Map from Peter Fidler’s journal, labeled “Drawn by Jean Findley, 1806”
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1950, an archaeological dig along the Spokane River caught the imagination of the nearby city. On a low rise just above the floodplain, investigators hoped to find the site of one of the first fur trading posts in the region. The workers shoveled into a promising trench so quickly that a local reporter wondered if the crew didn’t have “a little black magic” going for them; in fact, tribal people with knowledge about the post had pointed to exactly the right spot to begin digging. By the following summer, patient excavation had outlined the overlapping footprints of Spokane House during its occupation by three successive fur companies between 1811 and 1825.
While trying to locate a bastion at the corner of one stockade, workers exposed several large flagstones a few inches beneath the surface. Below the stones they found a thin slab of rotten wood covering a shallow pit and remnants of a wooden coffin edging the hole. The heavy flagstones had collapsed the coffin’s lid, damaging the human skeleton below; the processes of natural decay had almost completely decomposed the ribs, leaving little more than an empty rectangle framed by relaxed arm bones, a dented skull, and a flattened pelvis, with crossed legs trailing off below. Analysis revealed that the remains belonged to a mature male with an enlarged right tibia, probably the result of chronic rheumatism.
Thirteen nails, a few tatters of cloth, and three brass buttons were found inside the rotted coffin. A number of personal belongings had been buried alongside the body as well: a fragment from a bone comb, a tin drinking mug, and a disintegrating hunting knife sheathed in a thin metal scabbard. A three-by-ten-inch portion of writing slate, together with the nose piece and broken lens from a pair of spectacles, indicated that the person in the grave was educated, and an assortment of pipe bowls suggested a certain fondness for smoking. There were five in all: two pipes of clay, one carved from wood, a stone bowl that still held the lead ring used to attach a stem, and a copper one beaten smooth.
One of the clay pipes had four straight lines scratched into its bowl. Two of the lines formed a fairly distinct letter J, and a pair of horizontal nicks flew off the vertical. Local historians were convinced that the cryptic “JF” was the monogram of none other than Jaco Finlay, an early furman who had been living at Spokane House at the time of his death. Local legend regarding his burial at the old post was bolstered by an entry in the journal of Nathaniel Wyeth, who passed by the abandoned trade house in 1833 and noted that while most of the buildings had been burned for firewood, one bastion had been left standing out of respect for a dead clerk who was buried beneath it. Within days of the find, a newspaper article trumpeted, “Discovery at Spokane House: Jaco Finlay and His Grave.”
In the summer of 1952, the ongoing survey uncovered another burial site containing the remains of a woman, a girl, and a man, all bent forward at the waist in the traditional posture of Interior Salish interments. Alongside the male skeleton, the diggers found three trade muskets and two short decorated wooden bows. The stocks of the trade guns had been broken off, and a copper kettle found nearby had been bashed in; the chief archaeologist noted that this destruction was in keeping with a Salish practice of “killing” articles to be buried with a corpse. Other items unearthed at the grave site included a quantity of small blue beads and some dentalia shells. The artifacts were shown at a public museum in downtown Spokane, and museum interpreters began to ponder a more permanent exhibit. In a time when native remains were commonly displayed, someone broached the idea of leaving the crouched skeletons in situ and peeling away enough dirt so that the graves could be glassed in for view by a walk-through audience. “With proper lighting and glass boxes, this could be done in a respectful and educational manner,” one report concluded.
Jaco Finlay’s remains had been removed from the excavation site the previous year and placed in storage, but no one suggested including them in the display. Speaking in October 1953, the president of the local historical society admitted, “We are somewhat at a loss to know what to do with Jaco, but at this time his resting place is a box in our Eastern Washington State Historical Society Museum, awaiting some program of improving the Spokane House area, when Jaco’s remains should be marked with a proper marker near his original resting place.” If the museum wasn’t sure exactly how to handle Jaco, at least they knew where he belonged.
JACO FINLAY’S FATHER, James, was born in Scotland in 1734 and shipped to lower Canada when he was around thirty years old. There he fell in with the array of independent Scotch, French, and New England traders who eventually coaslesced into the North West Company. By 1767 James Finlay had wintered in the “Indian Country” beyond the Great Lakes and produced a son with a Montreal wife. Before the next winter blew in, he had established the Fort Finlay trade house downstream from the Forks of the Saskatchewan River, well over a thousand miles west of his urban family. At his field post, Finlay took a mistress from the Saulteaux tribe, an Eastern Woodlands people who had absorbed elements of both fur trade and Cree culture as settlement pushed them north and west from the Great Lakes. Around 1768, James’s unnamed “country wife” bore a mixed-blood child they named Jacques Raphael. In time he acquired a nickname that was pronounced in the French way, Jocko, but spelled by the most consistent writers of the time as Jaco.
Over the next decade, James Finlay continued his seesaw life, journeying back and forth between the city and the wilderness and fathering six more children by his wife in Montreal. In 1776 he was still manning his namesake trade house, a sprawling and prosperous post on the Saskatchewan. Jaco would have been eight years old then, the country son of an important feudal boss. He would have watched brigades of voyageurs moving up the river as the fur companies pressed farther and farther westward, and he would have been about twelve or thirteen when the smallpox epidemic of 1780–81 wreaked its terrible havoc. By then James Finlay had already begun to reduce his investments in the fur business, and by the mid-1780s he had received an appointment as the official Inspector of Chimneys in the city of Montreal, where he died in a comfortable two-story house in 1797.
While there is no record of Jaco ever joining his father in town, James Sr. apparently made certain provisions for his mixed-blood son. The youngster must have learned the basics of reading and writing because, along with his half-brothers, he was commissioned into the North West Company as a clerk. But instead of regularly returning to lower Canada like his father and siblings, Jaco’s path opened West—upstream on the Saskatchewan, across the Prairies, to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.
His first appearance in the fur trade record occurred when he was twenty-six years old and stationed at the North West Company’s Upper Bow House (near modern Medicine Hat, Alberta). In June 1794, the Hudson’s Bay Company establishment a short distance away came under attack by a raiding party, who killed men, women, and children, pillaged all the goods, and put the buildings to the torch. The attackers then moved on to the North West Company post, where Jaco Finlay organized a handful of men to fight off the assault. When one of the raiders stood up to urge his cohorts on, Jaco shot him dead, and the attackers retreated. One account credits Jaco with rescuing the sole survivor of the neighboring post, who was hiding in a cellar beneath the wreckage of the burned fort. North West partner John McDonald of Garth, recounting the event years later, said: “Our fort was in charge of one Jaccot Finlay, a man of courage.”
Two years later, Jaco was posted on the North Fork of the Saskatchewan, where he apparently manned several posts for the remainder of the decade. In 1799, while his Montreal-born halfbrother John was promoted to head the whole Athabasca District, Jacques Raphael Finlay appeared on the pay list as a clerk receiving twelve hundred livres per year (one French livre was worth about seven-eighths of an English shilling), one of the highest wages on the chart and exactly equal to that of veteran fur agent and surveyor David Thompson, recently hired by the North West Company.
While nothing is known of Jaco Finlay’s activities during the subsequent five years, the company’s 1804 pay list retained him at the same level he had held in 1799—a person of mixed blood could not aspire to any position higher than clerk in that era. It is likely that he continued to ply the upper Saskatchewan as the company added new posts farther upriver in pursuit of trade. He had a native wife by then, often identified with his mother’s Saulteaux-Cree tribe, and at least three children. In the fall of 1806, he became the point man for the North West Company’s corporate expansion across the Rocky Mountains. Jaco Finlay’s knowledge of the country and his facility for native languages made him a logical choice as chief scout for the adventure. John McDonald of Garth, the agent at Rocky Mountain House and one of the prime instigators of the ambitious plan, sent Finlay ahead to clear trail and lay up two canoes for the party that would come across in the spring.
By October, Jaco had crossed the Divide along with his family and some of his in-laws and was already at work building canoes. Late in the month he sent two of his helpers back across the mountains with a young Kootenai to fetch more supplies and tobacco. In mid-November Jaco himself visited Rocky Mountain House for a week, and it may have been then that he drew a rough map containing much accurate information about drainages and trails on both sides of the Rockies. This sketch later appeared among the papers of Hudson’s Bay Company agent Peter Fidler with the inscription “Drawn by Jean Findley, 1806”—a name close enough to that of the only known person who had the information needed to draw such a chart.
In late February 1807, Jaco again sent a courier from west of the Divide to fetch sugar, flour, and spirits from Rocky Mountain House; at the end of March he and his wife and two children all returned to the fort. When word reached the trading post on April 20 that a group of Kootenais had crossed the pass with furs to trade, Jaco and a young clerk named Finan McDonald went out to greet them with tobacco.
WHEN DAVID THOMPSON LED THE COMPANY’S expedition across the Rockies in June 1807, Jaco Finlay was not with them. The party ascended what is now called Howse Pass and then staggered down the west slope of the Rockies along the Blaeberry River, which was running wild with meltwater. As they proceeded, Thompson became increasingly unhappy with the work of his advance scout. The path had not been cleared wide enough for packhorses, and although Jaco had assembled the parts for two small canoes, “hardy enough for light voyaging,” he had failed to cache the proper timbers for a cargo canoe, gum for caulking the seams, or suitable birch bark for sheathing the boats. “By this vast trouble we have had, it may be seen how Jaco [and his men] … have earned their wages. Those of Jaco ought certainly to be forfeited as he has done next to nothing,” Thompson wrote in a report to the North West Company partners.
While he overwintered at Kootenae House, the trading post he built at the source lakes of the Columbia, Thompson’s anger began to cool. In a letter written in March 1808 he referred to the trail-clearing fiasco, but went on to admit that his own incomplete knowledge of the country had contributed to his problems, and he left open the possibility of working with Jaco again—he was the man, after all, with the most experience in the region. “Jaco has behaved like a scoundrel,” Thompson wrote, “but all is now over.” Such forgiveness did not prevent him from taking a jab at Finlay in another letter written the next day. Apparently Jaco had gone down to the Bow River country to trap and trade, and Thompson “could not help but smiling” at his projected returns. “I will bet any of you two to one of a whatever you please that he does not get 10 packs from them in 2 years. As to our being friends or enemies that will depend on the interest of the concern.”
By this time Jaco had given up steady employment as a clerk for the life of a free hunter, occasionally working for the North West Company while trapping independently the rest of the time. He often traveled with tribal and mixed-blood trappers, any of whom might take on temporary employment with the company as scouts, hunters, or interpreters. When David Thompson’s Columbia brigade passed down the Saskatchewan in June 1808 on their way to deliver the year’s furs to the company warehouse on Lake Superior, they found Jaco camped near Rocky Mountain House along with some of his in-laws. Thompson paused long enough to pick up Finlay’s winter take of sixty-seven beaver pelts, one otter, and a pair of muskrats—about one fur pack. Thompson’s daybook does not mention whether this meager haul provided him with another smile, but the two men continued to work together, off and on, for the next five years. Since Thompson left behind a wealth of field journals and Finlay left none, literally eveything we know about Jaco during this period comes through the pen of David Thompson.
It was five months later that Jaco next appeared in Thompson’s daybook, arriving at Kootenae House on a snowy November afternoon with his family and five Iroquois men named Joseph, Pierre, Ignace, Martin, and Jacques—a cadre of experienced trappers whom Thompson had recruited to trap on the west side. After Jaco and the Iroquois had settled into camp a short distance from the post, clerk James McMillan paid them a visit to settle accounts for the eight and a half packs of furs they had procured over the summer. Some of the payment was in the form of rum, and after business was concluded, the group “drank and fought all night.” Next evening, McMillan returned to Jaco’s camp for another round of revelry. During the rest of the winter, Finlay remained close by in the Columbia Valley along with his Iroquois compatriots and his wife’s Saulteaux-Cree relatives.
At some point Jaco took an interest in the herds of wild horses that grazed in the fine grassy hills above the Columbia’s source lakes. According to Kootenai elders, these were the feral offspring of horses that had been turned loose after an epidemic of smallpox killed their owners some years before. The voyageurs called the horses marrons, a French slang term for something tame gone back to the wild. In early January 1809, Jaco visited Kootanae House to purchase a new gun and reported that he had captured and halter-broken a string of ten marrons; a few days later his count had reached eighteen. Within the week, Thompson joined in the chase, and he later described a delirious day of riding full tilt over the hills, running down the spirited mustangs.
That spring, the wife of a Kootanae House voyageur suddenly passed away, leaving four small children, the youngest only six months old. A week later Thompson paid a visit to “Jaco’s Campment” and left the children in the custody of Jaco’s family. It must have been Finlay’s anonymous wife, who already had several small children of her own to care for, who accepted the responsibility. While he was there, Thompson also ordered two new canoes and asked Jaco to secure provisions for his men in preparation for their journey east to deliver furs. The willingness of the Finlays to care for four orphaned children did not keep Thompson from criticizing Jaco’s boatbuilding skills, however. Only a few days later, the explorer complained that the canoes were far behind schedule and so badly made in the bottom that they would never last.
That summer Jaco’s camp received a much rougher visit from marauding Piegan Blackfeet, who made off with all his fine marrons and most of his other property as well. The ravaged family was ascending Howse Pass on foot when they met the North West Company brigade returning from the east. Upon learning of their plight, Thompson supplied the Finlays with horses and other necessities, and the family reversed directions to accompany the voyageurs on a journey down the Kootenai River through what is now western Montana and northern Idaho. Jaco speared fish for the furmen along the way and brought them meat as they were thatching the roof of their new Kullyspel House on Lake Pend Oreille. The furmen were among Interior Salish–speaking people now, a loose collection of tribes who maintained a relationship with the Kootenais and were sworn enemies of the Blackfeet.
Jaco and his family moved east to Salish winter camps in the dependable grasslands along the Clark Fork and Flathead Rivers. After exploring to the west, Thompson followed his scout’s footsteps and decided to construct another trading post called Saleesh House in close proximity to those camps. But with winter closing in quickly, and no one having any luck at hunting, the voyageurs became so weak with hunger that they could not pursue their work on the post. Thompson’s journal entries took on an air of hungry concern as more gameless days drifted by, until Jaco and his wife arrived bearing dried beaver tails and pounded meat that replenished the men’s strength.
Jaco may well have spent most of the winter with a Salish band not too far upstream, in a beautiful small drainage now called the Jocko River. The following spring, 1810, Thompson put Finlay back on the company payroll “in his old Capacity as Clerk and Interpreter.” Soon Jaco and his family, trailed by several familiar Iroquois, arrived at Saleesh House to help wrangle the spring brigade of fur packs downstream. Before departing on his annual trek east, Thompson gave Jaco instructions to travel to the Spokane drainage and supervise the building of a post to serve the people there.
Finlay chose a wedge of land formed by the confluence of the Spokane and Little Spokane Rivers, the site of an important village of the Middle Spokane people. The salmon and steelhead fishery at the spot attracted a wide variety of visitors and made a natural location for a new trade house. Jaco oversaw the construction of the post and, with some help from Finan McDonald, managed its operations until June 1811, when David Thompson arrived to enter Spokane House into written history: “Thank Heaven for our good safe journey, here we found Jaco etc. with about 40 Spokane families.” Over the next ten months, Jaco’s trading post served as a hub for exploration and transport—the center for horses purchased and pastured, messages sent, new men left off, old hands redeployed. When Thompson returned that fall from his epic trip to the Pacific Ocean, he dropped off a Hawaiian voyageur named Coxe at Spokane House so that Jaco could mentor him in the trade.
Jaco apparently remained at Spokane House during the winter of 1811–12, and it may have been around this time that he married a Spokane woman called Teshwentichina. In the spring of 1812, he was summoned to the Colville Valley, where David Thompson was building cargo canoes. There the two men, whose relationship spills over any attempt to qualify it—peers and rivals; comrades and explorers; boss and laborer; pen man and point man—began their last collaboration. Thompson oversaw the construction of two cedar bateaus while Jaco took charge of a pair of birch bark canoes. Boards were knifed and split, bent and sewed. Thompson’s journal recorded dogged progress on the boats for the next nine days, and at each phase, Jaco lagged a little bit behind. As Thompson began to split out oars, “Jaco’s second canoe the side seam sewed only.” The cedar plank boats were both being dragged toward the Columbia before Jaco had the first of his birch bark canoes completely timbered. But by April 22, all four vessels were in the water, crammed with over nine thousand pounds of furs, ready to depart on their three-hundred-mile trip upstream to the mountain portage. David Thompson, whose path had crossed and recrossed Jaco Finlay’s for thirteen years, stepped into a canoe bound for Montreal and paddled out of his life forever.
Within a month of Thompson’s departure, Finlay had introduced himself to the Pacific Fur Company, an American venture that was expanding its business upstream from Astoria. An agent at Fort Okanogan was told that if a Mr. Jacques Finlay sought trade goods on credit, he should be accommodated with everything except liquor and treated well. A sales slip from the company records indicates that Jaco did indeed visit the American post:
Received of Mr. Donald McGillis, the following Goods—8 Half and 4 Small, etc. etc. to lay out in the Indian trade for the interest & good of the P. F. C. [Pacific Fur Company] duly received by me
(signed) Jacque Finlay
The signature on this chit preserves the only known stroke of Jaco Finlay’s hand. He carried it out with apparent relish, adding a fat double flourish to the final Y, which swings back across several previous letters. It is the autograph of a man who was comfortable with a pen.
As for switching allegiance in an international fur trade rivalry, Jaco surely considered himself a free hunter at heart, entitled to play in any new game that came along. This particular clash between fur interests was of little consequence anyway, vanishing when a British man-of-war rode into the mouth of the Columbia on the eve of the War of 1812. The North West Company purchased all Pacific Fur Company holdings outright, then immediately resumed its role as lord of the Columbia District. The partners apparently held no ill will toward their wandering clerk or his sons, because the company’s employment list for the winter of 1813–14 contained no fewer than four Finlays:
53. Finlay, Jac. Rap Clerk & Interpreter
54. Finlay, Rap., Jun. Interp. & Hunter
55. Finlay, Thorburn M[ileu] & Hunter
56. Finlay, Bonhomme M[ileu] & Hunter
Jaco’s contract at Spokane House extended until April 1816, and his wage was listed as eighteen hundred livres, six hundred more than other established clerks like Finan McDonald and six times that of his son Thorburn, who was hired as a mileu (paddler in the middle of the boat) and hunter.
After the Hudson’s Bay Company juggernaut absorbed the North West Company a few years later, Jaco’s extended family continued to range all over the Columbia District in various capacities. Two Finlay sons accompanied a Snake River expedition to the far reaches of the Boise Basin, and another manned a boat at the mouth of the Columbia. Others intercepted Shuswap trade at the Canoe River, carried furs across the Athabasca Pass to Jasper House, eased south into the Willamette Valley and north to the Fraser River. Sons and daughters married into families in the Flathead Valley, in the Pend Oreille marshlands, and on the Spokane prairies. They nestled into the close confines of the Colville Valley and joined in the annual Salish rounds of fishing and root digging, fur hunting and horse racing.
While his family spread far and wide, Jaco apparently stayed close to his old haunts in the Spokane country. In 1825, the Hudson’s Bay Company moved their operation from Spokane House north to the new Fort Colvile near Kettle Falls, and after the last iron hinges had been stripped away, Finlay took over the husks of the buildings. No record has survived of any committee decision that this was a fair reward for services rendered; there is no trace of money or goods changing hands. But it seems fitting that the man who had originally chosen the site now stayed behind as its caretaker.
JACO FINLAY WAS AT HOME AT the old Spokane House on the spring morning in 1826 when David Douglas came to call. The botanist had ridden down from Fort Colvile with two of Finlay’s sons, covering eighty wet, chilly miles at a rapid clip, and they arrived at Jaco’s place just before noon on their second day out. “Mr. Finlay received me most kindly,” Douglas recalled, “regretting at the same time that he had not a morsel of food to offer me.”
Jaco told Douglas that his family had been subsisting for the past six weeks on camas bulbs, bitterroot, and “moss bread” derived from “a black Lichen which grows on the Pines.” Since Jaco’s wife Teshwentichina was a Spokane, there was nothing unusual about having such traditional fare around the house. Douglas was not familiar with the local method for transforming the lichen into edible cakes, and thus a good portion of his account was given over to a recipe for steeping and roasting the lichen bread.
The mode of preparing the latter is as follows—after clearing it thoroughly from the dead twigs and pieces of bark to which it adheres, it is immersed in water, and steeped till it becomes perfectly soft; when it is placed between two layers of ignited stones, with the precaution of protecting it with grass and dead leaves, lest it should burn. The process of cooking takes a night, and before the lichen cools, it is made into a cake, much in the same way as the Camas; when it is considered fit for use. A cake of this kind, with a bason of water, was all that Mr. Finlay had to offer me.
Douglas did not actually observe the preparation of the cakes, and according to tribal members, his recipe omitted camas and wild onions, which the Spokanes always mixed with their lichens. Perhaps not as eager to eat these cakes as he was to describe them, Douglas dug some dried buffalo meat from his saddlebag and shared some fresh game—possibly one of the long-billed curlews he had shot along his journey. When it was all spread out, the two men sat down to the business at hand: Douglas’s musket was knocked up, and the agent at Fort Colvile had recommended Jaco Finlay as the only person in the entire country who could put it to rights, and had added that he was also just the man to provide extensive information concerning local natural history.
After lunch, Douglas “hastened to inform him of my request, though my imperfect knowledge of French, the only language that he could speak, much limited our intercourse, and prevented my deriving from him all the information that I wished to obtain.” The botanist left his musket for repair and spent the afternoon on a long collecting walk up the Spokane River. Upon his return he was delighted to find that “Mr. Finlay had obligingly put my gun in good order, for which I presented him with a pound of tobacco, being the only article I had to give.”
Douglas must have made some progress with his French, because he spent two more days botanizing around Spokane House, delivering everything he found back to the patron of the house for inspection. Particularly taken with the local varieties of currants, he was delighted when Jaco explained how three different blossoms produced three distinct berries. The naturalist engaged Finlay to collect specimens and seeds for him, and asked him to be on the lookout for a particular kind of onion with a delicious nutlike root.
As their halting conversation turned to animals, Finlay seemed to recognize a peculiar local species of mountain sheep that Douglas had heard about, and promised to bring back a Mouton Gris when the family was out hunting in the fall. While Douglas was snipping at the local plant life, one of Jaco’s sons brought down a grizzly bear in the hills above the river and presented it to the collector, but the animal was too large to be preserved. Clearly delighted with the idea of a crew gathering new specimens, Douglas gave the Finlay sons a lesson in the way he liked to have his skins dressed and promised to pay them if they would procure different animals for him.
One of the sons escorted Douglas back to Fort Colvile, and later that summer Jaco’s oldest son James guided the botanist on an excursion into the Blue Mountains. At Fort Walla Walla, Douglas hooked up with John Work and accompanied his pack train back to Fort Colvile. When the party crossed the river near the old Spokane House, Jaco Finlay emerged to offer his guests some salmon freshly taken from his weir in a branch of the river. Douglas’s journal offers nothing more than the simple meal of fish, and that is the last morsel of Jaco Finlay we have to chew on. He died at Spokane House in May 1828, approximately sixty years of age. John Work heard about Jaco’s passing while he was hauled out downstream on the Columbia, trying to repair a damaged cargo canoe.
Over the summer, news of Jaco’s demise would have traveled the river, touching his many children and relatives, plus the clerks, voyageurs, free hunters, and tribal members who had smoked with him during his time. In early October, two Saulteaux-Cree brothers from west of the Divide arrived at Edmonton House, bringing news of Finlay’s death. The siblings could have been the same in-laws who had helped Jaco blaze the Howse Pass trail for David Thompson in 1806. The pair traded for a few supplies and took off again the next day; having reported from across the divide of time, they disappeared once again into the Columbia country, just as quietly as Jaco had so often during his long run in the trade.
IN THE FIRST SUNSHINE of early May, I stood at the railing of a small bridge over the Colville River. The water roiled through a sprawl of red-osier dogwood, hawthorn, alder, and clumps of wild rose. On the face of a freshly eroded bank, the winding tunnel of an old muskrat den was clearly visible. Black-headed grosbeaks were already singing hard, and within the next few weeks, as the bushes leafed out, orioles, catbirds, chats, and redstarts would arrive to fashion their nests among the tangle. The Colville Valley forms one focal point of the Finlay family story, and it also provides six generations of time for watching the river flood and dry up; for its banks to get stripped clean and grow back; for Finlays to work as miners and farmers, postmistresses and schoolteachers, to move away for a while and then touch base again. This was how I imagined the Colville Valley must have looked and sounded during the many spring traverses made by Jaco Finlay and his children.
Local historian and raconteur Walt Goodman stood beside me on the bridge and considered the notion.
“My mother, now,” he said, “she could remember the time before the river was dredged, when the water would sweep around here, with a current slow enough that you could dawdle around in a rowboat, and pools deep enough to hold big trout. She used to walk down behind her house in the late afternoon—her dad’s farm was right over there—and be back with a few nice fish for supper. I expect my grandmother did the same thing, and Mary King, my great-grandmother, before that.”
Mary Ann King was the wife of retired Hudson’s Bay employee Peter King. She was Walt’s great-grandmother and Jaco Finlay’s granddaughter, a connection not uncommonly traced and honored among local inhabitants. Mary King would have eaten plenty of curlew during her time. She would have seen muskrat push-ups spread across the entire valley, and she might have been able to say whether it was her father, Patrick Finley, who once guided David Douglas through the marshland.
Walt pointed to a farm that hugged an eastern twist of the valley floor less than a mile away.
“That was probably Patrick Finley’s place,” he said. “He was my connection, Mary King’s dad. Other brothers were scattered around nearby, shuffling from this place to that. I think most of the boys liked to move around. But not all of them.” Walt reminded me that when Elkanah Walker and Cushing Eells opened a mission at Tshimiakain in 1839, they soon became acquainted with Patrick Finley, whom Walker called “Pishnot,” his three brothers, and a sister living in the Chewelah valley. On journeys to and from Fort Colvile the missionaries would regularly spend the night in the cabin of Jaco’s daughter Josette and her husband, a Hudson’s Bay Company employee.
I asked how many children Jaco had, and Walt, who took rightful pride in his clear mind, took a stab at the lineage, but was slurring and grinning long before he could spit out the whole list of Jaco’s offspring, somewhere around eighteen strong. However neatly he tried to rattle them off, they never fell out exactly the same. “And all of Jaco’s children spelled their last name e-y instead of a-y,” Walt said. “Why do you think that was? I asked my granny about that one time, when I was first getting interested in names, and all she did was turn away.”
Walt turned his head to mimic the way his grandmother avoided the subject. “She just never talked about that part of her background—a lot of people back then didn’t want you to know they were mixed-blood, Metis, whatever you want to call it. I don’t know if I ever heard her say a word about Jaco or his children.”
Still, it is well known that several of Jaco’s daughters married Hudson’s Bay Company men, and many of his boys appeared on the pay lists of contemporary fur brigades. The many Finlay and Finley entries in the fur trade journals amount to brief glimpses of the masculine line—hardly enough to keep track of a whole family, but when Jesuit missionaries arrived in the upper Columbia at the end of the 1830s, Jaco’s legacy began to take shape on paper. Throughout the network of small Catholic missions across the Northwest, his children’s and grandchildren’s names were recorded in parish ledgers of birth, baptism, marriage, and burial. Although Jaco was identified on one daughter’s marriage record as “Finlay, infidel,” it was the infidel’s progeny who were attending the mission churches.
Jesuit Father Pierre DeSmet rode down the Colville Valley in the summer of 1845, and after receiving permission from the local Salish people, he established St. Francis Regis Mission to the Crees beside a cottonwood spring. Several Finlays attended the services there, and when DeSmet returned two summers later he reckoned that “already about seventy Metis or half-breeds have collected to settle permanently.” It might have been during that second visit that Father DeSmet, always curious about genealogy, drafted a family tree on a piece of foolscap paper. The name “Jaco Finly” climbs a stout genealogical trunk. Fifteen branches spread elegantly from his stem, each one tagged with a son or daughter’s name: James, Josette, Augustin, Pichinna, Kiakik, Jennessie, Francois, Jaco Migwham, Isabelle, Nicolas, Baptist, Marguerite, Joatte, Rosette, Basil.
Pichinna, the second limb from the bottom, was Walt Goodman’s third grandfather, whom he knew as Patrick. “So many languages,” said Walt. “So many sounds. Patrick; Pichinna; Bish-e-nah. They’re all the same guy.” In Father DeSmet’s rendering, Pichinna’s loaded branch has to curl back on itself to avoid running off the page; his family numbered four wives and sixteen children, who had already blessed him with thirteen grandchildren.
The second and third generation of Finleys, the branches and twigs on Father DeSmet’s tree, continued to spread across the Northwest. When the international boundary was established in 1846, they kept moving back and forth across it. When a measles epidemic led indirectly to the Whitman massacre in Walla Walla, Patrick’s brother Nicolas was in the thick of it. When gold was discovered in California, various sons and daughters packed down to the Sierra Nevada, and returned with placer-mining knowledge that resulted in an early strike in Montana. When a prospective settler named John Campbell rode north through the Colville Valley in the late winter of 1855, he met four of Jaco’s sons and their offspring firmly entrenched in a community of former Hudson’s Bay Company workers. But their sister Josette was no longer with them; she and her husband had moved to Oregon and taken up a homestead on the Umpqua River.
Walt Goodman watched a root clump come twisting down the Colville River and disappear beneath the bridge. He crossed to the other side in time to watch the mass bounce out and roil away into the hawthorns.
“Always riding,” he said. “Lots of horses running through these stories. I heard one, I think I can remember it, about a Finley who was traveling from Fort Colvile down the river somewhere, to look at a horse—this brother was a great one for trading horses. He was going to Wilbur I believe, that’s quite a ways, and for some reason he had to carry a child there as part of the deal. Now this Finley brother always rode bareback. He put the boy in front of him, astraddle the horse’s withers, and took off.
“They say this Finley was tall and jawboned, kind of a hard man. The boy who was with him didn’t fit across the horse’s neck quite right, and that made the horse shy, so that it kept flicking its skin—you know how a horse twitches to get the flies off? Every time it flicked, the boy would cry. The horse kept flicking, and that boy kept crying, but no way was Finley going to stop. They had themselves a long, miserable ride down to Wilbur.
“I don’t think any of the boys stayed in this valley very long at one stretch. They all died over in Montana, you know—Patrick was buried in Frenchtown, a horse accident if I’m not mistaken, in 1885. But some of the women stayed behind. You know what happened to Mary King.”
In 1910, Mary King and her children applied for official enrollment in the Confederated Colville Tribes, which would entitle them to an allotment of land and a small amount of money. Initially, the council voted to include Mrs. King and some, but not all, of her children. The following year, the council reversed its decision on the grounds that Mary King was one-eighth Cree. In November 1912, Walt’s great-grandmother and several of her daughters appeared before the council at the Colville Agency in Nespelem to appeal their applications. In order to be approved, Mary King had to demonstrate kinship with the Colville Tribe.
When Mary Ann King stood before the council, her plea was read by Superintendent J. M. Johnson: “This old woman says that she has lived at Chewelah all her life.” Mary King didn’t know exactly where she was born, but her parents had been employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and her father was Patrick Finley, who she thought was half Spokane. Her mother spoke French, lived most of her life in the Colville Valley, and died in Montana.
Fur trade descendant George Herron came forward to witness. “I knew Mary Ann King,” he said, “and knew her father. His name was Bish-e-nah. He was one of the Finleys from Red River.… He talked several languages, Spokane, Pend Oreille, Cree, and French. He was a half-breed. When I first saw him in Colville he was married. He continued living in the Colville Valley at Chewelah for a while and then went to Flat Head and never came back. Mary Ann, this woman, never left.”
Joseph Grand Louie said that he knew Bish-e-nah and his wife, and that both of them had spoken French, Cree, and Kalispel but not the Colville language. He did not know their tribe, but supposed it to be Cree or Kalispel.
Mary King protested that she could speak a little Colville, and understood Colville very well. She said she knew the Colville chiefs. Superintendent Johnson spoke again, affirming that Mrs. King’s four children had attended the Colville Mission School. Then he said, “Unless there is something more to be said I will ask for a vote on the case now.” In regard to her land allotment, Mary King received twenty-three favorable votes and sixty-three unfavorable; as to money, fifteen favorable and sixty-eight unfavorable. In an official document, the reason for her refusal was listed as “too much Cree.”
Sometime around 1900, an itinerant photographer took a picture of Peter and Mary King’s homestead on the open floor of the valley. In the center of the frame, a handsome house is fronted by a sharp picket fence and a line of solid-looking men, all well turned out in a mix of northern European and native dress, with a touch here and there of the cowboy. The way the light falls on the house behind them accentuates the perfect dovetail joints at its corners.
Up on the porch stands a lone woman, almost hidden in the shadows. Her face is dark and full of character; she looks older than any of the men and is the only obvious native in the scene. She wears a long black dress that fastens close around her neck and sweeps the rough wooden planks of the porch floor. Her hair is parted down the middle and pulled back tight to merge with the blackness of her dress. She is doing something with her hands in front of her, perhaps holding an object, but the darkness of the photo makes it impossible to tell.
“Mary Ann King,” Walt said, pointing to the figure in the shadows. “Patrick Finley’s daughter. She’s standing on her own porch in the house that her husband built. They say he was a really fine blacksmith and carpenter. He would have been gone, what, fifteen years at the time this picture was taken. Mary, now, she was a good-sized woman. Quite a hand at preparing hides, scraping and curing deer, beaver, things like that.
“I only saw her three times in my life that I know of. Once at the house that’s in the photograph, when I was too young to remember much of what went on. My older sister used to spend the night there to take care of her. She’d cook for her, rub her back to ease her sore muscles. Then when Mary’s health started to fail, she moved to Priest River with her daughter. We visited her there before she went to a nursing home in Idaho. One time I remember was in 1925, I was ten, and she wasn’t doing well at all. I don’t know if she was sick or what, but it was kind of scary for a kid. She was lying on her back, and all she would say …”
Walt stopped himself for a moment, studying the memory.
“She didn’t speak English so well, you know. She looked at us and said, ‘Me poor old woman.’ That’s all she’d say. ‘Me poor old woman.’ ”
“It’s funny,” Walt said after a while. “I don’t really have anything to remember Mary King by, but when I see her in the photograph I think of this day I spent at an Indian fair. It always puts her in my mind. Seems like a crazy thing, because it didn’t happen until 1938, and she was long dead by then.
“The civic club I was involved with raised enough money to buy some carnival rides—an old merry-go-round and one of those hubs that little airplanes spin around. We had a popcorn machine and a cotton candy machine, and we started taking them around to little towns on Saturday. The people on the Colville Reservation at Inchelium got wind of it and really wanted us to bring the show to them.
“We got the rides set up and everything seemed to be going OK. Then I noticed this older Indian woman standing nearby. She was talking, not to anyone in particular, and I figured she must have some grandkids on the merry-go-round. I thought that was nice. But when I stepped a little closer I could hear her whispering ‘Goddamn’ in this angry way. ‘Goddamn you, Blue Eyes,’ she said. She repeated it over and over, really soft. ‘Goddam you, Blue Eyes.’
“I don’t know what could have gotten that lady so ticked off, but I think about her all the time. They say Jaco Finlay had blue eyes. I heard the same thing about Patrick, that they used to call him Blue Eyes.” Walt touched the top of his head, as if he was surprising himself. “And I don’t know why, but that lady at the carnival always makes me think of my grandmother Mary Ann King.”
“I NEVER COULD GET ALL THOSE SONS STRAIGHT,” said Jeannette Whitford from her living room chair. “Jaco, James, John, Jacques, George—they all sound the same to us. But my grandfather’s father was one of Jaco Finlay’s sons. Old Finlay, I believe he lived a lot like an Indian. We call him Honorable Ancestor.”
Jeannette was born on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation, even though her parents were enrolled Spokane. “What the white people call Middle Spokane, those are my people. They fished at the mouth of the Little Spokane, and told Jaco Finlay to build the first Spokane House near their village there. They ran horses on Peone Prairie to the north. The women dug roots. My family ended up on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation because the Jesuits had baptized us as Catholics.”
The Spokanes who were removed to the Coeur d’Alene Reservation tended to stick together. Jeannette’s grandfather died when she was four, and her only sister was thirteen years older than she was. Maybe that’s why she got into the habit of sitting with the Spokane elders whenever they gathered in someone’s house to talk. When her parents had a disagreement about whether she should go to the mission school at De Smet, she was happy to remain at home, listening, for a couple more years. The old ways of talking and storytelling became ingrained in her memory, and she grew fluent in two languages.
“That girl, she can listen,” the older Spokanes would say. “She knows what names to call us—who is grandmother, and aunt, and uncle. She knows Indian.”
Seated at the feet of her elders, Jeannette heard the stories that took a long time to tell and were full of the nuance of languages spoken by the separate bands. She heard all about the point of land formed by the joining of the Spokane and Little Spokane Rivers, and the sustenance it provided for the Middle Spokanes.
“There was a village there for many generations,” she said. “The people stored bitterroot and camas in pits on the Little Spokane side. There were caves somewhere around where a golf course is now that held ice all through the year, and that’s where they would keep their fish. The elders talked about those places.
“Sometimes they would talk about two brothers, sons of Jaco Finlay. These two liked to travel together; they were real close that way. I was never sure exactly which ones they were because when the elders would sit around and say ‘cousin’ and ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ it depended on who had died, and who was left, and who you were already related to. The elders knew all of that, but I think a lot of people who were writing the names down didn’t understand and got confused.
“But there were these two brothers who were always together, and they called one of them Blue Eyes because of his eyes. The other always rode without a saddle, so they called him Rode with Just a Blanket. In our language that sounds like the word for breechcloth, but it isn’t. These two brothers rode all over the country together and visited everyone, from the Flatheads to the Colvilles to the Coeur d’Alenes. They must have known their manners and what to call their aunts and uncles, because everywhere they went they were welcome. I can’t tell you their names or what they did or who their children were. I don’t know exactly who their wives were. I only know that they were Jaco Finlay’s sons, and they were welcome.
“I think about those women of the tribes, though, and the furmen they married. What did the women think about them? You know white men, that sour smell they always carry with them. How could they stand it? When one of our men had bad body odor like that, we would take him out and bathe him in the earth of a freshly dug molehill.”
Jeannette laughed at the tradition, and at herself for getting so worked up. She had grown up that way, aware of both the worlds around her. She attended the mission school at De Smet for four years, then switched to the public school in Worley, then went through university. In time she won, then lost, a seat on the Coeur d’Alene tribal council. When representatives asked her to serve as judge for the tribal court, she accepted the responsibility and set up a juvenile justice system.
In the early 1970s, the Eastern Washington Historical Society offered her a position on their museum board. There Jeannette Whitford listened to stories about the excavations at Spokane House. She looked at the artifacts that had been unearthed, and after a while she realized that bones identified as those of Jaco Finlay were stored in a cardboard box up on the third floor.
“I told the people we have to do something; no one’s Honorable Ancestor belongs in a box like that. But nothing happened. After a while I got in the car with my mother and daughter; I guess my little girl was nine years old that summer. We drove around to the reservations, looking for all the Finlays we could find, trying to drum up the interest to get him reinterred.”
Everywhere they traveled they saw different versions of his name: Findlay Creek above Canal Flats in British Columbia; Findley Road on the Pend Oreille; the Jocko River in Montana.
“I remember coming to Finlay Point on Flathead Lake; we had ourselves a picnic there,” Jeannette said. “It was nice to be at a place where we knew our ancestor had been. We talked to a lot of relatives, but it was like anything else—some people showed their concern, and some didn’t. When we got back to Spokane I told the board that if they didn’t do something, I was going to do it myself. After that things started to move.”
Jeannette helped make the preparations for a small service on the grounds of the Spokane House State Park. The reinterment was scheduled for July 25, 1976, with a Jesuit priest and a Congregational minister presiding. Everyone was in accord, and several descendants planned to make the trip to the park for the simple ceremony.
The evening of July 24, a representative from the Park Service called to say that it would be illegal to bury anyone at Spokane House because the ground had not been designated as a cemetery. Someone on the museum board knew a judge, and by the time a modest crowd of museum staffers, Jesuit priests, and tribal members gathered the next afternoon, a document had been signed designating a little square of dirt off the edge of the old bastion as a legal burial site. They laid Jaco Finlay’s remains in that place, exactly where they had dug them up.
“You know, the old people, they always said that Teshwentichina was the one who placed Jaco Finlay’s knife and pipe bag in his grave,” Jeannette said, “so everything we had went back.” Jeannette recalled the moment clearly. “Bones and buttons, little pipe bowls, whatever else was in the box. We covered them up and said that’s where it all belongs.”