It was pouring down in a warm fall rain when the canoes arrived in their rendezvous place. Anah saw the drained, white body of Little Raven and, overcome by his angry grief, tore away his shirt, then ran into the woods and stayed there, naked for several days.
In lulls between cloudbursts, the Haida, preparing a makeshift funeral ceremony for Little Raven and the other warriors, could hear Anah in the distance, howling in a way that none had ever heard before. When he finally returned, he was covered with dried blood and the stigmata of self-flagellation and mutilation, fresh knife cuts along his legs and arms. He had pierced himself with branches through his ribs and chest. And he had a look on his face that never left him thereafter, a terrifying black mask of a stare, signaling to all an absence of any hope of mercy.
In the ceremonies, he vowed in front of the other lead men that he would have the head of a big white tyee to act as a footstool for Little Raven in the next life.
Chapter Thirteen
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Isaac
ATTACK THWARTED!
Heroic Naval action prevents another outrage
Northerners routed in bloody engagement
— The Colonist - October 16th, 1857
We are host to friends and prospective settlers.
God’s blessings shared.
—Isaac Evers’ Diary, October 16th, 1857
News of the Port Gamble conflict reached Whidbey the a few days later with descriptions of destruction of Northerner canoes and warriors.
The commandant of the Massachusetts reported a great victory and predicted that the bloody beating he had administered would finally end Northerner aggression, so demoralized were the survivors of the cannonade.
Official reports to General Harney stated that the Indians around the mill, “mostly Northerners, had been given ample and repeated opportunity to disburse but had refused to do so,” forcing Captain Melton to open fire.
The captain did not mention that long boats had escaped and he minimized the number of casualties that the natives had suffered. The ship’s marines had placed several of the wounded Salish, unable to flee into the forests, into irons, and the captain made a big show of transporting them out of the region and depositing them on a small island southeast of Victoria, presumably to perish. Without interpreters, he never realized that none of his captives were Northerners.
When the Whidbey settlers heard the initial reports about the events in Port Gamble, most assumed the raiding would stop, at least for the rest of the year, because the weather would soon preclude canoe travel on most of the sound.
Their reassurance was based further on common knowledge that the Northerners had always avoided direct confrontation with better-armed foes, and the presence of a fast steamer gunboat like the Massachusetts, independent of the wind, surpassed the ability of the raiders to move quickly in any weather.
If the gunboat patrolled the sound, as they had assumed it would henceforth, the Indians would desist. They did not know that the Massachusetts was bound for San Francisco in one week. They also did not fully appreciate how important revenge for wrongdoing was to the Haida and all other tribes.
Isaac returned from his burial detail to a settlement much relaxed from the week before. The Whidbey families had seen no other long boats. The regional newspaper, The Colonist, had reported that a large contingent of northern marauders had been clapped in irons and taken away.
Hearing the stories related to the Port Gamble battle, Isaac smiled at heaven, which had surely sent an answer to his repeated requests to General Harney, Governor Stevens, and the numerous legislative contacts he had in Olympia.
Isaac had good reason for his requests. For the past two years, since the uncoordinated attack by several tribes on the Elliott Bay community, most of the naval patrolling had been done with small, slow-sailing gunships that concentrated on the south sound, where numerous tribes still were considered hostile.
The thirty-four-gun Decatur sloop-of-war that had saved the Elliott Bay Settlement during the attack had long since departed the Northwest waters. The United States Navy did not have enough ships deployed on its long West Coast to patrol all the waters it now owned, and General Harney, without ever creating any formal agreement, had decided he would leave the major responsibility for containing the most hostile of the aborigine tribes to the British navy, which by contrast, had established a formidable presence in Victoria.
Yet the Brits seldom ventured into southern Puget Sound ports. The sporadic violence that every settler anticipated as a risk of pioneering could not be predicted, and thus, it was almost impossible to halt. And so, the Port Gamble events and the reassurances that had come from them did, indeed, seem like a godsend.
But Providence had not established a real balance.
Four weeks later, in mid-November, immediately after a three-day deluge, with high winds that toppled men and trees alike, two Indian visitors, an elderly man and woman, landed on Isaac and Emmy’s western-facing beach, just south of the small community on the plateau.
Dressed in pioneer garb, each wearing long pants and red calico long-sleeved shirts, they bore no visible markings on their faces or hands. Speaking in Chinook, they found a local Salish native, Jim Thomas, who occasionally worked for Emmy. They queried him about where they might find the local physician, Dr. Joseph Edwards.
Edwards, trained and apprenticed in Philadelphia, had settled on Whidbey three years before and had established a widespread reputation for compassionate homeopathic care. He delivered his potions and repaired broken bones with enough success that some even sought his opinion on other, nonmedical matters, travelling from as far as Elliott Bay and Bellingham on occasion for his consultation.
He, like Isaac, had developed a good amount of influence on legislative processes in Olympia, and both men had more than once been mentioned as possible gubernatorial candidates to displace Stevens, the mercurially tempered politician
