The Indians on the Sound, including those on the Strait of Fuca, numbered some eight thousand five hundred, and were divided into a great many tribes and bands. They were canoe Indians, and drew most of their food from the waters, chiefly salmon and shell-fish, eked out with game, roots, and berries. Those about the upper Sound had bands of ponies, with which they roamed the prairies in summer. They lived in large lodges, several families together, constructed of planks split from the cedar, with nearly flat roofs, and often thirty or forty feet long and twenty wide. They showed no little artistic skill in their canoes, paddles, spears, fish-hooks, basket-work impervious to water, and mats of rushes. Out of a single cedar-tree, with infinite pains and labor, they hewed and burned the most graceful and beautiful and finest canoe ever seen, the very model, in lines and run, of a clipper ship. These varied in size from the little fishing-craft, holding but two persons, to a great canoe carrying thirty. They held as slaves the captives taken in war and their descendants, and, singularly enough, the heads of the slaves were left in their natural state, while the skulls of the free-born were flattened by pressure during infancy into the shape of a shovel. Many of the bands were remnants of former large tribes, for they had been greatly diminished in numbers by the ravages of smallpox and venereal disease. They lacked the energy and courage of the Indians of the upper country, and lived in perpetual dread of the gigantic and savage northern Indians,—the Hydahs and other bands of Tlinkits of British Columbia and Alaska,—who would periodically swoop down the coast in their great war canoes and raid these feebler folk, ruthlessly slaughtering the men, and enslaving the women and children. They suffered also, but to a less degree, from incursions of bands of Yakimas across the mountains, equally on trade and plunder bent, whom they designated “Klikitats,” or robbers, a term which has been taken as a tribal name. To these dangers were now added the fear of the all-powerful and ever-increasing whites. Thus situated and thus apprehensive, the messages and exhortations of the governor promising them protection, pointing out the way of bettering their condition, and of even imitating the envied superior race, broke upon them like a lighthouse in a dark night upon the storm-tossed mariner, relieved their fears and anxieties, and gave them hope. They hastened to assemble at the appointed council grounds, eager to listen to the new white chief, and to learn what he offered from the Great Father for their benefit.
On December 7, only two days after delivering his message to the legislature, Governor Stevens organized his treaty-making force by appointing James Doty secretary, George Gibbs surveyor, H.A. Goldsborough commissary, and B.F. Shaw interpreter, Colonel M.T. Simmons having already been appointed agent. The governor assembled these gentlemen to confer upon the projected treaties. After giving his views, and showing the necessity of speedily treating with the Indians and placing them on reservations, he had Mr. Doty read certain treaties with the Missouri and Omaha tribes, which contained provisions he deemed worthy of adoption, and invited a general and thorough discussion of the whole subject. So many points were settled by this frank and free interchange of views that Mr. Gibbs was directed to draw up a programme, or outline of a treaty, which on the next meeting on the 10th, after discussion and some changes, was adopted as the basis of the treaties to be made with the tribes on the Sound, coast, and lower Columbia.
No better advisers could have been found than the men with whom he thus took counsel; and one is struck by the clever and considerate way in which he secured the best fruits of their knowledge and experience, and enlisted their best efforts in carrying out the work. Simmons and Shaw were old frontiersmen, among the earliest settlers, and had dealt much with, and thoroughly understood, the Indians, and were respected and trusted by them. Simmons has been justly termed the Daniel Boone of Washington Territory. Shaw was said to be the only man who could make or translate a speech in Chinook jargon offhand, as fast as a man could talk in his own vernacular. The Chinook jargon was a mongrel lingo, made up for trading purposes by the fur-traders from English, French, and Indian words, and had become the common speech between whites and Indians, and between Indians of different tribes and tongues. He greatly distinguished himself afterwards in the Indian war as lieutenant-colonel of volunteers. Gibbs and Goldsborough were men of education, and had lived in the country long enough to know the general situation and conditions, and to learn much about the Indians. Gibbs, indeed, made a study of the different tribes, and rendered an able report upon them as part of the Northern Pacific Railroad exploration. Doty, a son of ex-Governor Doty, of Wisconsin, was a young man of uncommon ability and energy, who had spent the preceding winter at Fort Benton, and had studied and made a census of the Blackfeet.
The salient features of the policy outlined were as follows:—
1. To concentrate the Indians upon a few reservations, and encourage them to cultivate the soil and adopt settled and civilized habits.
2. To pay for their lands not in money, but in annuities of blankets, clothing, and useful articles during a long term of years.
3. To furnish them with schools, teachers, farmers and farming implements, blacksmiths, and carpenters, with shops of those trades.
4. To prohibit wars and disputes among them.
5. To abolish slavery.
6. To stop as far as possible the use of liquor.