Ten years of missionary work among the Indians at Skokomish, Washington Territory, 1874-1884Eells, Myron
Religion
Ten years of missionary work among the Indians at Skokomish, Washington Territory, 1874-1884
Eells, Myron
Clallam Indians -- Missions; Missions -- Washington (State); Skokomish Indian Reservation (Wash.); Twana Indians -- Missions
The agent could tell many a story of prosecuting liquor-sellers;
sometimes before a packed jury, who, when the proof was positive,
declared the prisoner not guilty; of having Indian witnesses tampered
with, and bought either by money or threats, so that they would not
testify in court, although to him they had previously given direct
testimony as to who had furnished them with the liquor; of a time when
some of the Clallam Indians became so independent of his authority that
they defied him when he went to arrest them, and he was obliged to use
the revenue-cutter in order to take them, and when, in consequence, his
friends feared that his life was in danger from the white
liquor-sellers, because the latter feared the result of their
lawlessness; of a judge who, although a Christian man, so allowed his
sympathies to go out for the criminal that he would strain the law to
let him go; or, on the other hand, of another judge who would strain the
law to catch a rascal; of convicting eight white men at one time of
selling liquor to Indians, only to have some of them take their revenge
by burning the Indians’ houses and all of their contents. Still in a few
years he made it very unsafe for most permanent residents to sell
intoxicating liquors to the Indians, so that but few except transient
people, as sailors and travelers, dared to do so.
“For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain” the Indian and the
liquor-seller can almost rival the “heathen Chinee.” A saloon is on the
beach, and so high that it is easy to go under it. A small hole is in
the floor under the counter. A hand comes up with some money in it:
after dark a bottle goes down, and some Indians are drunk, but nobody
can prove any thing wrong.
An Indian takes a bucket of clams into a saloon and asks the bar-tender
if he wishes them. “I will see what my wife says,” is the reply, and he
takes them to a back room. Soon he comes back and says: “Here, take your
old clams, they are bad and rotten.” The Indian takes them, and soon a
company of Indians are “gloriously drunk,” a bottle having been put in
the bottom of the bucket. Sometimes a part of a sack of flour is made of
a bottle of whiskey.
An Indian, having been taken up for drunkenness, was asked in court, in
Port Townsend, where he obtained his liquor. “If I tell, I can not get
any more,” was the blunt reply. Others have found theirs floating in the
river or lying by a tree, which may all have been true, yet some man who
understood it was the gainer of some money, which perhaps he found. Many
an Indian, when asked who let him have the liquor, has said: “I do not
know;” or, “I do not know his name.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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