Free Winter Brothers by Ivan Doig

in thirst overcame their parching: whether each had become one-quarter drunk, one-half drunk, three-quarters drunk, or wholly drunk. Every so often the Melrose diary presents the forthright wavery notation: “author whole D.”
    Swan, I hardly need say, was not a man to record himself as whole D or any other degree of it. But that he was tussling with the temptation of the bottle is plain enough in his own diary even so.
    Joined the Dashaway Club of Port Townsend
—a group who took a pledge of abstinence and whom one unsympathetic editor dubbed a claque of “high-toned drunkards.”
    Cut my lip with a brush hook this evening in Gerrishes store in a scuffle with Maj. Van Bokkelin
—Van Bokkelin was one o£ Swan’s closest friends and a pillar of community respect, and a scuffle hardly thinkable of a sober Swan.
    Days later,
Made a pledge...not to drink any more liquor for two years from this date
, the ninth of December 1860.
    That pact may have been as much with Webster, gatekeeper to future employment at the Makah Reservation, as with himself. Whether or not, most of the next twenty-one months until Webster finally was able to pluck the appointment as Indian agent found Swan odd-jobbing in sobriety at Neah Bay. (And quartering at the Baadah Point trading post with Webster and whoever else happened to be on hand, in what seems to have been a peppery household:
During the evening a’skunk came into the kitchen to eat swill. Mr Webster fired at him with his pistol, cutting some of his hair off with the boil. The skunk made his escape but filled the house with his stench.)
Some months more had to pass before Webster could enroll Swan on the Makah Reservation payroll as teacher, but then, the first of July of 1862, at last Swan having secured position and salary, immediate dig-nification sets in. Three and a half years of jotted doings in pocket notebooks leave off and the first of Swan’s ledger diaries, the pages long and officious and the handwriting scrupulously clear and margined, ensues.
    What is recorded for the first year and more has nothing to do with education, except that over this course of time Swan’s classroom ever so slowly gets carpentered to completion. Instead Swan spent the time lending a hand in the sundry chores of the little Neah Bay work force, especially the labors of the Reservation’s farmer, Maggs, earnest bearer of agriculture to damp Cape Flattery.
    â€œMaking the earth say beans instead of grass,” Thoreau teased himself about his garden at Walden. At Neah Bay, the official notion was that the brush-tufted coastal soil ought to orate potatoes.
    We plow the land twice
, Swan recorded,
harrow it twice, then plow in the potatoes and harrow the whole over again....If what we plant grows as thrifty as the wild raspberry, currant, gooseberry and elder and nettles, cow parsnip and other rubbish grew we shall have a famous crop.
A kind of Hibernian woefulness moans through this idea of remaking such a people of the sea as the Makahs into potato farmers. I think of the “potato Protestants” of Connaught in the Irish famine, forced to barter their religion for the meals of survival. (Credit Swan with grave doubts about persuading the Makahs to trade canoe for plow:
Indians cannot live on potatoes alone, any more than the white man; they require animal food, and prefer the products of the ocean to the farina of the land. It will take many years, and cost the Government large sums of money to induce these savages to abandon their old habits of life and acquire new ones....I think they should be encouraged in their fisheries...
.) The Makahs, however, with an oceanful of seafood at their front doors, were not at the edge of desperation and so managed to make the best of the potato policy. As democratic eaters they blithely demanded their spud allotments whenever a harvest was produced. But as uninspired agriculturalists they conspicuously left most of