We arrived at the hut occupied by this family at noon. It stands on the bank of the river, half a mile above the village of Chehalis, and as we pulled up, two old and two young squaws and nine small Indians, some of them mere papooses in arms (but not in long clothes—in fact, not in any clothes worth mentioning), came swarming out to meet us. Their abode was a shanty about twelve feet square, made by setting four corner posts into the ground, nailing cross-ribs on, and over these clapboards riven from the native cedars, and the roof was of the same material. The adult members of this social alliance had been engaged in catching and drying salmon during the recent run; the heads, entrails and backbones of which had been dumped into the river at their very door. There being no current near the shore they had sunk in barely enough water to cover them, and lay there rotting and poluting the water used by the family for drinking and cooking. Cart-loads of this offal were also lying about the dooryard, and had been trampled into and mixed up with the mud until the whole outfit stunk like a tanyard.
Within was a picture of filth and squalor that beggars description. The floor of the hut was of mother earth. A couple of logs with two clapboards laid across them formed the only seats. On one side was a pile of brush, hay, and dirty, filthy blankets, indiscriminately mixed, on which the entire three families slept, presumably in the same fashion. Near the centre of the hut a small fire struggled for existence, and that portion of the smoke that was not absorbed by the people, the drying fish and other objects in the room, escaped through a hole in the centre of the roof. The children, barefooted and half-naked, came in out of the rain, mud, and fish carrion, in which they had been tramping about, and sat or lay on the ground about the fire, looking as happy as a litter of pigs in a mud hole. On poles, attached by cedar withes to the rafters, were hung several hundred salmon, absorbing smoke, carbonic acid gas from the lungs of the human beings beneath, and steam from the cooking that was going on. It is understood that after this process has been prolonged for some weeks these once noble fishes will be fit for the winter food of the Siwash.
Some of the houses in Chehalis are neat frame cottages; in fact, it is a better-built town, on the whole, than the village of Harrison River already described; but these better houses all stand back about a quarter of a mile from the river, and the inhabitants have left them and gone into the "fish-houses," the clapboard structures, on the immediate river bank. Some of these shanties are much larger than the one mentioned above, and in some cases four, five, or even six families hole up in one of these filthy dens during the fish-curing season.
As a matter of fact, there are salmon of one variety or another in these larger rivers nearly all the year, but sometimes the weather is too cold, too wet, or otherwise too disagreable in winter for the noble red man to fish with comfort, and hence all these preparations for a rainy day. After the fishes are cured they are hung up in big out-houses set on posts, or in some cases built high up in the branches of trees, in order to be entirely out of the reach of rats, minks, or other vermin, and the members of the commune draw from the stock at will. The coast Indians live almost wholly on fish, and seem perfectly happy without flesh, vegetables, or bread, if such be not at hand, though they can eat plenty of all these when set before them. If one of them kills a deer he seldom or never eats more of it than the liver, heart, lungs, etc. He sells the carcass, if within a three days' voyage of a white man who will buy venison.
SALMON BOXES IN TREES.
One of the young men already mentioned went with me down to one of the big fish-houses and called out Pean, a man about fifty years of age, who he said was a good goat hunter and a good guide. They held a hurried conversation in their native tongue, at the close of which the young man said Pean would go with me for two dollars a day. I asked Pean if he could talk English, and he said "yes," but this proved, in after experience, to be about the only English word he could speak. He rushed into the hut, and in about three or four minutes returned with his gun, powder-horn, bullet-pouch, pipe, and a small roll of blankets, and was ready for a journey into the mountains of, he knew not how many days. His canoe was on the river bank near us, and as we were stepping into it I asked him a few questions which he tried to answer in English, but made a poor stagger at it, and slid off into Chinook.
Just then another old Indian came up with a canoe-load of wood. I asked him if he could speak English—"wah-wah King George"; and he said "Yes."
I then told him I had hired this other man to go hunting with me and asked him if he knew him.
"Oh, yes," he said; "me chief here. All dese house my house. All dese people my people. No other chief here." I said I was delighted to know him, shook hands with him, gave him a cigar, and inquired his name.