And then something else happened to mark that occasion.
As Ingalls observed one “tyee” after another walk up to the table to place his mark, he saw a pretty face in the crowd of onlookers staring over at them.
At first, he thought she was looking at him, and straightened himself in anticipation of a possible covert liaison with the girl. But then he realized she was looking directly at Pickett, who like he, had dressed for the occasion in his uniform, complete with epaulettes and sword.
After a moment, he elbowed Pickett, who turned to see the young girl.
Her name was Morning Mist.
Ingalls recalled that Pickett seemed fixed in place, holding eye contact with the girl for almost a full minute, before blushing and turning away.
She continued staring at him. She was a radiant being, no more than fifteen, Ingalls recalled. Her eyes, widely spaced on a high-cheeked symmetrical face, compelled one to look back and forth at each. And when he did so, he found she conveyed both a sadness and hope.
She had a comely, slim figure, and her legs were straight and well formed, unlike most of the older aborigine women and men in the region who spent so much of their time with their legs folded under them. She seemed demure and modest, just like all the other native women who had not been sullied by forced prostitution or slavery.
Ingalls had watched the shy courtship quickly unfold in the camp that night.
She spoke Chinook jargon and a few words of English.
“Take me with you. Take me,” were the first words she said to Pickett, and she articulated it in a way that Ingalls understood to go far beyond a plea for an elopement. She spoke with the urgency of a young girl who saw the dissolution of her surroundings and feared that disintegration; a girl who saw hope, bound in a projected passion onto Pickett, in an emissary from a bizarre, new world.
The intensity of the plea overpowered the lonely Pickett, Ingalls observed.
After that, the shyness quickly turned into a steamy, constantly charged storm. Pickett couldn’t have enough of her.
Within a week, he asked her tyee father, MaNuitu ’sta, for permission to bring her as his wife to the fort in Bellingham.
Ingalls was surprised at Pickett’s decision, but, thinking back to those events, Ingalls knew the previous year had been his friend Pickett’s happiest. Until Morning Mist died.
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Pickett glanced over at Ingalls and realized his friend had been observing him for quite a while. When their eyes met, Ingalls nodded at him and gave him a kind smile. Pickett knew the look and nodded back, reassured his friend understood him.
Thinking back over all the events they had experienced together over the past fifteen years, he knew that Ingalls, more than anyone else, would forgive him for taking the liberty of searching again for meaning on the painful events of the past twelve months. He ran them through his mind for the thousandth time as the boat neared the Bellingham harbor and the home he had built for Morning Mist.
It would never be the same, he knew. It would never be the same.
Chapter Six
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Anah
The Hudson’s Bay Company is offering rewards of up to 25 pounds sterling to citizens or natives for reliable information leading to the apprehension of the Haida aborigine, Anah Nawitka Haloshem, a.k.a. ”Black Wind”
—1857 Circular posted in Victoria, Esquimalt, and throughout Vancouver Island
Three years after the raid into northern California, another epidemic raced through the Haida and Kwakiutl clans, felling half the people in the area, from Queen Charlotte northward up the inland coast two hundred miles. This time, the disease was smallpox, the plague planted purposefully by a conspiracy of whites and local natives who would never take the blame for it.
In one circumstance, several large chests containing trading goods, but also carrying diseased wool blankets, were set adrift in three small boats close to the inlet of the Nass River where Anah’s clan was wintering. One skiff floated north across the strait into Tlingit territory, and another was discovered by a Haida Raven Clan woman gathering goose barnacles and seaweed.
She dragged the Trojan horse two miles upriver into the camp.
Within a week, the first victims fell ill. Because the telltale pustules didn’t present right away, several women attended the vomiting, febrile, disease-stricken first victims and, thus exposed, carried the pox infection throughout the thirty long house lodges.
Five of Anah’s wives died, and thirteen of his children perished in two months.
Following gossip from trappers of the epidemic’s devastation and betting the Haida clan would be incapacitated, the Hudson’s Bay Company sent out another expedition in March, this time a force of 256 soldiers and a small complement of Metîs mixed-breed bounty hunters on three fast ships to capture Anah and destroy his clan. Tlingit allies, hearing gossip about the assault from natives in Esquimalt, British Columbia, where the Royal Navy berthed, again alerted the Haida of the approach a few days before the ships arrived.
But Anah couldn’t move this time. Because so many in the tribe were too ill to evacuate, Anah sent out three war canoes to confront and then turn and flee from the approaching ships to try to divert them from the village.
The Eurydice, a twelve-gun, sixth-rate ship of the line, peeled off in pursuit, but the other two larger ships, the Constance and the Thetis, dropped anchor at the mouth of the broad inlet. They set their cannons broadside to the mouth of the river to prevent any ocean escape and sent 220 of the red and green uniformed marines ashore.
Correctly anticipating the most probable landing site, Anah had prepared an enfilading ambush, a tactic he had learned watching British field maneuvers. When the marines in the first boat landed and moved onto the crest of the beach, thirty of his Haida shot a devastating
