During the winter of 1880-81 a medicine-man made a feast on Sabbath evening and invited all the Indians to it. It was to be, however, a bait for a large amount of tamahnous, which was to take place. The Indians went, the members of the church as well as the rest, leaving the evening service in order to attend it. The school-teacher felt very badly and wrote me immediately about it; but a little later he learned that on that same evening the Christian Indians, feeling that they were doing wrong, left the place before the feast was over, went to one of their houses, where they held a prayer-meeting and confessed their sin, and on the following Thursday evening, at the general prayer-meeting made a public confession. We could ask for nothing more, but could thank the Holy Spirit for inclining them thus to do before any white person had spoken to them about it.
Knowing of four new ones who wished to join the church in April, 1882, I thought that the time had come to organize them into a church by themselves. So letters were granted by the Skokomish church to seven who lived at Jamestown, and the church was organized April 30, 1882, with eleven members, nine of whom were Indians. The services were in such a babel of languages that their order is here given: Singing in Clallam and then in English; reading of the Scriptures in English; prayer by Rev. H. C. Minckler, of the Methodist-Episcopal church, the school-teacher; singing in Clallam; preaching in Chinook, translated into Clallam; singing in Chinook; baptism of an infant son of a white church member in English; prayer in English; singing in English; propounding the articles of faith and covenant in English, translated into Clallam, together with the baptism of four adults; giving of the right hand of fellowship, in English, translated into Clallam; prayer in Chinook; singing in Chinook; talk previous to the distribution of the bread, in Chinook, translated into Clallam; prayer in English; distribution of the bread; talk in English; prayer in Chinook, followed by the distribution of the cup; singing in English a hymn in which nearly all the Indians could join; benediction in Chinook. A number of their white neighbors gathered in, to the encouragement of the Indians, six of whom communed with us.
The next fall three more joined, and seven more in 1883, one of whom was a venerable white-haired white man, over seventy years old. In the fall of that year five infants were baptized, the first belonging to the Indians in the history of the church.
In the fall of 1883 three of them accompanied me on a missionary tour to Clallam Bay. They gave their time, a week, and the American Missionary Association paid their expenses. It was the first work of the kind which they had done, and I was pleased with their earnestness and zeal. The previous spring I had been there, and there were some things which made me feel as if such a trip might do good. Still it is a hard field because a majority of the men are over fifty, and, being in the majority, practise and sing tamahnous, and go to potlatches a good share of the time during the winter. There is very little white religious influence near them.
When the day-school first began, in 1878, the teacher, Mr. J. W. Blakeslee, began also a Sabbath-school. His successor, Rev. H. C. Minckler, carried it on until he resigned in April, 1883, and no other teacher was procured until early in 1884; but then they chose one of their own church members, Mr. George D. Howell, who had been to school some, and still carried on the school. He served until November, when he temporarily left to obtain work, and Mr. Howard Chubbs was chosen as his successor.
In 1880 they procured a small church-bell, the first in the county, and added a belfry to the church.
Not all, however, of the people in the village can be called adherents to Christianity. There is a plain division among them. Some are members of the church, a few who are not attend church, and some hardly ever go, but profess to belong to the anti-Christian party.
It is worthy of note that while Clallam County had so many people in it as to be organized into a county in 1854, and had in 1880 nearly six hundred white people, yet these Indians have the only church building in the county, the only church-bell, hold the only regular prayer-meeting, and at their church and on the Neah Bay Indian Reservation are the only Sabbath-schools which are kept up steadily summer and winter. One white person, who lives not far from Jamestown, said to me on one Sabbath, in 1880, as we came away from the church: “It is a shame, it is a shame! that the Indians here are going ahead of the whites in religious affairs. It is a wonder how they are advancing, considering the example around them.”
XXXII.
COOK HOUSE BILLY.
HE will always be known by this name, probably, though on the church roll his name is written as William House Cook. He is a Clallam Indian, of Jamestown. His early life was wild and dissipated, he being, like all the rest of his tribe, addicted to drunkenness. At one time, when he was living at Port Discovery, he became quite drunk. He was on the opposite side of the bay from the mill, and, wishing for more whiskey, he started across in a canoe for it; but he was so drunk that he had not gone far before he upset his canoe, and had it not been for his wife, who was on shore and went to his rescue, he would have been drowned.