One of the family escaped by wading out into the water where he might have become very cool, if not entirely cold, if it had not been that Captain Fay and George Martin, a Swedish sailor, were passing by in their boat and the Indian begged to be taken in, a request they readily granted and landed him in a place of safety.
Again at Bean’s Point an Indian was shot by a white man, a Scandinavian; the charge was a liberal one of buckshot.
Some white men who went to inquire into the matter followed the Indian’s trail, finding ample evidence that he had climbed the hill back of the house, where he may have been employed to work, and weak from his wounds had sat down on a log and then went back to the water; but his body was never found. It was supposed that the murderer enticed him back again and when he was dead, weighted and sunk him in the deep, cold waters of the Sound.
At one time there was quite a large camp of Indians where now runs Seneca Street, Seattle, near which was my home. It was my father’s custom to hire the Indians to perform various kinds of hard labor, such as grubbing stumps, digging ditches, cutting wood, etc. For a while we employed a tall, strong, fine-looking Indian called Lachuse to cut wood; through a long summer day he industriously plied the ax and late in the twilight went down to a pool of water, near an old bridge, to bathe. As he passed by a clump of bushes, suddenly the flash and report of a gun shattered the still air and Lachuse fell heavily to the ground with his broad chest riddled with buckshot.
There was great excitement in the camp, running and crying of the women and debate by the men, who soon carried him into the large Indian house. He was laid down in the middle of the room and the medicine man, finding him alive, proceeded to suck the wounds while the tamanuse noise went on.
A distracted, grey-haired lum-e-i, his mother, came to our house to beg for a keeler of water, all the time crying, “Mame-loose Lachuse! Achada!”
Two of the little girls of our family, sleeping in an old-fashioned trundle bed, were so frightened at the commotion that they pulled the covers up over their heads so far that their feet protruded below.
The medicine man’s treatment seems to have been effective, aided by the tamanuse music, as Lachuse finally recovered.
The revengeful deed was committed by a Port Washington Indian, in retaliation for the stealing of his “klootchman” (wife) by an Indian of the Duwampsh tribe, although it was not Lachuse, this sort of revenge being in accordance with their heathen custom.
“Jim Keokuk,” an Indian, killed another Indian in the marsh near the gas works; he struck him on the head with a stone. Jim worked as deck hand on a steamer for a time, but he in turn was finally murdered by other Indians, wrapped with chains and thrown overboard, which was afterward revealed by some of the tribe.