Six o’clock in the morning finds the fields redolent of odor, musical with sound and swarming with pickers. Poles laden with wet vines are falling here, there and everywhere. There are buckets, baskets, boxes, babies and blankets in endless admixture, while white, black and Indian are taking stations. Dropping polls, like snowflakes falling, are heaping in miniature mountains in every row. So it goes. Day in, day out, from morn to night, throughout the season, until the last pole has been plucked and the last load rolled into the mammoth kiln.
Indians make the best pickers, and among the Indians the klootchman ranks supreme. She picks hops while the lazy, indolent brave plays cards or lounges in the shadow of his rakish tepee. His great delights are in card playing and pony racing. Those of the interior will travel for days across the mountains every autumn, not to pick hops but to horse race on Sunday. Sunday is their big day, a day of carousing, gambling and racing. On those days all the villages in the valley are overrun with the pickers in holiday garb of fancy colors. Then assemble a cosmopolitan crowd not greatly unlike such as gather at fair time in the far famed Nijni Novgorod from the steppes of Tartary or Siberia. The Yakimas and Klickitats and other interior tribes, male and female alike, are scampering about on long haired ponies, while the more sedate Puyallups, Nisquallys, Tulalips, and dozens of other coast tribes trudge hither and thither, grunting and muttering and poking their fingers and noses into anything and everything which can be eaten or worn. Night drives them to their various camps, some scattered miles away in various parts of the valleys, and the following Sunday the scene is repeated.
STONE HATCHETS OF PUGET SOUND TRIBES
Near Puyallup in a long reach of level ground the Indians have raced for years at hop picking time, and so great is the rivalry and excitement of the sport that the whole interim from one autumn till the next is given up in preparation and training of horse flesh with which to outrun rival steeds on the race course. Sometimes but two, at other times six or eight horses will enter in a single race. The race is always a running race and the Indians mount without any reference to weight, handicap, jockey or saddle. A big Indian will be seen mounted on a diminutive wooly pony, and will sail over the course like a meteor, his long black locks streaming in the wind. Bets of ponies, lodges, blankets, saddles, knives, money and everything and anything tangible and movable will be staked on the result of a race and paid with as much nonchalance as a thousand pounds Sterling would be paid on Epsom Downs. Often there are seen at these Sunday races 3,000 people. Such days and places are the paradise of the gambler, contraband whiskey vendor and trashy whites generally. They congregate like vultures at a carrion feed. Only a goodly number of United States deputy marshals prevents downright and open handed robbery and vice.
The close of the picking season always finds the principal towns flooded with returning pickers and the dock fronts lined with long, lank Indian canoes. The Indians are spendthrifts, and they plant the profits of the picking season as generously as princes of the realm. Their canoes are laden with bric a brac from the Boston man’s store as long as the money lasts or as long as there is room to store them.
QUINIAULT SEA OTTER LOOKOUT
They always bring with them from their mysterious northern lands the fruits of the chase on land or sea, and the workmanship of rude hands, for barter with the whites. Mats of reeds, images, miniature canoes, bladders of fish oil, slabs of seal meat, dried elk and bear, seal skins, beaver skins, pelts, sea otter skins, and such like, form their chief staples in trade. These are generally bartered on the trip down, for eatables, while waiting for the maturing of the hop fields, as they are most always here weeks before the time for picking.
The coast Indians come generally in fleets of a dozen to twenty or thirty big canoes, numbering fifty or one hundred pickers, who are generally presided over by some scion of a royal line or by some head man elected to chieftainship, much as the whites elect their officials. If there is any tribal restrictions or dictatorial authority by the chief at home, it is dropped when they start on their long water journeys, sometimes of many hundred miles, to the hop fields.