In the preceding decade, before the smallpox had devastated the Northerners’ ranks, the sight of six boats heading northward, presumably back to their homes on the Queen Charlotte Islands and northern British Columbia, would have provided little comfort to white settlers and local tribes, because it was reasonable to assume there might have been others lingering in the area.
But the straits had been relatively quiet for some time now with fewer sightings, so it was widely assumed that increased patrolling by British gunboats was acting as a sufficient deterrent.
No reports from any neighbors had come in the recent weeks of any other large groups of marauders. Winter was coming on quickly. It was believed that the Northerners seldom raided during the cold season. So, Isaac and the islanders relaxed a bit.
Eight days later, Isaac left the guarding of the homestead in care of his brother Winfield, and took a small contingent of volunteers back across the sound to bury the Negro settlers.
It was a depressing and grim journey, but Isaac reasoned it was the only decent thing to do, commenting to the few who protested that he hoped someone would do the same for him and his family if, God forbid, they ever were taken in the same way.
Emmy, who was not pleased with his departure again, understood the decency of such a mission, but threw herself into all of the unfinished business at hand.
Not far away from the site of the slayings, Isaac’s party found Sam’s body, twisted in an outstretched contortion at the base of ravine. Apparently he had fallen off an embankment, likely in the fog the morning he fled, breaking his neck, dying, Isaac hoped, with swift mercy.
Over the large grave they had scraped in the clearing behind the cabins, Isaac prayed for forgiveness from the Lord who had spared him but had taken these sad, frightened lambs.
He regretted his curses against Sam. He put himself in Sam’s situation on that horrible day, tried thinking in the same way as Sam must have thought. The quiet, competent fellow had never been malicious or lazy, and Isaac forgave him for his cowardice.
Remembering his own terrible fear on that day, Isaac wondered whether God had heard the curses he uttered against the poor man, hope God had not answered those curses at the same time as He was granting him his own deliverance, and thought about God’s strange way of showing mercy to him in that exchange. He told himself that his own selfishness had to have had some purpose - perhaps a counterweight in some a strange form of Providential balancing perhaps - with a purpose that he might not ever understand.
He would accept that, forgiving himself as he did so. It was the will of Providence after all.
Chapter Twelve
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Anah
A half day before Ben Crockett saw the long boats on the strait, two other Northerner boats, commanded by Little Raven, split off to find water and look for more to plunder.
Anah with his six long boats continued north, carrying fourteen captives, to the mouth of the Campbell River on Vancouver Island. There he quickly sold the captives, all young healthy women, to a trapper who served as an intermediary to a prostitution slaver.
The trapper, Rene Marté, and his companion, a huge, one-eyed Negro known as Cull, had developed a number of similar business arrangements, including smuggling stolen contraband goods to the Tlingit and Haida. Their prearranged contract allowed Anah to obtain powder and winter supplies as well as the alcohol he would use to barter and stoke the rising anger of numerous tribal allies he hoped to recruit.
Anah understood the power of alcohol and guarded it as carefully as a weapon, distributing it just before an assault. But he also always carried a small flask for himself into his initial parlays because that seemed to make things easier.
In Port Gamble, near a new sawmill enterprise that had imported forty Irish men and women to work it, Little Raven’s raiders found an encampment of local natives, mostly Salish and Chimakum, who had converged on the small mill community. The Indian groups had come in gradually over the summer to see the mill, many out of curiosity, some for trading, and others for handouts.
By August, over four hundred natives surrounded the mill. The mill foreman had sent repeated requests to the forts at Port Townsend, Bellingham, and as far south as Olympia to see if some soldiers could be dispatched to break up the encampment and avoid what the foreman perceived as an inevitable calamity.
The foreman had reason to be concerned, for he had heard several rumors that the coastal Salish, rich in some parts of the Puget Sound and numerous in diverse, small bands throughout the Olympic peninsula, were being recruited by the powerful tyee known as Leschi and by other tribes to join in another attack on the Elliott Bay community and the white settlements further south. But thus far, the Salish had resisted.
Still, incursions by settlers throughout the region were disturbing to the Salish because of the audacity of the whites and the arrogant contempt they all seemed to display at every official encounter. It was rumored that Leschi, in particular, was angry about a land and reservation treaty that had been consummated at Medicine Creek a few years earlier, which, Leschi protested, he had never signed.
To further aggravate the hostilities, it was widely known that Stevens, the Washington territorial governor, had declared a war of extermination the previous year against the regional aboriginal tribes, thereby giving justification to both sides for senseless violence. As the white settlers increased in numbers, the disputes also increased, resulting in numerous deaths, reported and unseen.
A few Jesuit and Oblate missionaries had established a presence and
