He is thin and wiry looking, with some straggling bristles for a beard and thick short hair, still quite black, covering a head which looks as if it had been flattened directly on top as well as back and front as they were wont to do. This peculiar cranial development does not affect his intelligence, however, as we have before observed in others; he is quick-witted and knows a great many things. Yutestid says he can speak all the leading dialects of the Upper Sound, Soljampsh, Nesqually, Puyallup, Snoqualmie, Duwampsh, Snohomish, but not the Sklallam and others north toward Vancouver.
Several incidents related in this volume were mentioned and he remembered them perfectly, referred to the naming of “New York” on Alki Point and the earliest settlement, repeating the names of the pioneers. The murder at Bean’s Point was committed by two Soljampsh Indians, he said, and they were tried and punished by an Indian court.
He remembers the hanging of Pat Kanem’s brothers, Kussass and Quallawowit.
“Long ago, the Indians fight, fight, fight,” he said, but he declared he had never heard of the Duwampsh campaign attributed to Sealth.
Yutestid was not at the battle of Seattle but at Oleman House with Sealth’s tribe and others whom Gov. Stevens had ordered there. He chuckled as he said “The bad Indians came into the woods near town and the man-of-war (Decatur) mamoked pooh (shot) at them and they were frightened and ran away.”
Lachuse, the Indian who was shot near Seneca Street, Seattle, he remembered, and when I told him how the Indian doctor extracted the buckshot from the wounds he sententiously remarked, “Well, sometimes the Indian doctors did very well, sometimes they were old humbugs, just the same as white people.”
Oleman House was built long before he was born, according to his testimony, and was adorned by a carved wooden figure, over the entrance, of the great thunder bird, which performed the office of a lightning rod or at least prevented thunder bolts from striking the building.
When asked what the medium of exchange was “ankuti” (long ago), he measured on the index finger the length of pieces of abalone shell formerly used for money.
In those days he saw the old women make feather robes of duck-skins, also of deer-skins and dog-skins with the hair on; they made bead work, too; beaded moccasins called “Yachit.”
The old time ways were very slow; he described the cutting of a huge cedar for a canoe as taking a long time to do, by hacking around it with a stone hammer and “chisel.”