The village fronts on two crescent beaches, and a long, rocky point running out into the water fairly divides it into two villages, so separate are their water fronts. A fleet of graceful Haida canoes was drawn up on the first and larger beach, all of them carefully filled with grass and covered over, and their owners joined in receiving the visitors, and accompanied us on our sight-seeing tour. The houses at Howkan are large and well built, and the village is remarkably clean. Some of the chiefs have weatherboarded their houses and put in glass windows and hinged doors, but before or beside nearly every house rises the tall, ancestral totem poles that constitute the glory of the place.
TOTEM POLES AT KAIGAN OR HOWKAN.
Skolka, one of the great chiefs, has a large house guarded by two totem poles, and at his offer the house had been occupied for two years as a school-room by the mission teacher. A flagstaff and a skeleton bell-tower were added to the exterior decorations of his house in consequence, and Skolka was the envy of all the Kaigahnees. Skolka is a wise and liberal chieftain, and a member of the Eagle family. Effigies of that totemic bird surmount the poles before his house, and on one pole appears the whiskered face of a white man, capped by an eagle, and finished with the images of two children wearing the steeple-crowned mandarin hats of the Tyees. Skolka explains these images as telling the story of one of his ancestors, who was a famous woman of the Eagle clan. She went out for salmon eggs one day, and when she drew up her canoe on the beach upon her return, she had several baskets filled. Not seeing her two little children, she called to them, but they ran and hid. Later she called them again, and they answered her from the woods with the voices of crows. Her worst fears were realized when she found that a white man, “a Boston man,” had carried them off in a ship. These two orphans never returned to their people. Such is the simple kidnapping story that has been handed down in Skolka’s family for generations, and this whiskered face on the totem pole is said to be almost the only instance of a Boston man attaining immortality in these picture-writings.
THE CHIEF’S RESIDENCE AT KAIGAN, SHOWING TOTEM POLES.
“Mr. John” is another fine-looking chief, who dresses in civilized style, and is rather proud of his advanced ways of living and thinking. He lives in a large house near Skolka, and has a grand old totem pole before his doorway. In his queer idiom he tells one, “I am a Crow, but my wife is a Whale;” and as Mrs. John is of generous build, there is lurking sarcasm in his statement.
The deceased chief, Mr. Jim, left some fine totem poles behind him, and on the second beach of the village there is a semicircle of ancient moss-grown totem poles standing guard over ruined and deserted houses. The mosses, the lichens, and the vines cling tenderly to these strange old monuments of the people, and, in the crevices of the carvings, grasses, ferns, and even young trees have taken root and thrive. Back in the dense undergrowth rise the mortuary poles, the carved totems and emblems that mark the graves of dead and gone Haidas. Skolka’s father and uncles have fine images over their burial boxes, and from the head of the Eagle on one of these mortuary columns, a small fir-tree, taking root, has grown to a height of eight or ten feet. In this burying ground there are large boxes filled with the bones and ashes of those said to have died when the great epidemics raged among the islands a half century ago.
We found the Howkan ship-yard under a large shed, and the canoe builder showed us two cedar canoes that were nearly completed. The high-beaked Haida canoes are slender and graceful as Venetian gondolas, and the small, light canoes that they use in hunting sea otter are marvels of boat-building. The shapely skiffs that the boat builder showed us had been hewn from single logs of red cedar, and were ready to be braced and steamed into their graceful curving lines. Our admiration of the work caused him to offer a light, otter-hunter’s canoe for fifty dollars, but not one of the company made a purchase. In one house we found a paralyzed man lying on a couch in the middle of the one great room, and the relatives gathered about him soon brought out their treasures and offered them for sale.
