WILLIAM DESHAW, THE PIONEER AND INTIMATE FRIEND OF CHIEF SEALTH
From a Life Sketch
Deshaw, a rank copper-head to this day, is part of the flotsam and jetsam that came into the Sound along with the early tide of emigration. He was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1834, and was part of the early drift of Arizona, New Mexico and California. He went into the Sacramento valley a year before the others struck the coast and true to his nature of moving out on the flood tides soon left there and came this way. He has been shot full of arrow holes, and has among numerous other trophies five Indian scalps in his trunk of his own taking. That he ever remained here so long is entirely due to the climate. Let the rains of one long winter on Puget Sound percolate down a man’s back and he seldom gets away after that. He takes to it, as it were, like the moss on the roof, and becomes a fixture of the location. And so it was with the old Texan. He drifted in here for a stay of a month or two and he is here yet. He soon got mixed up with the natives, became a squaw man and never after that could he pull himself away. And why should he leave? He had wedded into the royal house of Sealth; wedded a princess, a grand-daughter of the chief of the allied tribes of the Duwamish, Samamish, Squamish, etc., and probably forgot about his old-time habit of drifting. Mrs. Deshaw, nee Princess Mary Sealth, has been dead these many years, and now lies buried in the little reservation churchyard on the hill across the narrow strip of tide water. There are, however, two fine looking girls and some boys left of the union, and in their society the old man is happy and contented. Speaking of the little “God’s acre” on the hill near the reservation church reminds us very vividly that within its sacred precincts rests almost all that there is of the races and tribes of Sealth. Eighteen new mounds have been added during the past year. Yet a little while and there will not be a solitary individual left alive to remind those of to-day that such a people ever lived. Father Time has wrought some rapid changes with the allied tribes since the whites came among them. The evil and contaminating influences that have ever followed civilization into the dominion of the simple natives, coupled in this case with their severe and taxing superstitions, have combined to quickly wipe them out of existence.
So quickly have the changes been wrought that whole families have disappeared almost in the night-time. A Siwash with a wife and eight or ten apparently healthy children might wake up to-morrow to find himself a widower without family. Men there are now at the Old-Man-House who have buried their third wife and living with the fourth. Klootchmen were pointed out who have married five different times and only the fifth man living. Chief of Police Jimmy Sealth is the fourth husband of his present wife, who is not over 30 years of age. She lost her first, second and third husbands successively, and with the first one buried seven children. The record of the second and third marriages was not given. Jimmy Sealth, no relation of the old chief, who besides being chief of police, was sheriff, prosecuting attorney, judge and general factotum on the reservation, has been married two or three times and buried two children by his first wife. In one little family plot in the reservation churchyard 23 graves were counted side by side. The dead are not alone buried side by side—they are piled in one on top of another in many cases, although there is a waste of wilderness on every side of the burying ground.
Disease has fallen with a heavy hand upon the allied tribes, but even in the memory of the first white man superstition has done almost as much in the labor of thinning out the population. Graves there are at the Old-Man-House that have been wet with the blood of human sacrifice within the memory of their great Ta-mahn-a-wis, William Deshaw. One man there is on the Old-Man-House reservation who has slain 11 children in the practice of their Skal-lal-a-toot, or hoodooism, and whose blood saturated the tomb of their hy-as-tyees.
Such in a few words is the rather sympathetic story of a people who hereabouts were the first in the land. A people whose Ta-mahn-a-wis men, or great medicine men, foretold the coming of the white people days and days before the Indians themselves saw the ships of Vancouver sailing from out the heavy cloud banks and high up in the air, for from such a source did the three ships appear to the simple natives as told now in some of their traditions. The Old-Man-House, or Port Madison Indian reservation lies about 15 miles northwest of Seattle and not far from the Port Madison mills, one of the big lumber camps of Puget Sound, now idle and almost tenantless, a result as much probably of extensive litigation as anything else. It is a mill town owned exclusively by the mill company, which furnishes all the employment of the place to its 300 or 400 inhabitants when the mill is busy. Now that there is nothing to do in the mill there is no occasion for remaining there and the mill men with their families have moved elsewhere and the rows of pretty whitewashed cottages are empty and voiceless.
The mill property is situated in a pretty little bight of the Sound, once a favorite nook of the Indians, hid away from view until one is right upon it. It is located nearly at the northernmost end of Bainbridge island, and the mill town at one time besides supporting a considerable mill population, was the county seat of Kitsap county. But during a few years past, however, the most officious and omnipresent individual over there was the court’s officer, who held the keys to the mill and looked after the property for the court pending final adjudication of the case on behalf of all litigants.
The Indian reservation lies about three miles distant from the mill and separated from it by Agate passage, a narrow thread of water 900 feet across at half tide.
The way over to the reservation is nothing more than a narrow trail hewn out of the woods a few feet up from the beach, and was apparently first cut by the men who strung the old Puget Sound telegraph and cable company’s wire to the lower Sound.
