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Skagit River Journal

of History & Folklore
Subscribers Edition
The most in-depth, comprehensive site about the Skagit
Covers from British Columbia to Puget Sound. Counties covered: Skagit, Whatcom, Island, San Juan, Snohomish & BC. An evolving history dedicated to committing random acts of historical kindness

Noel V. Bourasaw, editor

810 Central Ave., Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284
Home of the Tarheel Stomp

Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug

S'Klallam and Chemakum
Indian tribes on Olympic Peninsula
when Jarman settled there in 1848-52

This photos is of a Quamichan Indian Village on Vancouver Island, taken in 1875. Quamichan was northwest of Nanaimo on the Quall-e-hum River, where Dr. Robert Brown explored in 1864. Also called Quallchum, the village's name was derived from Nanaimo term "place of dog [chum] salmon." The image was pretty universal in the Pacific Northwest, showing the construction methods of houses and a Quamichan paddling a chuck canoe near rushes at the river's edge.

We spun this story off from the William "Blanket Bill" Jarman biography in order to address the considerable confusion and contradiction in various accounts about the tribes present on the Olympic Peninsula when Jarman settled there temporarily, off and on, in the period 1848-52. The contradictions were present in both the contemporary U.S. Government documents of that time, private writing later in the century and books by various historians between then and now. In our review, we will also explain the genealogy of Alice, Jarman's wife and companion for the next three decades. She and the Indians that Jarman met in that period helped shape both his life and the legends about him.
Our direct evidence about Jarman's stay with the Indians of the northern tip of Olympic Peninsula comes from the handwritten notes of Bellingham editor Frank Teck, who interviewed Jarman at the home of his niece, Minnie Vine Plaster, in 1897. Leaving the "Indian Ransom and Blankets" legend aside for this article, we find, starting on page three, Bill's claim about his first encounters at the area around the landform that Capt. George Vancouver first sighted on his Discovery voyage of 1792 and named Point Wilson, for his colleague, George Wilson:

Late in [1848] Bill took a canoe and came to Point Wilson, where King George and his Clallams lived, where Port Townsend is now. . . . Stayed with George till late '49, when he went to California. [And Page 9] King George; General Scott, his brother; Duke of York [later known as to whites as Chetzemoka], another brother; General Taylor, another brother.

Bill Jarman, circa 1900, after returning from England

Jarman befriended the local S'Klallam Chief, whom the white settlers soon nicknamed King George and who ethnographer George Gibbs called S-Hai-ak when Gibbs profiled Indian tribes for Capt. George McClellan in 1854. Some historians have concluded that the naming was solely because the settlers patronized the Indians as inferiors, but several historians of the day noted that the Indians called all ships "King George ships" from the 18th century on, so that could have been the genesis, which continued on with Duke, General, etc. Gibbs spelled the Indian camp, Kai-tai. From now on we will use the spelling Kah-tai for consistency and because that is how the reader will find the name, which is now attached to the lagoon that you see west of the boat haven after you descend the hill into Port Townsend, via Highway 20/Sims Way. Kai-tai or Kah-tai was the anglicized approximation of the phonetic Indian spelling. As Thomas W. Camfield explained in his 2002 book, Port Townsend, the City that Whiskey Built:

Just exactly when Port Townsend truly was established as a village populated by humankind is a matter for conjecture. Earliest evidence of human presence in Western Washington appears to be one of the mastodon bones unearthed in nearby Sequim in 1977. It had a spear point embedded in it. The bones were carbon-dated back to about 12,000 years ago. Yet Port Townsend's generally acclaimed "founding" dates to only 151 years ago, when the first egocentric Euro-Caucasians arrived to force their conception of civilization onto the area and its ancient people. They gave the age-old Indian community Kah Tai the name of a foppish English aristocrat (the Marquis of Townshend), began replacing the beauty of natural forests with a comparatively garish conglomeration of straight lines and angles, added whiskey to the local diet — and the White Man's Port Townsend was founded.

Tom Camfield found this photo of Kah-Tai Lagoon (at the left) from 1905, largely as it looked when Jarman lived near there with Indians, before the highway was built alongside, and way before it was dredged. Today, it is considerably smaller. Click on the thumbnail for the full photo.

The lagoon itself is much smaller than when the early pioneers arrived in mid-19th century. Filling-in began in 1961. Tom Camfield began working for the Port Townsend Leader newspaper more than 50 years ago and for 20 years researched and wrote obituaries for the newspaper. I asked him where King George's camp was likely located.
"I believe King George's Indian camp would have been pretty much from Point Hudson [or Hudson Point] along the Admiralty Inlet beach north toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca (as witnessed by the old Vancouver expedition etching featuring a net apparently used for capturing ducks--which I used toward the front of one of my books) . . . and probably also on around the point (Point Hudson) and along the shore of Port Townsend Bay westward (where the first white settlers commenced building their town)," Camfield suggests. "I do recall that James G. Swan accompanied Chetzemoka on a fishing expedition out to Chimacum Creek and environs along in the 1850s and that Chetzemoka apparently had relatives out there. But then, Chetzemoka also had a sister who married the founder of Brinnon, on down the canal beyond the Quilcenes (also spelled Twana) and toward the main Skokomish country. The S'Kallams, of course, occupied all the way from Port Angeles down around Port Townsend Bay. The Wilkes Expedition of 1841 showed a village at the head of Discovery Bay (see map near the back of one of my books). We also have current archeological work under way at Beckett Point (further up the eastern shore of the bay) where old bones were unearthed during excavation for a sewer project by the current white colony that occupies that spit."
[Journal ed. note: note that the names for the tribe — Chimacum, Chemacum, Chimakum and Chemakum, have been interchangeable in documents for 160-plus years. The town on the way north to Port Townsend is spelled Chimacum, but we have chosen the spelling of Chemakum for consistency in our own writing because it was so often used in various documents. Pam Clise adds that the S'Klallam villages ranged as far as Port Gamble.]

Bill lived among the S'Klallam/Clallam Off and on for the next three years, Bill used the Kah-tai camp as his home base when he was not paddling back and forth up and down the Sound. I sometimes wonder if Gibbs met with Bill and benefited from Bill's first-hand observations. Despite all his yarn-spinning, Jarman deserves credit for living with, assimilating and just plain getting along with and communicating with Indians when most white visitors considered them a mere impediment. Indeed, for the next 30 years Bill preferred the company of his S'Klallam wife and other Indians more than hanging out with other white settlers. Readers are often confused by the names Clallam and Klallam. The confusion began when Gibbs and others spelled the name with a "C," but he did note that the Indians preferred to call themselves S'Klallam. Historians and Indians still prefer the S'Klallam name, apparently because it is phonetically closer to the original Indian name for the tribe, Nu-sklaim, or strong people. For consistency in this article, we use the spelling S'Klallam in our own writing. The Jamestown Band of the S'Klallam tribe have their own excellent website.
Myron Eells, missionary and author of extensive works about West Coast Indians, explained in the American Antiquarian Oriental Journal, Volume IX (January-November 1887), that Clallam had already become the common accepted Anglicized spelling:

The Clallams — In the treaty this name is spelled S'Klallam. The S has already been explained. It is now generally dropped, and the k changed to c. A county is named from it, which has dropped one l and in some official seals the word is spelled Clalm, Other tribes now call them Klallam and S'Klallam. It evidently originated from their own name for themselves Nu-sklairn, which means a strong people, for they formerly were a strong tribe. Their territory formerly extended from Port Discovery Bay west to the Hoko River on the northern coast of Washington Territory. The treaty expected them to go to the Skokomish reservation, and the Government was to furnish the means for this purpose. This has never been done, and they have never been moved, and probably never will be.

Duke of York, or Chetzemoka, and his wife, Victoria.

George Gibbs profiled the Indian Tribes of the Olympic Peninsula in two 1854 reports, one to Capt. George McClellan — later the General of the Army of the Potomac, and the other to Congress. He reported that the S'Klallam had become dominant on the northeast end of the Peninsula, replacing the nearby Chemakum tribe, which had been decimated by an attack:

Next to the Makahs are the Clallams, or, as they call themselves, S'Klallams, the most formidable tribe now remaining. Their country stretches along the whole southern shore of the Straits to between Port Discovery and Port Townsend; besides which, they have occupied the latter place, properly belonging to the Chimakum. They have eight villages, viz: Commencing nearest the Makahs, Okeno, or Ocha, which is a sort of alsatia or neutral ground for the runaways of both tribes; Pishtst, on Clallam bay; Elkwah, at the mouth of the river of that name; Tse-whit-zen, or False Dungeness; Tinnis, or Dungeness; St-queen, Squim bay, or Washington harbor; Squa-que-hl, Port Discovery; and Kahtai, Port Townsend. Their numbers have been variously estimated, end, as usual, exaggerated; some persons rating them as high as 1,600 fighting men. An actual count of the last three, which were supposed to contain half the population, was made by their chiefs in January, and, comprehending all who belonged to them, whether present or not, gave a population of only 376 all told.. The total number will not probably exceed 800. That they have been more numerous is unquestionable, and one of the chiefs informed me that they once had one hundred and forty canoes, of eighteen to the larger and fourteen to the smaller size; which, supposing the number of each kind to be equal, gives a total of 2,240 men. . . .
The head chief of all the Clallams was Lach-ka-nam, or Lord Nelson, who is still living, but has abdicated in favor of his son, S'Hai-ak, or King George--a very different personage, by the way, from the chief of the same name east of the mountains. Most of the principal men of the tribe have received names either from the English or the "Bostons;" and the genealogical tree of the royal Family presents as miscellaneous an assemblage of characters as a masked ball in carnival. Thus, two of King George's brothers are the Duke of York and General Gaines [Gaines may have actually been a Chemakum; see below]. His cousin is. Tom Benton; and his sons; by Queen Victoria, are General Jackson and Thomas Jefferson. The queen is daughter to the Duke of Clarence, and sister to Generals Scott and Taylor; as also to Mary Ella Coffin, the wife of John C. Calhoun. The Duke of York's wife is Jenny Lind; a brother of the Duke of Clarence is John Adams; and Calhoun's sons are James K. Polk, General Lane, and Patrick Henry. King George's sister is the daughter of the late Flattery Jack. All of them have papers certifying to these and various other items of information, which they exhibit with great satisfaction. They make shocking work, however, in the pronunciation of their names; the Rs and Fs being shibboleths which they cannot utter.

General Gaines, the Chemakum and Patkanim of the Snoqualmoos

Chief Patkanim, Snoqualmoo/Snoqualmie tribe, circa 1855

Here we briefly address what could be a mistake in the historical record that has not yet been corrected in print. In his 1854 reports, George Gibbs wrote of the Chemakum:

Above the Clallams are the Chimakum, formerly one of the most powerful tribes of the Sound, but which, a few years since, is said to have been nearly destroyed at a blow by an attack of the Snoqualmoos. Their numbers have been probably much diminished by the wars in which they were constantly engaged. They now occupy some fifteen small lodges on Port Townsend bay, and number perhaps seventy in all. Lately, the Clallams have taken possession of their country, and they are, in a measure, subject to them. Their language differs materially from either that of the Clallams or the Nisqually, and is not understood by any of their neighbors. In fact, they seem to have maintained it a State secret. To what family it will ultimately be referred, cannot now be decided. Their territory seems to have embraced the shore from Port Townsend to Port Ludlow.

We have been unable to find an account of the actual attack and what year it occurred. The only clue comes again from Frank Teck's Jarman interview notes of 1897, which Edson summarized in 1951. In an unnumbered handwritten page, which is partly ragged at the top, cutting off some preliminary information, Teck quoted Jarman:

[The] Chimikum Indians [cut off] Chimikum Creek, Port Townsend, entirely different language and customs from Clallams. Blanket Bill says about 1842 or 3, Chimikums had fortifications or palisades of timbers driven in ground all around village. Skagits and Snohomish combined came and set fire to palisades, destroying nearly all the Chimikums with bone, iron and stone spears, arrow, knives and hatchets as the victims came out to escape from fire. Only about 200 Chimikums left of big tribe when Bill lived with Clallams at Pt.T in 184[last number unfortunately cut]. General Gaines was chief of Chimikums in '48. King George Chief of Clallams. There were about 2,000 Clallams.

The conflict arises in three other sources that seem to be contradictory. As we noted above, Gibbs wrote in 1954: "Thus, two of King George's brothers are the Duke of York and General Gaines." Next, Gaines was a signatory on the Point No Point Treaty of Jan. 26, 1855, identified as "Yah-kwi-e-nook, or General Gaines, S'klallam sub-chief." Those references initially led us to assume that Gaines was indeed an S'Klallam. But in reading Camfield's 2002 book, Port Townsend: An Illustrated History of Shanghaiing, Shipwrecks, Soiled Doves and Sundry Souls, we found his quotation from James Swan, who was a pioneer settler at Shoalwater/Willapa Bay in 1852 and then lived in Port Townsend as a base from 1859-99, during which time he was a regional newspaper reporter, lawyer specializing in admiralty law, customs official and ethnographer for the Smithsonian Institute. He was also an avid diarist and Camfield found that Swan identified Gaines as the chief of the Chimicum, which he also identified back and forth with two different spellings. So we sought out the 1860 diaries and discovered several references that year, including these:

Jan. 12 — Cloudy calm and mild. Billy Balch and the owner of the Chemakus from Wyatch came up in a canoe from Neah Bay last evening with 8 other men and women. Billy wants me in the absence of Capt. Fay to intercede with Gen. Gaines, the Chimakum chief, relative to slave boy. Took the Mackahs to the Duke of York's lodge where they made their headquarters. . . . Oct. 25 — Went to Gen. Gaines, the Chemakum chief's tent and explained to the Chemakum Mr. Gosnell's letter. Gen. Gaines then made me a speech which he requested me to write to Mr. Geary. Gen. Gaines gave me the census of his tribe, which is now only 73 persons, men, women and children. Sch. Growler arrived from Victoria, boarded her and saw Mr. Armstrong who told me that Col. Simmons had nothing to do with the Clallams this side of Dungeness Spit.

This was the cover of Mary Ann Lambert Vincent's original 1960 S'Klallam genealogy book, The 7 Brothers of the House of Ste-tee-thlum. Courtesy of Donna Sand, who found this copy in the stacks of the Bellingham Public Library.

The final conflict comes from Mary Ann Lambert Vincent's definitive 1960 S'Klallam genealogy book, The 7 Brothers of the House of Ste-tee-thlum (we profile the author below). Although we have detected a few minor errors in that book, Vincent carefully listed three generations of the S'Klallam chieftain's family tree and General Gaines does not appear anywhere as the brother of brothers King George and Duke of York (Chetzemoka). So, we want to cite the conflicting records and attempt to reconcile them. First, we note that Gibbs could have easily been confused because Swan, himself, identified Gaines as the S'Klallam chiefs' brother in another document in 1859, which is almost identical to Gibbs's references. There seem to be only two answers. Either Gaines was not an S'Klallam at all, but rather a Chemakum all along, or he was an S'Klallam of some other family who took control of the decimated Chemakum whose warriors and chiefs were killed off in the battles of the early 1840s. [Update: just before posting this story, still more clues surfaced about Chief Gaines that muddied the waters even more. We will address them below in connection with the very confusing Point Elliott Treaty.]
We are still searching for answers to two questions that also arise. By 1848, the Snohomish Indians, who are reputed to be the victors in those battles, were led by Patkanim, a warrior chief who turned from being the most effective Indian challenger to hegemony by the white interlopers, but then became an acknowledged friend of the white settlers . In 1848, he gathered together a few thousand warriors and their families from several tribes to a gigantic pow-wow on Whidbey Island where they trapped and slaughtered game and dined royally while Patkanim urged them to strike decisively at the still small numbers of settlers and a small U.S. militia at Nisqually and Steilacoom. He was chief of the Snoqualmoo tribe, which in 1999 was federally recognized as a tribe by the tribal name of Snoqualmie, changed because of the place names that whites determined. Another small band of Snoqualmoos, largely descendants of Patkanim's daughter Julie, has challenged the leaders of the recognized tribe and they made headlines in 2004 when they challenged the expansion of the Salish Lodge at Snoqualmie Falls. Now centered at Carnation, Patkanim led the tribe from his camp at Fall City.
The best profile of Patkanim we have found is in the 1972 book by Margaret McKibben Corliss, Fall City in the Valley of the Moon (Fourth Printing, 2004). Mrs. Corliss has written a terrific regional book about that area and she describes Patkanim as:

The Chief of the Snoqualmies was Patkanim, a particularly shrewd and powerful chief. He seems to have been something of an anomaly. The evidence indicates that he hated the British Hudson's Bay people with a deadly hatred, but, after some hesitancy, became a friend and protector of the Americans. He fully won the confidence of Arthur Denny and Alki Point pioneers.
Patkanim was an exceptionally personable Indian, with an intelligent countenance and rather striking features. The first historical record of him is in connection with a great feast and pow-wow he organized on Whidbey Island in 1848. He assembled all the Puget Sound tribes, 8,000 Indians in all, and with the aid of dogs and runners, staged a grand hunt.

By the mid-1850s, Patkanim changed his mind and eventually decided that he could manipulate the rapidly growing white population to his advantage. In the fall and winter of 1855, Governor Isaac I. Stevens was surveying in Nebraska and Secretary of State Charles H. Mason was acting governor. He worked to defuse hostilities by enlisting Patkanim's help with pay. According to a letter that Mason sent to a magazine reporter in 1902, Patkanim collected bounty from the Territory for the heads of hostile Indians, and after the Battle of Seattle in January 1856 he soon became regarded as a friend of the settlers. Speidel also contended that after arranging an attack Patkanim collected $500 for his own brother, Cussass (also spelled Kussass, the irony of the English turn of that word is apparent), when he delivered him to the Territorial government to be hanged. Corliss confirmed that fact and also confirms that Cussass would not have staged an attack within the gates of Fort Nisqually and killed Leander Wallace without Patkanim's knowledge. Corliss asserted that Patkanim covered his own presence during that attack by claiming that he meant to attack the Nisqually tribe, not the white men at the fort. As Mason also recalled, on April 3, 1856, Patkanim made a grand entrance into Elliott Bay with 25 war canoes and alighted arrayed in citizen's garb, including Congress gaiters, white kid gloves, and a white shirt, with standing collar reaching halfway up to his ears, and the whole finished off with a flaming red necktie."
Even though he was one of the most effective and flamboyant of the Indian chiefs in Territorial times, neither Patkanim's birth date nor place seems to be known. Corliss continued:

When the Denny [and John Low] party of Seattle pioneers landed at Alki Point in November 1851, Patkanim was early on the scene. The new settlers knew nothing of his history or background and at first were uncertain about his protestations of friendship, but, in time, they came to have complete confidence in him. He never violated their trust. To their last days, the Alki party had difficulty in realizing that Patkanim was the sinister savage of the Whidbey Island and Nisqually episodes. The only explanation seems to be that he hated the English but later came to like the Americans. Patkanim repeatedly warned Arthur A. Denny of the hostility of the Indians east of the mountains, at one time at night, shortly before an outbreak. . . .
Near Tulalip in the Mission Beach Indian Cemetery is a seven-foot granite shaft with a plaque bearing the old chief's picture and the inscription: 'Pat Kanim Chief of the Snoqualmie, Snohomish and allied tribes. Signed Man. 22, 1855, the treaty which ceded all of the lands from Elliott Bay to the British line, as captain of the Indian warriors. He fought for the white people."

One of the chief's sons (Americanized as William) died at age 108 in 1943. His grandson Jerry Kanim gained fame in the 20th century for his work for the rights of Indians; he died in March 1956 at age 87.
The question arises: did Patkanim become the leader of the Snoqualmoos and Snohomish in 1848 or had he gained power in 1842 or before on the strength of leading the attacks in that period on the Chemakum? The other question is from Jarman's own recollection to Teck: did the Skagits actually join the Snohomish in those attacks? If they did, was the reasoning that if they joined the stronger neighbor's forces that they would less likely be a target themselves? And also, was it the lower Skagits who lived on what became known as Skagit Bay, the islands of the area and what became known as the Swinomish Peninsula? Or was it the upper Skagits? We hope that a reader has conducted research on these matters or has read original documents that can help us answer these many questions.

Alternate Chemakum legends and the crushing 1857 defeat

This photo from an Indian camp on the Olympia Peninsula is from Samish Island, a History: From the Beginning to the 1970s the new book by Susan and Fred Miller. They explained that the photo was taken by Samuel G. Morse and shows how Indians dried their fish as a winter food source. Click on the thumbnail for the full photo.

Before we leave this subject, we want to refer readers to other legends that answer the question of the attacks on the Chemakum tribe. In Port Townsend, the City that Whiskey Built, Tom Camfield reviews several versions of such legends. Some peg marauding tribes as attacking in 1857, but even if that is true, Gibbs referred to the most devastating attack occurring before 1854. The earlier year is also confirmed because Jarman learned about the prior attack while living with the S'Klallam in 1849-51. We want to thank Sandy Hershelman, a graphic artist and writer in the Port Townsend area and a long-time observer and volunteer about Port Townsend history. She recalls, as does Camfield, that there are many Snohomish tribal surnames associated with the Chemakum descendants in the area.
One other legend of the many that Camfield recorded, however, does provide a feasible alternative to the Snohomish-1842-attack contention, or maybe it was about an earlier attack that weakened the tribe so they were even more vulnerable two decades later. Camfield writes:

Legend says that it was about 1823 that Northern Indians massacred the Chimacum tribe of Indians. A large band of warriors from Queen Charlotte Island are said to have snuck quietly into the Sound and camped near the head of present Port Townsend Bay. Then, under cover of darkness, they fell upon the unarmed Chimacums/Chemakum in their village. They killed many and herded the others before them to Kuhn's Spit where they were butchered during a final stand. According to [James G.] McCurdy's By Juan de Fuca's Strait (Binsfords & Mort, Portland, 1937), only four Chimacum warriors escaped. On into the 20th century, human bones in large quantity were to be seen at the site of this ancient battle, which by all accounts may have been just one of many massacres visited upon the Chimacums.

We do not mean to dismiss the 1857 attack out of hand, however, because it is well documented and certainly doomed the Chemakum tribe from ever recovering their power from the 18th century and early 19th. Donna Sand in Bellingham found an excellent account of the 1857 attack in the 1966 Jefferson County Historical Society book, With Pride in Heritage. William Bishop Jr. dictated his family memories of the attack to his daughter-in-law Kathleen Bishop in the 1920s. Bishop was elected state senator from Jefferson County three times between 1919-33; he died in office. He was a logger and capitalist and helped create the Northwest Federation of American Indians with his son Tom. Camfield noted that his father was one of the first three settlers near Chimacum Creek in 1855 after deserting from a British frigate on the Canadian side of the border and he erected the Bishop Building on Washington Street in 1891. William the elder married a Snohomish Indian woman named Sally in 1858 and divorced her in 1865 before marrying the proper and white Hannah Hutchinson, from Scotland, in 1869. William Jr. was the third child by Sally, so he had a unique perspective about the Snohomish tribe who attacked the Chemacum in the spring of 1857, a year before his father's marriage.
William Jr. recalled that the Snohomish joined forces with the Barclay Sound tribe of western Vancouver Island, who were very strong. By that time, Snohomish Chief Patkanim had led his tribe to be the strongest on the Puget Sound and the two tribes had many intermarried couples. Even though the Chemakum were weak from the former losing battles, they were still a warlike tribe and they maintained lookouts in the trees on the hills at Irondale. In earlier days those sentries would alert teams of braves who would intercept the canoes of both the Barclays and Snohomish and rob them, sometimes even taking the younger rowers as slaves. One evening that spring the few settlers in Port Townsend observed a "great line of canoes carrying war-painted warriors" pass the village and they landed at Glen Cove and Oak Bay, south of Irondale. Although 40 canoes of Chemakum rallied when warned, William recalled that they were all slaughtered. "The land fighters were buried on the battle ground at the mouth of Chimacum Creek. Many of them were beheaded and the heads put on sticks where they were in evidence and examined by many people for years. This was one of the old customs following a battle. The victors held war dances around the heads for three days and nights."
William Jr.'s mother, Sally, was the daughter of a Snohomish sub-chief whom George Gibbs called S'hootst-hoot and she was living with Chemakum relatives near Chimacum Creek when his father met her. Patkanim had ultimate control of the Snohomish Indians as well as his own Snoqualmoos and his grand headquarters lodges were at what is now Fall City. The Snohomish bands were congregated mainly at the mouth of the Snohomish River near present Everett and Gardner Bay, as well as on the southern end of Whidbey Island. William Jr. also had a daughter named Kathleen L. Bishop who was the most prominent of all her family in Indian affairs. That Kathleen was a judge, served for 24 years on the Snohomish tribal council and was their business manager, and she also wrote an important report, "The Landless Tribes of Washington State."
Pam Clise, who has studied Peninsula tribes extensively and who also interviewed individual descendants provides an answer to why the Chemakum were attacked so often and trounced. People from various tribal families have told her that the Chemakum were at one time very warlike and battled so many tribes that their eventual defeat and decline was inevitable. And, as Clise and Camfield also observe, the Snohomish victors intermarried with many of the daughters of the families who were left and those surnames still survive today.

Jarman lived with S'Klallam, not Chemakum In order for the student and researcher to follow the many confusing scenarios and names in pioneer accounts about the Indians of the Peninsula whom Jarman befriended, they need to know the genealogy and fealty of the S'Klallam tribe in those days. Here we are indebted once again to Donna Sand of Bellingham, who sent us the story of the 18th-century S'Klallam family that produced their chiefs, written by Mary Ann Lambert Vincent (1878-1966). Her small 1960 book with a hand-drawn cover was titled The 7 Brothers of the House of Ste-tee-thlum. She learned the lineage of the tribe as a young girl and as a part-Indian herself. Born in 1878 in Port Townsend, Mary Ann was one-eighth Indian and descended from one of two white women who survived a 1775 shipwreck on the Washington Coast. One married an S'Klallam chieftain and was known thereafter as Sally the First. Succeeding generations had a Second and a Third Sally and the latter was Mary Ann's grandmother.
Mary Ann's mother was Annie Jacobs, who, at age 15, married Charlie Lambert, age 55. Lambert was a Swedish immigrant who was born Carl Lunebourg. He died in 1887, when Mary Ann was seven, and her mother was left with four children. Consequently Mary Ann lived much of the time with a neighbor, James O. Woodman, an English immigrant who legally married an Indian and who had a substantial home library. After attending public schools in Port Townsend, she received further education in Kansas and then at a nursing school in New York. She married Thomas A. Maher in Connecticut and had four children with him, one of whom was deceased by the time of her death on Oct. 27, 1966. Pam Clise found census records from 1910 when the Maher family was living in Grays Harbor and 1920 when they lived at Blyn. By those enumerations, Mary Ann was recorded as Marion; we are unsure which one was her given name, but she preferred Mary Ann for her books.
In the With Pride and Heritage profile, Mary Ann was said to have worked as a matron at Indian schools in Arizona and at Colville, Washington, but in December 1921, she married Frank Vincent, a packer who lived in the town of Brinnon, nearby Dabob Bay, 35 miles south of Port Townsend; he died in 1948. So we are unsure when she took those other positions. At the time of her death, she boasted as having living near Sequim for 60 years. Just as she did 40 years before, she lived as a widow in Blyn, at the head of Sequim Bay, just east of the town of the same name and 25 miles west of Port Townsend. Blyn is also the location of the "7 Cedars" Indian casino and the offices of the Jamestown band of the S'Klallam. Her original family home was about ten miles east at the eastern side of Discovery Bay and across from Port Discovery, where Capt. George Vancouver stopped to obtain spars for his ship, Discovery, on his 1792 voyage. Various sources put the ancestral camp of one band of S'Klallam in the area of Fairmount (or Fairmont) and Woodmans, which is located about 15 miles south-southwest of Port Townsend near the intersection of Hwy 101 and Hwy 20 at the head of Discovery Bay. Pam Clise informed us that the family historian, Patricia Taylor Severse, has passed away and we are still unsure where Mary Ann's and the family records are stored.

The historical S'Klallam In With Pride in Heritage, Vincent recalled:

The Clallams had a village at the present location of Fairmount, and it, incidentally, was named by Thomas Borger, after his home village in Pennsylvania. Clallams who married Chemakum lived in another village at Woodmans, near where the present Anderson Lake road joins the Discovery road. This was the Indian trail with Chimacum to the Bay.

Fairmount is on the way south from Port Townsend to Woodman and Blyn, on the eastern shore of Discovery Bay. In her 7 Brothers book, Mrs. Vincent delineated the genealogy of the family of "King George," the S'Klallam chief whose camp was Jarman's home for a year or two. King George's grandfather was the powerful chief Ste-tee-thlum of Peninsula Indians back in the 18th century. He and his wife, whom the whites called Princess of Nanaimo, had seven sons and one daughter. Their son Lach-ka-nim (not to be confused with Snoqualmoo Chief Patkanim) had four sons and four daughters, including two famous S'Klallam chiefs, Klowston, whom the settlers called King George, and Cheech-ma-sham, whom the settlers called the Duke of York and they later called Chetzemoka (1808-88). His Indian name was also spelled Chits-a-mah-han as a signatory on the Point No Point Treaty of Jan. 26, 1855, and also spelled as T'Chits-a-mah-han by other sources. The city park north of Point Hudson in Port Townsend was named for him when it was dedicated in August 1904.
The fourth daughter of Lach-ka-nim and his wife, Qua-tum-a'low, was When-an-ismo, who in turn had three children, including Alice, who would soon marry Bill Jarman. Another descendant of the House of Ste-tee-thlum would soon become a very important figure in the lives of the young married couple, William and Alice Jarman. Lach-ka-nim's next eldest brother, Whe-yux, had a son named S'yah-whom who would become known as Sehome; after his death in 1860, the name Sehome was attached to both geographical landmarks and companies in Whatcom County. S'yah-whom married a Samish princess sometime in about 1850 and apparently moved to the far eastern end of Samish Island by 1852, where he became chief of the remnants of the Samish tribe, which had regrouped there after a series of costly attacks from Vancouver Island Indians. He welcomed the Jarmans to the delta of the Samish River and that would be Jarman's base of operation for most of the next two decades.

S'Klallam signatories of 1854 and 1855 treaties We also note here another confusing point in various accounts of the treaties between the U.S. Federal Government and Washington Territory Indian Tribes. The key treaty is known as the 1855 Point Elliott Treaty, but it is sometimes confused with the Point No Point Treaty of the same year. Actually, both were signed in tandem, as HistoryLink.org (www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=5402 ) explains:

Native American tribes sign Point Elliott Treaty at Mukilteo on January 22, 1855 On January 22, 1855, Chief Seattle joins 81 other leaders of Puget Sound tribes in signing a treaty with Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens (1818-1862) at Point Elliott (now Mukilteo). Tribes including the Duwamish and Suquamish surrender their lands for cash, relocation to reservations, and access to traditional fishing and hunting grounds. Four days later, tribal leaders from Hood Canal and the upper Puget Sound sign a similar agreement at Point-No-Point (near Hansville on the Kitsap Peninsula).

Those signings followed the confusing and almost disastrous Medicine Creek Treaty of Dec. 26, 1854, which author Bill Speidel claims provoked a rebellion among the Indians.
The new Governor obtained his office as a patronage plum because he was a firm supporter of Franklin Pierce's successful candidacy for President in 1852. Originally a surveyor by trade, President Pierce on March 2, 1853, dressed Isaac I. Stevens in three hats: as Territorial Governor, as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the region; and as official surveyor for the northern states. As Stevens traveled west across the prairies and mountains to the territory he would govern, he surveyed the terrain and a possible northern transcontinental railroad route and arrived in Olympia, the new capital, in November that year. Stevens has been alternately praised and reviled, mocked and satirized by various writers through the years. You can read a humorous example of the latter treatment in Speidel's 1978 book, Doc Maynard, which is full of both fascinating historical discoveries and possibly apocryphal yarns. In a section titled "Pop Goes the Weasel," Speidel derided Stevens as a "bandy-legged tyrant."

From the time of the treaties through his Winter Campaign against eastern Washington tribes such as the Yakima (now spelled Yakama) and his hanging of Nisqually Chief Leschi on Feb. 19, 1858, Stevens enraged settlers and officials who countered that they knew the local situation better. Leschi's hangman is reputed to have later said "I felt then I was hanging an innocent man, and I believe it yet."
During that stretch of four years, Territorial Judge Edward Lander enjoined Stevens to cease and desist, but Stevens reacted by having Lander arrested in May 1856 for defying Stevens's call for martial law (also see Camfield: Port Townsend, the City that Whiskey Built). Prominent pioneer Ezra Meeker tried to organize resistance among the settlers, but Stevens ultimately won out. Even after Pierce sent a message of his displeasure, Stevens just swatted that aside as he did Meeker's outrage as the governor exhibited his political skill and his manipulation of the written word from his Territorial pulpit. He ultimately convinced a majority of the citizens that Meeker had sided with the dangerous Indians, while their Governor was on the side of the white settlers. Three decades later, Frederick J. Grant attempted to redress the wrong by naming the Leschi neighborhood in Seattle on the shore of Lake Washington after the chief. Finally, in March 2004, both the House and Senate of the Washington state legislature passed resolutions stating that Leschi was wrongly convicted and executed and they asked the state supreme court to vacate Leschi's conviction. The chief justice demurred on jurisdiction grounds, but on Dec. 10, 2004, Chief Leschi a Historical Court of Inquiry exonerated Leschi by a unanimous vote following a definitive trial in absentia. Stevens met his own end in the Civil War Battle of Chantilly, where he was fatally shot as a commanding brigadier general on Sept. 1, 1862, in Fairfax County, Virginia, in the concluding battle of the Northern Virginia Campaign.

King George and the Indians problem with liquor In the continuation below of the George Gibbs reports we cited above, he makes certain judgments about the Indians, based on the demonstrated inability for many of the Indians to drink in moderation. The problem became so rampant that James Swan called it a scourge. In 1854, Gibbs wrote:

It is a melancholy fact that the S'Klallam representatives of these distinguished personages are generally as drunken and worthless a set of rascals as could he collected. The S'Klallam tribe has always had a bad character, which their intercourse with shipping, and the introduction of whiskey, have by no means improved. The houses of the chiefs at Port Townsend, where they frequently gather, are of the better class — quite spacious and tolerably clean. Two or three are not less than thirty feet long by sixteen or eighteen wide, built of heavy planks, supported on large posts and crossbeams, and lined with mats. The planks forming the roof run the whole length of the building, being guttered to carry off the water, and sloping slightly to one end. Low platforms are carried round the interior, on which are laid mats, serving for beds and seats. Piles of very neatly made baskets are stored away in corners, containing their provisions. There are from two to four fires in each house belonging to the head of the family, and such of his sons as live with him. They have an abundance of salmon, shell-fish, and potatoes, and seem to be very well off. In fact, any of the tribes living upon the Sound must be worthless indeed not to find food in the inexhaustible supplies of fish, clams, and water-fowl, of which they have one or the other at all times. They have a good deal of money among them, arising from the sale of potatoes and fish, letting out their women, and jobbing for the whites. . . .

The condescension and moral judgment are consistent with the times, but Gibbs's account is the best overall picture we have of the S'Klallam and the Chemakum during the period that Jarman lived among the former. As far as we know, he did not live with the Chemakum who were still a separate band of Indians. As you will see in the Epilogue, Gibbs was a Harvard-trained ethnographer who already had extensive experience with Indian tribes in Oregon and Washington, had already compiled dictionaries of Indian languages and had exhibited genuine interest in the various populations as opposed to the "Noble Savage" school of observers.
We do not know the year of King George's alleged drowning or in what year Chetzemoka assumed his role as chief of the S'Klallam, but citations of him as chief began in 1854. From January 1856 on, after he and many other S'Klallam signed the Point No Point Treaty, he became highly regarded by the settlers as their friend because of his role in protecting settlers during what became known as the Indian Wars of 1855-56 in other parts of the Territory. White writers still referred to Chetzemoka's reputation as a heavy drinker, however, especially Theodore Winthrop in his 1863 book, Canoe and Saddle (also called The Canoe and The Saddle), which was based on 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 not only pristine wilderness but also the S'Klallam and their often-soused Duke of York and his family. Winthrop closely observed the Duke number-two wife — Jennie Lind (Chill-lil), younger than the chief's senior wife, Queen Victoria, or See-hem-itsa. Settlers named Jennie for Jenny Lind Goldschmidt, the Swedish immigrant who captured American hearts as the "Worlds Sweetest Singer," after P.T. Barnum convinced to emigrate to the U.S. in 1850. Vincent wrote in 7 Brothers that Jennie was not totally pleased with her inferior status and that she eventually "made good her escape from the House of the Duke of York to Squaxon Island where her grandmother lived." Winthrop deduced that Jennie appeared to have some Caucasian blood in her tree:

"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 [mead]he 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 union, 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 consideration 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 parting at the nose-bridge and streaming athwart the cheeks! Knew ye but this, at once ye would reform from your undeluding shams, and recover the forgotten charms of acknowledged pinxit [Latin for "he or she paints it].

For our story, however, Winthrop's most important observation was that King George was still very much alive in July 1853:

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?

I have occasionally met Indians who do not want to discuss the problems associated with liquor at all, not so much out of denial, but because they rightly note that liquor was used to stereotype Indians in general on the frontier, much like the Stepin Fetchit character — played by Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, stereotyped Indians in movies. Many of the bibliographical sources I have consulted about Washington Territory are rife with such stereotypes and jokes at Indians' expense. By the middle of the 20th Century, on the other hand, some writers advanced the theory that Indians have a particular genetic predisposition towards the inability to digest and process liquor as their Caucasian counterparts do. That theory, however, has been debunked in some serious papers, so we are following its progress.
Those who looked for answers rather than judgments were impressed with a 1996 book, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America, by Peter C. Mancall. A professor at the University of California, Mancall studied the problem and complaints about it all the way back to early colonial times in America. Although his book's scope is limit to the era through the end of the 18th century, many of his facts and conclusions help answer questions for those seriously studying the subject. In his review in the Winter 1996 edition of the Journal of Social History, James Kirby Martin writes:

Mancall frames his study with a review of current theories regarding why Native Americans continue to have difficulties with liquor. Scientists, for example, have speculated about genetic predispositions passed through the generations.(1) Anthropologists have viewed heavy Indian drinking as a form of protest against Euroamericans because of the loss of traditional cultural life-styles and values.(2) Historians, by comparison, have not fully engaged themselves in this discussion. . . . Alcohol, Mancall reminds us, was a European contribution in the Columbian exchange with Native Americans, except in portions of New Spain where the native populace had already produced small quantities of distilled beverages in most cases for use in public ceremonies. Early English and French traders quickly drew Native Americans into the transatlantic economy by using alcohol as a primary lubricant in the burgeoning commerce in furs. Despite local and provincial laws that emerged to prohibit the sale of alcohol to potentially drunk and violent Indians, liquor persisted as a key trading commodity as well as a corrupting agent of native ways of living.
Mancall discusses consumption patterns and personal and cultural costs, and he seeks to break new ground by addressing the matter of why some Native Americans drank so heavily in binge-like fashion. Among many explanations, he suggests that Indians got drunk while in the process of mocking what they saw as silly colonial customs, such as toasting. Personal empowerment and regaining control over one's life were also important stimulants to heavy drinking, especially among Indians who had to cope with heavy death tolls among tribal members or, more generally, with the depressing realities of cultural degradation and decline. At the same time, alcohol seemed to be a "sacred substance" (p. 75) with "magical effects" (p. 80) that permitted the drinker to go so far as to visit a better world, however briefly. And since alcohol rather than the drinker was responsible for possible crimes, Indian peoples had nothing to fear if they became destructive while inebriated. There could be no retribution, at least from other Indians, because the mind altering character of alcohol was the real culprit. In some instances, tribal members even encouraged particular individuals to get drunk, hoping they would murder undesirables in their midst.
These explanations are worthy of further exploration. So is the author's argument about broad-ranging temperance movements among the native populace. Mancall contends that Native Americans attempted in various ways to promote abstemious behavior, the most extreme examples of which were the revitalization movements of various spiritual leaders like the Delaware Prophet Neolin. When native temperance advocates called for assistance from imperial officials and traders, they received virtually none, largely because of the never ending "greed for skins." On the other hand, Mancall does not simplistically lay all blame on Euroamericans, since he points out that "Indians who tried to halt the alcohol trade also encountered resistance at home" (p. 123). Deadly Medicine is a challenging, balanced, thoughtful book. Mancall does not pretend to have all the answers. Rather, he suggests many possibilities in looking at the roots of a serious and damaging social problem that seems to keep defying solutions. Mancall, as such, has produced a significant book, one that should serve as a model for other scholars interested in writing both informative and "useful" history.

Epilogue We wish we knew more about what Jarman learned from his contact with the Indians of the Peninsula because, like so many instances, he was the first white man to spend a prolonged period with them. Jeffcott learned from various sources that Jarman learned the language of each tribe he lived among, a family tree that has long been grouped as Coastal Salish and that Vi Hilbert has identified as Lushootseed. He may have learned Chinook Jargon first, because it was the trading language developed by Indians, fur traders and sailors on Vancouver Island.
The only observation he shared with Frank Teck was a rambling tale about a ritual at King George's camp that he said no white man had ever seen before. Teck spelled it as Sklallitool (?) and Bill told him it was conducted by four naked men and the actions of a medicine man. Although he did not explain how, the medicine man was supposed to manipulate a tamanuous, "like a piece of kelp an inch thick and 4-5 inches long, looked like a pencil of glass; must not touch it, represents life of some other Indian. If finder keep it, Indian will die; only medicine men dare touch it; takes place at night, with bright pitch-and-bark fire; women beg them to stop but they won't." The details are difficult to decipher but Bill sensed that it had something to do with inspiring the braves that "all men have same power but don't know it." He probably could have told us what he learned about the precipitous decline of the Chemakum, following the attacks in 1842-43 and again in 1857.
After helping proofread the original draft of this article, he concluded as we have that, due to the lack of written history in tribes such as the S'Klallam, we may never know the answers to some of the questions we have about them. We tried above to present reasonable conclusions after we were able to cross-check sources and opinions, but like with all our Journal features, this story, too, will evolve as readers challenge our ideas or provide additional documentation and photos. Meanwhile, Camfield presents some information that we have not been able to substantiate yet. First, he reminded us that James G. McCurdy wrote in his 1937 book, By Juan de Fuca's Strait about Chetzemoka, "His father, Lah-Ka-Nim, a Skagit who married Quah-Tum-a-Low, a Clallam . . ." That Skagit lineage is mystifying, after reading Vincent's family genealogy of the House of Ste-tee-thlum. We hope that a reader may be able to address anyone in that lineage being a Skagit Indian.
Regarding General Gaines and the Chemakum, we noted above that his kinship was very confusing; some last-minute information confused the matter even more. Earlier, Tom Camfield reminded me that the chief of the Chemakum who signed the Point No Point Treaty (Jan. 18, 1855) was not Gaines, but "Kul-Kah-Han or General Pierce, 'Chief of he Chem-a-kum.' " In addition, Camfield continued, "I see you have dealt rather thoroughly with the matter of General Gaines and his relationship to Chetzemoka. My account of Swan's fishing trip to Chimacum with Chetzemoka and his wives is on page 168 of my second volume [City that Whiskey Built]. The second paragraph, quoting Swan, is a bit unclear about the role of General Gaines — as he refers to a remnant of the Chimacum tribe, officially recognized as S'Klallam. And it's hard to decipher whether Chetzemoka's role as 'head chief' applies to this Chimacum group (with Gaines as a possible sub-chief) . . . or just what. I don't know that General Gaines actually was 'chief' of the Chemakums.
Those discoveries were confusing all by themselves. Then we learned from the new book, Samish Island, A History, that historians have missed an important fact. Fred Miller discovered in the National Archives that George Gibbs wrote an original handwritten draft of the Point Elliott Treaty (Jan. 22, 1855) that was considerably different than the final published copy for the U.S. Records. Gibbs included several signers in the handwritten draft that he left out of the final copy and he recorded some names differently from one version to another. Miller's discovery may also explain another unaccountable contradiction. In the published version of the Point Elliott Treaty, Pierce is recorded twice, as "Kwallattum, or General Pierce, Sub-chief of the Skagit tribe, his x mark," and as "She-hope, or General Pierce, Skagit tribe, his x mark. (L.S.)" If you are now confused about the conflicting information, so are we and we are still trying to reconcile the discrepancies.
As we recount in our 2004 Journal story, Poets on the Peaks, about firewatchers Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder in the North Cascades, George Gibbs (1815-73) went on to an assignment on the Northwest Boundary Commission with cartographer Henry Custer. In Custer's 1866 Report of Reconnaissances, about their August 1859 expedition down the Skagit from British Canada with Indian guides, Custer wrote that in 1858, George Gibbs attempted to explore the Skagit from the mouth of the river, portaging around the log jams at future Mount Vernon, but was unable to continue past the Skagit Gorge. That was the year of the short-lived but intense gold rush to the Fraser River in British Columbia and the first search for gold on the upper Skagit.
Trained as a surveyor and ethnologist, Gibbs was born to a wealthy New York family and became a '49er, crossing the country with thousands of others, but soon went to Oregon, where he became an assistant director customs. After he studied law at Harvard University, he decided instead to become a librarian for the American Ethnological Society. Those skills came in handy in Oregon Territory, where he negotiated treaties with Indian tribes, drafted the first accurate map of Oregon and compiled dictionaries of tribal languages. In 1853, as Washington broke off from Oregon and became a separate territory, Capt. George McClellan hired Gibbs for the Northern Railroad Survey and he packed off with Isaac I. Stevens as geologist, zoologist and animal handler and ethnographer for the survey.
We wonder if Stevens had followed Gibbs's advice for relations with the tribes, could the Indians Wars of 1855-56 have been headed of. According to research compiled by the Washington State History Museum, Gibbs "argued passionately that, due to the variety of the Indians' customs and languages, and their need for fishing rights, many small reservations should be created" rather than moving displaced tribes far from their hunting and fishing grounds. Speidel found in notes that Gibbs wrote later that he warned the governor that he was sitting on a powder keg in May 1855 as they headed for Walla Walla to force a treaty on tribes in that area. "Indian women living with white settlers warned their husbands to take care of themselves; but these reports were disregarded. After working for five years with the boundary commission as both geologist and interpreter, he catalogued Washington's virgin forests in the early 1860s and then spent the last decade of his life in Washington, D.C., where he studied Indian languages with the Smithsonian Institution, which still retains several volumes of his papers.
The last traditional chief of the S'Klallam and heir to the house of Ste-tee-thlum, David Prince, hosted his golden anniversary with a huge group of the descendants in 1954. He died in July 1960 and his wife, Elizabeth (Slap-tza) Prince, died in June 1973. They had lived with the Jamestown S'Klallam since 1905. He was the last surviving son of Lach-ka-nim (or Lach-kay-min as in his obituary) — whom the settlers called Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Chetzemoka. David took Prince as his surname to honor his father. At age 77, Prince had just returned from the beach, where he had been teaching his young friends the art of building a raft, when he was stricken. As in the case of her own obituary, Mary Ann Lambert Vincent was credited for the heritage information as "Marion." Both are buried at Jamestown Cemetery.
Patkanim had a younger daughter, named Elizabeth or Lizzie Kanim, who also married a white man who figures into the lives of one of the other important pioneer families of Washington Territory in 1853. Her husband, James Alexander Patterson, was a Whatcom County pioneer in the 1860s. He was born to an aristocratic Tennessee family and came West during the '49er period, but he was more in interested as a livestock breeder, drover and seller. While buying stock in the Snoqualmie Pass area, he became smitten with Elizabeth Kanim. They apparently married sometime in 1862 at Snoqualmie Falls, possibly in a tribal ceremony. After having two daughters with Patterson, Elizabeth left her family with the aid of hired hand "Indian Ned" and went to live with an Indian band in British Columbia near Chilliwack, northeast of Sumas. Following their marriage, Patterson apparently treated Elizabeth more as a slave than a wife and helpmeet and tended to be tyrannical. Although some sources suggest or imply that she just abandoned the girls, we now know from research by Mary Michaelson of Bellingham that she visited her daughters after leaving the family. She still loved them and wanted to visit them more, but after her first trip back, she died of tuberculosis on an unknown date at Chilliwack.
In the late 1860s, Patterson approached Whatcom pioneer Henry Roeder and beseeched his friend to help him find someone who could care for his two motherless daughters. Knowing that Patterson traveled regularly to Olympia by sternwheeler, Roeder referred him to Holden and (Phoebe Goodell) Judson. Phoebe was the daughter of Jotham W. and Anna Goodell, 1853 pioneers of Grand Mound in Lewis County, and she authored one of the most famous books by a woman on the frontier, A Pioneer's Search for an Ideal Home. The Judsons had lived in Olympia after their wedding, and were temporarily living on Whidbey Island, but Patterson offered him his cabin and land on the Nooksack River in Whatcom County, so Holden sold his store and moved the family up to the Patterson farm sometime before the 1870 federal census was enumerated during that summer and included the Patterson girls as part of the Judson family at ages eight and five. The Judsons raised Dolly Patterson Rittenberg and Nellie Patterson McDonald and they thrived with the family, escaping the stigma of many other children of Caucasian fathers and Indian mothers. In fact, they were both honored with the silver Old Settlers Cup at the annual Old Settlers picnic in 1938, after marrying and raising their own families in Whatcom County. Patterson had a most interesting connection to U.S. President Andrew Johnson. His brother, David Trotter Patterson, married Johnson's eldest daughter, Martha, back in Tennessee in 1855, and during Johnson's impeachment period, Martha and her sister took over her mother's first lady role in Washington, D.C., while their mother was ill. Patterson moved to Oregon after leaving Whatcom County and we have been unable to trace his later life.
Bill's longest lasting friendship with any of the S'Klallam whom he met was with Thomas Jefferson, the infant son of King George. Jarman told Frank Teck that he used to hold the little papoose on his lap while living at the tribe's camp. As a young man, Thomas moved to Lummi Island where he became a prominent member of the governing council of the Lummi tribe, and his descendants have continued as tribal leaders and spokesmen. We know that Jefferson was the police chief of Lummi by 1892, when his son was almost killed in an accident.
Researcher Donna Sand discovered from Jefferson's obituary in the Bellingham Herald that he died at age 79 on Oct. 7 1933, and was described as a "prominent Lummi Indian [who] died at his home on the Lummi Reservation." He was survived by widow, Mrs. Mary Jefferson and seven sons, Ben, Angelo, James, Simon, Edward, Francis and David and a daughter, along with 32 grandchildren and one great-grandchild. His wife, Mary Catherine, was born in 1857 and died on Mar 3, 1936.

Endnotes

1. Myron Eells His brother was Edwin Eells, Indian Agent of the Skokomish Agency, where the S'Klallam Indians were sent to the reservation. Many refused and chose to live near their original camps or to buy land. [Return]

2. James Swan's Port Townsend diaries Most of Swan's diaries from 1859-1998 are housed at Manuscripts, Special Collections, University Archives section of the University of Washington. [Return]

3. Chief Leschi For more information about the sad story of Leschi's hanging, see the accompanying story about Port Townsend settlement in Issue 40. Also we strongly suggest the definitive story about Leschi in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Seattle Journal for Social Justice by Kelly Kunsch, the Reference Librarian and Adjunct Professor at the Seattle University School of Law who has conducted extensive research into the case. [Return]

Links, background reading and sources Blanket Bill Jarman and the stories associated with him are the entire contents of Issue 40. Go back to the Table of Contents for that issue to find the links to all the stories. If you are not yet a subscriber to the Subscribers Journal magazine online, please see the complete story list and details of how to subscribe. We are pleased to announce the publication of a complete history of the island where the Samish Indians were based. Samish Island, a History: From the Beginning to the 1970s by Susan and Fred Miller is a terrific new book and a loving story of the hook of land just west of Edison in Skagit County. Look for it at your favorite bookstore or online. There is no ISBN number, but the publishing information is: Mount Vernon, WA: Copy & Print Store, 2007. Gail Hopley laid out the book, which also includes poems and stories by and from one of our favorite writers, Berniece Hoyt Leaf, of Sedro-Woolley and Juniper Beach. When we finish reading the book, we will review it in depth in the free home pages of the Journal. If you want to purchase the self-published Miller book in your area, Fred shared a current list of retail locations: "WD Foods in Allen; Skagit County Museum at LaConner and Anacortes Museums; Stowe's Clothing Store and Horen's Drugstore, both in Burlington; Rosabella's Gift and Apple Store on Allen-West and Farm to Market Road; Rhododendron Cafe on Chuckanut Drive; and Blau's Oysters, here on Samish Island. Books can also be ordered thru our e-mail (miller.ff@gmail.com) and at Hopley's e-mail at (ghopley@wavecable,com). Or people can phone me at 360-766-6548 or Gail Hopley at 766-6823. We will go on line to such outlets as Amazon at some point. We arranged the publication ourselves, so there is no publisher sales outlet." If you live outside the area, look for it at your favorite bookstore or better yet, ask them to stock it. There is no ISBN number, but the publishing information is: Mount Vernon, WA: Copy & Print Store, 2007.

Olympic Peninsula stories, including Major Van Bokkelyn, reviews of Tom Camfield Port Townsend books and other stories.
And these other stories from Issue 40 of the Subscribers Journal online.
A profile of William R. Jarman and the legends of Blanket Bill, researched, discussed and debated, Part One.
A profile of William R. Jarman and the legends of Blanket Bill, researched, discussed and debated, Part Two.
Ray Jordan's story of Blanket Bill and Jarman Prairie, from his point of view as a young Belfast neighbor.
Bessemer, Birdsview and the Elliott Hotel, owned by Bill's daughter, Alice, and her husband, James Elliott.
Percival R. Jeffcott's book of Blanket Bill Jarman and the mysteries and legends, some debunked, and a profile of Jeffcott.
The history of the S'Klallam and Chemakum tribes of the Olympic Peninsula. William R. Jarman lived with them, one of the descendants became Chief Sehome of the Samish and another became Mrs. Alice Jarman, namesake of Alice Bay near Edison.
Port Townsend, the birth of the town and Bill's first Washington home
Kitsap County, Slaughter County and a Jarman myth debunked
A full review of the fine new book, Samish Island, a History, by Sue and Fred Miller, which all Skagit history-lovers will want to read, along with those who want to learn about the geology of the Puget Sound area and the "pre-history" of the Indians of the archipelago before the white settlers arrived.
We were shocked and saddened just as we went to press, when we learned of the death of Robert Jeffcott, grandson of Percival R. Jeffcott. Our hearts go out to his family, who grieve his passing. A memorial is planned for the afternoon of Oct. 13, 2007, at his Lummi Island property.

Attention: We have reserved the Burlington Library meeting room for a presentation on October 18. This replaces our original date of Sept. 27, which had a conflict. We will review rare photos and documents about the settlement of the towns north of the Skagit River and west of Sterling. Reservations are not required, but we would appreciate your feedback for planning purposes if you would like to attend. Please click this email button ->> with the number of people, your remarks and what you would like to see. Or read more details here

Story posted on Aug. 30, 2007 . . . Please report any broken links so we can update them
This article originally appeared in Issue 40 of our Subscribers-paid Journal online magazine

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Jones and Solveig Atterberry, NorthWest Properties Aiken & Associates: . . . See our website
Please let us show you residential and commercial property in Sedro-Woolley and Skagit County 2204 Riverside Drive, Mount Vernon, Washington . . . 360 708-8935 . . . 360 708-1729

Oliver Hammer Clothes Shop at 817 Metcalf Street in downtown Sedro-Woolley, 86 years.

Joy's Sedro-Woolley Bakery-Cafe at 823 Metcalf Street in downtown Sedro-Woolley.

Check out Sedro-Woolley First section for links to all stories and reasons to shop here first
or make this your destination on your visit or vacation.

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We may be able to assist. Email us for details.

Peace and quiet at the Alpine RV Park, just north of Marblemount on Hwy 20
Park your RV or pitch a tent by the Skagit River, just a short drive from Winthrop or Sedro-Woolley

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S'Klallam and Chemakum Indian tribes on Olympic Peninsula when Jarman settled there in 1848-52

S'Klallam and Chemakum
Indian tribes on Olympic Peninsula
when Jarman settled there in 1848-52