2

INVETERATE WARS AND PETTY PILFERINGS

Less than two weeks after Captain Meares and his fifty crewmembers fled Makah waters in 1788, the Felice returned to the ča·di· (“cha-dee”) borderland but avoided Tatoosh’s space around Cape Flattery. Instead, Meares anchored in Barkley Sound, located north across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Tatoosh Island. Although the ship lay miles away from either Tatoosh or Wickaninnish, the two chiefs learned of the Felice’s return by those visiting the ship. The British stayed for ten days, trading with Makahs, Clayoquots, and other Natives who brought fish, berries, and the occasional sea otter fur. While anchored in Barkley Sound, Meares deployed the longboat under the command of First Officer Robert Duffin to determine whether the Strait of Juan de Fuca was the Northwest Passage. While waiting for the return of Duffin’s expedition, the situation of the longboat, which carried their “hopes of success, or the fears of calamity,” weighed on the minds of the crew.1

Once again, Tatoosh thwarted British ambitions. Four days after setting out, Duffin brought the longboat into a small cove in San Juan Harbor on Vancouver Island. The Pacheedaht inhabitants claimed Tatoosh as their leader, and Duffin found them a “bold, daring set of fellows.” The following morning, several canoes carrying forty to fifty warriors—a coalition of Makahs and Pacheedahts—attacked. As the adversaries prepared to board and seize the craft, a Pacheedaht chief readied his harpoon to impale the coxswain. Instead, one of the crew fired first and dropped the chief with a single shot to the head. Warriors lining both sides of the shore rained arrows and stones onto the vessel. One barbed missile struck Duffin in the head—only his thick hat prevented mortal injury. Arrows wounded an Italian in the leg, a Chinese sailor in the side, and a third crewmember in the chest. The longboat “was pierced in a thousand places by arrows,” and the survivors felt that the conflict had been “close” as they “fought for their lives.”2

Duffin ordered the crew to the oars, and they pulled the little vessel out of the cove. After fleeing the coalition of Makah and Pacheedaht warriors, Duffin named the location Hostility Bay because he believed that he had done nothing to provoke the attack. While limping back to the Felice, a small canoe paddled by two of Wickaninnish’s people approached. They sold the bruised and battered crew some fish and offered two freshly severed heads “still streaming with blood.” They told Duffin that these were two of Tatoosh’s warriors whom they had killed because the Makah chief had declared war on Wickaninnish. Duffin declined the grisly offering, and the crew continued creeping along the coast. On their reunion with the Felice, Meares concluded, “We were now obliged to give up all hope of obtaining any further satisfaction concerning the extent of the strait,” which he still believed was the Northwest Passage. Instead, they left the strait and returned to Nootka Sound. Their arrival relieved the shore crew of English and Chinese laborers who had stayed behind at Yuquot in order to build a small vessel that Meares intended to use for accessing trading opportunities in the innumerable shallow inlets dotting the coast. By then, indigenous messengers had already brought news of the attack on the longboat. Some reports exaggerated, telling how the entire crew of the Felice—not just the longboat—had been “cut to pieces” and the principal officers had perished. Other details were accurate and described specific wounds.³ The ambush by Tatoosh’s people and allied Pacheedaht warriors delayed British exploration of the strait until George Vancouver’s expedition four years later.

Meares’s interpretation of the attack on the longboat exemplifies the perspective of many non-Native traders who experienced threats or violence in the ča·di· borderland. Ignoring relevant details, he characterized the antagonists as inherently savage. In the voyage’s official account, Meares wrote, “Though we had never had any intercourse or communication with the inhabitants of the straits, we had … hope[d] that our friendly conduct toward their neighbours, might, by some means have reached the district of their habitation and given them favourable impressions of us: but their conduct marked the most savage and bloody hostility.”⁴ But his first officer, and therefore Meares, knew that they had communicated with those who had attacked them: the warriors had told Duffin that Tatoosh was their chief. However, by stating that he “had never had any intercourse” with the antagonists, Meares could claim the higher moral ground and characterize the violence as an unprovoked attack by hostile savages. Many, but not all, maritime fur traders parroted similar claims.

The belief in the inherent savageness of some indigenous peoples reflected a common assumption of racial violence in a colonial world. Many explorers, navigators, and trading captains categorized Natives as noble or ignoble savages.5 Meares believed that Tatoosh and the Makahs lacked the civilized and noble qualities he found present among other peoples of this borderland. First, Wick-aninnish, a leader whom Meares respected, had warned him about Tatoosh and Makahs. From Meares’s perspective, then, even the local savages deemed the People of the Cape ignoble. Second, the Makah chief refused to trade, unlike non-Makah chiefs. This seemed to confirm what Wickaninnish had told him about their hostility. Third, Maquinna and Callicum, who both shared geographical information about the coast, helped Meares’s Chinese and British carpenters build a smaller vessel at Yuquot. The assistance of these two chiefs supported British efforts to explore the region. By contrast, Tatoosh’s warriors had foiled Meares’s attempts to map empire onto Makah waters. While most traders and navigators found these obstructions baffling and frightening, some understood the reasons behind indigenous attacks on their vessels. Non-Natives criticized the competition, accusing rivals—often from other nations—of being provocateurs of violence.

In the ča·di· borderland, most first contact encounters and maritime fur trade exchanges included violence because of the competitive nature of producing space by imposing and enforcing culturally specific protocols and practices that both shaped and reinforced identity. Not merely reactive, violence was part of group interactions and politics long before the arrival of European ships. Natives and non-Natives harassed, intimidated, stole from, punished, attacked, and murdered one another. Beyond its immediate destructive qualities, however, violence could be productive when leaders and communities claimed space and power at the expense of others. Indigenous borderlanders maintained protocols and reciprocity by force—what Europeans often called “theft” or misconstrued as violence inherent to Natives—when they were not followed or offered voluntarily. Moreover, violence in this borderland had a multidimensional quality because distinct indigenous peoples also committed these acts against one another. Yet violence itself operated on the metaphorical knife’s edge—too much violence or conflict at the wrong time had counterproductive results and weakened a leader’s influence and authority.⁶

This understanding of violence differs from previous interpretations of maritime fur trade conflict that have downplayed its violent qualities, arguing that traders capitulated to Native chiefs who “vigorously asserted their demands.”⁷ Some posit that both sides had goods wanted by the other, thereby fueling peace and accommodation. Violence emerged only after the fur trade era when settlers failed to accommodate Native demands and came to the frontier to transform it to meet their needs. However, oral histories and documents report many incidents of theft, intimidation, and violence, which have prompted some to characterize the maritime fur trade as a “looting of the coast.”8 In these histories, greedy traders resorted to pawning off poor-quality goods, theft, hostage-taking, and violence when competition increased and sea otter furs became scarce. Native health deteriorated with the introduction of alcohol, nontraditional foods, venereal diseases, and smallpox. The proliferation of firearms made Indian warfare deadlier and fueled an increase in Northwest Coast slavery. The commodification of sea otters disrupted the ecology of the coast, thereby reducing fish numbers and increasing Native dependence on non-Native foods. Assuming the inevitability of racial conflict, this assessment of fur trade violence casts indigenous peoples as victims whose simple natures precipitated trouble with rapacious European and Euro-American traders. A more recent study counters the assumption of indigenous victimization by explaining that traders became entangled in Native agendas and rivalries because the maritime fur trade “inflamed old grievances and encouraged new conflicts.”⁹ This reassessment, however, misses the larger and more important dynamics characteristic to the ča·di· borderland because it ignores the region’s transnational characteristics and confines its subject to Canadian boundaries, which did not exist at the time. Previous scholarship simplifies the complex local dynamics that transcended simple racial antagonisms between Natives and non-Natives and often resulted in violence between indigenous peoples and imperial actors.

If we examine the violence of this era from the indigenous perspectives, a different picture emerges. Violence marked early encounters because of competition among rival chiefs in the ča·di· borderland. When imperial actors entered the region, they exacerbated older lines of tension, added new opportunities for conflict, and applied their own tools of violence and terror. In this indigenous borderland where distinct peoples shared and contested spaces and resources, violence was not anomalous or the result of miscommunications: threats and violence were central to both the borderlands and imperial processes of this period. More important, indigenous leaders such as Tatoosh employed violence to foil imperial designs for domination of tribal marine space. To non-Natives during the maritime fur trade, these dynamics created a geography of fear that came to characterize the ča·di· borderland. Sometimes inscribed onto maps with place-names like Hostility Bay, stories of earlier incidents of violence and theft shaped the expectations of subsequent encounters. And indigenous peoples were anything but passive in the creation of this geography of fear. Chiefs manipulated mamni and babałid (“buh-buh-lthid,” non-Natives) anxieties to the advantage of themselves and their people.

PREENCOUNTER VIOLENCE IN THE ČA·DI· BORDERLAND

Native and non-Native interactions of the maritime fur trade did not introduce violence to the ča·di· borderland. Before the arrival of Europeans along this stretch of the Pacific shore, indigenous leaders such as Maquinna, Wickaninnish, and Tatoosh employed violence to extend their authority and shape outcomes. Thus, violent incidents had a productive quality; they were not simply aberrations resulting from misunderstandings or breakdowns in normal relations. Nor were these incidents part of a cycle of revenge, reflecting an inherently violent Indian mentality. In some ways, episodes of violence on the Northwest Coast shared similarities with those described by European historian David Nirenberg in his examination of the medieval persecution of minorities in neighborhoods where violence was also part of the negotiations of space and social place. He argues that perpetrators and recipients of violence “were tightly bound in a wide variety of relations that enmeshed moments of violence and gave them meaning,” a conclusion that also fits the ča·di· borderland of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.10

Nirenberg identifies five categories of violence—quotidian, cataclysmic, strategic, controlled, and stabilizing—which offer a useful framing for similar acts along the Northwest Coast. In this indigenous region, violence committed against slaves illustrated the most common acts of quotidian violence.¹¹ During the maritime fur trade, cataclysmic violence was not a relevant category. From the perspective of Northwest Coast peoples, this type of violence would have applied only to large-scale violence related to the supernatural world, such as the time when Transformer changed the world and gave nonhuman people the forms they wear today.¹² Once they concluded that mamnis and babałids were not from the supernatural world—a determination they quickly made during the initial first encounter period—violent interactions with Europeans better fit the other analytical categories. Chiefs used violence strategically, attacking their rivals to seize slaves, resources, land, and sea space. Violence could also be a stabilizing factor used by one or more titleholders to keep a rival from becoming too powerful. Finally, chiefs deployed violence and threats to control areas over which they held authority.

For generations before the arrival of non-Natives, indigenous leaders and peoples competed over marine resources and access to them, and their struggles often became violent. As some of the best locations to harvest the sea’s riches, the villages of Cape Flattery and Tatoosh Island were the focal point of repeated, violent contests. Some Makah oral histories relate that the Qwidiččaa·t (“kwih-dihch-chuh-aht”), “the People of the Cape,” have always been there, while other accounts date their arrival from Vancouver Island to 3,500 years ago.13 Northwest Coast societies commonly have different versions of stories about how they came to occupy specific places because various lineages came together to form today’s tribal nations.¹⁴ Although Makahs have called Cape Flattery and its nearby waters home for a very long time, other indigenous peoples have contested their tenure. These historical conflicts help us better understand the competitive nature of violence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Recorded in the early to mid-twentieth century, oral histories explain that possibly during the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, Makahs fought Ditidahts, related kin from Vancouver Island, for ownership of Neah Bay, Tatoosh Island, and the adjacent marine space. The former held Waa (“wuh-uhch”), u·yas (“tsoo-yuhs”), and use·ił (“oo-sa-ihlth,” better known as Ozette) villages, while the latter claimed Tatoosh Island and Neah Bay. In earlier times, a great flood had brought Ditidahts to the southern side of the strait, where they then claimed former Makah lands and waters. For a while, the two related peoples lived in a tense peace. However, tensions between them intensified when a Ditidaht strongman pulled the head off a Makah in a strength contest and when Ditidahts enslaved five Makah girls after a storm had pushed their canoe to Tatoosh Island. Makahs attacked Tatoosh Island, and after a “great slaughter on both sides,” Ditidahts retreated to Neah Bay. In a war council, Makahs agreed to continue fighting until they had pushed the Ditidahts back to Vancouver Island. Remembered as a cultural hero, Whacwad (“wuhts-wuhd”), son of an Ozette chief, assassinated one Ditidaht chief, and then Makahs slew another chief during a subsequent battle. With their two highest-ranking chiefs dead, the surviving Ditidahts packed their belongings and left the Cape Flattery region, returning north across the strait. This left the ancestral Makah lands and waters in Makah hands once again, prompting some People of the Cape to argue that Neah Bay and Tatoosh Island belong to them “because we have shed blood here.” Conflicts between these two peoples in the ča·di· borderland continued for some time as Makahs raided Ditidaht villages in order to take salmon runs.¹⁵

In an effort to fashion claims to Cape Flattery and valuable marine resources, non-Makahs also tell their own stories about fighting the People of the Cape for control over the Makahs’ ancestral home. A nineteenth-century Quileute oral history—generally discredited by Makahs today—claims that their warriors had once pushed the People of the Cape north across the strait.16 The victors then claimed Cape Flattery, Tatoosh Island, and the surrounding waters. The exiled Makahs—then living with Ditidaht kin on Vancouver Island—continued fishing the halibut banks stolen by Quileutes. Fearing that the People of the Cape were preparing to reclaim ancestral villages and marine waters, Quileute warriors paddled in one hundred war canoes across the strait and raided a Ditidaht-Makah village while the men were absent. The Indian agent who sensationally recounted this incident wrote, “With whale bone and stones and clubs, clam shell knives, and yew wood daggers [the Quileutes] dealt death on every side.” The victors took women and children captive, cut off the heads of the old men, and returned home. While Quileutes reveled in their victory, Makahs and Ditidahts retaliated against the Cape Flattery villages still held by their enemies. Arriving at Neah Bay, they turned it into a smoldering ruin. Then they moved around the cape, slaughtering all Quileutes they could find. A Makah whaling chief slew one of the most powerful Quileute “medicine men” by harpooning him through the head. The victors dragged the bodies of their enemies to the low tide mark so the sea would carry them away because “all Indians whose bodies are claimed by the sea turn into owls, the worst thing that could happen to anyone.”¹⁷ Makahs finished with a “terrible battle” at Ozette, the premier whaling village of the coast. They pushed Quileutes south and thereafter excluded them from the waters and marine resources around Cape Flattery and Tatoosh Island.

At this time, chiefly rivalries centered on controlling lucrative marine resources and the best sites for harvesting them. For example, when Ditidahts laid claim to Neah Bay, Tatoosh Island, and the nearby waters, they temporarily transformed this area into Ditidaht space. This meant that Ditidahts and those with kinship ties to them resided in these villages, fished the nearby halibut banks, harvested shellfish along the foreshore, and hunted sea mammals off the northern corner of the Olympic Peninsula. Ditidaht chiefs claimed authority over this space and benefited from the resources, which gave them trade goods and potlatch gifts to spend strengthening their influence in the borderlands. The People of the Cape retaliated with strategic violence to reverse this situation and to turn this area back into Makah space.

The lingering effects of violent struggles affected non-Natives when they arrived in the 1770s and 1780s. Wickaninnish was an expansionist leader who had moved his people from the interior to the coast in the decade before the appearance of Europeans. Oral histories collected in the early twentieth century explain that the population of Wickaninnish’s inland village grew so large that they had outstripped local food resources. With superior numbers, the chief and his people declared war on the Kelsamites, who lived on the coast, in order to obtain their waters and resources. Wickaninnish drove the Kelsamites out of Opitsit, and from there he conquered neighboring villages and expanded his influence throughout Clayoquot Sound. Through this conquest, Wickaninnish gained access to marine resources, especially salmon, halibut, and whales. His success brought this portion of the ča·di· borderland under his control and gave him access to whale oil, an important commodity in the regional trade network. The new wealth allowed him to host lavish potlatches, which secured his influence among the conquered people in the sound and within the region. By the time Meares came to trade, Wickaninnish had expanded his influence over thirteen thousand people living in eleven villages throughout Clayoquot Sound.18

These episodes of violence over ocean waters, marine resources, and the best sites to access them illustrate that the ča·di· borderland was a region spatially contested long before the arrival of mamnis and babałids. When Meares sailed into Makah marine space in 1788, he entered an indigenous borderlands crisscrossed by historic and contemporary lines of conflict and violence. Europeans and Euro-Americans did not introduce violence into a peaceful Native Eden. Instead, the newcomers exacerbated existing lines of tension and added new possibilities for conflict, especially when Northwest Coast chiefs incorporated mamnis and babałids into established and competitive trade and kinship networks.¹⁹

VIOLENCE AND EARLY ENCOUNTERS IN THE ČA·DI· BORDERLAND

During the late eighteenth century, distinct peoples—locals and outsiders, Natives and non-Natives—sought control over the ča·di· borderland. Yet amicable exchange characterized the first encounter between indigenous borderlanders and Europeans. In 1774, when Pérez and his Spanish crew exchanged clothing, shells, and knives for sea otter furs, fish, and cedar bark clothing, bad weather—not threatening or violent Natives—drove the Santiago away. This first contact encounter in the region had a peaceful outcome because both sides “sought to minimize danger and maximize opportunities.”²⁰ Beyond these practical considerations, however, the dynamics of the ča·di· borderland better explain why violence did not mar this particular meeting. Unlike later navigators who coasted from one village to the next and traded with competing chiefs, Pérez appeared off the entrance to Nootka Sound. This was also Pérez’s sole stop in the borderlands, and he stayed for less than two days, which left little time for rivals chiefs to appear. Additionally, Pérez’s encounter off Nootka Sound involved only a single group of people. After leaving Nootka Sound, the Santiago sailed south along the Washington coast. Although the crew saw the “smokes of many great fires, so that we know this coast to be inhabited,” they did not linger to meet any other indigenous borderlanders.21

Subsequent first contact encounters, however, did include intimidation, theft, and conflict as borderlands violence shaped cross-cultural interactions and created a geography of fear in the minds of newcomers. This became evident during the 1775 Spanish expedition along the western edge of North America. Captaining the frigate Santiago, Bruno de Hezeta y Dudagoita commanded the expedition. A second vessel, the schooner Sonora, captained by Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, also accompanied them. On their way north, the vessels became separated somewhere along the Washington coast. Early the following morning, July 14, nine Indians in a canoe approached the Santiago and offered sea otter skins and fish to trade. Afterward, Hezeta and an armed party went ashore and performed the customary possession ceremony—erecting a cross and reading the requirimiento, which ordered Indians to accept Spanish rule and Christian conversion—as Spaniards had done all over North and South America. They kept this one quick because they feared that the deteriorating weather would beach the Santiago. Naming the sheltered anchorage Rada de Bucareli (Bucareli’s Roadstead), Hezeta described the landing site as being “choked with brush and branches so that any object at a distance of four varas [twelve feet] can not be seen by anyone outside,” a condition that heightened his anxiety and hastened their return to the Santiago.²²

On sailing farther north along the coast, his crew spotted the Sonora near the mouth of a river and heard the firing of shots. They later learned that a host of Indian warriors had killed several Spanish crewmembers. The bloodshed resulted from a chain of events that had begun the evening before. A canoe of Indians had approached the Sonora, and Bodega y Quadra invited them aboard and gave presents. The Indians reciprocated with fish and whale flesh and invited the crew to come to their village to feast and dance. The following morning, Bodega y Quadra sent seven crewmembers ashore in a launch to collect water and to cut a topmast. According to the Spanish witnesses, when they arrived at the mouth of the river, two to three hundred Indians ambushed them. They “cut to pieces” five of the crew as another two “escap[ed] from their hideous cruelty by throwing themselves into the sea,” only to tire and drown.²³ The attacking Indians stripped the launch of its iron, salvaged what boards they could, and set the remainder afire.

As the boat smoldered on the shore, the attackers retreated into the woods, appearing to take the dismembered Spanish bodies with them, an action that convinced the seven remaining crewmembers aboard the schooner that the attackers were cannibals. At the same time, nine canoes of Indians who had visited them the evening before returned. A sailor on the Sonora alerted the crew that the newcomers had armed themselves, yet as they drew nearer, the Indians made signs of friendship. The Spanish offered glass beads to entice them to approach. When a canoe came within range, the Spaniards fired their muskets and a swivel gun (small cannon)—these were the shots the Santiago crew heard. The fusillade “killed seven of the nine [Indians in the lead canoe], thus making them pay for life for the seven Spaniards they had slain,” and the canoes retreated hastily. When the Spanish ships reunited, Bodega y Quadra urged Hezeta to land a party onshore so they could punish the “treacherous” Indians. The commander, however, decided against vengeance. Not only did he have instructions to limit violence to cases of self-defense, but the crew were also outnumbered and would be fighting in overgrown terrain that the enemy knew well. He recognized that if he lost any more men, he would need to turn back. Instead, he ordered the vessels to leave the coast and to push north.24

During the return voyage south several days later, they again encountered Indians while sailing near the waters where they had lost the seven crewmembers. A canoe carrying ten Indians came out to the Santiago, offering pelts and dried smelt for trade. One of the sailors told Hezeta that he recognized two as part of the group that had come onboard the Sonora the evening before being attacked. The commander plotted to lure the canoe close enough to take them hostage. The Indians evaded his efforts and skillfully kept the canoe positioned into the wind, making it impossible for the Spanish to overtake them. Hezeta lost sight of them at sundown, and the following day, he sailed south away from the Northwest Coast.²⁵

Unlike the earlier Pérez voyage, Hezeta’s 1775 expedition illustrates that competition between distinct peoples of the ča·di· borderland could lead to violence. While exploring the Washington coast, the vessels had sailed into the waters of two competing tribal nations, the Quileute and Quinault, both just south of the Makahs. Although the Spanish were unable—or unwilling—to distinguish one group from another, the concurrent incidents of trade and violence indicate that they had encountered two different peoples. The peaceful interactions were likely with Quileutes, whereas the violent ones involved Quinaults, an understanding corroborated by Quinault oral histories. Those who visited the Sonora on the evening of July 13 had exchanged whale flesh and fish for “trifles” offered by the Spanish—these were Quileutes because they had better access to whale meat, something that Quinaults would have been unlikely to have because they only harvested the occasional drift whale.²⁶ When seven of the Sonora’s crew went ashore, they landed at the mouth of the Quinault River, within Quinault territory and near Taholah, one of their villages.27 When the Quileute canoes returned after the Quinault ambush, they had armed themselves to fight the Quinault, not to attack the Spanish aboard the Sonora. With emotions running high after witnessing the death of seven crewmembers, the Spaniards fired on the Quileutes, assuming that they had been the attacking Indians and misunderstanding that they offered support against a common enemy, the Quinault.

This incident also reveals clashing efforts among Quileutes, Quinaults, and Spaniards to produce and control space in the southern corner of the ča·di· borderland. The position of the Spanish vessels suggests that the Quileute traders had trespassed in Quinault waters when they offered sea otter skins and fish to exchange. By trading in Quinault waters, Quileutes challenged the Quinaults’ control over this marine space. Quileutes probably armed themselves in an attempt to ally with the Spanish against their rivals. On a voyage of exploration, the Spanish engaged in producing space for empire. They took “possession” of the land by planting a cross, an action which some Quinaults possibly witnessed from the safety of the woods that had made the Spaniards nervous.²⁸ However, the Quinault attack on their shore party demonstrated the fiction of this space being Spanish. Complex indigenous dynamics fueled the Quinaults’ violent reaction. They attacked the Spaniards onshore to punish them for trading with the rival Quileutes in Quinault waters. Spanish attempts at taking timber and freshwater from woods and rivers owned by titleholders also would have concerned Quinaults. This attack exemplified Quinault efforts to control interactions within tribal space, illustrating that from the beginning of imperial efforts at producing space in the Northwest Coast, indigenous peoples frustrated this process.

Scholars often emphasize the peaceful quality of the region’s next mamni-indigenous encounter, Captain Cook’s monthlong sojourn at Friendly Cove in April 1778. But tensions of violence particular to the ča·di· borderland marked that episode, too. What Europeans perceived as theft provoked initial anxieties among the British crew. After just one day among the Mowachahts of Nootka Sound, Cook concluded that “they were as light fingered as any people we had before met.” Indians pilfered many small items, including nails, chisels, and other pieces of metal. Some of these petty thefts went unnoticed by the British at the time, but others seemed threatening to voyagers so far from home, especially when important equipment went missing. Someone stole a thirty-pound iron hook used to pull up the main anchor. Cook also complained about the Natives’ sharp trading practices. Some cheated his crew by mixing water in with the whale oil they sold. Subsequent traders complained of Mowachaht chiefs who blackened sea otter pelts with charcoal to make them appear of a higher value.29

We should understand these thefts and apparently unscrupulous trading practices within the context of the Northwest Coast culture and of sociocultural dynamics specific to the ča·di· borderland. Many accounts noted supposed incidents of theft between distinct, unrelated peoples. John Rickman, a lieutenant on the Resolution, one of the two vessels on Cook’s third voyage, described an incident where Mowachahts “took everything” from a non-Mowachaht “stately youth” who had visited the ship and traded. To British eyes, it appeared that the inhabitants of Friendly Cove had stolen these goods. From the perspective of the indigenous inhabitants of the ča·di· borderland, however, the young chief had committed the theft by trading with the mamnis without the Mowachaht chief Maquinna’s permission. Mowachahts simply confiscated the goods he had received illicitly. Non-Native explorers’ and traders’ accounts rarely recorded thefts among the inhabitants of one village or within a confederation of communities. In 1787, the British trader James Colnett believed that the inhabitants of any one village in Nootka Sound were “strictly honest among themselves.”³⁰ Theft was unusual within a village where everyone shared real or fictive kinship.

The fact that nearly all the mamnis and babałids lacked kinship connections to local indigenous communities made them fair targets for theft. Nuu-chah-nulths and other ča·di· borderlanders saw non-Native property as up for grabs because Europeans were outside the established kinship and trade networks of the region. Perhaps the inhabitants of Nootka Sound saw non-kin Europeans as potential enemies and therefore legitimate marks for theft. Chiefs might have found the property threatening if it fell into the hands of a rival who might use it against enemies or to enhance status. Perhaps this concern encouraged leaders to overlook thefts of non-Native property, especially when the valued goods ended up in their village rather than a rival’s.³¹

Social status also shaped these incidents. In the ča·di· borderland, trade often happened between high-ranking equals who ritualized exchanges through formal diplomatic protocols. Trade across status ranks, though, was more of a free-for-all. Chiefs often had the right to seize what they wanted from the lower ranks when commoners operated in leaders’ owned spaces. Colnett noted that Oughomeize, a Muchalaht chief along the eastern shores of Nootka Sound, intercepted canoes returning from his fishing grounds, and he took a percentage of the catch. The same dynamics shaped incidents of supposed “theft.” Natives probably classified many sailors and laborers aboard vessels as slaves because they did the work ascribed to the lowest-ranking members of society. Eighteenth-century Europeans and Euro-Americans would have understood this assumption because some compared a sailor’s lot—most of whom had been impressed into service—to that of black slaves. Many of the accounts of theft occurred when an Indian stole something from a non-Native who was not an identifiable officer. Cook noted an early incident where a pair of Indian men worked together to steal from one of his sailors; one individual “amused” the crewman while another stole from him.32

To Natives, these incidents inscribed class and status along indigenous terms. From the British perspective, however, they exemplified theft. Although crew comments written in hindsight described indigenous hosts who “offered the least violence” while Cook’s vessels were at Friendly Cove, at the time, the British found theft and underhanded trading practices threatening and believed that they portended violence. When their hosts armed themselves against potential antagonists about to enter Friendly Cove, some crewmembers feared they might be preparing to attack.³³

Non-Native captains found these thefts galling. Eighteenth-century captains possessed “near-dictatorial powers [that] made the ship one of the earliest totalitarian work environments.”³⁴ All captains relied on physical force to keep the sailors—men in a lower social class than the captain and his officers—in line. This included beatings, curses, and threats to kill, especially if any sailor raised a hand in self-defense. Kanakas (Native Hawaiians) and non-Anglo sailors received more disciplinary actions than Anglo crewmembers.³⁵ Captains meted out punishments such as keel-hauling, running the gauntlet, and flogging with the cat-o’-nine-tails in front of the crew in order to intimidate the rest into following his orders.³⁶ Recognizing the point beyond which one should not push the crew, shrewd captains combined rewards, promises, and kind words with brute strength, curses, and threats to maintain authority and prevent mutiny.

This disciplinary model influenced how captains and crew dealt with Natives whom they believed had done them wrong. Drawing on the early eighteenth-century experience in which authority and discipline stabilized the merchant shipping industry and empire, maritime fur trade captains of the late eighteenth century believed that they needed to establish discipline over indigenous peoples in the Northwest Coast.³⁷ They deployed violence to create imperial spaces in the ča·di· borderland. As on their ships, captains believed that punishments were most effective when conducted in front of an audience of potential offenders. Some captains struck chiefs in front of their people, fired on canoes with other warriors watching, and destroyed villages while Natives hid in nearby woods. Shrewd traders understood that a combination of enticements and violence best intimidated potentially dangerous trade partners.

British crewmembers and officers expressed their anxieties by employing violence to punish thieves. Cook noted that an Indian thief “generally relinquished his prize with reluctancy and sometimes not without force.”38 One midshipman also wrote about a fellow sailor who threw a piece of wood at one thief with such force that it cracked a canoe it hit instead to the waterline. Those in the canoe became angry and drew their bows to fire at the sailor, but another crewmember intervened, firing an arrow from a bow he had just purchased from an Indian man.³⁹ Even Cook himself, often viewed as a paragon of restraint, attempted to punish indigenous thieves. After having been at Friendly Cove for nearly a month and suffering from what he perceived as theft, the exasperated Cook fired a musket loaded with small shot at a canoe carrying someone who had stolen a small piece of iron. He injured four men in their backs and “made the whole party leave us rather apparantly in an ill Humour with us.”⁴⁰ The crew and officers exerted their authority to extend British space in this corner of the ča·di· borderland. But continued thefts indicated their failure.

Much as Hezeta’s 1775 expedition had triggered conflict off the Washington coast, at Nootka Sound, Cook’s presence in 1778 also exacerbated tensions among distinct peoples with a history of mutual hostility. Charles Clerke, commander of the Discovery, reported that the local Indians had many disputes with neighboring peoples. At one point, three to four hundred Mowachahts paddled across Nootka Sound to attack enemies on the opposite shore. On their return, they exchanged with the British some sea otter pelts they had seized from their rivals.⁴¹ This and other longstanding conflicts demonstrate that this was a region contested long before the arrival of Europeans. With the influx of new goods, Maquinna employed violence to maintain his authority and to expand Mowachaht control. His indigenous methods of warfare and politics complicated imperial designs to transform this into European zones of safety, order, and free trade.

MARITIME FUR TRADE VIOLENCE IN THE ČA·DI· BORDERLAND, 1786–1803

Similar dynamics of theft, intimidation, and conflict pervaded the maritime fur trade throughout the ča·di· borderland. When a growing number of non-Native traders came to the area during the late eighteenth century, relations of violence expanded along existing lines of tension in the region, encompassing a greater variety of peoples. Increased Native contacts with mamnis and babałids provided numerous opportunities for misunderstandings, insults, and new violence. Some incidents of violence had a productive quality because borderlands dynamics allowed rivals to benefit from discord elsewhere. Chiefs such as Tatoosh used conflict to their advantage to expand their influence in this indigenous marine borderland.

Earlier incidents of violence shaped subsequent interactions between indigenous peoples and non-Natives. In 1787, twelve years after Hezeta’s voyage of violence along the Washington coast, Captain Charles Barkley brought the four-hundred-ton, twenty-gun Imperial Eagle to the region seeking sea otter skins.42 Because East India Company employees had surreptitiously financed the voyage, the twenty-six-year-old Barkley renamed the Louden the Imperial Eagle and flew the Austrian flag as a subterfuge to avoid the expensive licensing fees that they were supposed to pay to the company. Barkley and his crew spent more than a month at Nootka Sound trading for furs. After other licensed trading vessels arrived, Barkley completed his transactions at Yuquot and sailed south along the Vancouver Island coast, stopping at Clayoquot Sound and Barkley Sound to collect furs from Wickaninnish and related peoples. Later, he headed south across the strait, identifying and naming this the “long lost strait of Juan de Fuca.”

Sailing south along the coast of the Olympic Peninsula, Barkley ran into serious trouble near where Indians had attacked Hezeta’s Spanish crew. The British captain anchored off the mainland and sent thirteen men in two boats to travel up the Hoh River to trade with Indians. Because the river was too shallow for the longboat, the smaller craft with six men took a sheet of copper for trade and rowed upstream, never to be seen again. When Barkley sent an armed party ashore the next day, they discovered clothes and linen, “mangled and bloody,” but they found neither bodies nor boat. Drawing on a common fear of Pacific Natives consuming Europeans, they concluded that the sailors had been eaten and set a nearby Hoh village afire in retribution.⁴³ Afterward, Barkley sailed for China, where he sold his eight hundred furs for $30,000, which fueled dreams of wealth despite news of hostile Natives.

Barkley had brought the Imperial Eagle into waters already bloodied by an earlier cross-cultural encounter. Other Native peoples told babałid captains that Quileutes had attacked Barkley’s crew.⁴⁴ Quileutes would have had at least two reasons to do so. First, they recalled the encounter from twelve years earlier when babałids (Spaniards) fired on them without cause, slaughtering a canoe-load of their people who had offered support against the attacking Quinault warriors. Second, Quileute chiefs desired to keep non-Natives away from the Hoh village that Barkley approached. With the competitive dynamics of this indigenous borderland, Quileute titleholders would have blocked a rival Hoh chief’s access to valued trade goods. From the Quileute perspective, they had seen the Imperial Eagle sail past their village. Rather than stopping to offer trade—and to make up for the murderous actions of the earlier non-Native visitors—the vessel anchored in the waters of their closest competitors. The attack on the crew of the Imperial Eagle exemplified strategic violence, which Quileutes used to discourage the British from trading with rivals.

Especially when these incidents resulted in dead Europeans, indigenous power created a geography of fear for non-Native visitors to the Northwest Coast. Non-Native reactions to and memories of the Spanish and British deaths along the Olympic Peninsula illustrate this process. After Quinaults killed members of his crew, Bodega y Quadra mapped this violent incident into the imaginations of Spaniards and other Europeans by naming the location of the “massacre” Punta de los Mártires (Martyrs Point). He also named a nearby island Isla de Dolores (Isle of Sorrows).45 The names Bodega y Quadra bestowed on these features appeared on late eighteenth-century maps of the Pacific Northwest. Similarly, Barkley named the waterway where he lost thirteen men Destruction River and renamed Bodega y Quadra’s Isla de Dolores with an English name, Destruction Island, the name it carries to this day.⁴⁶ The act of naming transforms a space “symbolically into a place … a space with history.”⁴⁷ For both of these Spanish and British captains, violence would forever mark the histories of these places.

Captured on maps, the geography of fear made non-Natives anxious and fearful when on the Northwest Coast. This can be seen throughout Meares’s time in the region. The “massacre” of the sailors of the Imperial Eagle weighed on the minds of Meares and his British crewmembers, and it shaped many of their actions and interactions with various indigenous peoples. Erecting a trading base and crude shipyard at Yuquot, Meares enclosed them within a strong breastwork and defended it with a cannon. Revealing his anxiety, he explained that they “wished to operate on [Indian] fears as well as their gratitude.” Meares also overlooked most thefts, even of important items such as the ship’s pinnace, a small boat handy for shore landings. Someone in Friendly Cove had stolen and broken it apart for its iron and nails. Although both Maquinna and Callicum professed to know nothing about its theft, Meares chose not to confront them about this very serious loss. He feared that a confrontation might jeopardize their trading activities or lead to a more serious conflict in this remote corner of the Pacific.⁴⁸

Thefts prompted Meares to take precautions, which often insulted indigenous leaders. When they first anchored off Wickaninnish’s village in Clayoquot Sound, Meares feared the chief’s power to do “mischief” against the vessel and its crew. The captain always kept armed crewmembers on deck and curtailed the number of Indians on the Felice at any one time. This constant vigilance angered the Clayoquot chief, who left the ship and refused to allow his people to trade. Meares then had to assuage the chief’s feelings by giving him a sword, a large copper dish, and a pistol, an item Wickaninnish had desired for some time.49

Meares’s anxieties heightened when he crossed into Makah marine space. Wickaninnish had already warned the captain that Tatoosh and his people were “subtle and barbarous.” Coming from the chief of the Clayoquot, a bold people who appeared less civilized than those he had met at Friendly Cove, Wickaninnish’s warning must have commanded the captain’s attention. After Tatoosh’s confrontation with Meares aboard the Felice, the British dispatched the longboat to look for secure anchorage. Fear kept the longboat crew from retaliating when a “great crowd of canoes” surrounded the small boat and when intimidating Makah men leapt aboard and stole various articles. For Tatoosh and his warriors, taking goods from total outsiders, these babałids, was justified under cultural norms, especially after the captain had insulted the Makah chief. Fortunately for the longboat’s crew, the People of the Cape stopped short of an all-out assault, probably because they hoped that intimidation would encourage Meares to make up for the insult by giving gifts. Just before departing Makah waters the next day, Meares wrote of their isolation “on a wild and unfrequented coast, in a distant corner of the globe, far removed from all those friends, connections, and circumstance which form the charm and comfort of life, and taking our course, as it were through a solitary ocean.”⁵⁰ Fear hurried them out of Makah waters, despite Tatoosh’s efforts to make amends for his earlier confrontational behavior.

The crew’s anxieties intensified when they entered the waters where Barkley’s Imperial Eagle had lost six of its crew. Coming within sight of Destruction Island, the weather became “thick and gloomy” and then turned to rain. The wind died, forcing Meares to anchor off a Quileute village, which “distress[ed]” the crew, who feared becoming a meal for “cannibals.” The captain’s account captured the crew’s anxiety: “The wretched fate of the people belonging to the Imperial Eagle, evidently predominated in the minds of our crew; and being on the very coast where such an act of barbarity was committed, the infectious apprehension of a similar destruction spread amongst them. It was the common subject of their discourse, and had such an influence on their spirits, as to endanger the loss of the ship.”⁵¹ Fortunately for the crew, a wind kicked up, and the Felice tacked out of the frightening waters by nightfall. Meares’s impressions illustrate the geography of fear through which he and his crew sailed.

For their part, indigenous borderlanders remained ambivalent about the mamnis and babałids. Chiefs and their followers desired the trade goods that vessels brought. The non-Native scramble for furs even encouraged some chiefs to raid other indigenous peoples possessing “soft gold.” Late in the summer of 1788, Meares witnessed Maquinna, Callicum, and Comekala lead a Mowachaht navy north to wage war on a distant people. Although Maquinna told Meares that they were retaliating against those who had attacked a village under the leadership of his grandmother, the battle netted a “great booty of sea-otter skins.”52 Some chiefs tried to gain mamni allies in conflicts against others. When Bodega y Quadra’s cabin boy turned up dead in 1792, Maquinna attempted to convince the Spaniards that a rival on the other side of Nootka Sound had ordered the murder. Maquinna offered to have his brother Comekala take a Spanish launch, armed with several swivel guns, to punish the murderer. Maquinna wanted this to be a joint Spanish-Mowachaht expedition so that his enemies would know that “Maquinna is the same as Quadra, and Quadra is the same as Maquinna.”⁵³ A common pattern throughout the eighteenth-century North American West, displaced violence was often the result of imperialism: one group of indigenous peoples committed violent acts against others for reasons related to the expanding colonial world.⁵⁴ In the ča·di· borderland, displaced violence happened along indigenous lines of tension. Maquinna, for example, took this opportunity to strike at longtime enemies. For these influential chiefs, the ability to wage war and plunder others indicated their power to control areas distant from home villages.

Sometimes, a chief manipulated the borderlands’ dynamics of rivalry and conflict to expand his influence. Tatoosh did so in the late eighteenth century. When Meares agreed to the exclusive trading arrangement with Wickaninnish in 1788, this action exacerbated existing tensions within the borderlands, and Tatoosh maneuvered himself into a position to extend his influence deeper into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. After Meares demonstrated that he would not offer the Makah chief a similar trading arrangement, Tatoosh became worried that Wickaninnish’s exclusive agreement with the babałid trader would give his Clayoquot rival an inordinate amount of regional influence. Therefore, when the Felice returned to the area and sent its longboat deeper into the strait, Tatoosh seized the opportunity to strike at the Meares-Wickaninnish alliance. Leveraging ties with Pacheedahts on Vancouver Island, Tatoosh convinced them to join his warriors in attacking the British longboat just as the Makah chief declared war on Wickaninnish. Pacheedahts preferred an alliance with the powerful chief from Cape Flattery to falling prey to Wickaninnish’s expansion. Neighbors of the conquest-minded Clayoquot chief, the Pacheedahts worried that they might be next, especially now that he had strong ties to a non-Native trader who provided him with firearms and metal weapons.

The alliance with Tatoosh came at a cost, however. Instead of conquest at the hands of the Clayoquots, Pacheedahts needed to provide furs to the Makah chief. When the Lady Washington sailed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca a year later, the American crew complained that Pacheedahts and others along the strait had no furs because “Tatooth of Clahaset” had already procured them. It also appears that Tatoosh used this foothold on Vancouver Island to expand his authority even farther into the borderlands. Probably through a combination of trade opportunities, kinship ties, intimidation, and violence, Tatoosh held sway over a village on the southwest corner of the island by 1792. At this time, Spaniards noted that the Makah chief “was one of the most feared of all the chiefs who live on these shores, and that he had won the greatest respect and authority among [the inhabitants of this village], on account of his bravery, ability and character.” In 1793, after Tatoosh had finished trading furs with the Boston vessel Jefferson at Barkley Sound, he “took the opportunity to plunder the [local] natives.” What the captain mistook as plundering was Tatoosh exerting his titleholder’s privilege to collect furs and other goods from people over whom he held authority. But Tatoosh’s influence, and that of subsequent chiefs, over non-Makah villages and peoples did not go uncontested. By 1825, the People of the Cape were engaged in an “inveterate war” with the Clayoquots and Ditidahts, enslaving many to sell to indigenous communities as far south as the Columbia River. Neighboring peoples rankled at Makah influence in the ča·di· borderland. At times, S’Klallams along the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula and Quileutes to the south maintained antagonistic relations with Makahs through the mid-nineteenth century.55

Violence enabled some powerful chiefs to maintain or enhance their status; mamni and babałid attacks against their people and neighbors, however, made them wary. One contemporary observer worried that the “hot tempered character” of his fellow sailors sparked altercations with Indian men.⁵⁶ In many ways, this observation was an understatement. Non-Native intimidation, theft, and violence created an atmosphere of fear and even terror within indigenous villages and among certain groups. And mamnis and babałids committed plenty of violence to make indigenous peoples cautious. Some of this violence was possibly a strategy on the part of ship captains to maintain “advantage” over indigenous peoples.⁵⁷ Perhaps this was one way that captains attempted to mitigate the geography of fear.

While non-Native captains and crew complained about indigenous thefts, many of the mamnis and babałids also stole from Indians, who then retaliated. In 1787, Captain Barkley angered the Nootka Sound chiefs when he ignored indigenous trading protocols by intercepting canoes and seizing sea otter skins, offering Indians only what he thought proper. In 1803, Maquinna complained to his “white slave” John Jewitt that Captain Tawnington entered Maquinna’s longhouse when the chief was gone and stole forty of his best furs at musketpoint from his women and slaves. This plundering especially insulted Maquinna because the Mowachahts had treated the captain well when he wintered at Nootka Sound.58 Non-Natives committed actions that indigenous peoples perceived as theft yet non-Natives saw differently. Northwest Coast societies believed that everything had an owner. So when mamnis and babałids entered sovereign spaces of titleholders and helped themselves to water, driftwood, timber, fish, sea mammals, game, and wild plants, the rightful owners saw this as stealing. These thefts encouraged reciprocal takings by indigenous peoples.

While chiefs perceived theft of property and kidnappings as affronts to their authority, they saw attacks on themselves and their people as more serious challenges requiring forceful responses. The first mamni after Captain Cook to bring a vessel into the ča·di· borderland, the British trader James Hanna, had what other traders called “a very serious Engagement with the Natives.”⁵⁹ In September 1785, Hanna sailed the Sea Otter into Nootka Sound. After a few days of amicable trade with the Mowachahts, a dispute arose. Hanna fired on a canoe carrying an Indian blamed for stealing a chisel, which the accused thought he had received in exchange for a fur. This fusillade killed twenty men, women, and children. On the schooner at the time, Maquinna escaped by ignominiously leaping into the water from the quarterdeck.⁶⁰ After avoiding the Sea Otter for a few days, several canoes approached the schooner, and a herald stood in one and “solemnly declared” the “reasons for war,” informing Hanna that they would attack the following day. The next day, a fleet of canoes surrounded the schooner and fired a “shower of arrows and darts,” but “Captain Hannay’s musquetry and small guns did great execution among them, and they drew off.”⁶¹ Afterward, a Mowachaht came forward and begged for peace. Trade commenced once again and continued until the British trader sailed for China.

Also during this voyage, one of Hanna’s sailors played a practical joke on Maquinna, a stunt with long-lasting consequences. Still upset by this incident four years later, the Mowachaht chief told the Spanish captain Esteban José Martínez about it. Eager to highlight the poor behavior of a British captain, Martínez recorded the incident in his journal: “One day, when Macuina, the principal chief of the village in this port where we are lying, went on board [Hanna’s] ship to visit him, and when they had seated him near the binnacle, they sprinkled a little powder under his chair, giving him to understand that this was an honor which they showed to chiefs. He supposed that the powder was dark colored sand, but he soon felt its effect, when one of the Englishmen set off the charge. Poor Macuina was raised from the deck by the explosion and had his buttocks scorched; he showed me the scars.”62 Unlike violence directed at lower-ranking Indians, this insult struck at the chief. Compounded by Hanna’s killing of twenty Indians for a petty theft, the practical joke prompted Maquinna to limit the flow of furs. Although violence did not shut down trade at this time, it did limit it—Hanna complained that Maquinna only traded half the furs his people had. Perpetrated by low-status sailors, this prank demonstrated that sailors were not completely controlled by their captains. Indeed, their actions could help set, or sometimes harm, the terms of trade and interactions in ways that commanders did not intend. More important, this incident demonstrated that chiefs controlled the rules of exchange and could frustrate non-Native commercial desires.

Rival chiefs could turn violence against another group of indigenous people in the ča·di· borderland to their advantage. Cleaskinah, an Ahousaht chief and lesser rival to Maquinna, exchanged names with Hanna during his 1785 voyage to the Northwest Coast.⁶³ Hearing of the conflict between Hanna and Maquinna, Cleaskinah recognized the opportunity to gain trade goods from the British vessel rather than mediated through the more powerful Mowachaht chief. Hanna welcomed the Ahousaht chief’s offer because Maquinna had curtailed trade with the Sea Otter.

The fact that mamnis and babałids struck indiscriminately at chiefs and commoners alike concerned many titleholders. In 1789, Martínez established a settlement and fort at Nootka Sound to strengthen Spanish sovereignty in the face of Russian, English, and US encroachments along the west coast of North America. Martínez was an unpopular commander—the expedition’s naturalist, José Mariano Moziño, described him as a “ferocious pirate whose avarice did not respect a single thing.” Martínez’s confrontational actions in seizing several English trading vessels precipitated the Nootka Sound Controversy, which nearly brought England and Spain to war and resulted in the loss of Spanish claims to the Northwest Coast. More concerning for Native peoples in Nootka Sound, brutal violence marked his time there. When Callicum, the second highest-ranked chief in Nootka Sound, boarded the Princessa and called Martínez a “wicked man” for seizing the vessels of the Mowachaht’s British friends, the captain had him killed for his impertinence as the chief departed. When Martínez’s weapon misfired while shooting at the retreating chief, another Spaniard shot Callicum dead. His body tumbled into the sea and sank. Afterward, the chief’s father begged Martínez for permission to “creep for the body beneath the water,” but the captain refused the request until presented with a sufficient quantity of sea otter pelts. Moziño noted that Callicum’s “blood with which the sea was tinted, saddened the natives beyond measure” and prompted Maquinna to flee Nootka Sound to seek safety among Wickaninnish.64

Nuu-chah-nulth oral histories reveal a darker side to the Spanish time at Nootka Sound. Martínez’s Yuquot fort included a blacksmith shop to manufacture small metal trade items and to supply the garrison with arms. Nuu-chah-nulth histories remember that some Spaniards mistreated young Indian girls, pulling them into the blacksmith’s shop “without any romance.” The blacksmith always had a red-hot iron ready for those who refused. According to an oral account, the smith would poke the hot iron into a girl’s vagina if she refused his unwanted advances; some died from their injuries.⁶⁵ Colonial sexual violence such as this “establishe[d] the ideology that Native bodies [were] inherently violable—and by extension, that Native lands [were] also inherently violable.”⁶⁶ Even if this example of horrifying violence has been exaggerated over centuries of oral histories, what is important is that Spaniards created a social environment in which such abuses were possible.

Spaniards in positions of power attempted to produce imperial space by controlling Natives through violence and intimidation. Martínez killed Callicum because the chief had shown disrespect for him in front of his men on his own vessel. Already unpopular among his crew, perhaps Martínez feared that allowing such disrespect would encourage his crew to do the same or even mutiny. He also demonstrated his spatial control over the very waters of Friendly Cove by prohibiting Callicum’s father from recovering his son’s body. In this violent environment shaped by the “ferocious” Martínez, his men felt that they had the power to deploy sexual violence against Native women. From the male Iberian perspective, Mowachahts needed to learn the value of hierarchy in Spanish spaces such as the blacksmith’s shop and the Princessa. Far from disapproving official eyes, some Spaniards deployed such violence to demonstrate their control over Yuquot.

Spanish abuse of Mowachahts affected cross-cultural interactions in other parts of the ča·di· borderland when news of the atrocities spread. A year after Martínez abandoned the Yuquot outpost, Makahs resisted subsequent Spanish efforts to control Cape Flattery. In late July 1790, Manuel Quimper sailed the Princesa Real into Neah Bay, took possession for the Spanish Empire, and named it Nuñez Gaona. Although he noted the excellent shelter the bay offered and that the surrounding country appeared fertile with several level spots for settlement, the People of the Cape discouraged him from staying long. Before his arrival, he had certainly heard firsthand from Bodega y Quadra about the troubles the 1775 Hezeta expedition encountered on the Northwest Coast—the two sailed together from Cádiz, Spain, to New Spain in 1789—which established Quimper’s expectation to experience a geography of fear. Makahs confirmed this when they told him that they “pride[d] themselves on having killed the captain” of a fur trading vessel. Much to Quimper’s horror, they ambushed and left for dead one of his sailors when a group of Spaniards went ashore and used a Makah stream—owned by a chief—to wash their clothes.67 As some Spaniards accrued a nasty reputation, so Makah resistance earned them a reputation for fierce independence that endured for the next century.

Despite the People of the Cape’s warlike reputation, the viceroy of New Spain—gazing at a map while sitting in Mexico City more than a thousand miles away from Cape Flattery—concluded that Nuñez Gaona (Neah Bay) was a suitable spot for a new Spanish garrison. In 1792, he ordered Salvador Fidalgo to fortify the port by establishing a permanent Spanish presence there. Fidalgo’s Princessa anchored at Nuñez Gaona in late May. After taking possession of the site with the customary formalities, Fidalgo’s crew began building the outpost, which consisted of a shed, bakery, provisional barracks, blacksmith’s shop, corral for cattle, and garden.

Spanish outpost at Nuñez Gaona (Neah Bay) and “grand war canoe” of Chief Tatoosh. On the right is the Spanish frigate Princessa; the Mexicana and Sutil of the Galiano exploration of the Strait of Juan de Fuca lie astern. Drawing by José Cardero, 1789–94, who accompanied the Alejandro Malaspina and Galiano expeditions to the Pacific. Image courtesy the Museo de América, Madrid.

Relations among the Spanish and the People of the Cape remained tense. Recalling the earlier Makah assault on a sailor from Quimper’s expedition and the fate of Hezeta’s crew who put ashore just south of Cape Flattery, Fidalgo took precautions. He kept a longboat close to shore to evacuate the garrison if Makahs attacked. The Spaniards fortified the outpost and protected it with six small cannons. Fidalgo allowed only chiefs on board to trade, and he refused to provide them with arms or even knives. At sunset, Fidalgo’s crew fired a cannon to warn the People of the Cape to stay away from the Princessa and the outpost until dawn. Not only did these actions highlight the geography of fear that must have weighed on Fidalgo’s mind, but they also indicate that Fidalgo understood the tenuous hold imperial Spain had over Makah space.

At the beginning of July, Antonio Serantes, the Princessa’s pilot, disappeared while hunting in the woods behind the outpost. The following morning, twenty men and several dogs searched the woods in vain. Meanwhile, a Makah told Fidalgo that Chief Tatoosh had killed the Spanish pilot. Although the Spanish sources do not note what would have caused Tatoosh to kill Serantes, Makah oral histories from the 1860s relate that the People of the Cape had killed Serantes for committing several rapes.68 In a fit of rage, Fidalgo fired on two canoes of Makahs, killing all within except a boy of fifteen and a girl of six.⁶⁹ Several days later, Spaniards found Serantes’s body in the woods. When interviewed by Bodega y Quadra not long after this incident, Tatoosh related that non-Makahs had murdered and robbed Serantes before fleeing the area. Although the commander did not believe Tatoosh, he realized the precarious nature of the tiny Spanish settlement and decided to befriend the powerful chief by giving gifts for sharing this information.

While Makahs continued trading with the Spanish, tensions remained high. Canoes of warriors intimidated passing vessels, and chiefs exchanged sea otter pelts with British and American vessels, something that frustrated Fidalgo because these competitors took valuable furs away from him. The People of the Cape told any non-Spanish captain who would listen that they disliked the intruders. Constant Makah threats, coupled with the inability of Bodega y Quadra and George Vancouver—empowered by the British crown to resolve the Nootka Sound Controversy—to settle the Pacific boundary claims between their respective empires, encouraged the viceroy to abandon Neah Bay.⁷⁰ Less than four months after Fidalgo sailed the Princessa into Nuñez Gaona, Bodega y Quadra ordered him to abandon the fledgling outpost and remove his garrison to Nootka Sound. Once the Spanish retreated from Neah Bay, Makahs dismantled the outpost as if to eradicate its former presence. They burned what they could not use, threw the bricks in a nearby creek, and transformed the site into a refuse heap.⁷¹ The People of the Cape had stymied Spanish efforts at producing imperial space in their customary territory.

LEGACIES OF VIOLENCE IN THE ČA·DI· BORDERLAND

As chiefs struggled to maintain their influence in the changing dynamics of the early nineteenth-century ča·di· borderland, they occasionally struck at maritime fur trade vessels in dramatic incidents that became infamous examples of “savage” violence and confirmed non-Native assumptions about indigenous peoples of the region. Two specific incidents, the Mowachaht capture of the Boston in 1803 and the Clayoquot attack on the Tonquin in 1811, clarified for non-Natives a geography of fear for the west coast of Vancouver Island, which contributed to reorienting the maritime fur trade away from these coastal villages and ended the diplomatic protocol that once structured encounters. These changes altered the indigenous sociopolitical dynamics of the ča·di· borderland, strengthening the Makahs’ position at Cape Flattery.

On March 22, 1803, Maquinna and his warriors attacked the crew of the Boston after Captain John Salter had offended the Mowachaht chief. Salter had given Maquinna a double-barreled musket, which broke after a few days’ use. When the chief complained about the defective weapon, Salter angered Maquinna by calling him a liar and snatching away the musket. A few days later, the Mowachaht chief returned. He lured away some sailors, encouraging them to fish for salmon some distance from the Boston. Then he and his warriors killed those remaining on the vessel and lined the quarterdeck with their severed heads. Maquinna spared the lives of John Jewitt and John Thompson, the ship’s blacksmith and sail maker, and enslaved them. They remained as his “white slaves” for almost twenty-eight months. After their period of captivity, Jewitt published the journal (1807) he kept of his time at Nootka Sound and later adapted it into a narrative (1815) and a play (1817) in which he starred. At the time, Jewitt’s captivity narrative sold well, and it has shaped our view of the Northwest Coast and its indigenous peoples for the past two centuries.72

Questions remain about why the Mowachaht chief attacked the Boston. Historian Anya Zilberstein has noted that scholars characterize Maquinna’s action as an episode “in what had become a cycle of Indian retaliation for incidents of Euro-American misconduct and guile.” She correctly critiques this standard assumption for simplifying the complex dynamics of the maritime fur trade and for “relying instead on the well-worn stereotypes of natives as bloodthirsty or victimized primitives.”⁷³ Recent examinations of the maritime fur trade have set this incident within other contexts. Geographer Daniel Clayton, for example, argues that “chiefly power and prestige” motivated Maquinna’s actions.⁷⁴ However, Clayton limits his sociopolitical analysis to neighboring chiefs on Vancouver Island and does not encompass the more relevant dynamics of the larger ča·di· borderland.

Maquinna’s attack on the Boston at Nootka Sound, 1803. The Yuquot chief likely hoped that seizing the vessel would result in a wealth of trade goods that would bolster his waning influence in the ča·di· borderland. Illustration from the 1816 edition of A Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt. Oregon Historical Society, #cn 086321.

Acknowledging the status issues Clayton notes, Zilberstein problematically argues that Maquinna resorted to violence out of desperation caused by food shortages. According to her analysis, she concludes that those living at Yuquot produced few consumables and had to import most of their food. Zilberstein posits that with the advent of the maritime fur trade in the late 1780s, Mowachahts redirected their labor from meeting basic subsistence needs toward hunting sea otters.75 In turn, they exchanged goods procured from non-Native traders for foodstuffs from indigenous neighbors. When the supply of foreign products dried up with the collapse of overhunted sea otter populations, those living at Yuquot became susceptible to periodic food shortages and subsequent spells of hunger. Citing Jewitt’s account of his time at Yuquot, Zilberstein argues that hard times hit the Mowachaht village in the early nineteenth century. On April 9, 1804, Jewitt complained that “we cannot get any thing to eat except what we are obliged to sell our wearing apparel for. The natives eat only once a day, and their meal consists of cockles, muscles, &c.”76 Even Maquinna worried about the food shortage. Concerned that his people might kill him if he could not provide, the chief ordered Jewitt to arm himself with a brace of pistols and a cutlass to keep watch at night.

But did an increasingly desperate subsistence situation at Yuquot provoke Maquinna’s attack on the Boston? Probably not. Zilberstein is misreading the evidence when she cites Jewitt’s observation of imported foodstuffs as proof that Mowachaht labor had reoriented to such a degree that they could no longer provide their own sustenance. Because local environments provided unequal kinds and quantities of resources, indigenous borderlanders regularly exchanged large amounts of different types of salmon, berries, other fish and shellfish (dried and fresh), and whale oil. Zilberstein bases her conclusion on the assumption that before the maritime fur trade, Mowachahts labored only to provide for their own subsistence. These Vancouver Islanders were one of many groups who fished and hunted for commercial purposes long before Europeans came to the Northwest Coast. By 1795, trade in sea otter skins had dropped precipitously at Yuquot, and fewer vessels visited as they began acquiring furs from Haidas on the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia.⁷⁷ It seems improbable that Maquinna or any other leader at Friendly Cove allowed his people to go hungry from 1795 until 1803, when the chief eventually had an opportunity to seize the Boston’s supply of trade goods that could then be exchanged for needed food from neighboring peoples. Finally, periodic food shortages on the Northwest Coast were not uncommon. A Makah oral history recounts a time of famine caused by a lengthy period of rough weather that made fishing dangerous and difficult. Similarly, Mackay suffered food privations during his time at Nootka Sound from 1786 to 1787.⁷⁸ Concluding that Mowachahts reoriented their practices so radically away from basic subsistence needs in order to secure European goods exemplifies the problematic trope of classic dependency theory in American Indian history, namely that Native desires for whatever non-Native traders offered caused Indians to neglect critical subsistence and cultural activities.⁷⁹

Analyzing Maquinna’s decision within the context of the ča·di· borderland reveals a different possible conclusion and complex motives for his assault on the Boston. The Mowachaht chief desired to strike back at mamnis because of earlier violence perpetuated against his people. While Salter’s rudeness over a broken musket sparked the actual violence, Maquinna later confided to Jewitt that earlier incidents, such as the Spanish killing of Callicum and other transgressions, had made the Mowachahts “resolved to have revenge on the first ship they should fall in with.” Nuu-chah-nulth oral histories from Nootka Sound blame Spanish violence for angering Mowachahts to the point of attacking any mamni vessel when the opportunity presented itself.80

But more than the chief’s desire for revenge caused Maquinna’s attack on the Boston. By 1803, few furs could be found in parts of the ča·di· borderland such as Friendly Cove. Much to the disadvantage of some chiefs, the dearth of sea otter pelts was not uniform throughout the borderlands. Tatoosh and Wickaninnish had access to sea otter pelts well into the nineteenth century, a situation that must have rankled their rival, Maquinna.⁸¹ The small amount that he had came from distant villages. These numbers had been dwindling since the late 1790s, when traders began collecting furs from the supplier villages, thereby cutting out Maquinna as the middleman. The Nimpkish Kwakwaka’wakw, who once sent their furs to Maquinna via the overland “grease trails,” began exchanging the valuable pelts directly with non-Native traders in the early 1790s. By the turn of the century, the Nimpkish encountered non-Native traders frequently enough that they no longer sent furs to Maquinna.⁸² Fewer furs meant that the Mowachaht chief secured a smaller quantity of trade goods, which resulted in his waning influence in the ča·di· borderland. During this time, the dwindling number of vessels that stopped at Friendly Cove only sought supplies: fresh and dried fish, whale oil, freshwater, and timber to repair ships. These provisions brought fewer goods than what had once come to Maquinna and his people. Therefore, his desire to reestablish his influence by seizing a wealth of trade goods contributed toward the decision to attack the Boston. Maquinna was desperate; but his desperation lay in his declining influence with respect to neighboring chiefs such as Wickaninnish and Tatoosh.

The Mowachaht chief exploited his victory to enhance his status and that of his son. At Maquinna’s invitation, a great number of canoes from twenty tribal nations to the north and south arrived at Yuquot a few days after taking the Boston. The Mowachaht chief arranged to awe his visitors with his rejuvenated chiefly power. He assembled his warriors on the beach, each man carrying at least one loaded musket and wearing clothes pillaged from the vessel. Years later, Jewitt recalled, “Nothing could be more ludicrous than the appearance of this motley group of savages collected on the shore, dressed, as they were, with their ill-gotten finery, in the most fantastic manner, some in women’s smocks, taken from our cargo, others in Kotsacks, (or cloaks,) of blue, red, or yellow broadcloth, with stockings drawn over their heads, and their necks hung round with numbers of powder-horns, shot-bags, and cartouch-boxes, some of them having no less than ten muskets a piece on their shoulders, and five or six daggers in their girdles.”⁸³ One of Maquinna’s new white slaves, Thompson, readied a cannon that the chief had mounted in front of his longhouse. When the visitors approached, Maquinna leaped to the roof of his longhouse, began drumming on the boards, and then ordered the muskets and cannon fired. Afterward, he invited his guests into his longhouse, where he feasted them for days on whale blubber, smoked herring spawn, dried fish, and whale oil. In a grand potlatch, Maquinna gifted part of the seized loot to his guests, all in the name of his son, Sat-sat-sok-sis. These crafted displays illustrated to all that Maquinna and his lineage still held enough power to control space on his own terms.

Yet Maquinna had his critics, and their views even shaped some Nuu-chah-nulth communities’ memories of the chief. At the time, the attack on the Boston angered some because it had driven away the valuable trade vessels. More than a year after the seizure of the Boston, rumors of borderlanders “massacreing one another for want of cloth, muskets, &c.” reached Nootka Sound, and Maquinna worried that neighboring peoples held him responsible and intended to kill him.84 Similarly, a few late twentieth-century oral histories remember Maquinna unflatteringly as “the first white man” among their people and characterize him as arrogant, aggressive, and high-handed. They criticize him for acting on his own decisions rather than consulting his people and keeping their best interests in mind, damning criticisms that would have resonated with the Mowachaht chief in the early nineteenth century.⁸⁵

Eight years after Maquinna’s seizure of the Boston, another successful attack on a maritime fur trading ship seemed to confirm to non-Natives the violent nature of Indian peoples in the ča·di· borderland. After insulting a Clayoquot chief, Euro-American captain Jonathan Thorn lost his life and the Tonquin in June 1811. The German-born New York financier John Jacob Astor had hired Thorn to transport one of the two parties headed west to establish the Pacific Fur Company in Oregon Country. During the eight-month voyage from New York to the mouth of the Columbia, Thorn had earned a reputation for irascibility and stubbornness, especially when dealing with indigenous peoples and his inexperienced crew. On March 22, 1811, his poor judgment cost the lives of eight crewmembers when he sent them into treacherous waters at the mouth of the Columbia to seek a channel for the Tonquin. Before sailing into Clayoquot Sound, Captain Thorn had demonstrated characteristics that made him unsuited for cross-cultural negotiation.⁸⁶

Thorn’s disrespect sparked the Clayoquot attack on the Tonquin. The dispute began when Thorn and Nook-a-mis, an elderly chief from Echachis village, disagreed over the low price of two blankets that the captain would pay for each sea otter skin. Exploding in anger, Thorn kicked aside Nook-a-mis’s pile of skins, verbally abused the chief in front of his people, and struck him across the face with one of the pelts. After the insulted Nook-a-mis and his people left the Tonquin, Shee-wish, the youngest son of Wickaninnish, returned the next day with a large number of Clayoquots, offering furs to trade. Shee-wish negotiated for a rate of three blankets and a knife per skin, a deal to which Thorn agreed. The captain allowed many Clayoquots onboard, despite warnings from Joseachal, the Quinault interpreter Thorn had hired for the voyage. As a brisk trade ensued—and armed each Indian man with at least one knife—the crew became anxious, especially when they noticed that the few women present stayed in the canoes. Thorn scorned their anxieties, believing that they could repel any attack. But moments later, he became afraid when Clayoquots crowded close and cut him off from the crew. At this point, he ordered the Indians back to their canoes and sent his crew scurrying to ready the ship to sail away. Instead of departing, the Clayoquots grabbed their recently acquired knives, pulled other weapons from the furs, and attacked. Striking crewmembers unconscious, they threw them into the sea, where women in canoes dispatched them with their paddles. After Thorn stabbed Shee-wish and cast him down a hatch, Wickaninnish’s brother, an “uncommonly strong Indian,” constrained the captain while warriors clubbed him to death. Leaping overboard, the interpreter surrendered himself to the women. Because his sister was married to a Clayoquot, they did not kill him.87

Four to six survivors, including a few Native Hawaiians, ignited some black powder, and in the ensuing fire, they made their escape. Several slipped away in a small boat and set out for the mouth of the Columbia River, but a gale drove them aground at Cape Flattery, where Makahs executed them.⁸⁸ The other survivors (probably the Native Hawaiians) swam ashore, where they died at the hands of Clayoquots. Believing that they had put out the fire, Clayoquots began to tow the Tonquin to Tin-Wis, a nearby village; however, the still smoldering fire ignited the ship’s magazine, nine thousand pounds of gunpowder the vessel was carrying to the Russian-American Company outpost at Sitka. The resultant explosion destroyed the ship and killed between eighty and two hundred Clayoquots.⁸⁹ A possible eyewitness recalled decades later, “The noise of the explosion made the earth tremble, and … fragments of the ship were flying through the air everywhere.”⁹⁰ After the Tonquin incident, the Clayoquot community closed in on itself. Some saw the explosion and the deaths of many warriors as a sign that their people should withdraw from the maritime fur trade. One grandmother even took her family away from the oceanside village, returning to the Clayoquots’ ancestral home at Kennedy Lake. Today’s Tla-o-qui-ahts (Clayoquots) remember this as a “grim event” in their history.⁹¹

Unlike Maquinna’s seizure of the Boston, the attack on the Tonquin did not result in a wealth of looted goods. However, similar motivations appear to have precipitated this incident. In both cases, captains had disrespected a ranking titleholder. Like other indigenous peoples in the region, Clayoquots had suffered earlier insults from non-Native captains and crew. Two Americans had upset Wickaninnish separately in 1793 and 1796 when they failed to turn over vessels the chief had paid for with down payments of prime sea otter skins.92 Fresh on the minds of Clayoquots in 1811 was the more recent affront, when the Bostonian Captain Ayres had hired and then abandoned a dozen seal hunters earlier that year on the Farallon Islands off the northern California coast. This angered Wickaninnish, who vowed to “avenge themselves on the first white men who appeared among them.”⁹³ The Tonquin turned out to be that ship. Clayoquot Sound communities also suffered from smaller amounts of furs than they once had, although the declining number of available sea otter pelts was less severe than the situation in Nootka Sound because Wickaninnish still had suppliers from distant villages on Vancouver Island. This meant that Clayoquot chiefs would have also worried about their waning influence in the borderlands.

Word of each vessel’s loss traveled throughout the Pacific and beyond, fueled by a combination of Northwest Coast peoples spreading the news and maritime ship captains carrying it to distant ports. Four days after the capture of the Boston, two ships, the Juno and the Mary, entered Nootka Sound and fled after Mowachahts fired on them with the captured muskets. In mid-August 1803, visiting Clayoquots informed Jewitt that a captain anchored in the Columbia River had told Chinooks that he knew of the two survivors. By the end of that month, Spanish officials in Monterrey first heard about the loss of the Boston when John Brown, captain of the Alexander (Boston), reported that he had almost suffered the same fate. News of the cannon battery Maquinna had set up in front of the village and the existence of a few survivors traveled on to Mexico City and Madrid via San Blas and cooled any plans the Spanish had about reoccupying Nootka Sound. By April 25, 1804, word had reached Boston, probably via Canton or the Sandwich Islands, when a brief report appeared in a local newspaper; but it took another three years for a more complete recounting of the loss of the Boston to become known in the Northeast. Similarly, within a matter of weeks, local Indians brought rumors of the demise of the Tonquin to Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River and to maritime fur trade vessels collecting sea otter skins at Nahwitti village located in Tlatlasikwala Kwakwaka’wakw lands on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Based on news from vessels returning from the Pacific, the first published account of the loss of the Tonquin appeared in a New York newspaper on April 22, 1812. By the fall of 1813, papers in the Northeast had published versions of the interpreter Joseachal’s eyewitness account and at least one periodical in London had duplicated it.⁹⁴ This reportage made clear that despite decades of encounters, non-Native navigators and traders had failed to turn these into Spanish, British, or US spaces.

The 1803 and 1811 attacks on these two US vessels cast a long shadow over the ča·di· borderland and changed the local contours of the maritime fur trade. For some time after Maquinna’s seizure of the Boston, vessels avoided Nootka Sound, fearing that they, too, would suffer the same fate. With fewer ships visiting Yuquot, Maquinna had to rely on indigenous trade networks to send the few sea otter pelts that he did procure to other trading ports, such as Nahwitti village and Fort George (what the British renamed Fort Astoria after the Northwest Fur Company of Montreal took it over during the War of 1812), probably through Makah connections at Cape Flattery. This represented a critical reversal of the earlier pattern where Maquinna received furs from others and benefited from monopolizing the exchanges with traders. Wickaninnish and Clayoquots experienced a similar outcome because trading ships shunned their villages for several years after the losses of the Boston and Tonquin. Just as conflict among indigenous peoples and Spaniards had made non-Native crews afraid when stopping on the Washington coast in the 1780s, Nuu-chah-nulth attacks on these two vessels created a geography of fear along the entire west coast of Vancouver Island. Now that captains had more knowledge of the region, they realized that they could trade with friendlier Indian peoples to the north and south and still procure furs while avoiding villages now seen as dangerous. This situation privileged Makah chiefs because ships stopped at the Cape Flattery villages in lieu of Yuquot and Clayoquot. The New Hazard, a trading brig from Salem, Massachusetts, deliberately sailed past Nootka Sound about two weeks after hearing rumors of the loss of the Tonquin. Instead, the New Hazard headed south to Cape Flattery, where the crew purchased whale oil and slaves from Makahs.95

When vessels began visiting Vancouver Island villages once again, high-ranking chiefs kept a low profile. In 1817, when the French Bordelais sailed into Nootka Sound, Maquinna approached in a small canoe. Unlike his conduct during previous visits by non-Native ships, Maquinna did not announce his presence with a parade of canoes. Captain Camille de Roquefeuil noted, “There was no ceremony that announced the presence of their chief, but the natives having pointed him out to me, I invited him to come on board.” Once aboard, the captain gave the Mowachaht chief a small meal, a present, and a seven-gun salute. Maquinna reciprocated with three small sea otter furs, but he demanded immediate payment for them. Worried that Maquinna might mount an attack on the Bordelais, the captain deployed the boarding nets, which prevented people from climbing aboard anywhere along the vessel, and kept the ship a fair distance away from Yuquot. Eight years later, a Hudson’s Bay Company ship, the William and Ann, sailed into Nootka Sound. This time, a small flotilla of canoes greeted them, but Maquinna was absent; he did not board the vessel until it anchored off Yuquot. Unlike previous encounters with traders, the Mowachaht chief had no sea otter pelts to offer because Native hunters had nearly wiped out the species in waters over which Maquinna controlled. As with the Bordelais, the HBC ship took extra precautions to prevent an attack.96

Diplomatic protocols also changed in high encounter areas outside Nootka Sound because chiefs questioned their safety aboard vessels. When the Bordelais made a second visit to Nootka Sound in 1818, a delegation from Clayoquot—minus Wickaninnish—tried to lure the French vessel away from Maquinna’s space. The French did not trust the offer, and they sailed south for California instead of visiting Clayoquot Sound. Similarly, when the William and Ann entered Makah waters after its visit to Nootka Sound, no diplomatic protocol took place. Canoes carrying fish greeted the vessel, but Chief Tatoosh was not among the passengers. Instead, he sent a lower-ranking chief, one of his brothers, to facilitate the exchange of fish for trade goods.⁹⁷ The highest-ranking chiefs, Maquinna, Tatoosh, and Wickaninnish, no longer felt safe leading delegations to trading vessels. They feared that captains might take them hostage to extort furs from them or to punish them for attacks on non-Native vessels. The diplomatic protocol that had once provided structure for encounters between Natives and non-Natives appears to have become a casualty of violence. Abandoning the diplomatic protocol eroded the authority and influence that some chiefs had accrued through monopolizing the maritime fur trade exchanges.

Maquinna, Wickaninnish, and Tatoosh dominated much of the maritime fur trade in the ča·di· borderland. The manners of their deaths in the 1820s illustrate the consequences of their responses to the changing dynamics of the indigenous marine borderlands in the early nineteenth century. Of the three, we have specific information only about the death of Maquinna. The last archival reference to Maquinna comes from an HBC trader in 1825—he described the infamous Mowachaht chief as an “ageing man.” Oral histories report that in the late 1820s, Maquinna planned to raid his uncle’s Muchalaht village to take their salmon stream. Muchalaht women living at Yuquot warned their people after overhearing the chief’s plan. When Maquinna and his warriors paddled upriver toward the target village, his uncle led an ambush and killed Maquinna by holding his head underwater until he drowned.⁹⁸

The situation and manner of Maquinna’s death reveal that the desperation of this maritime fur trade chief continued to mount after the 1803 capture of the Boston. When naturalist John Scouler visited Nootka Sound in 1825, he noted the scarcity of European goods among the Mowachaht.99 Now that the maritime fur trade had long shifted away from Friendly Cove and Maquinna’s control, the Mowachaht chief believed that he needed to do something dramatic, on the scale of what he had accomplished more than two decades earlier with his attack on the Boston—the aged leader decided to seize a valuable indigenous resource, a nearby productive salmon stream owned by his uncle. With the paucity of non-Native vessels stopping at Nootka Sound and the Mowachahts’ limited supply of sea otter pelts, Maquinna turned to a common strategy in the ča·di· borderland: seizing a lucrative resource site from a rival in order to augment one’s influence.

The deaths of Tatoosh and Wickaninnish were neither dramatic nor violent. No oral histories tell of these leaders dying at the hands of rivals while making desperate gambles to maintain or reestablish influence. This suggests that these chiefs died of old age or by other normal means. When Scouler sailed into Makah waters in 1825, he met an elderly brother to the still-living Tatoosh. This is the last archival reference to the Makah chief. By 1841, when Wilkes’s US Exploring Expedition lingered at Neah Bay, they encountered Chief George, then the ranking titleholder. Wickaninnish also seems to have died of old age sometime after 1820.¹⁰⁰

In contrast to the violent death of Maquinna, the quiet passings of Tatoosh and Wickaninnish illuminate the changing borderlands conditions that privileged the People of the Cape and Clayoquots. First, the villages of Cape Flattery and Clayoquot Sound were better positioned to benefit from valuable indigenous trade goods harvested from whales and other sea mammals. From his time at Nootka Sound at the beginning of the century, Jewitt noted that Klai-zarts (Makahs) and Wickaninnish’s people (Clayoquots) provided great quantities of whale oil and other sea mammal products. During the same period, he described Maquinna’s concern over his lack of whaling success, a significant problem because Tatoosh and Wickaninnish could then maintain their influence in the borderlands more easily than Maquinna once the maritime fur trade shifted away from Nootka Sound.¹⁰¹ Second, unlike the inhabitants of Nootka Sound, Makahs and Clayoquots still had access to sea otter pelts, albeit in smaller quantities than before. This meant that non-Native vessels traded greater quantities and higher-quality goods with the People of the Cape and Clayoquots for the valued furs. Again, this gave Tatoosh and Wickaninnish an advantage over their rival Maquinna. Finally, because the dramatic attacks on vessels at Nootka and Clayoquot had encouraged vessels to anchor at Neah Bay instead, this also benefited Tatoosh over his Nuu-chah-nulth rivals. Together, these advantages meant that Wickaninnish and especially Tatoosh did not need to resort to desperate and dangerous violence against neighbors or relatives to maintain or reestablish their authority in the borderlands. Violence—or the lack thereof—continued to play a pivotal role in the political dynamics of the ča·di· borderland well into the nineteenth century.

Maritime fur trade accounts and logbooks confirm that theft, intimidation, and violent conflict characterized this industry. Many—but not all—traders believed that Indian attacks on them were unprovoked and due to the inherently “savage” nature of Natives. This was not the case. Borderlands dynamics and previous incidents established the context of subsequent encounters and made violence multidimensional as Natives clashed with other indigenous peoples and mamnis or babałids. Colonialism and imperial processes did not create this violence. Instead, they exacerbated existing, indigenous lines of tension and conflict, characteristics of the ča·di· borderland where distinct peoples contested and shared spaces and resources as they had for generations before and after the arrival of Europeans.

But violence also had its benefits. Certain chiefs and their people gained from conflict and tension in other parts of the borderlands. Direct violence against weaker rivals resulted in the expansion of tribal spaces, alliances, and resources. Some chiefs manipulated the dynamics of conflict to expand their influence, such as when Tatoosh allied with Pacheedahts to stop both Meares’s exploration and the growth of Wickaninnish’s influence. This extended Makah space deeper into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Dramatic incidents of violence, such as Nuu-chah-nulth attacks on the Boston and Tonquin, indirectly benefited the People of the Cape by making Neah Bay a safer port of call than Vancouver Island villages. This situation shaped the dynamics of the land fur trade, which came to eclipse the maritime fur trade in the Pacific Northwest.

Indigenous chiefs such as Maquinna, Tatoosh, and Wickaninnish used violence to produce and control space on their own terms. They deployed violence strategically to gain or protect resources and spaces. Chiefs also used violence as a stabilizing factor to confront rivals who became too powerful. Additionally, they employed violence to control people within the spaces over which they held authority. Most important, indigenous leaders applied violence to interrupt Europeans and Euro-Americans from making imperial spaces in the region. Some individuals and peoples—especially Makahs and their various chiefs—disrupted imperial efforts at least through the early 1850s. However, several important events and the establishment of colonial borderlands began to challenge the power of indigenous leaders in the ča·di· borderland in the decades following the maritime fur trade.