Three days after one of the Shilshohs came to my house in a very agitated frame of mind to inquire if I had seen anything of the Stickeens. He said his folks heard rapid firing in the direction of my house three nights before and thought I had been attacked by the Northern Indians, perhaps killed, and, to save themselves his people had all taken to the woods, where they were still in hiding. He had skulked around by Lake Union and along near Salmon bay and up to my house to learn if possible whether the Stickeens had left Salmon bay. Although I assured him that I had been the innocent cause of their alarm it was several days before they ventured back.
The few families that were here when I first came to live in the Cove melted away like a morning frost. Gambling is a ruling passion among nearly all Indians and I attribute their rapid extinction largely to that vice.
After the “Bostons,” as they called Americans to distinguish them from the Hudsons bay traders, came among them they soon began to live better. They bought flour, beans, rice, clothes, blankets, and many of the more enterprising among them lived quite comfortably until a gambling mania would seize them when they would frequently gamble off everything they owned, even their clothes, and then sleep on the bare ground or some newly gathered ferns or moss and so nearly naked. The result of course would be colds ending in pneumonia or consumption.
Dr. Jim, a genuine herb doctor, who was quite renowned for his many astonishing cures among the sable sons of the forest, was the last of the Shilshohs. He was really a superior Siwash, manly, fine looking and intelligent, and during the last years of his chequered life he spoke the English language fluently. About fifteen years ago he grew weary of this world and left it by hanging himself to a rafter in his own house at the mouth of the Shilshoh bay one morning while his old wife was preparing breakfast.
Never having been blessed with offspring and his last wife being a lake Indian, his death struggles ended the cares of a man-cursed tribe, once famed for its manly men and comely maidens. Of course they were not comely viewed from the standpoint of a cultured American esthete, but the maidens with fine features and red cheeks were as beautiful to the tawny hunter tribes as a Hebe would be to a Bostonian.
Of their life and legends Dr. Smith never fully acquainted himself. Here is one tribe of native people at least who will pass into oblivion with scarcely a line left to the history-loving and history-writing people who have taken their places. One legend alone and that the pioneer has reduced to verse has been preserved. The legend, as it appears, was written 40 years ago merely for the pleasure of it by the old pioneer and never was offered for publication. It is tinged with romance and relates to an Indian maiden whose betrothed was killed during a raid by the Northern or Stickeen Indians to Shilshoh bay. The Indian maiden’s grief was so great that she became deranged and on several occasions started alone in search of the absent lover in a canoe imagining she could sail to the happy hunting grounds and into the sunshine of his happy presence. One morning she was missing and as her lover’s canoe was gone and as her tracks proved that she had taken it her friends easily guessed her fate:
GAZELLE, THE FOREST MAIDEN.
The birds and the beasts had retired to rest,
The sun’s lingering rays from the mountains had fled,