The Siwash, Their Life, Legends, and Tales: Puget Sound and Pacfic Northwest

by J. A. Costello

ALL THAT’S LEFT OF OLD-MAN-HOUSE

What a home it must have been. Although the family residing there was large, yet never a resident of Washington lived in a home more spacious. It covered the length and breadth of sandy beach like a king’s palace that it was. Three hundred and eighty-four or ninety-four yards, as Wm. Deshaw remembered, did it stretch away up and down the beach of the narrow Agate passage. Twenty yards or more in breadth it extended back to the edge of the little bluff where its long timbers rested as on a footstool, and high enough for the tallest Indian brave.

The outlines of the old pile are still readily traceable along the ground although it has been nearly thirty years since the Indians gave it up as a place of abode and took to constructing little huts and lean-tos along the beach and on the gentle slopes above. The attractive relic of the old structure and the one that lends the best idea of the old building’s original shape, is one of the log rafters still resting in position on two immense uprights just as it did in the days when the allied tribes hoisted its great weight into the air. It is a cedar log 63 feet long, 12 inches in diameter at the smaller end and probably 23 or 24 inches at the larger end. The uprights, to lend color to the great proportions the old building must have attained, are of immense cedar trees that must have been four feet through. The one nearer the water is 12 feet high and the other fully eight feet. The big timbers were first split asunder and the inside hollowed out and hewn away until a piece probably 10 or 12 inches thick had been left to form the upright. They have been hoisted into position with the convex or bark side turned to face the interior of the house and tamped into the ground until they became solidly set and able to support the great weight that was put on above. Back of the row of uprights that stood at the rear and furthest from the beach, extended another row of stringers or girders to the bank, supporting also a roof, and this greatly enlarged the area of the building. Up and down the beach are numberless posts and foundation blocks of the old house and all in a good state of preservation, as is the single big rafter and two uprights yet in position. These latter are only worn and rotted where they came in contact once with the other or where they enter at the surface of the ground.

An alder bush, a salal bush, and a weed or two have found a foothold in an old wind crack of the rafter and now add to its quaint and picturesque appearance. All else has been torn down or fallen down by the lapse of time and has either floated off with the tide or been burned up in their earthen fires.

Five hundred, six hundred, and as high as seven hundred Indians lived in the big palace here at one time. They lived here long after the white people came among them. The site had been their great village for probably hundreds of years before. Successive chiefs have sat in council here and great war dances and night orgies held through generations of time under the chiefs of the Sealth.

Great banks of crushed and broken and roasted clam shells that whiten the beach and cover the bottom of the sea as with a porcelain lining far out into deep water, attest this better than could have musty scroll or parchment. The entire sea beach extending back onto the high ground is but a bed of decayed clam shells, and even as high up as the Indian farmer’s little garden, soil had to be carted in and put upon it, in which the seed germs could take hold and grow. Below it was a bed of lime-like earth, the offal and remains of many thousands of Indian feasts.

Besides the vast amount of crumbled shell mounds there are other and smaller mounds about the site that look as if they might have served the purpose of an elevated fire place. The whole area is overgrown with a thick carpet of short sand grass which even now makes it a most inviting place for campers or picnic parties. Beyond the few things mentioned above there is nothing to remind one now of the interesting past hereabouts.

An interesting character still resides, 1895, at the Old-Man-House reservation. He is William Deshaw, whom the tides of time cast upon the beach at Agate point, Kitsap county, 27 years ago.