I saw it first in the slanting light of a redly setting August sun; the
little tuft of green shrubbery that crests its summit was black against
the crimson of sea and sky, and its colossal base of grey stone gleamed
like flaming polished granite.
My old tillicum lifted his paddle blade to point towards it. "You know
the story?" he asked. I shook my head (experience had taught me his
love of silent replies, his moods of legend-telling). For a time we
paddled slowly; the rock detached itself from its background of forest
and shore, and it stood forth like a sentinel--erect, enduring, eternal.
"Do you think it stands straight--like a man?" he asked.
"Yes, like some noble-spirited, upright warrior," I replied.
"It is a man," he said, "and a warrior man, too; a man who fought for
everything that was noble and upright."
"What do you regard as everything that is noble and upright, Chief?" I
asked, curious as to his ideas. I shall not forget the reply: it was
but two words--astounding, amazing words. He said simply:
"Clean fatherhood."
Through my mind raced tumultuous recollections of numberless articles
in yet numberless magazines, all dealing with the recent "fad" of
motherhood, but I had to hear from the lips of a Squamish Indian Chief
the only treatise on the nobility of "clean fatherhood" that I have yet
unearthed. And this treatise has been an Indian legend for centuries;
and lest they forget how all-important those two little words must ever
be, Siwash Rock stands to remind them, set there by the Deity as a
monument to one who kept his own life clean, that cleanliness might be
the heritage of the generations to come.
It was "thousands of years ago" (all Indian legends begin in extremely
remote times) that a handsome boy chief journeyed in his canoe to the
upper coast for the shy little northern girl whom he brought home as
his wife. Boy though he was, the young chief had proved himself to be
an excellent warrior, a fearless hunter, and an upright, courageous man
among men. His tribe loved him, his enemies respected him, and the
base and mean and cowardly feared him.
The customs and traditions of his ancestors were a positive religion to
him, the sayings and the advices of the old people were his creed. He
was conservative in every rite and ritual of his race. He fought his
tribal enemies like the savage that he was. He sang his war songs,
danced his war dances, slew his foes, but the little girl-wife from the
north he treated with the deference that he gave his own mother, for
was she not to be the mother of his warrior son?
The year rolled round, weeks merged into months, winter into spring,
and one glorious summer at daybreak he wakened to her voice calling
him. She stood beside him, smiling.
"It will be to-day," she said proudly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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