Free Winter Brothers by Ivan Doig Page A

the plowing and other field labor to Maggs and Swan.
    Through 1862 and most of 1863, Swan dabbles as extra muscle in the potato field. Gleans lore from the Makahs. (Captain John is an ever-ready, if problematical, fund of it:
]ohn as a general thing is a great liar, but he is well informed on all historical matters.
...) Does sketchwork. Keeps the diary constant. And otherwise disposes of days until the carpenter hired by Webster at last whams the final nail into his schoolhouse.
    Webster himself is absent from Neah Bay much of the time now that he has Swan and the others in place there, so Swan fairly often discovers himself standing in as arbiter among the Indians.
Peter came in this evening and had a long talk with me relative to his conduct since he came back from California. He promised to do better and said he hoped I would be friendly to him. I told him I always had been his best friend and was now,
but his actions had displeased me and in particular the fact that he had not paid a debt he owed in Port Townsend to Sheehan the tinsmith.
...And sometimes the tumbleweed white population as well.
Capt Melvin arrived in the schooner
Elisabeth.
He had been down on a trading voyage and had been trading whiskey among the Nittinat Indians in the vicinity of Barclay Sound...he assured me positively that he had not nor would he sell any liquor near the reserve. He however inadvertently showed me his account book and I saw that he had with his potatoes one barrel 33 gallons whiskey...I advised him to keep away from where I was for so soon as I had proof of his selling whiskey so sure would I complain of him.
    This Neah Bay Swan, if you look steadily at him for a moment, is a greatly more interesting and instructive fellow than the Shoalwater oysterer/loiterer first met on this frontier coast. He has shown himself to be a chap who likes to hear a story and to take a drink, not absolutely in that order; reveals a remarkable fast knack for friendships, among whites and Indians both; is as exact a diarist as ever filled a page and as steadily curious as a question mark; contrives not to stay in the slog of any job very long (although we shall have to see about this forthcoming profession in the Cape Flattery schoolhouse); can drily characterize—
I thought that their friendship was of the kind that might induce them, should I give offence, to stick my head on top of a pole for a memento
—or get a bit preachy—
I told Peter I always had been his best friend and was now, but
—long since has unwifed and defamilied himself yet maintains week by week steady correspondence with Matilda, Ellen, and Charles; hardly ever meets a meal he doesn’t like or a coastal scene he doesn’t hanker to sketch; muses occasionally, observes always.
    And is about to offer more instruction yet. Mid-November of 1863, the potato harvest in, the schoolhouse at last roofed and windowed,
I painted the alphabet on the blocks Mr. Phillips made for me and tomorrow I intend to commence teaching.

Day Fourteen
    Neah Bay pedagogy gets off to a stuttery start. The first morning, the seventeenth of November of 1863, a single student showed up; Captain John’s ten-year-old nephew, Jimmy Claplanhoo. Swan chose a bit of guile.
This evening I got out the magic lantern and gave Jimmy an exhibition of it as a reward....
Within a few days four more Makah children edged into the schoolroom and were treated to Swan’s picture show. By the end of the first week,
Twenty children present today exercised them on the alphabet and then gave them a pan full of boiled potatoes.
    Success in the schoolroom, discord in the world. Something here sets Swan unusually to brooding about the Civil War and its politics:
I do not believe in the principles of the Republican party as enunciated by Greely, Sumner, Phillips, Beecher...but I do believe that the country is in real danger and I believe at such times it is the duty of every true man to stand by his