Afterword
November 1878-October 1966
From my early years I have lived among the S’Klallam. I speak their language I understand their way of life. I feel their side of the struggle should be part of the history of Jefferson Country . . .
—Mary Ann Lambert
This book was inspired by the life of the S’Klallam historian Mary Ann Lambert. In her work she honored her Indian heritage, at the same time sketching the daily lives of ordinary people in an epoch of rapid change. Lambert told the stories of family, friends, and neighbors: Native and immigrant, who did their utmost to prosper, but often struggled to survive. Her narratives describe the traditions of her community and the impact, often negative, of white settlers on the Indians. As one of the Strong People, Lambert realized the importance of witnessing the past.
She was born in Port Townsend, Washington on November 13, 1879. Her father, Charles Luneberg Lambert, was a mariner-turned-farmer from Sweden. His family was Finnish, a pejorative for “peasant” in Sweden at the time, according to Lambert’s grandson Tom Taylor.
Her mother Annie Jacob, also of mixed-race ancestry, identified primarily as S’Klallam. Annie was fifteen when she was given in marriage by her parents to Charles Lambert, in his fifties or older. Unhappy, she ran away from him numerous times but eventually stayed when she became pregnant with Mary Ann who was born in 1879. The couple had three more children: Cynthia, Charles, and Matilda.
When Mary Ann was six or seven the family moved from Port Townsend to Port Discovery Bay. She attended the Old Mill School in Blyn. A few years later, Mary Ann was sent to Port Townsend to board with a family in order to attend secondary school. While she was away, Carl died of septicemia from a minor fishing injury.
Shortly after, Annie Jacob Lambert, only twenty-three, but with children to support, married Charles Lambert’s best friend, Isaac Barkhausen. According to Mary Ann Lambert’s own account, Barkhausen, already elderly and ill, developed “quick consumption” and died.
She then married the Chilean sailor Bartolo Reyes from Puerto Montt, Chile, shipwrecked on the Olympic Peninsula in 1889. In Lambert’s account, the two met when Bartolo sold Annie a photo album as he peddled goods door to door. Bartolo was the love of her life. Annie Jacob Lambert, feisty and wise, never learned to read and write but was well-versed in family traditions, both S’Klallam and Swedish. She was well loved by her children, grandchildren, and great nieces and nephews until she died in 1946.
The teenaged Mary Ann Lambert completed her schooling in Port Townsend. She then attended college at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. Later she went to nursing school in Waterbury, Connecticut.
On the East Coast she met her first husband, a traveling actor named Thomas Maher. They had four children: Marion, Charles, Thomas, and William. Why Lambert left Maher is not a part of the public record. It probably ended in divorce. “Anyway, that’s not the kind of thing we talked about in our family,” remarked her great niece Sherry Macgregor. In the early 1920s Lambert, with her sons and daughter, returned to the Olympic Peninsula. A few years later she married Frank Vincent, a packer and jack-of-all-trades from Dosewallips.
In a Scrapbook of History, edited by Ida and Vern Bailey, Lambert’s daughter Marian describes how her stepfather Frank taught her to fish and hunt. She learned to shoot while riding a horse. On one of their many trips over the Olympic glaciers, Vincent trapped a bear cub and presented it to her. Her oversized pet ambled after her, plucking out her hairpins. When Marian left Blyn to study at the University of Washington, she freed the bear but once in a while it would return to eat apples from the tree in their yard. Later on as a writer she would add to her mother’s legacy of local history.
Her children grown, Mary Ann Lambert dedicated more time to her writing. Grandson Tom Taylor described how, in her middle age, she devoted herself to learning the local Indian languages. In the introduction to her first collection, Lambert describes what it feels like to listen to a S’Klallam elder tell his story: “His language is rich and full. He will express a phrase in a word, he will qualify the meaning of an entire sentence with a syllable, and he will convey different significations by the simple inflection of his voice.”
Historian Jerry Gorsline, editor of Shadows of Our Ancestors, includes a number of Lambert’s chapters in his anthology of primary documents of the period. Gorsline writes, “Mary Ann showed a fierce loyalty to her Native American heritage.” To her family she made it clear she had no patience for those who disparaged others because of their race. She often asked her children, “Would you rather be Indian or stupid?” In a place where immigrants from every nation mingled with a tapestry of Indian peoples, Mary Ann Lambert could tolerate anyone and anything, except for a lack of curiosity.
As a child her great-niece Sherry Macgregor felt drawn to her. She recalls afternoons in the Blyn cabin off Chicken Coop Road, browsing in Lambert’s famous scrapbooks with information on every subject. For a high school project, Mary Ann taught her how to make “Indian Ice Cream” using the dried Soap Olalla berry. At fifteen, Sherry moved to California, but the two remained close. When her great-aunt discovered she loved to drink tea, she sent Sherry her favorite tea, “one-third Darjeeling and two-thirds Oolong. Imagine that. My great-aunt was one of the few people in the 1950s and 60s living on the Olympic Peninsula who could easily discuss Eastern philosophies and practices.”
“She wanted to know about the whole world.” Sherry Macgregor, a scholar and a writer, searches for precise words to describe her great-aunt. “Mary Ann was a scholar in her own way. She even wrote letters from her cabin in the woods to people, often famous ones, to get answers to her questions.”
According to Lambert’s grandson Tom, she was “different. She was interested in everything. My god, what a mind.” She had mental telepathy. When she needed to see me, she called me. I was working in the sawmill at three-thirty a.m. Bam! It hit me. Sorry I have to go. I’d come around Sequim Bay and sure enough the light was on. It’s really an Indian thing. She didn’t have it as strong as some.”
Comprehension, compassion, courage—whichever word one chooses, Mary Ann Lambert had a gift she was brave enough to share. To her family she bequeathed a legacy: an outspoken manner, a love of place, and the ability to live in two cultures and with great pride.
Breakfasting with Mary Ann Lambert’s descendants at Sequim’s Oak Table offers up a platter-sized apple pancake, specialty of the house, and a reprise of her most outstanding qualities.
For example, the capacity to create a mesmerizing narrative, grandson Tom Taylor, her closest living relative, wears a big hat and a dungaree jacket with the sleeves cut off. He favors “Eggs Benny, Country Style,” with mushroom sauce and sausage on the side, and he always pays the check for the entire table. The twinkle in his eye and the covert smile usually signify he’s about to tell an insightful joke; most likely, at his own expense.
Great-niece Sherry Macgregor, also a storyteller, exemplifies Mary Ann Lambert’s love of learning. She has a BA in Economics, an MA in Humanities and a Ph.D. in Ancient Near-Eastern Art and Archaeology. She’s also a self-described Existentialist and Feminist, and, more recently, a Buddhist, because the practice “opens you up to a new world: the one immediately right in front of you.” Likewise, the time spent on Inter-tribal Canoe Journeys has helped her “understand her Northwest Indian heritage.” Currently Sherry is writing a book about Past and Present Coast Salish Canoe Culture—another female historian in the family.
Also, exemplifying Lambert’s ingenuity and creativity is Cathy MacGregor, another great-niece. One of the first female winemakers in California, she is now in Sequim earning accolades and awards as a traditional weaver creating modernist baskets and bags of cedar bark and bear grass. Chatting in her sunny house overlooking Sequim, Cathy’s warm sensitivity and humor made us feel at home.
I am honored to have a place at the table with this remarkable family: clever and curious, opinionated and open-minded, concerned with the past yet ever alert to the present moment. Mary Ann Lambert cherished the regional accounts of the people that surrounded her. Appropriately, her life and the experiences of her family are now a part of the greater narrative.
In 1960, historian Mary Ann Lambert was the guest of honor at a tea, held at the home of nineteenth-century merchant D.C.H. Rothschild, sponsored by the Port Townsend Science, Literature and Art Club, to commemorate the publication of The House of the Seven Brothers. Her second volume, Dungeness Massacre and other Regional Tales, was published a year later. She passed away in 1966, but her importance is acknowledged by the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe and by members of her family.
“She is one of the most important recorders of her family and S’Klallam history,” her great-niece Sherry remarked. “The Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe is very grateful to her, for her diligence in recording a people and a time in the past.”
In the first decades of the twentieth century, as the Pacific Northwest became the West Coast of a great nation, Mary Ann Lambert increasingly dedicated herself to the preservation of the past. In her writing she strove to establish the rightful place of the S’Klallam. Lambert used her knowledge, skill, and empathy to document a way of seeing in accord with the environment. She captured the voices of the people, in their own words. Today, her works are an essential source of information for both white and Native historians. By chronicling the stories of the Strong People her voice resounds in the twenty-first century, clear and strong.