A Pacific Coast Vacation

by Mrs. James Edwin Morris

It holds true the world over that “some must follow and some command, though all are made of clay,” as Longfellow puts it.

We are soon out on the ocean, where it is all sea and flood and long Pacific swell.

All up and down the picturesque shores of Puget Sound live the Silash Indians, who to-day dress in American costumes and follow American pursuits. One sees them on the streets of the cities and towns. The Silash, like the ancient Greeks, peopled the unseen world with spirits. Good and evil genii lived in the forest; every spring had its Nereid and every tree its dryad. They believed the Milky Way to be the path to heaven; so believed the ancient Greeks.

One beautiful day there gleamed and danced in the sunshine a copper canoe of wonderful design. Down the sound it came. When the stranger whom it carried had landed he announced that he had a message for the red man, and sending for every Silash, he taught them the law of love. The Indian mind is slow to adjust itself to new thought. Such ideas were new and strange to these children of nature. When this beautiful stranger about whose head the sun was always shining, told them of the new, the eternal life in the world beyond, they listened with deep interest, but the savage was stronger than the man in the red skins and they dragged the stranger to a tree, where they nailed him fast with pegs in his hands and feet, torturing him as they did their victims of the devil dance.

Then they danced around him until the strange light faded from his beautiful eyes. Slowly the radiant head dropped and life itself went out. A great storm arose that shook the earth to its very center. Great rocks came tearing down the mountain side. The sun hid his face for three days.

They took the body down and laid it away. On the third day, when the sun burst forth, the dead man arose and resumed his teaching. The Indians now declared him a god and believed in him.

Year by year the Silash grew more gentle and less warlike, until of all Indians they became the most peaceful. My readers will readily see that this is a confused tale of the Christ.

Another fantastic tale of this region is that of an Indian miser who dried salmon and jerked meat, which he sold for haiqua,—tusk-shells,—the wampum of the Silash Indians. Like all misers, the more haiqua he got the more he wanted.

One cold winter day he went hunting on the slopes of Mount Rainier. Every mountain has its Tamanous, to which travelers and hunters must pay homage. Now the miser, instead of paying devotion to the god of the mountain, only looked at the snow and sighed, “Ah, if it were only haiqua.”

Up, up he went, and soon reached the rim of the volcano’s crater, and hurrying down the inside of the crater he came to a rock in the form of a deer’s head. With desperate energy he flung snow and gravel about. Presently he came to a smooth, flat rock; summoning all his strength, he lifted the rock. Beyond was a wonderful cave where were stored great quantities of the most beautiful haiqua his eyes had ever beheld.