Three of the Suquamish canoes tipped, including Na ma t’ shata’s, and the rest of the tribe, seeing this, broke off the attack.
Anah and Little Raven’s long boat moved back to the shoals where the other Northerner long boat was wallowing in the mud.
The Suquamish made no further attempts. Na ma t’ shata, untouched but very dead, washed up on Maury two days later.
By the time the Haida raiding party returned to its small village on the Queen Charlotte Islands three weeks later, the thirteen-year-old Anah had acquired three more heads and a reputation for mutilation of the dead.
This form of barbarism was not the custom of his clan, and it embarrassed his father, Little Raven. But it did not matter, for everyone understood thereafter that Anah had a brilliant dominating presence that made him special in the tactics of war and survival. Klixuatan, who had witnessed Anah’s actions during the battle with the Suquamish, pronounced that the vigor of the clan was with the young teenager.
Although his aging father, Little Raven, remained chief, Anah became the resonant leader of the Haida Northerner clan. His reputation among the numerous Haida and other tribes grew over the next seven years, rivaling the formidable tyees, the chiefs of the Tsimshian and coastal Chinook tribes, whose warriors numbered in the thousands. And, because of Anah’s proclivity for rape and occasional cannibalism, even the Spanish and Russians, who rarely sailed this region anymore, knew his name and steered alert in the Hecate Strait that ran between the Queen Charlotte Islands and the mainland. Only a few of the Portuguese ships, those that bartered for slaves bound for the brothels and mines of Brazil, ventured into the Queen Charlottes.
The British Hudson’s Bay Company, given exclusive domain over the area by the Crown, soon put up a bounty for Anah and raised it twice, but no one was foolish enough to bribe his way into the Charlottes to go after it. Anah’s mobility on and off the Queen Charlotte Islands kept him out of the grasp of the frustrated Brits.
In 1850, at the same time the territorial British governor, Douglas, was personally leading retribution excursions against dormant and well-established Nootka and Bella Coola clans, he also dispatched three survey expeditions out of Esquimalt with accompanying contingents of Royal Marines, expressly for the additional task, should the opportunity present itself, of capturing and hanging Anah.
Each time, though, he and his most loyal accomplices had enough forewarning from Tlingit allies along the coast to move out of reach, abandoning villages and then taking new ones if the Brits found their winter encampments.
Anah’s elusiveness made a mockery of the Brits’ efforts. He continued his predation, occasionally even raiding the tribes protected by British garrisons.
Slaving was profitable for Anah, more so than the miscellaneous pickings from the Qualicum, Suquamish and Bella Coola villages he ravaged.
As the fur trade died out by midcentury and increased pressure was brought to bear by the Brits against slavery, Anah learned the value of selling women for other purposes than labor. He found ready buyers for his healthier captives from the Portuguese and Russians, and also from a few American ships venturing up from Oregon.
And his personal appetite was voracious. It was rumored that he kept several women, fair and dark-skinned, red- and raven-haired in his own entourage. Few slaves sold by his clan escaped his mark, especially the young women and boys.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In 1853, in the twenty-fourth year of his life, Anah traveled with his father and a huge raiding party—composed of several Haida, Tlingit, and Skidegate clans—far, far south along the coast into northern California.
When they returned, they had acquired an immense amount of wealth with miscellaneous trading items, including over one hundred captives: young women, children, and a few healthy male teens, many of whom had fair hair and complexions. They had been snatched in quick raids on six peaceful, unprepared Umpaqua and white coastal settlements between the Rogue River and Mendocino.
Anah kept two young Scandinavian twin sisters for himself, kidnap bounty from a Coos Bay emigrant settlement, and distributed half of the other captives to his followers. Anah was fascinated by the twins—not with the respectful reverence many aborigines held for such children, who were a rare occurrence among Northwest Indian tribes, but with a defiant contempt for the powers that created this anomaly.
The girls, ravaged repeatedly by Anah, were both pregnant within a fortnight.
One week later, he traded the rest of the exhausted captives for a small mountable cannon and several breech-loading rifles to an enterprising Portuguese slaver, who sailed south again profitably depositing the remaining victims with buyers in Panama, Chile and Brazil.
By this time, Anah had collected six wives, none who were Haida, and from them, twenty children. With the cannon mounted on his largest cedar canoe, he began waging war on anyone who wasn’t Haida or Tlingit, attacking several villages the next year.
The terror was great enough that the Qualicum and even the fierce Kwakiutl moved their long houses far away from the shore so the distance between these dwellings and their previous location came to be called “Madman land.” Still, armed as he was with his own cannons on a fleet of eleven long boats, Anah was wise enough to continually evade any confrontation with the Brit navy ships.
The prestige he gained from his predation, measured in part by the fear he read in other men’s eyes, stimulated an insatiability. Anah continued his raids well into the winter when other clans had moved to their winter long houses. His Raven clan was the first out in the early spring.
In Victoria, as the terror along the coast increased, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s balance sheets reflected the impact of Anah’s raids to the company’s mining and trading operations. By 1852, emigrant settlers and indentured operatives, protesting for the safety of their lives, increasingly refused to move to remote coastal outposts. These events did not go unnoticed by the company’s London
