Alaska (109 page)

'No special man, no special bird, no special face. Just how I feel. Just how the rains fall.'

Rain was beginning to fall, so men brought canvases to protect the still-wet paint, and through that first night of the potlatch one man played a fiddle, women danced, and Tom Venn complained to Nancy: 'Nobody tells me what it is. A potlatch for what?'

and watching the celebration as if from afar, she explained this ancient custom: 664

'When all goes well and there is money in the house and neighbors think kindly of you, maybe it's proper for you to give it all away and start over. Maybe you must prove yourself again. Maybe you must not rise too high above your neighbors. Look!

They dance. They sing. And Sam Bigears grows bigger in their eyes, for he has made real potlatch.

'The missionaries hated potlatch. Claimed it was the work of the devil. Too much noise. Not enough praying. Lots of things happen at potlatch. Good things. Noisy things. Maybe seem wild. But the celebration . . .'

She nodded her head gently to the screeching of the fiddle and smiled as she watched her mother dance in a corner as if partnered by a ghost, dancing to a music which she alone heard.

On the morning of the third day everyone assembled at the totem to participate in the ritual of its erection. Since the pole was thirty feet long and ample at the base, this was going to present quite an engineering problem, but the Tlingits had, through the centuries, perfected a system for getting their massive totems into an upright position, and now came the test.

Bigears and Tom and Nancy had already readied the hole for the pole, lining it with rocks, so now a trench was dug leading on a gradual slope from the deep bottom of the hole out beside the pole to a distance of about one-third the length of the totem.

When it was properly graded, the men applied muscle and rope to the task of easing the long pole sideways and down into the sloping trench. The top end of the totem that is, the end not in the trench was propped up at various points with stout logs, and all was ready, except that at the last moment men wedged into the waiting hole, along the far face, a large flat slab against which the bottom of the totem would abut, so that when the top was raised, this slab would prevent the totem from gouging out the soft earth as the end of the pole was forced against it.

Now ropes were applied at many points along the top of the pole, one of the most important being the one which would prevent it from swinging too far over when it was pulled upright. Other ropes were attached to keep the totem from weaving from side to side, and men experienced in raising poles began to shout orders while others hauled on the ropes. Women, watching in admiration as the handsomely carved totem began to rise majestically in the sunny morning, 665

its painted surfaces reflecting light, began a chant, whereupon the men pulled more vigorously, and with those pulling back to prevent too rapid a rise straining to maintain a balance between speed and caution, the beautiful totem rose in the air, trembled for a moment as it approached the perpendicular, then shuddered and quietly slipped down into its hole. Tom Venn, pulling on one of the ropes which prevented sideways motion, felt the great log come to rest.

'Halloo!' the man in charge of the ropes shouted, and everyone let go, and as the ropes fell easily toward the tall pole, men and women alike cheered, for now Sam Bigears' totem stood alone and erect, facing the shore as if to greet all ships that might approach on the inlet.

The potlatch was over. Sam's neighbors carried their gifts to their canoes, each man aware that at some future time he would be expected to repay Sam with a gift of equal value, each woman wondering what gift she could sew or knit that would be as presentable as those Sam's wife had given. Thus the economy of the Tlingits was preserved and enhanced; goods were exchanged; wealth was redistributed; obligations were established which would continue into the indefinite future; and at the entrance to Pleiades River a man, his wife and their daughter preserved a way of life totally alien to the one developing in the town of Juneau, only seventeen miles away as the raven flew.

WHILE SAM BIGEARS WAS CONDUCTING HIS POTLATCH AT the mouth of the Pleiades, what was happening in the lake at the head of the river to Nerka and his generation of salmon? By the beginning of 1903, even though he had completed two years, he was still so insignificant that he played no conspicuous role in the lake. Larger fish ate his brothers so incessantly that they were now depleted to a mere eighty. As the devastation continued and even intensified, it began to look as if the sockeye in Lake Pleiades must soon be exhausted, but Nerka, with a powerful urge for self-preservation, kept to the dark places, avoided the predatory larger fish, and continued as little more than a fingerling, unaware that upon the perseverance of other salmon like himself depended the survival of their breed.

In that winter of 1903, while Nerka's generation in Lake Pleiades dropped to two million, and Tom Venn was busy in his new store along Juneau's waterfront, the Ross & Raglan steamer

Queen of the North docked with a large shipment of goods for the summer trade plus a red-headed gentleman who was about to revolutionize this part of Alaska. He was 666

Malcolm Ross, fifty-one years old and surging with energy. 'I'm bursting with plans,'

he said as he led Tom into the small office from which the Juneau branch of R&R conducted its business. 'And I'm warning you, Tom, I want to start now.'

Tom had not seen Mr. Ross since that day in 1897 when he began representing R&R along the waterfront, but in the intervening years he had witnessed the tremendous growth of the firm, and he took personal pride in the reports circulating through Alaska that Mr. Ross was a commercial genius.

'What do you have in mind?' Tom asked. 'A new store in Skagway?'

'Skagway's finished. The gold rush has ended. That new railway to Whitehorse may be good for a few years. But I can see no future for Skagway.'

'Where, then?'

'Here.'

Tom was stunned. His store in Juneau was doing well, but it did not warrant any enlargement, and the idea of a duplicate in some other part of town would be precarious at best and more likely a disaster: 'Mr. Ross, I know R&R rarely makes mistakes, but a second store here ... it wouldn't be justified.'

'Thank you for an honest opinion, son. But I'm not thinking about another store.

I want you to start right now, this morning, to build R&R a major salmon cannery.'

'Where?' Tom asked weakly.

'That's for you to find out. Let's start now.' When Tom protested that he knew nothing of fishing as an industry, let alone canning, Ross forestalled him: 'Neither do I.

We start even. But I do know one thing. There's going to be a fortune made on salmon, and we've got to get our share.'

Tom had never seen anything like Malcolm Ross; not even Superintendent Steele of the Mounties had displayed the intensity and vigor of this handsome Seattle merchant who knew intuitively that salmon was certain to replace gold as Alaska's contribution to mainland wealth. By eleven that morning Ross had assembled four knowledgeable men, whom he entertained at a lavish lunch so that he and Tom could probe their secrets about salmon fishing.

'What you would need,' one of the men said, 'that is, if you wanted to do it right . . .'

'I'd do it no other way.'

'Well then, get out your pencil. To clean the fish, you need a huge shed. Bigger than anything you see around here. To cook them, you need another shed, not quite as large. To house the Chinese, because they have to be kept separate, they fight with everyone, you need a third shed, a bunkhouse.

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For the other workers, another dormitory. A mess hall divided one-third for the Chinese, two-thirds for the others. A carpenter's shop for making crates, a welding shop for making the tin cans. A warehouse next to a loading dock built out on pilings so you can tie lip at either high or low tide.'

That's a lot of money,' one of the other men said, and Ross replied: 'I think we can borrow it. But where do we get our fish to put in the cans?'

The first man resumed: 'Now we get down to the really expensive part. You would have to have a large ship under your own control, leased perhaps, but better if you owned it.'

'We have ships.'

'But not like the one out there. You need a ship to bring the Chinese north in the spring, and all the goods you need. And then it collects fish, brings them to the cannery, and at the end of the season hauls away the workers and the canned salmon.'

'What do you mean, season?'

'Salmon only run a few months each year. Summer. So you open two months early to get things ready and handle the slow early run. Then work your tail off. Take one month to close. Late fall and all of winter you're shut down.'

'Who stays at the cannery during the winter?'

'One watchman.'

'All those buildings, all that investment and one watchman?'

'Mr. Ross, you don't understand. Your cannery will be way out in the country, along some small body of water, nobody around for miles except bears and spruce trees and salmon.'

'Where do I find such a place?' Ross asked, and now all the men wanted to talk at once, but the first speaker was not finished, so he silenced the others: 'So when you have your big ship to do the big jobs, you must have one or two small ships to move about the waters servicing the thirty-odd boats that do the fishing. You need a lot of boats, Mr. Ross.'

'I can believe that. But where?'

Carefully and with mature judgment, these men, well versed in the lore of the sea and its riches, eliminated the unpromising sites: 'Most scenic body of water hereabouts is Lynn Canal leading to Skagway, but it has few fish.'

'I have no interest in Skagway,' Ross said abruptly, 'and absolutely none in scenery.'

'There's good salmon fishing on Admiralty Island, but the best sites are taken.'

'I don't want second-class locations.'

'There are some very promising areas on Baranof Island...'

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'Too far from Juneau. I want my headquarters here.'

'With good boats, it doesn't matter much how far away your cannery is. There are some great salmon streams to the south.'

'I've fixed my sights here.'

'Then there's only one untouched spot good run of salmon, good anchorage for cannery boats.'

'Where?'

'But it has one drawback. The wind that roars out of Canada you won't believe.'

'We can build to protect ourselves against wind.'

'Not this wind. Eddie, tell him about you and the Taku.'

A nearby fisherman, who had been eating prodigiously, laid down his fork and said: 'Everybody hereabouts calls it the Taku Wind. It comes down off the mountains in Canada and funnels through Taku Inlet. In fifteen minutes it can beat up from dead calm to fifty miles an hour. Be careful in a Taku Wind.'

Ross dismissed the warning: 'What kind of salmon run the streams coming into this Taku Inlet?'

'Sockeye, mostly,' the men agreed, and with the utterance of this magic word, Ross made up his mind: 'We'll find a spot on Taku Inlet where there's protection from the wind,' and immediately after lunch he asked Tom to arrange for an exploration of that beautiful body of water.

They found Sam Bigears at work on an addition to the hotel, and he was delighted with the prospect of heading back up the Taku, so one of the small R&R coastal steamers already in Juneau was commandeered, and by noon the expedition was under way.

As soon as the steamer turned the corner into the inlet, Malcolm Ross became aware that he had come upon something special, for the fjord was far more beautiful than he had imagined from the accounts he had heard at lunch. 'This is magnificent!' he cried as the shimmering blue face of Walrus Glacier came into view. He was also impressed by the narrow defile between the glacier and Walrus Rock through which the ship nosed its way, and when the inlet broadened out, disclosing exciting new perspectives, his attention focused on the emerald face of Pleiades Glacier, one hundred feet high and gleaming in sunlight: 'This is stupendous!'

But then he looked to the east, and behind the headland on which Sam Bigears' cabin stood he saw his first Alaskan totem pole, its varied colors glistening in the sun as if to complement the glacier on the facing shore. 'Why would such a pole be erected up there?' Ross wanted to know. 'Nothing around but that one cabin.'

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'That's Bigears' cabin,' Tom explained. 'He carved the totem. I helped put it in position.'

'I suppose the figures mean something. Pagan rites and all that.' So Bigears was called to the railing to explain his totem, and he did a much poorer job than his daughter would have done, until finally Ross, somewhat irritated, asked: 'Tell me, who's the man in the top hat?' and Bigears said with a big smile: 'A white man. Maybe Russian.'

'Don't you know?' Ross asked impatiently, and Sam said: 'Just a white man. He won.'

Ross could make nothing of this, and when he asked about the bird atop the totem, he received another ambiguous answer: 'Just a bird. Maybe a raven.'

Now Ross became conciliatory: 'That's a fine pole. And you have a good location here.

Any salmon in the river?'

'Many sockeye,' Sam replied, and Ross made careful note of this fact, but his shrewd eye detected a fact of greater significance to a potential salmon cannery: 'Bigears, doesn't your headland jutting out and up like that . . . doesn't it protect that little bay from what they call the Taku Wind?'

'Maybe.'

'So if I built my cannery on that point to the south, opposite yours, I'd not have to worry too much about the wind, would I?'

'Maybe not.'

'Then why did you build your cabin up there where the wind hits?' and Sam replied: 'I like wind. It blow too hard, stay inside, build good fire.'

After several more twists, the steamer passed close to the sullen snout of Taku Glacier, immensely higher and wider than the earlier ones but lacking the intense blue color, its dirty ice standing in gray-brown pillars. They were, however, massively impressive, as if they were ready to tumble down upon any ship that came too close. As Ross watched, the captain came down to inform him that ships like this sometimes carried small cannon so that they could fire at glaciers, seeking to precipitate spectacular calving of icebergs, and he said: 'I'd bet a big one's about to let loose.'