In an early day when Ira W. Utter lived on Salmon Bay, or more properly Shilshole Bay, he was much troubled by cougars killing his cattle, calves particularly. Thinking strychnine a good cure he put a dose in some lights of a beef, placed on a stick with the opposite end thrust in the ground. “Old Limpy,” an Indian, spied the tempting morsel, took it to his home, roasted and ate the same and went to join his ancestors in the happy hunting grounds.
This Indian received his name from a limp occasioned by a gunshot wound inflicted by Lower Sound Indians on one of their raids. He was just recovering when the white people settled on Elliott Bay.
The very mention of these raids must have been terrifying to our Indians, as we called those who lived on the Upper Sound. On one occasion as a party of them were digging clams on the eastern shore of Admiralty Inlet, north of Meadow Point, they were attacked by their northern enemies, who shot two or three while the rest klatawaw-ed with all the hyak (hurry) possible and hid themselves.
CHAPTER II.
PIONEER JOKES AND ANECDOTES.
In early days, the preachers came in for some rather severe criticisms, although the roughest of the frontiersmen had a genuine reverence for their calling.
Ministers of the Gospel, as well as others, were obliged to turn the hand to toil with ax and saw. Now these tools require frequent recourse to sharpening processes and the minister with ax on shoulder, requesting the privilege of grinding that useful article on one of the few grindstones in the settlement occasioned no surprise, but when he prepared to grind by putting the handle on “wrong side to,” gave it a brisk turn and snapped it off short, the disgust of the owner found vent in the caustic comment, “Well, if you’re such a blame fool as that, I’ll never go to hear you preach in the world!”
James G. Swan tells of an amusing experience with a Neah Bay Indian chief, in these words:
“I had a lively time with old Kobetsi, the war chief, whose name was Kobetsi-bis, which in the Makah language means frost. I had been directed by Agent Webster to make a survey of the reservation as far south as the Tsoess river, where Kobetsi lived, and claimed exclusive ownership to the cranberry meadows along the bank of that river. He was then at his summer residence on Tatoosh Island. The Makah Indians had seen and understood something of the mariner’s compass, but a surveyor’s compass was a riddle to them.
“A slave of Kobetsi, who had seen me at work on the cranberry meadows, hurried to Tatoosh Island and reported that I was working a tamanuse, or magic, by which I could collect all the cranberries in one pile, and that Peter had sold me the land. This enraged the old ruffian, and he came up to Neah Bay with sixteen braves, with their faces painted black, their long hair tied in a knot on top of their heads with spruce twigs, their regular war paint, and all whooping and yelling. The old fellow declared he would have my head. Peter and the others laughed at him, and I explained to him what I had been about. He was pacified with me, but on his return to Tatoosh Island he shot the slave dead for making a fool of his chief.”