civilized than here, where the great tides of Puget's Sound rise and fall, this royal George had sunk in absolute wreck. Kings are but men. Several kings have thought themselves the god Bacchus. George of the Klalams had imbibed this ambitious error, and had proved himself very much lower than a god, much lower than a man, lower than any plebeian Klalam [Klallam], Indian, a drunken king.
In the great shed of slabs that served them for palace sat the Queen, — sat the Queens, — mild-eyed, melancholy, copper-colored persons, also, sad to say, not sober. Etiquette demanded inebriety. The stern rules of royal indecorum must be obeyed. The Queen Dowager had succumbed to ceremony; the Queen Consort was sinking; every lesser queen, the favorites for sympathy, the neglected for consolation, all had imitated their lord and master.
Courtiers had done likewise. Chamberlain Gold Stick, Black Rod, Garter King at Arms, a dozen high functionaries, were prostrate by the side of prostrate majesty. Courtiers groveled with their sovereign. Sar-danapalus never presided, until he could preside no longer, at a more tumble-down orgie.
King, royal household, and court all were powerless, and I was a suppliant here, on the waters of the Pacific, for means of commencing my homeward journey across the continent toward the Atlantic. I needed a bark from that fleet by which King George ruled the waves. I had dallied too long at Vancouver's Island, under the hospitable roof of the Hudson's Bay Company, and had consumed invaluable hours in making a detour from my proper course to inspect the house, the saw-mill, the bluff, and the beach, called Port Townsend. These were the last days of August, 1853 {1853/08/00}. I was to meet my overland comrades, a pair of roughs, at the Dalles of the Co-lumbia on the first of September {1853/09/01}. Between me and the rendezvous were the leagues of Puget's Sound, the preparation for an ultramontane trip, the passes of the Cascades, and all the dilatoriness and danger of Indian guidance. Moments now were worth days of common life.
Therefore, as I saw those winged moments flit away unharnessed to my chariot of departure, I became wroth, and, advancing where the king of all this region lay, limp, stertorous [snoring], and futile, I kicked him liberally. Yes! I have kicked a king! Proudly I claim that I have outdone the most radical regicide. I have offered indig-nities to the person of royalty with a moccasined toe. Would that that toe had been robustly booted! In his Sans Souci, his Oeil de Boeuf, his Brighton Pavilion, I kicked so much of a first gentleman of his realm as was George R., and no scalping-knife leaped from greasy seal-skin sheath to avenge the insult. One bottle-holder in waiting, upon whose head I had casually trodden, did indeed stagger to his seat, and stammer truculently in Chinook jargon, "Potlatch lum! Give me to drink," quoth he, and incontinently fell prone again, a poor, collapsed bottle-holder.
But kicking the insensible King of the Klalams, that dominant nation on the southern shores of Puget's Sound, did not procure me one of his canoes and a crew of his braves to paddle me to Nisqually, my next station, for a blanket apiece and gratuities of sundries. There was no help to be had from that smoky barn or its sorry inmates, so regally nicknamed by British voyagers. I left them lying upon their dirty mats, among their fishy baskets, and strode away, applying the salutary toe to each dignitary as I passed.
Fortunately, without I found the Duke of York, only ducally drunk. A duke's share of the po-tables had added some degrees to the arc of Vibration of his swagger, but had not sent it beyond equilibrium. He was a reversed pendulum, somewhat spasmodic in swing, and not constructed on the compensation principle, when one muscle relaxed, another did not tighten. However, the Duke was still sober enough to have speculation in his eyes, and as he was Regent now, and Lord High Admiral, I might still by his favor be expedited.
It was a chance festival that had intoxicated the Klalams, king and court. There had been a fraternization, a powwow, a wahwah, a peace congress with some neighboring tribe, perhaps the Squaksnamish, or Squallyamish [now spelled Stillaguamish], or Sinahomish, or some other of the Whulgeamish, dwellers by Whulge, the waters of Puget's Sound. And just as the festival began, there had come to Port Townsend, or Kahtai, where the king of the Klalams, or S'Klalams, now reigned, a devils-end of a lumber brig, with liquor of the fieriest. An orgie followed, a nation was prostrate.
The Duke was my only hope. Yet I must not betray eagerness. A dignitary among Indians does not like to be bored with energy. If I were too ardent, the Duke would grow coy. Prices would climb to the un-approachable. Any exhibition of impatience would cost me largess of beads, if not blankets, beyond the tariff for my canoe-hire. A frugal mind, and, on the other hand, a bent toward irresponsible pleasure, kept the Duke palpably wa-vering. He would joyfully stay and complete his saturnalia, and yet the bliss of more chattels, and consequent consid-eration, tempted him. Which shall it be, "lumoti" or "pississy," — bottle or blanket? revel and rum, or toil and toilette? — the great alternative on which civilization hinges, as well among Klalams as elsewhere. Sunbeams are so warm, and basking such dulcet, do-nothing bliss, why overheat one's self now for the woollen raiment of future warmth? Not merely warmth, but wealth, wives, chiefest of luxuries, are bought with blankets; with them canoes are bought, and to a royal highness of savages, blankets are purple, ermine, and fine linen.
Calling the Duke's attention to these facts, I wooed him cautiously, as craft woos coyness; I assumed a lofty indifference of demeanor, and negotiated with him from a sham vantage-ground of money-power, knowing what trash my purse, would be, if he refused to be tempted. A grotesque jargon called Chinook is the lingua-franca of the whites and Indians of the Northwest. Once the Chinooks were the most numerous tribe along the Co-lumbia, and the first, from their position at its mouth, to meet and talk with strangers. Now it is all over with them; their bones are dust; small-pox and spirits have eliminated the race. But there grew up between them and the traders a lingo, an incoherent coagulation of words, as much like a settled, logical language as a legion of centrifugal, marauding Bashi Bazouks, every man a Jack-of-all-trades, a beggar and blackguard, is like an accurate, unanimous, disciplined battalion. It is a jargon of English, French, Spanish, Chinook, Kallapooga, Haida, and other tongues, civilized and sav-age. It is an attempt on a small scale to nullify Babel by combining a confusion of tongues into a confounding of tongues, a witches' caldron in which the vocable that bobs up may be some old familiar Saxon verb, having suffered Procrustean docking or elongation, and now doing substantive duty; or some strange monster, evidently nurtured within the range of tomahawks and calumets.

Chinook Jargon There is some danger that the beauties of this dialect will be lost to literature, "Carent quia vate sacro." The Chinook jargon still expects its poet. As several of my characters will use this means of conveying their thoughts to my reader, and employ me only as an interpreter, I have thought it well to aid comprehension by this little philological preface. My big talk with the Duke of York went on in such a lingo, somewhat as follows:
"Pottlelum mitlite King Jawge; Drunk lieth King George," said I. "Cultus tyee ocook; a beg-garly majesty that. Hyas tyee mika; a mighty prince art thou, pe kumtux skookoom mamook esick; and knowest how robustly to ply paddle. Nika tikky hyack klatawah copa Squally, copa canim; I would with speed canoe it to Squally. Hui pississy nika potlatch pe hui ikta; store of blankets will I give, and plenteous sundries."
"Nawitka siks; yea, friend," responded the Duke, grasping my hand, after two drunken clutches at empty air. "Klosche nika tum, tum copa hyas Baasten tyee; tender is my heart toward thee, o great Yankee don. Yaka pottlelum-halo nika -wake cultus mann Dookeryawk; he indeed is drunk- not I- no loafer-man, the Duke of York. Mitlite canim; got canoe. Pe klosche nika tikky klatawah copa Squally; and heartily do I wish to go to Squally."

Jenny Lind and the Duke's family Had the Duke wavered still, and been apathetic to temptation of blankets, and sympathetic toward the joys of continued saturnalia, a new influence now brought to bear would have steadied him. One of his Duchesses, Only duchessly intoxicated, came forth from the ducal lodge, and urged him to effort.
"Go, by all means, with the distinguished stranger, my love," said she, in Chinook, "and I will be the solace of thy voyage. Perchance, also, a string of beads and a pocket-mirror shall be my meed from the Boston chief, a very generous Man, I am sure." Then she smiled enticingly, her flat-faced grace, and introduced herself as Jenny Lind, or, as she called it, "Chin Lin." Indianesque, not fully Indian, was her countenance. There was a trace of tin in her copper color, possibly a dash of Caucasian blood in her veins. Brazenness of hue was the result of this un-ion, and a very pretty color it is with eloquent blushes mantling through it, as they do Mantle in Indian cheeks. Her forehead was slightly and coquettishly flattened by art, as a woman's should be by nature, unless nature destines her for missions foreign to feminineness, and means that she shall be an intellectual roundhead, and shall sternly keep a graceless school, to irritate youthful cherubim into original sinners. Indian maids are pretty; Indian dames are bags. Only high civilization keeps its women beautiful to the last. Indian belles have some delights of toilette worthy of con-sideration by their blonde sisterhood. O mistaken harridans of Christendom, so bountifully painted and powdered, did ye but know how much better than your diffusiveness of daub is the concentrated brilliance of vermilion stripes part-ing at the nose-bridge and streaming athwart the cheeks! Knew ye but this, at once ye would reform from your unde-luding shams, and recover the forgotten charms of acknowledged pinxit [Latin for "he or she paints it]

In a canoe with the Duke At last, persuaded by his own desires and the solicitations of his fair Duchess, the Duke de-termined to transport me. He pointed to a grand canoe on the beach, that should be our Bucentaur, and now he must don robes of ceremony for the voyage. For, indeed, both ducal personages were in deshabille. A dirty shirt, blue and short, was the Duke's chief habiliment; hers, a shirt longer, but no cleaner.
Within his palace-curtains now disappeared the second grandee of the Klalams, to bedeck himself. Presently I lifted the banging mat that served for door to his shed of slabs, and followed him. His family and suite were but crapulous after their less than royal potations. He despatched two sleepy braves to make ready the ca-noe, and find paddles.
"Where is my cleanest shirt, Chin Lin? he asked.
"Nika macook lum; I buy grog with um," replied the Duchess.
"Cultus mamook; a dastardly act," growled the Duke, "and I will thwack thee for 't."
Jenny Lind sank meekly upon the mud-floor, and wept, while the Duke smote her with palm, fist, and staff.
"Kopet! Hold!" cried I, rushing forward.
Thy beauteous spouse has bought the nectar for thy proper jollity. Even were she selfish, it is uncivilized to smite the fair. Among the Bostons, when women wrong us, we give pity or contempt, but not the strappado." Harangues to Indians are traditionally in such lofty style.
The Duke suffered himself to be appeased and proceeded to dress without the missing article. He donned a faded black frock-coat, evidently a misfit for its first owner in civilization, and transmitted down a line of deformed wearers to fall amorphous on the shoulders of him of York. For coronet he produced no gorgeous combi-nation of velvet, strawberry-leaves, and pearls; but a hat or tile, also of civilization, wrinkled with years and battered by world-wandering, crowned him frowzily. Black dress pantaloons of brassy sheen, much crinkled at the bottom, where they fell over moccasins with a faded scarlet instep-piece, completed his costume. A very shabby old-clo' Duke. A virulent radical would have enjoyed him heartily, as an emblem of decay in the bloated aristocracy of this region. Red paint daubed over his clumsy nose, and about the flats surrounding his little, disloyal, dusky eyes, kept alive the tradi-tional Indian in his appearance. Otherwise he might have been taken for a decayed priest turned bar-tender, or a col-porteur of tracts on spiritualism, or an ex-constable pettifogger in a police court. Commerce, alas! had come to the waters of Whulge, stolen away his Indian simplicity, and made him a caricature, dress, name, and nature. A primitive Klalam, clad in skins and undevoured by the flames of fire-water, he would have done well enough as a type of fish-fed barbarism. Civilization came, with step-mother kindness, baptized him with rum, clothed him in discarded slops, and dubbed him Duke of York. Hapless scarecrow, disreputable dignitary, no dukeling of thine shall ever become the Louis Philippe of Klalam revolutions. Boston men are coming in their big canoes over sea. Pikes have shaken off the fever and ague on the banks of the muddy Missouri, and are striding beyond the Rockys. Nasal twangs from the east and west soon will sound thy trump of doom. Squatters will sit upon thy dukedom, and make it their throne.

On the Whulge, or Puget sound Tides in Whulge, which the uneducated maps call Puget's Sound, rush with impetus, rising and falling eighteen or twenty feet. The tide was rippling winningly up to the stranded canoes. Our treaty was made; our costume was complete; we prepared to embark. But lo! a check! In malignant sulks, King George came forth from his mal-perfumed lodge of red-smeared slabs. "Veto," said he. "Dog am I, and this is -my manger. Every canoe of the fleet is mine, and from this beach not one shall stir this day of festival!"
Whereupon, after a wrangle, short and sharp, with the Duke, in which the King whipped out a knife, and brandished it with drunken vibrations in my face, he staggered back, and again lay in his lodge, limp and stertorous. Had he felt my kick, or was this merely an impulse of discontented ire?
How now? Could we not dethrone the sovereign, and confiscate his property? There are precedents for such a course. But savage life is full of chances. As I was urging the soberish Duke to revolutionary acts, or at least to a forced levy from the royal navy, a justifiable piracy, two canoes appeared rounding the point. " 'Come unto these yellow sands,' ye brasscolored braves," we cried. They were coming, each crew roving anywhither, and soon, by the Duke's agency, I struck a bargain for the leaky better of the two vessels.
No clipper that ever creaked from statu quo in Webb's shipyard, and rumbled heavily along the ways, and rushed as if to drown itself in its new element, and then went cleaving across the East River, staggering under the intoxicating influence of a champagne-bottle with a blue ribbon round its neck, cracked on the rudderpost by a blushing priestess, no such grand result of modern skill ever surpassed in mere model the canoe I had just char-tered for my voyage to Squally. Here was the type of speed and grace to which the most untrammelled civilization has reverted, after cycles of junk, galleon, and galliot building, — cycles of lubberly development, but full of in-struction as to what can be done with the best type when it is reasoned out or rediscovered. My vessel was a black dug-out with a red gunwale. Forty feet of pine-tree had been burnt and whittled into a sharp, buoyant canoe. Sundry cross-pieces strengthened it, and might be used as seats or backs. A row of small shells inserted in the red-smeared gunwale served as talismans against Bugaboo. Its master was a withered ancient; its mistress a haggish crone. These two were of unsavory and fishy odor. Three young men, also of unsavory and fishy odor, completed the crew. Salmon mainly had been the lifelong diet of all, and they were oozier with its juices than I could wish of people I must touch and smell for a voyage of two days.
In the bargain for canoe and crew, the Duke constituted himself my courier. I became his prey. The rule of tea-making, where British ideas prevail, is a rough generalization, a spoonful for the pot and one for each bibber. The tariff of canoe-hire on Whulge is equally simple, a blanket for the boat, and one for each paddler. The Duke carefully included himself and Jenny Lind among the paddling recipients of blankets. I ventured to express the view that both he and his Duchess would be unwashed supernumeraries. At this he was indignant. He felt himself necessary as impresario of the expedition.
"Wake closche ocook olyman siwash; no good that oldman savage," said he, pointing to the skipper. "Yaka pottlelum, conoway pottlelum; he drunk, all drunk. Wake kumtux Squally; no understand Squally. Hyas tyee Dookeryawk, wake pottlelum, — kumtux skookoom mamook esick, pe tikky hyack klatawah copa Squally; mighty chief the Duke of York, not drunk, understand to ply paddle mightily, and want to go fast to Squally."
"Very well," said I, "I throw myself into your hands. My crew, then, numbers six, the three fishy youths, Olyman siwash, Jenny Lind, and yourself. As to Olyman's fishy squaw, she must be temporarily di-vorced, and go ashore; dead weight will impede our voyage."
"Nawitka," responded the Klalam, "cultus ocook olyman cloocheman; no use that oldman woman. "So she went ashore, bow-legged, monotonous, and a fatalist, like all old squaws.
"And now," continued the Duke, drawing sundry greasy documents from the pocket of that shapeless draggle-tail coat of his, "mika tikky nanitch nika teapot; wilt thou inspect my certificates?" I took the foul papers without a shudder,-- have we not all been educated out of squeamishness by handling the dollar-bills of civilization? There was nothing ambiguous in the wording of these "teapots." It chanced sometimes, in days of chivalry, that spies bore Missions with clauses sinister to themselves, as this: "The bearer is a losel vile, — have you never a hangman and an oak for him? "The Duke's testimonials were of similar import. They were signed by Yankee skippers, by British naval officers, by casual travellers, — all unanimous in opprobrium. He was called a drunken rascal, a shameless liar, a thief; called each of these in various idioms, with plentiful epithets thrown in, according to the power of imagery possessed by the author. Such certificates he presented gravely, and with tranquil pride. He deemed himself indorsed by civilization, not branded. Men do not always comprehend the world's cynical praise. It seemed also that his Grace had once voyaged to San Francisco in what he called a "skookoom canim copa moxt stick; a colossal canoe with two masts." He did not state what part he played on board, whether cook, captain, stowaway, or Klalam plenipo to those within the Golden Gate. His photograph had been taken at San Francisco. This he also exhibited in a grandiose manner, the Duchess, Olyman siwash, and the three fishy siwashes examining it with wonder and grunts of delight. Now it must not be supposed that the Duke was not still ducally drunk, or that it was easy to keep him steady in position or intention. Olyman siwash, also, though not patently intoxicated, wished to be, — so did the three unsavory, hickory-shirted, mat-haired, truculent siwashes. Olyman would frequently ask me, aside, in the strange, unimpassioned, expressionless undertone of an Indian, for a "lumoti," Chinook jargon for la bouteille, meaning no empty bottle, but a full. Never a lumoti of delay and danger got Olyman from me. Our preparations went heavily enough. Sometimes the whole party would squat on the beach, and jabber for ten minutes, ending always by de-manding of me liquor or higher wages. But patience and purpose always prevail. At last, by cool urgency,, I got them all on board and away. Adieu Port Townsend, then a town of one house on a grand bluff, and one saw-mill in a black ravine. Adieu intoxicated lodges of Georgius Rex Klalamorum! Adieu Royalty! Remember my kick, and continue to be h'happy as you may.

Story posted on May 26, 2005
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Canoe and Saddle Theodore Winthrop's 1863 book

Canoe and Saddle
Theodore Winthrop's 1863 book