The going and coming of the Washington hop pickers is as regular as the annual migration of water fowl or the rotation of the seasons, and are ever a source of attraction and interest.
CHAPTER XLI
LEGEND OF THE CRUCIFIXION
The Siwash have a legendary theory and story of the crucifixion. Hezekial Butterworth picked it up while on one of his vacation jaunts to the west, and tells it very prettily, though it has been told by a score of writers and is one of the first to come to the knowledge of the white man:
Long, long ago, say the Siwashes, in the splendid sunsets of the Whulge, or Puget Sea, there came a canoe of copper sailing, sailing. The painted forest lords and feathered maidens saw it from the bluffs—in the sunrise at times, or in the moonsets, but ever in the red sunsets, sailing, sailing. The gleam of copper in the red sunset is more beautiful than gold; and ever and anon on the blue wave was seen the burnished gleam of the copper canoe. On it came, and the solitary voyager in the copper canoe landed at last on the Whulge, under the crystal dome of Mount Rainier, and he shadowed among the cool firs of the headlands there the boat that flashed out the rays of sunset light.
He called together the tribes. They came in canoes from everywhere. He began to teach and preach. “I come among you as a preacher of righteousness,” he said, or thoughts like these. “All that men can possess in this world, or any other, is righteousness. If a man have that, he is rich, though he be poor, and his soul shall rise, rise, rise, and live forever.
“Oh Siwashes,” he preached, “the unseen power that thinks and causes you to act is the soul. It does not die when the breath vanishes. It goes away with the unseen life and inhabits the life unseen. You have never seen the soul, or life, but death is only the beginning of a longer life, and the soul with righteous longings shall be happy forever.
“But war is wrong—the spear, the arrow, and the spilling of human blood. Man may not kill his brother. The soul was meant for peace.”
He preached these or like doctrines, a beautiful gospel, like the Sermon on the Mount.