On December 24, 1851, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s brig Una wrecked at Neah Bay after having sheltered there for a few days. Even with both anchors down, the ship was blown by strong winds into Waadah Island at the opening of the bay. Bound from Fort Simpson, about five hundred miles to the north, to Fort Victoria at the southern end of Vancouver Island, the Una carried a load of furs and £300 worth of gold that the crew had collected from the Queen Charlotte Islands along the northern coast of British Columbia. Makahs salvaged stores, rigging, and other flotsam from the wreck of the 187-ton vessel. According to Northwest Coast ownership standards, chiefs of the People of the Cape (Makahs) owned whatever washed ashore at Neah Bay. Conflict erupted, however, when the Una’s crew and passengers attempted to prevent Makahs from exercising their salvage rights. In the fray, someone stabbed a passenger, Sudaał, daughter of a Gispaxlo’ots (Tsimshian) chief and wife of Fort Simpson’s chief trader, John Kennedy. A prominent individual in Northwest Coast and Hudson’s Bay Company societies, Sudaał was probably known by some of the People of the Cape; perhaps she was injured while attempting to use her high status to protect the ship’s cargo. Two American trading vessels, the Damariscove and Susan Sturges—also anchored in Neah Bay—intervened and took aboard the Una’s crew, passengers, and valuable cargo. As the survivor-laden ships departed, someone set fire to the wreck’s remains, demonstrating that the foreshore and sea around Cape Flattery was still Makah space.1
Two Makah leaders, Chiefs Yela
ub (“yeh-luh-koob”) and 
isi·t (“klih-seet”), knew that they needed to make some effort to appease the King George men (British) of the Hudson’s Bay Company and officials of the nearby Vancouver Island Colony. The chiefs would have been eager to avoid having British gunboats shell Makah villages in reprisal. More important, they would have desired to maintain cordial relations with the company, which provided them with valuable trade goods that they used to maintain their authority among the People of the Cape and neighbors in the ča·di· borderland. They sent messages to James Douglas, HBC chief factor and governor of the colony, apologizing for their people’s conduct and offering to pay for the stolen and damaged property. As one of the chiefs explained, they were absent at the time of the incident, so they could not control the villagers. Recognizing an opportunity, Yelaub and isi·t attempted to turn this incident to their advantage. By claiming their absence when the aggressive actions and violence occurred, they could point to the perpetrators as “bad” Indians while positioning themselves as the “good” chiefs with whom Douglas could work.2
In fact, one Makah leader—probably Yelaub—performed his version of the “good” chief when the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Cadborough sailed into Neah Bay a month later, seeking restitution for damage to British property and pride.3 Instead of being cowed by this symbol of empire, he contained the threat by deploying customary Northwest Coast diplomacy. The Makah chief told Charles Dodd, the commander of the expedition, that he had already executed ten of the plunderers and burned alive the one accused of setting the vessel on fire. In reality, this leader had probably done nothing of the kind. If he had executed or immolated anyone, the individual would have been a slave. Within Northwest Coast societies, high-status individuals occasionally used slaves as proxies to pay for murders, property damage, and theft, a fact that Dodd, an experienced HBC employee, might have known. Although the Makah leader never offered up any physical evidence of the grisly justice, the Cadborough’s commander quietly accepted the chief’s assurances about punishing the perpetrators, thereby acknowledging this leader’s authority to punish his people for supposed crimes against British citizens and property. Yelaub then restored to the King George men every article of value that his people still possessed from the Una. Additionally, he offered an annual payment of whale oil as restitution. This leader had guessed that the expiations would result in the Cadborough’s departure from Makah waters without incident.4
While positioning himself as a broker of peace between King George men and the People of the Cape, Chief Yelaub followed indigenous protocols of Northwest Coast justice rather than acquiescing to British intimidation. A Native leader, not British officials, had “executed” the guilty Indians, and he paid the aggrieved party for the loss of property, as if making peace with another chief rather than suffering extortion from a coercive imperial agent. At this time, neither Great Britain nor the United States could apparently exercise Max Weber’s essential power of the state at Cape Flattery—neither could “lay claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence” at Neah Bay.5 Makah chiefs still held this power, despite Britain’s commercial hold on the area through the land-based fur trade and US territorial claims to the region. Yet Natives such as isi·t and Yelaub valued the trading relationship they had with the King George men, and they worried that the aggressive actions of some of their people jeopardized opportunities to benefit from the settler-colonial world of the mid-nineteenth century. Similarly, HBC employees, settlers, and colonial officials found themselves balancing retributive violence with reliance on local Indians, who provided the furs, supplies, and food that made colonialism possible in the Northwest Coast. Together these various stakeholders engaged one another and the new opportunities and challenges presented by the expanding settler-colonial world to meet differing needs of authority on the shifting grounds and waters of the borderlands.
One set of changes revolved around the geopolitical claims to the region. From the 1770s through the 1840s, competing empires—including Russia, Spain, France, Great Britain, and the United States—drew boundary lines throughout the Pacific Northwest and attempted to reconfigure preexisting indigenous spaces, such as the ča·di· borderland, into places of commerce and empire. By the early 1820s, these overlapping colonial claims had simplified into the Oregon Country, a region whose joint occupation the United States and Great Britain made official through the Anglo-American Convention of 1818. According to the dominant historical narrative, the Pacific Northwest went from a borderland to a bordered land in 1846 when these two nations settled the boundary issue by creating a border from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean along the forty-ninth parallel and extending through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, cutting through Makah marine space. This transformation supposedly meant that the messy complexities of the colonial borderlands—embodied through the jointly occupied Oregon Country, the ambiguous identities of people living there, and the ethnic diversity and mixed-race world of the fur trade—settled into a tidy division between the US and British Wests.6 But the reality was not as neat as non-Native colonial and territorial officials desired because of the persistence of the ča·di· borderland’s characteristics.
Considering this period from a Makah perspective highlights not only continued indigenous agency and power but also the palimpsest nature of this borderland.7 New international boundaries, such as the one that separated the two halves of the Oregon Country, “remained dotted lines that took a generation to solidify.”8 When nation-states consolidated their power in the hinterlands, indigenous borderlanders supposedly lost autonomy. The metaphor of the palimpsest, however, allows us to uncover competing histories, such as those of the People of the Cape, whose actions demonstrate that the indigenous dynamics of the ča·di· borderland persisted longer than a single generation and after nation-state control grew. Paddling in canoes, trading, marrying, and fighting among the many villages of the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island, Northwest Coast peoples demonstrated that the indigenous ča·di· borderland continued to exist alongside the colonial borderlands. Instead of there being one borderland zone with conditions shaped and controlled by newcomers and distant colonial officials, two layers of overlapping and interacting borderlands defined this space.
These geopolitical changes unfolded within the context of the land-based fur trade, an industry that shaped the lives of isi·t and Yelaub much as the maritime fur trade had done for previous chiefs in the ča·di· borderland. The new industry resembled its maritime antecedent because both depended on the complex, interconnected relationships among numerous peoples—both Native and non-Native—of the Northwest Coast. From the beginning of the land-based fur trade in the early nineteenth century, indigenous contributions allowed for non-Native survival and success, highlighting the way that different peoples, societies, and practices “imbricated” into the regional fabric of the Northwest Coast.9 Similar to the maritime fur trade, the land-based industry depended on safe, ordered spaces for profitable exchanges. But different strategies for creating safety and order marked the greatest contrast between the two trades, influenced the lives of local indigenous peoples, and altered the dynamics of power in the region. The land-based fur trade established long-term, terrestrial toeholds for non-Natives in the Pacific Northwest. Kernels of settlement, the HBC forts and the trade goods they provided made the company influential and drew new kinds of non-Natives to the region. During the 1840s, US and British settlers began establishing sawmills, fishing operations, farms, and small settlements in the region. Eager to protect these newcomers, the colonial governments of the United Kingdom and the United States grappled with policies for managing the large populations of Indians who still outnumbered whites.
Influential Makah chiefs engaged trade and colonization in personal ways to maintain their ability to control space, and their actions helped to make colonialism possible in this region.10 By the 1850s, two Neah Bay chiefs—Yelaub and isi·t—emerged as the Makah Nation’s faces to the settler-colonial world. Born in 1818 or 1819 to a prominent Makah trader, Yelaub worked as a kitchen scullion at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Langley, located about thirty miles up the Fraser River, which empties into the eastern waters of the ča·di· borderland. There he learned English and lived among King George men who gave him a new name, Flattery Jack, and likely treated him poorly due to his age, race, and position in the kitchens. After someone murdered his father in 1831, the teenage Yelaub took over the family trading activities, traveling throughout the borderlands and beyond to exchange animal skins, ha·ykwa (dentalia shells used as currency), and slaves. Largely through trading, Yelaub rose to power among the People of the Cape, and he cultivated ties with several HBC personnel, who commonly called the village at Neah Bay “Flattery Jack’s Village.” There, he and his extended family lived in a longhouse that was about a hundred feet long by 1850, an indication of his high status.11
Known to non-Natives as “the White Chief” because of his light complexion and Russian heritage through his father, isi·t competed against Yelaub and other chiefs for authority among the People of the Cape. Born sometime between 1807 and 1812, he came of age as a whaler just as US and British coastal traders began purchasing large quantities of whale oil from Makahs. After the 1846 death of George, the previous ranking Makah titleholder, isi·t used the wealth garnered from whale oil to secure his position as the highest chief among the People of the Cape. He also married the sister of S’Hai-ak (“s-hay-uhk”), a prominent chief among the neighboring S’Klallams, a move that restored peaceful relations between the two tribal nations. Probably to counter the influence of Yelaub, isi·t sought closer ties with Bostons (Euro-American officials and traders) by the early 1850s.12
During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Yelaub’s and isi·t’s actions reveal aspects of Makah politics. The People of the Cape employed customary Northwest Coast leadership strategies to maintain their people’s autonomy in the face of mounting settler-colonial pressure, such as the racialized nature of power in this emerging colonial borderland. During the mid-nineteenth century, however, Native deaths from epidemics combined with increasing numbers of non-Native immigrants to change the demographics of the region and undercut the ability of Indians to define and control space on indigenous terms. In the years following the burning of the Una, a suite of diseases hammered the People of the Cape and other Native borderlanders. These catastrophes threatened to unravel the networks of kinship and trade that bound together the many peoples of the ča·di· borderland; that this did not occur is a testament to the resilience of the Makahs and their neighbors.
THE LAND-BASED FUR TRADE AND RISE OF THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY, 1811–1848
Native responses to the rising presence of King George men and Bostons transformed the ča·di· borderland into the sociopolitical region in which isi·t and Yelaub emerged as Makah leaders. Beginning in the 1810s, Makahs and other indigenous peoples of this marine borderland encountered more people from outside the Northwest Coast. Provided to non-Natives by various indigenous peoples, a wealth of natural resource commodities—furs, fish, whale oil, timber, and coal—drew newcomers to the region during the first half of the nineteenth century. Both isi·t and Yelaub developed ties to the most powerful newcomer, the Hudson’s Bay Company, as the People of the Cape became one of the key indigenous peoples central to the company’s regional success. When HBC forts appeared in the Northwest Coast, the young isi·t and Yelaub confronted the company’s efforts to produce and control space in and around the outposts. During this period, HBC officials at the forts employed retributive violence against Indians for supposed depredations on whites and their property. This established a precedent for the racialized nature of settler-colonial power that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.13 Yet Makah chiefs such as isi·t and Yelaub retained enough power to interrupt imperial processes at least until the early 1850s.
From the beginning, the new iteration of the fur trade presented Makahs with competition and opportunity, a pattern that carried through many of the later changes the People of the Cape faced. Although established during the maritime fur trade, Fort Astoria became the first land-based fur trade outpost at the edge of the ča·di· borderland. Having made his fortune in the Northeastern fur trade after emigrating from Germany to the United States, John Jacob Astor financed the Pacific Fur Company (PFC), whose employees erected Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River in 1811. Astor planned to collect furs from Indian hunters around the Columbia basin, ship the pelts to China, and exchange them for valuable products that could then be sold to US consumers. But Astor focused even more on attempting to monopolize provisioning the Russian-American Company’s settlements to the far north, thereby undercutting the incentive for potential competitors in the North Pacific. His plans went far beyond “calculations of profit”—he sought to extend US political and economic dominion beyond the Rockies, which would inhibit the expansion of his primary competitors, the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, into the Pacific Northwest. But the early loss of the Tonquin, en route to the Russian outpost of New Archangel (Sitka, Alaska) to deliver a load of gunpowder and additional goods, and other difficulties stymied Astor’s plans. By the fall of 1813, in the midst of the war between Britain and the United States, the Pacific Fur Company’s partners at Fort Astoria decided to abandon the enterprise. They sold the fort and the company’s goods and furs to the North West Company, and many of the personnel stayed on with the new owners. With no other land-based operations to contend with at this point, the newly renamed Fort George continued to be an important hub during the waning years of the maritime fur trade.14
Drawn by the trade’s opportunities for goods and labor, indigenous peoples both local and from farther away proved central to the success of the land-based fur trade. The Tonquin brought a dozen Kanakas (Native Hawaiians) to the Columbia River basin, and the Pacific Fur Company’s Beaver brought another sixteen to Fort Astoria in May 1812. In addition to helping to construct and maintain the fort, these men played a critical role in sustaining the Astorians by crewing vessels, felling trees, clearing land, tending livestock, maintaining the post garden, foraging for edibles, hunting deer and elk, and fishing.15 The Astorians and their Kanaka employees would have failed from the beginning had they not received the consent and assistance of local Native leaders, such as Chiefs Concomly (Chinook) and Coalpo (Clatsop). Already adept at handling non-Natives through the maritime fur trade and Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, which wintered at the mouth of the Columbia River from 1805 to 1806, Concomly and Coalpo understood the advantages to be gained from a local fort to which they could control access. Chinooks, Clatsops, and other Lower Columbia peoples protected the Astorians from hostile Indians, piloted ships across the treacherous sandbars of the river, passed on news and intelligence of regional events, and guided trade and reconnaissance expeditions into the interior and along the coast. They also performed more quotidian assistance as porters, hunters, gatherers, and fishers; women sold Astorians hats, moccasins, and baskets. As Alexander Ross, one of the fort’s clerks, complained, they “had to depend at all times on the success or good-will of the natives.” The Astorians’ amicable relationships often depended on their intimacy with Native women of rank and power. Daughters of prominent chiefs married white employees of the fort, and these exogamous relations fostered commercial ties and strategic alliances vital for the outsiders’ survival and success.16
Although they lived two hundred miles away, Makahs saw Fort Astoria as a potential trade competitor and just another small polity, one of several “little sovereignties” that composed indigenous Oregon from 1792 to 1822.17 During a reconnaissance to lands and peoples along the coast, Robert Stuart, a junior partner in the Pacific Fur Company, received warnings from Quinaults of a numerous and “wicked” nation to the north that “kill a great many Beaver & dispose of them (as well as the Quinhalt people, of their sea otter, of which they kill a considerable number) to the Neweetians for Hyquoyas.” Quinaults were likely referring to Makahs, who leveraged exchange and kinship networks to control the flow of furs, slaves, ha·ykwa, and other goods from peoples living between the mouth of the Columbia River and Nahwitti, a Tlatlasikwala Kwakwaka’wakw village at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. During the summer months, Indians from the north visited Baker’s Bay on the northern side of the Columbia’s mouth to fish and trade. Concomly warned PFC officials that these visitors were trying to encourage Chinooks to assist them in destroying the fort. Astorians conflated most northern Indians into “Neweetie Indians” and assumed that they were from Vancouver Island, although these northern visitors were more likely Makahs. Not only did they have marriage ties with Concomly’s Chinook family and make regular trips to the Columbia River, but they also would have had a significant motivation to attack interloping competitors.18
Although initially plotting to attack Fort Astoria, by 1816, Makahs had decided that without Chinook support, they were better off selling furs to these white traders on the Columbia, who by then were Nor’westers, employees of the North West Company. Peter Corney, an English sailor, noted that a group of Indians from Classet (Makahs) often camped at Baker’s Bay from June to October to cure salmon and sturgeon and to sell beaver and sea otter skins to Fort George, formerly Fort Astoria. Despite their decision to trade with the King George men, Makahs made it clear that they were a powerful people whom the outsiders should respect. Corney noted that “they are a very warlike people, and extremely dangerous, taking every advantage if you are off your guard.” Makahs continued to exchange furs with non-Native traders at the mouth of Columbia throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.19
With the support of the British government, the Hudson’s Bay Company absorbed the rival North West Company in 1821 and acquired Fort George. The company then began an aggressive expansion in the Pacific Cordillera stretching from the Columbia River to northern British Columbia, establishing fourteen posts between 1821 and 1846. Reflecting the shifting geography of the fur trade, in 1825 the company replaced the coastal Fort George with Fort Vancouver, located ninety miles upriver along the northern bank of the Columbia River, to better access inland exchange networks and the beaver skins they provided. The new fort became the Hudson’s Bay Company’s administrative headquarters and supply depot west of the Rocky Mountains. It also became home to an increasingly diverse population. After a visit in the winter of 1846–47, the Canadian artist Paul Kane described Fort Vancouver as “quite a Babel of languages, as the inhabitants are a mixture of English, French, Iroquois, Sandwich Islanders, Crees and Chinooks.”20 Like its predecessor, Fort Vancouver lay at the southern extent of the ča·di· borderland, “dropped into … [the] fully formed system of Chinook and Salish trade and culture,” by which it continued to receive furs from coastal peoples.21
Although the Hudson’s Bay Company set out to monopolize the industry in the Pacific Northwest, US competition provided indigenous peoples with even more trade options. Based out of New England ports, small “coasters” frequented the southern side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, and the Pacific shores to the mouth of the Columbia River. The brig Owhyhee entered the Columbia River in 1827, even sailing up to Fort Vancouver in an attempt to intercept furs bound for the HBC headquarters. Fearing potential losses from American coasters, Chief Factor John McLoughlin sent a crew to the mouth of the Fraser River at the eastern end of the ča·di· borderland to establish a new post, Fort Langley, in the fall of 1827. Reflecting a pattern typical of HBC workforces, this construction crew included one Abenaki from northeastern North America, two Native Hawaiians, one “York Factory Indian” from the shores of Hudson Bay, two Iroquois from upstate New York, and one “Canadian Half breed.” The Hudson’s Bay Company began collecting beaver skins from local Coast Salish peoples, Vancouver Island communities, and S’Klallams on the southeastern edge of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Fort Langley also drew Native laborers to the Fraser River area. They cleared land, provided large quantities of fish, cut timber and firewood, and performed other tasks important for the fort’s survival. Shortly after the establishment of Fort Langley, an influential Makah trader arranged to have his ten-year-old son, Yelaub, work in the kitchens.22 Yelaub’s father probably wanted his son to learn English and to gain a better understanding of the culture of King George men in order to benefit his people’s commercial dealings with the newcomers.
Other goods that Native peoples brought to Fort Langley outpaced the value of furs collected there and became commodities in the developing transnational exchange networks crossing the Pacific. In the early nineteenth century, Americans were the first to pursue a strategy of diversification that catalyzed an economic transformation for the northeastern Pacific. Beginning in the mid-1810s, maritime fur traders from New England traded sailing vessels with Kamehameha I, first king of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, for sandalwood, which they exported to Canton, where Chinese craftsmen made incense, medicines, and carvings from the wood. During the 1820s, US coasters carried spars from the Northwest Coast to Oahu and supplied Russian outposts in Alaska and Spanish missions in California with provisions. Eyeing the success of these small competitors, George Simpson, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s administrator of the Columbia Department, urged the company to diversify its economic activities by expanding into provisioning these growing Pacific markets, and Fort Langley occupied an important role in the efforts. When Honolulu became the base of the North Pacific whaling fleet during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the company was well positioned to supply specialized naval stores and hardware—including sheet copper, sheathing nails, anchors, anchor chains, rolls of canvas, tar, black and white paint, pitch, varnish, paint brushes, iron hoops, copper bolts, salted pork, arrowroot, charts, and nautical almanacs—to vessels that visited the Oahu agency. This outpost in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i became the primary supplier of produce, cured salmon, and spars, commodities collected from Northwest Coast peoples. The outcome of Simpson’s plan pleased company officials in the Pacific Northwest. In 1832, Archibald McDonald, chief trader at Fort Langley, reported, “Our Salmon … is close upon 300 Barrels, & I have descended to Oil & Blubber too…. I am much satisfied with its proceeds myself.” In return for indigenous goods, HBC traders such as McDonald provided standard trade items like tea, rice, tobacco, molasses, sugar, and salt. More exotic goods requested by Northwest Coast chiefs included coral and Chinese-made sandalwood and camphor boxes, which became popular potlatch gifts. Native demands illustrated the complexity of early nineteenth-century Pacific trade networks. Not only were indigenous peoples suppliers of commodities, but they also were savvy consumers of Asian and European goods.23
By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the regional economy depended on the trade among indigenous peoples and newcomers. Much as powerful chiefs had monopolized exchanges with vessels during the maritime fur trade, prominent Northwest Coast leaders controlled access to forts after they had been built on their lands or those of a weaker neighbor. Concomly, the ranking Chinook chief, and members of his family mediated many of the exchanges between Natives and traders at Forts Astoria and George during the first part of the nineteenth century. Cowichans, a powerful people at the eastern edge of the ča·di· borderland, controlled Native access to Fort Langley and prevented others, such as Makahs, from trading there, even though the Hudson’s Bay Company had built the post in Stó:lō territory.24
The People of the Cape circumvented Cowichan control over exchanges at Fort Langley by trading with HBC vessels when they stopped at Neah Bay. Shortly after the post’s founding in 1827, Cape Flattery emerged as “the critical spot” in Fort Langley’s trading area.25 Captain James Scarborough, who worked for the company for twenty years, so frequently visited Neah Bay that some colonial records called this body of water Scarborough Bay.26 Located between Nuu-chah-nulth peoples to the north and Coast Salish peoples to the east and south, the early nineteenth century Makahs continued to attract indigenous trade from all corners of the ča·di· borderland. Compared to surrounding parts of the Northwest Coast, valuable sea otters could still be found off Cape Flattery, where Makah men such as Yelaub and his father hunted them from canoes in the open sea and from behind blinds on coastal beaches. In addition to sea otter pelts and beaver skins from other parts of the borderlands, Makahs provided whale oil and bone, fresh fish, slaves, and ha·ykwa, shells they harvested from the deep seafloor by means of a long pole. Indicating its importance as a commodity, the chief traders at Fort Langley tallied the acquisition of “Cape Flattery oil,” whale oil that HBC ships often purchased at more than one hundred gallons at a time. They shipped much of it to London, where it was distilled into benzene to light homes and businesses.27
Despite the rising presence and power of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the wealth of goods provided by Northwest Coast peoples continued to draw US coasters to the region through the 1830s. The presence of these small, private traders backed by New England capital frustrated HBC traders and strengthened the position of Indian traders who could—and did—hold out for more favorable prices. Many of these coasters stopped at Neah Bay to purchase furs, fish, and whale oil, thereby intercepting commodities that normally went to Fort Langley.28 The overall trade in Cape Flattery oil increased, and by 1852, Makahs sold more than thirty thousand gallons of whale oil (valued at more than $20,000) to passing HBC and American vessels, and the People of the Cape kept a similar amount for personal consumption and exchange with neighboring Indians. According to whaling returns provided by a Makah chief in the late 1850s, sixty thousand gallons of oil represented approximately twenty-six whales killed annually.29 At times, Makahs had so much whale oil on hand that the visiting ships lacked enough casks and had to turn away Indian traders.30 A successful whaler such as isi·t would have been a primary supplier and overseen his people’s interactions with the Bostons and King George men when exchanging whale oil for trade goods at the cape.
The HBC answer to increasing competition—the building of more forts—entangled Makahs more closely with the company after the establishment of Fort Victoria in 1843. Earlier forts had appeared at the ča·di· borderland’s edges; Fort Victoria, however, was located squarely within the borderland, or “in the midst of the Natives’ world.” By 1843, the company had grown concerned about the boundary issue. Hudson’s Bay Company officials worried that the United States and Britain would place the border north of Fort Vancouver, which would leave their primary Pacific depot in US territory. They wanted a depot situated farther north in order to supply more easily the majority of their outposts in the northern Pacific Cordillera. During the 1820s and 1830s, several ships wrecked at the dangerous mouth of the Columbia River, resulting in the loss of years’ worth of trade goods, thereby undercutting the company’s ability to compete with American coasters. These reasons encouraged the HBC to erect a new outpost at the southern end of Vancouver Island. In addition to its advantages over Fort Vancouver, Fort Victoria lay close to the important fisheries in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, and the Fraser River. The new outpost also had easy access to ample lumber for construction, to good-quality land for expansion, and to a large Native population. The company assumed that Indians throughout the ča·di· borderland would construct the fort, sell food to HBC employees, supply goods for export, and provide a market for British imports.31
The establishment of Fort Victoria and its early operations highlight the way indigenous peoples were the cornerstone of HBC growth in the region. When charged with the task of constructing the fort in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Chief Factor James Douglas chose Camosun, a sheltered harbor on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, where Indians could beach their canoes easily. To Douglas, this site appeared appealing—even Edenic—because the Coast Salish Lekwungen set regular fires to maintain this as one of the region’s prime camas fields. After disembarking at Camosun, Douglas told the Lekwungen chiefs who owned the site that he desired to build a trading post on their land. Knowing that Fort Langley had benefited neighboring indigenous peoples along the Fraser River, the chiefs gave Douglas permission to build the fort and provided labor to help in its construction. Later that summer, the company brought to the new outpost wild Spanish cattle and workhorses from Fort Nisqually in Puget Sound. Lekwungens helped to care for the livestock, even taking them into their longhouses during severe winters. In the beginning, non-Natives often called Fort Victoria by its “Indian” name, Camosun, delaying the immediate tendency of Europeans to replace indigenous place-names and illustrating that early colonial places often occupied spaces where indigenous peoples continued to exercise power.32 Fort Victoria thrived because of the consent, labor, and support provided by nearby indigenous villages.
Fort Victoria, 1854. The artist captured the post’s marine connections with local Native communities by including Northwest Coast canoes, some with sails, traveling to and from the fort. Drawing by unnamed artist. Image A-04104 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives.
Even more than they had with Fort Langley, the People of the Cape played a key role in Fort Victoria’s survival and early success. After construction began at Camosun, Makahs became regular visitors at the new HBC outpost, located just a short canoe paddle across the strait from their Cape Flattery villages. During Fort Victoria’s first summer and fall, Makahs and Nuu-chah-nulth peoples provided salmon and potatoes that fed the King George men and the Kanaka and Lekwungen laborers constructing the outpost.33 Just as important to the fort’s success, though, were the commercial products brought there by the People of the Cape and other indigenous communities. Makah chiefs, such as Yelaub and isi·t, visited the fort with their people to sell fish, furs, and whale oil.34 Other borderlanders also brought goods to the fort, including enormous quantities of salmon, cedar shingles by the thousands, and canoe-loads of blueberries. The Hudson’s Bay Company earned a substantial margin of profit from these indigenous commodities by funneling them into the Pacific market that provisioned miners in California and the growing urban center of San Francisco. Douglas estimated that in 1854 Fort Victoria exported ten thousand gallons of Native-produced oil to California, where it fetched two to three dollars per gallon.35 Acknowledging the advantageous location of Fort Victoria and its rising importance in the provisioning trade, the Hudson’s Bay Company made it the company’s Pacific depot and headquarters in 1849. The commodities that isi·t, Yelaub, and others exchanged at Fort Victoria helped to transform this outpost into a prosperous commercial hub and provisioned colonial activities throughout the Pacific.
While providing commercial opportunities for Native traders, the presence and actions of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the ča·di· borderland exacerbated existing tensions among the indigenous peoples, much as the maritime fur trade had done earlier. Unlike the previous industry, in which vessels—sometimes several at a time vying for the attentions of Native traders—anchored for short periods of time off villages, the land-based fur trade established long-term trading opportunities in the homelands of specific indigenous groups. Throughout the year and over decades, these forts repeatedly drew a range of Native leaders, families, and warriors to the same places. This meant that when tensions escalated into violence, they often coalesced outside fort walls on the same Native lands time and again. Fortunately for Makahs, no forts were located at Cape Flattery, so they did not suffer from this violence at home. Instead, they found themselves in conflict with neighboring groups often on the lands of another people with whom they were not at war.
Company officials lacked the power to control intertribal conflicts for most of the first half of the nineteenth century, so no consistent policy with respect to this type of violence emerged. At times they desired to curb indigenous violence in order to create a safe and ordered environment for profitable exchanges. From the perspective of Chief Trader James McMillan at Fort Langley in 1828, violence among Indians was not the problem; instead, it was that conflict hampered Native abilities to collect furs. He wrote, “The poor tribes of this quarter Cannot attend to any thing like hunting [for furs] while their Powerful Neighbours from Van[couver] Island are allowed to Murder and Pillage them at pleasure.”36 McMillan believed that the commercial existence of the fort required order and safety. But company officials ignored intertribal violence when it did not inhibit trade. At least one official, Roderick Finlayson, even promoted conflict among communities, noting years later, “The policy of the Company was honesty—and also to keep the several tribes divided and at enmity among themselves. This plan followed for purposes of protection to ourselves—in short to keep up a jealous feeling between the respective tribes.”37 In charge of Fort Victoria from 1844 to 1849, Finlayson ignored the murder of Chief George, a Makah titleholder, just outside Fort Victoria in 1846. Visiting from the Columbia River, several Chinooks murdered the Makah chief after watching him exchange a sea otter skin for trade goods from Finlayson. While robbery might have partly motivated the killers, the reasons for attacking him were probably more complex. One British observer noted, “[George] had doubtless in his time played many tricks of the same kind as that to which he now fell a victim; they usually act and react one upon the other.”38 Although this comment is steeped in white assumptions of vengeful Natives, it speaks to the underlying reality that complex indigenous reasons—probably a combination of economic competition and a protest against Makah control of regional trade networks, in this case—provided the motivations for violence.
At other times, however, intertribal conflict made Finlayson anxious. During the fall of 1846, S’Klallams took possession of a drift whale Makahs had harpooned but lost. When the People of the Cape demanded a share of the whale and, more important, the return of their whaling gear, S’Klallams refused. This resulted in a “great battle” between the two peoples, and the S’Klallams “had suffered very severely.” S’Klallams retaliated by killing Chief Yelaub’s brother and some of his people when the Makah traders were paddling home after visiting Fort Victoria. Yelaub set out in twelve canoes with more than one hundred warriors and attacked a S’Klallam village. He took eighteen slaves and the heads of eight warriors that he “stuck on poles placed in the bows of the canoes[…,] carried to their village and placed in front of the lodge of the warriors who had killed them.”39 A year later, the tensions between the two peoples still simmered and concerned those living at Fort Victoria. In 1848, Captain George Courtenay soothed Finlayson’s anxiety by bringing the fifty-gun HMS Constance into Victoria Harbor to defuse a Makah-S’Klallam conflict unfolding just outside the fort’s gate.40 This incident reflected the Hudson’s Bay Company’s minimal ability to control indigenous peoples in the spaces beyond the walls of forts.
The company did use its limited power to exercise retributive violence against Indians for perceived depredations on non-Natives and their property. This ad hoc policy established a racialized precedent that haunted the ča·di· borderland for decades. In January 1828, S’Klallams killed HBC employee Alexander McKenzie and his companions along Hood Canal. As with many interracial acts of violence in this borderland, the S’Klallams had numerous reasons for attacking the HBC party. An experienced fur trader, McKenzie had married the “Princess of Wales,” the daughter of Concomly, the powerful Chinook chief who kept slaves, including several S’Klallams. McKenzie’s wife accompanied the party, and S’Klallams took her hostage, perhaps to bargain for their people’s freedom from Concomly. S’Klallams were also upset that the company traded with their longtime borderlands enemies, the Cowichans of Vancouver Island. S’Klallam chiefs had made several efforts to dissuade McKenzie and others from trading with Cowichans. Adding insult to injury, the company had established Fort Langley north of S’Klallam space. This benefited indigenous rivals and prevented S’Klallam chiefs from serving as intermediaries. Last, indigenous oral accounts point to earlier injustices traders had committed against these people: McKenzie’s party could have been killed in retaliation.41
Chief Factor John McLoughlin decided that the Hudson’s Bay Company needed to employ a policy of retributive violence against Indians who murdered company employees. Writing from Fort Vancouver to his superiors in London about the killing of McKenzie, McLoughlin argued, “To pass over such an outrage would lower us in the opinion of the Indians, induce them to act in the same way, and when an opportunity afforded kill any of our people, and when it is considered the Natives are at least an hundred Men to one of us it will be conceived how absolutely necessary it is for our personal security that we should be respected by them, & nothing could make us more contemptible in their eyes than allowing such a cold-blooded assassination of our People to pass unpunished & every one acquainted with the character of the Indians of the North West Coast will allow they can only be restrained from committing acts of atrocity & violence by the dread of retaliation.” He believed that conditions unique to the Northwest Coast at this time—Indians outnumbered whites, these Natives only respected vengeance—necessitated a violent response.42
Although the punitive expedition targeted ethnic S’Klallams rather than all Indians in general, this action illustrated an early example of the racialized nature of colonial power that whites used to control indigenous peoples, something that officials noted at the time. Led by Chief Trader Alexander McLeod, a force of about sixty men left Fort Vancouver in June, entered Puget Sound from the south, and set out in canoes for S’Klallam villages. McLoughlin instructed McLeod to find the “murderous tribe, and if possible, to make a salutary example of them, that the honour of the whites was at stake.” On the way to rendezvous with the HBC schooner Cadborough, McLeod’s party encountered two S’Klallam lodges. They fired on those sleeping inside, killing at least two families. After meeting up with the Cadborough, the expedition set out for the distant S’Klallam village at New Dungeness on the south side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Under cover of fire from the schooner, the expedition’s forces landed. After recovering the Princess of Wales and some articles from McKenzie’s party, they looted what provisions and whale oil they could carry. Then they burned the village and destroyed the rest of the S’Klallams’ property, including nearly thirty canoes, while the inhabitants watched from the forest’s safety. Although critical of McLeod’s leadership, Frank Ermatinger, an HBC clerk accompanying the expedition, reported that the extensive destruction of property would “be seriously felt for some time to come.”43 He believed that news of this retribution would travel among regional Indians. Makah chiefs certainly heard of this incident, and this story of HBC vengeance likely made the rounds among Indians such as young Yelaub, then working at Fort Langley. A year later, McLoughlin exacted a similar punishment on Clatsops for pillaging the wreck of the company’s William and Ann at the mouth of the Columbia River.44 Together, these responses illustrated the desire of some HBC officials to use collective violence when they could in order to punish Indians for perceived wrongs.
During the 1830s and 1840s, Makahs and others challenged HBC efforts at controlling Indians. One area of contention involved Northwest Coast slavery, specifically the enslavement of non-Natives by indigenous peoples. Company employees found it necessary to adhere to indigenous protocols when redeeming slaves from Makah leaders. During the winter of 1833, a storm drove a “junk” laden with rice and fourteen sailors out of sight of the Japanese coast. They drifted east across the Pacific for three months and came within sight of Cape Flattery. Makahs paddled out to the vessel and found a man and two teenage boys who had survived on rice and freshwater collected from rain. After enslaving the Japanese survivors, Makahs seized the vessel and its goods and broke it apart to salvage the useful materials. Chinook Indians brought the news of the unusual slaves to McLoughlin at Fort Vancouver; although he wanted to free the captives as soon as possible, he could not address the issue until later that year. Captain William McNeill, master of the HBC brig Llama, redeemed the captives by purchasing them from Chief George, the same chief whom Chinooks murdered a decade later outside Fort Victoria. After spending several months at Fort Vancouver waiting for a ship, the Japanese survivors caught one headed to London; from there the survivors attempted to return to Japan. Diplomatic tensions between the United Kingdom and Japan, in addition to the Japanese attitude that regarded anyone who left the country—even accidentally—as contaminated, prevented them from returning home.45 In the mid-1840s, the Hudson’s Bay Company also redeemed a white sailor whom Chief George had enslaved; much to the consternation of other whites, this sailor voluntarily returned to Chief George after his release. Stories of powerful Makah chiefs who kept non-Native slaves continued to color white opinions of the People of the Cape throughout the mid-nineteenth century.46 These incidents demonstrated that Makahs had the ability to control space on their terms. King George men could not enter Makah villages and simply demand the release of non-Native slaves—they had to accede to indigenous protocols and purchase them from the owner.
Even in spaces closer to forts, the Hudson’s Bay Company had only slightly more ability to punish Indians for perceived depredations, especially theft. At Fort Victoria, some Makahs ran afoul of the company’s efforts to control Natives and protect HBC property. In 1847, an HBC employee whipped a Makah man caught breaking into one of the outpost’s warehouses; when “a body of Cape Flattery Indians … threatened to attack the Post in retaliation,” Lekwungen warriors took up arms to protect the fort, Douglas noted to his superiors. But the theft of company livestock vexed Douglas more. In 1848, he complained of this “mischievious practice which must be checked by the punishment of the Offender, an object in which we have partly succeeded.” By 1850, “wandering Tribes” became such a problem that he appointed four guards to stand permanent watch over company livestock. Although he did not name the “wandering Tribes,” Makahs frequented the lands around the fort and were likely part of this group.47
A range of experiences during the decades of the land-based fur trade shaped isi·t’s and Yelaub’s strategies for interacting with the growing presence of King George men and Bostons in the ča·di· borderland. They learned about the many ways they could use trade and new labor opportunities to the advantage of themselves and their people. But Makahs also participated in, witnessed, or heard about the kinds of violence that these opportunities drew, especially when the outsiders established permanent operations in Native homelands. So when non-Natives intruded on Makah spaces, the People of the Cape responded aggressively.
SETTLERS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, 1845–1855
British and American settlers began arriving during the 1840s, thereby challenging indigenous sovereignty while providing more opportunities for Natives to engage the expanding settler-colonial world. The newcomers no longer simply needed small islands of security and order—forts—within an indigenous world; by the mid-nineteenth century, they required larger spaces of safety and order for pioneer enterprises, such as lumbering, farming, mining, and settling. This brought the newcomers into conflict with indigenous peoples, especially those living in places where outsiders wanted to build sawmills, open mines, and establish farms and towns. In order to ensure the newcomers’ safety, US and British officials drew from HBC strategies to attempt to control Indians.48 As in previous encounters, early settler-colonial processes depended on the participation and support of Native peoples. Without the labor provided by Natives who cut down trees, cleared land, tended livestock, and dug up coal, many early ventures would have failed. Northwest Coast peoples provided fish, potatoes, berries, and sea mammal oil to nascent settlements, critical commodities that sustained many of the first settlers who arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. More important, Native leaders interacted with settlers and colonial officials in order to strengthen their own authority over rivals and neighboring peoples.
During the mid-nineteenth century, the US and British empires began carving up the ča·di· borderland into supposedly discrete colonial spaces, yet these changes did not affect indigenous polities immediately. Coming along the Oregon Trail, increasing numbers of American filibusters settled south of the Columbia River. Supported by politicians with dreams of a continental nation, these newcomers agitated for US control over the entire Oregon Country. During the 1844 presidential contest, the Democratic Party embraced expansionist ideology and campaigned on the slogan “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” Once elected, President James K. Polk—who had never taken the slogan very seriously—abandoned the assertion that the western US boundary should extend north to the Russian frontier. Compromising instead on the forty-ninth parallel, his administration settled the boundary issue in 1846 through the Oregon Treaty. This ended nearly three decades of joint occupation in the Pacific Northwest and placed the boundary between US and British claims in the Far North American West “along the said 49th parallel of north latitude to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver’s Island, and thence southerly through the middle of the said channel, and of Fuca’s Straits, to the Pacific Ocean.” In 1848, the US Congress created the Oregon Territory, comprising the current states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. A year later, Britain created the Colony of Vancouver Island. In 1853, Congress separated Washington Territory from Oregon Territory; six years later, Oregon became the thirty-third state in the union.49
Although the Oregon Treaty had defined the border between colonial claims, government officials quickly discovered what the People of the Cape and other borderlanders already knew—by nature, the marine portion of the boundary along the Strait of Juan de Fuca was permeable. Makahs probably learned of the new boundary quickly. If crewmembers of HMS Herald neglected to tell them when visiting Cape Flattery in 1846 while surveying the marine borderline, then HBC officials at Fort Victoria would have informed Makah visitors and traders. Throughout most of the 1850s, the Hudson’s Bay Company remained the Makahs’ top trading partner, with company vessels stopping at Neah Bay and the People of the Cape traveling to Victoria. Indiscriminate trade between Makahs and the company concerned US officials. George Gibbs, a member of the Pacific Railroad Exploration and Survey of 1852, noted that it was impossible to “check this traffic,” and he advised Congress that “in any treaties made with them, it should enter as a stipulation that they should confine their trade to the American side.” In 1858 an Indian agent surveying the region complained that “all the money paid out by [our] government and citizens [to the Makah] goes immediately over to Victoria to be invested in blankets, muskets, etc.” Both US and British officials complained of citizens from the other side crossing the border to sell liquor to Indians, “an evil which endangers the peace of the frontiers.” One Puget Sound Indian agent, G. A. Paige, noted in 1857 the impossibility of controlling this traffic because of the many small trading vessels plying local waters. Like those living in other borderlands in North America, local residents—both Native and non-Native—exploited the boundary for their own economic advantage.50
At this time, mobile Indians who ignored the border were part of a larger colonial concern about local borderlanders who disrespected official boundaries. For much of the mid-nineteenth century, the British worried about American squatters. Despite the demarcation of the boundary line in 1846, the potential for squatters north of the borderline concerned colonial and company officials. In response—and to support their economic diversification efforts—the Hudson’s Bay Company decided to encourage British emigration to Vancouver Island. Based on information provided by Douglas, the company believed that the island would be an ideal place for a colony because it offered cultivable lands in the south, sheltered harbors for a naval depot, and abundant timber and coal. Sir John Pelly, HBC governor, secured permission from the British crown to allow the company to establish a colony on Vancouver Island in 1849. The first settlers arrived by the barque Harpooner on May 31, 1849, and included coalminers, workmen, carpenters, bakers, a shipwright, and their families. These would have been the first settlers to interact regularly with the People of the Cape.51
The experience of Walter Colquhoun Grant, the first non-Native to settle independently of the Hudson’s Bay Company on Vancouver Island, illustrates that early emigrants needed assistance from both local Indians and company officials. A Scottish native, Grant arrived on Vancouver Island in the fall of 1849. He planned to manufacture prefabricated house frames to sell in California for $250 each. From the beginning, his venture encountered difficulties. Concerned about Grant’s “destitute means”—he came with no money—the company paid for his passage from California to Fort Vancouver, gave him company credit, and provided him with livestock. The men Grant hired for this venture arrived at Fort Victoria two months before him, and Douglas had trouble preventing them from leaving for more lucrative work on American vessels or for the California gold fields. When Grant arrived, Douglas took him along the coast to point out potential sites for his sawmill and to introduce him to local Indians. Against Douglas’s recommendation, Grant chose a location twenty-five miles from Fort Victoria because it offered an abundant supply of timber and a stream for his sawmill. Douglas “endeavoured strongly to impress on the minds of Captain Grant and his followers, the invaluable importance, both as regards the future well being of the Colony, and their own individual interests, of cultivating the friendship of these Children of the forest.” The experienced fur trader worried that settlers such as Grant would antagonize local Indians.52
But Natives and settlers had many motivations for interacting in productive ways. Grant relied on indigenous labor and information. While at Neah Bay during a survey of the region, he asked Chief Yelaub for advice on where to settle and locate his sawmill. Already exhibiting a proclivity to direct settlers away from Makah space, Yelaub told him about large tracts of arable land and timber resources across the strait on Vancouver Island.53 Men from nearby Nuu-chah-nulth villages helped in felling trees and building Grant’s sawmill, which he had located on indigenous land. Like those living near Fort Victoria, Grant and his men bought salmon and potatoes from their indigenous neighbors. Many Native borderlanders welcomed the new markets in commodities and labor that settlers provided. Others, however, worried about newcomers taking land and resources, and resistant Indians stole from and threatened the outsiders. Echoing the complaints of other settlers, Grant accused Indians of “depredations”—the contemporary term for theft—and claimed that they caused everything to go “to ruin” during his absences.54 As interracial tensions mounted, colonial officials on both sides of the new boundary became concerned.
Those governing the Colony of Vancouver Island worried that the presence of British settlers made it all the more important to control Indians. After founding the colony in 1849, the Hudson’s Bay Company intensified its policy of inflicting devastating retribution for violence against whites and their property. Unlike previous attempts to develop a coherent policy, these efforts worked because official colonization brought with it the military backing of the British crown. On the Northwest Coast, this power manifested itself in the gunboats (sloops-of-war, corvettes, and frigates) of the Royal Navy, which local officials deployed against Indians. The resultant gunboat diplomacy approved by Douglas left “the smouldering ruins of a village and a scattered village tribe” as “the telling testaments of the process of keeping Northwest Coast Indians ‘in awe of British power.’ ”55 These destructive expeditions illustrated the growing colonial ability to project power into indigenous spaces.
The People of the Cape kept a wary eye on the Royal Navy vessels sailing—then steaming—through local waters to shell other villages. During 1850 and 1851, the fledgling colonial government at Victoria found itself needing to respond in kind to the murder of three deserters from the company ship Norman Morison. Believing that the Newitty (Tlatlasikwala Kwakwaka’wakws) near Fort Rupert on the northern edge of Vancouver Island had murdered the deserters, colonial officials called on the Royal Navy’s corvette Daedalus to punish the offenders. Echoing sentiments expressed by HBC officials in previous decades, they believed that “if we make no demonstration the Indians will lose all respect for us and may make an attack on [Fort Rupert].” As in the earlier incidents against the S’Klallams and Clatsops, the British burned longhouses and canoes at Nahwitti village, deciding that if the community would not surrender the murderers, then the whole group deserved punishment. The Newitty sued for peace on their own terms by bringing three mangled Indian bodies to Fort Rupert, telling the British that these were the offenders.56 Colonial officials felt that they had accomplished their goals. Douglas reported to William Tolmie at Fort Nisqually, “The Indians [are] all quiet and civil, being greatly awed by the example made of the Neweetees.”57 In what would become a pattern for Douglas, however, he ignored the way in which the Newitty chiefs confronted British retributive violence. Newitty actions demonstrated that Native leaders still had enough power to control some outcomes of conflicts within indigenous spaces. Native chiefs, not British officials or soldiers, executed the offenders.
Less than six months later, at the beginning of 1852, British colonial officials again faced Natives—this time Makahs and their aggressive salvaging and burning of the Una—exercising sovereignty over indigenous spaces. The way colonial officials responded reveals the limitations of colonial power while highlighting the emerging racial divide in the region. When initially reporting on the brig’s loss and Makah actions, Douglas highlighted the fledgling colony’s inability to protect British lives and property: “The Natives … gathered about the wreck in vast numbers, and behaved with great barbarity towards such of the ‘Una’s’ crew as were landed from the wreck. They broke open and rifled the Seamens’ chests, stript them of their clothes, and maltreated those who attempted, unarmed as they were to defend their property.” In fact, only the intervention of the Americans—fellow whites—prevented “greater atrocities” from happening and kept the valuable furs and gold out of Makah hands.58 Incidents such as this supported his argument that the colony needed even more naval support to protect it.
Most especially, though, the incident frustrated Douglas because there was little he could do immediately about this affront to British authority and property. For one, he did not have ready access to a company vessel that he could use to punish Makahs. The Cadborough was on a trading voyage in the north, while US customs officials in Olympia detained another two—the brigantine Mary Dare and steamer Beaver—for alleged duties violations. It was not until the end of January that he could deploy the Cadborough and “a well appointed force” to Neah Bay to bring the Indians “to a serious account for their barbarous conduct on that occasion, in order to repress the mischievous consequences likely to arise from their evil example, and deter other Savage Nations from committing wanton outrages on the persons and property of Her Majesty’s subjects.” Seeming more appropriate for a purposeful attack on the Una than a vigorous salvaging of a shipwreck, Douglas’s rhetoric indicated the mounting pressures he felt at securing white property against aggressive and still powerful Indians. Second, he could not ignore the fact that Neah Bay was in US territory. Unlike dealing with Native peoples north of the border, he could not simply shell this village of American Indians as he had responded to the Newitty. Instead, he was careful to inform Edmund A. Starling, the federal Indian agent for the Puget Sound District in Oregon Territory, of his actions against the Makahs.59
When reporting back to his superiors in both the colonial and company offices, Governor Douglas downplayed the fact that a Makah chief had handled the threat of British violence in his own manner. The governor condemned the chief’s “barbarous actions” of the summary execution of ten Makahs and the immolation of another while reassuring his superiors that deploying gunboat diplomacy—even without the firing of any shots—had achieved a suitable result. He explained that this expedition “produced the desired effect of alarming the Natives” and “has made a deep impression in the minds of the Natives, who were intently watching our proceedings.”60 Douglas’s threat of gunboat diplomacy reflected Lord Palmerston’s mandate from several years earlier: “Wherever British subjects are placed in danger … thither a British ship of war ought to be … for the protection of British interests.” But it also exemplified an even longer HBC effort of “keeping the Indians in awe” of British power in the Pacific Northwest.61 Although he framed the outcome of this incident as a success of personal, HBC, and colonial policies, the governor appeared too embarrassed to admit that Cape Flattery was still Makah space under the sovereign power of influential chiefs. Neither the British nor the Americans were in control—the People of the Cape were. For the time being, Douglas had to acquiesce to Makah authority because HBC operations in this region still depended on the consent and support of local chiefs.
But the balance of power was shifting. During the winter of 1852–53, Douglas confronted the Cowichans and Nanaimos for the murder of a company shepherd stationed just five miles from Victoria. Again with Royal Navy assistance, the governor took more than 150 men into Cowichan territory to capture the two accused murderers. After Douglas gave the tribal nation an ultimatum, they turned over a man the governor believed to be the suspect; actually, he was a slave offered instead as compensation. In this encounter, Cowichans handled British intimidation on customary indigenous terms by paying for a murder with a slave. But this incident did not conclude on Cowichan terms. Colonial forces caught a second suspect, the son of a Cowichan chief, after Douglas took the father hostage. The governor had both suspects—the slave and the chief’s son—tried in the colony’s first trial by jury. Naval officers found the two men guilty and hanged them in front of their people. In personal correspondence with Tolmie, Douglas cast his success in almost biblical terms, writing, “We had a good deal of trouble in effecting our object, and had to carry their villages sword in hand, but the Almighty disposer of events favoured the just cause, and the land is now cleansed from the pol[l]ution of innocent blood.” He argued that God sided with innocent, Christian Anglos against violent heathens. Once again, Douglas reported to his superiors that the scene “appear[ed] to make a deep impression” on the assembled Cowichans.62 Chiefs Yelaub and isi·t certainly heard about the execution of a Cowichan chief’s son and likely worried about the shifting dynamics of power in the region.
From the late 1840s on, both chiefs would have noticed the growing number of Bostons arriving in the region. The first Americans to claim lands north of the Columbia River, the African American Bush family and their white friend Michael Simmons, whom Makahs came to know as the territorial Indian agent, settled near Tumwater in 1845 after emigrating along the Oregon Trail. George Washington Bush, the patriarch of the family and key leader of this group, was the wealthy son of a black sailor and an Irish American servant. A former HBC employee, he had been to the Pacific Coast in the 1820s.63 These emigrants chose lands along the southern shores of Puget Sound over the more popular Willamette Valley because the provisional government of Oregon Territory had passed discriminatory laws prohibiting African Americans from settling south of the Columbia. During the second half of the 1840s, an increasing number of lumbermen came to the Puget Sound region to establish more than a dozen sawmills. They harvested the seemingly “inexhaustible forests of … rich timber,” which they shipped aboard the “large number of ships that are now constantly arriving and departing, heavily laden,” as one early settler noted.64 Many of these vessels would have stopped at Neah Bay to trade with Makahs for salmon and oil used to grease the skids of their logging operations. By 1849, C. T. W. Russell settled in Shoalwater Bay (Willapa Bay), north of the mouth of the Columbia River, where he started an oyster business. Several years later, he reported to Isaac Stevens, the territorial governor, that he had induced others—“the right kind of settlers, not hunters and trappers, but good old farmers with their families”—to take up residence in the area. While reports from early settlers such as Russell, Bush, and Simmons encouraged more Americans to come to the region, the Donation Land Act of 1850 further promoted settlement in Oregon Territory. In November 1851, the Denny Party landed at Alki in Puget Sound; by 1852, they had relocated to an indigenous Duwamish site, Little Crossing-Over Place, and founded Seattle.65
Before the 1850s, few non-Natives came to Neah Bay to settle, and any who did—or even gave the appearance of considering appropriating Makah space—received a chilly welcome. In 1838, HBC traders at Fort Nisqually heard from visiting S’Klallams that a vessel had visited the “Clasits” (Makahs) and that some passengers had purchased land for a settlement. However, these settlers did not stay long. Similarly, in 1845 the People of the Cape chased away company employees who left their vessel to explore Waadah Island at the mouth of Neah Bay. The logbook of the Cadborough, which regularly stopped at the Makah village to trade, noted, “The Captain & four men went in the jolly boat to sound, & whilst on Neah [Waadah] Island observed 6 canoes evidently in pursuit of them. The Captain instantly embarked and pulled toward the ship pursued by the canoes, in the foremost of which was a man standing up with a musket leveled at the Captain, as were, several bows & arrows. When the Captain got near the ships laying in the bay, the Indians landed & pursued the ships back, along the shore for some distance, but did not fire.” As they had during the maritime fur trade, Makahs discouraged non-Native efforts to encroach on their spaces. In 1849, when Grant spoke to Yelaub about locations for settling and cutting timber, the chief directed him away from Makah land. Several years later, the Scottish settler complained that “Flattery Jack … seemed to have delighted in telling the most atrocious falsehoods,” specifically lying about the “beautiful prairie-land” at Barkley Sound. Considering the number of complaints explorers and settlers have made regarding similar Indian “lies,” this appears to have been a common strategy used by Natives to get rid of unwanted outsiders.66
Makahs discouraged settlement around Cape Flattery while taking advantage of opportunities presented by the increasing number of non-Natives in the region. Since the maritime fur trade, Neah Bay had been an important anchorage and trading spot for many vessels, a condition that continued throughout the nineteenth century. When HMS America visited the Strait of Juan de Fuca in 1845, Captain John Gordon described Neah Bay as “a secure place for small ships” and a common anchorage for US whalers. Three American whaling vessels even asked the HBC barque Cowlitz for a barrel of powder and some stores so they could trade with Makahs, a request the captain denied. The People of the Cape regularly encountered ships sailing through their marine waters. When HMS Herald entered the strait in 1846, Makahs visited the vessel in canoes launched from Tatoosh Island. They offered fish and skins for trade and boarded the Herald “without the least fear,” indicating that this was a normal occurrence. By the early 1850s, Makah slaves were raising more than a hundred tons of potatoes annually from seed obtained from the Hudson’s Bay Company. Makah families consumed some of this harvest and traded the rest to nearby company posts and passing vessels.67
Although many Makahs benefited from trade with Bostons and King George men, they resisted initial attempts to establish permanent trading posts at Cape Flattery. In 1849, the Euro-American Samuel Hancock failed to establish one at Neah Bay. Keenly aware of his “isolated situation,” Hancock worried that Makahs would steal his trade goods. He wrote that they “seemed dissatisfied with my presence” and described numerous Makah threats and entreaties for him to leave. In fact, a “large deputation” of two hundred Makahs surrounded his post, broke his canoe into pieces, and forced him to depart within three days. Neither Chief isi·t nor Chief Yelaub interceded on Hancock’s behalf at this time. Between the growing number of vessels anchoring at Neah Bay and the burgeoning port of Victoria, the Makah leaders likely felt that they had plenty of trade options and did not need a Boston trader in a Makah village. Not wanting to kill the trader, which might result in a loss of trading opportunities with non-Natives and unite white officials on both sides of the border against Makahs, they still worried that this outsider might compete with them by ignoring chiefs’ prerogatives to manage trade. Therefore, he needed to go.68
But competition between Chiefs Yelaub and isi·t brought Hancock back to Neah Bay in 1851. The growth of Fort Victoria and proliferation of Puget Sound towns likely began to siphon away trade from local Indians, so Makah chiefs without privileged connections to non-Native traders would have begun losing their position as middlemen in regional exchange networks. If Yelaub had successfully positioned himself as the Makah leader of influence in dealings with the Hudson’s Bay Company, isi·t would have been eager, for example, to explore new trade opportunities such as having a Boston trader under his authority at Neah Bay. In his memoir written less than a decade later, Hancock did not name any particular Makah chief, much less the one who invited him to return to Cape Flattery. He did note, however, that the community welcomed him as a trader, which would have only happened if one of the ranking chiefs had approved of the outsider’s presence. Perhaps Hancock received an invitation to return to the Makah village when he went to Neah Bay on business earlier that year.69 As these powerful chiefs competed to enhance their authority in the ča·di· borderland, they offered new commercial opportunities to settlers such as Hancock.
The trader’s second venture began well and benefited both him and the sponsoring chief. This time, Hancock came better prepared. He hired two assistants and chartered a vessel from the new Puget Sound town of Olympia to take them and an adequate quantity of trade goods to Neah Bay. With a chief’s support, Hancock received a better reception from the People of the Cape. By October, he and his men had built a small compound; they also hired a Makah cook. He traded for furs, oil, and salmon with Makahs and others to the north and south. In 1852, the commander of the US Pacific Coast Survey noted that Makahs “maintain trade with the Indians on the west of Vancouver [Island], forcing them to dispose of their oil and skins to themselves directly, and not the traders. By this means they make a large profit as intermediate traders.”70 Following longstanding practices that had served titleholders well during the maritime fur trade, Hancock’s sponsoring chief mediated trade between non-Makahs and the American trader.
However, the presence of Hancock and other intrusive outsiders displeased other Makahs, especially someone such as Chief Yelaub, who would have resented the competition. After the trader’s arrival, several people stole some of his goods. Hancock also worried that tensions between the People of the Cape and ships carrying goods from San Francisco to Puget Sound towns would make him a target for Indian anger. Many ships stopped at Neah Bay to trade liquor and other goods for fish, furs, and whale oil. Although Hancock railed against the evils of selling liquor to Natives, he also appeared to engage in this illicit trade—at least one set of trade goods he bought from San Francisco included more than two hundred gallons of whiskey. While the People of the Cape welcomed the trade brought by these vessels, they resisted those who failed to show proper respect. During the winter of 1851–52—the same season as the wreck of the Una—Makahs threatened Captain Pinkham’s schooner Franklin. Evidently the captain had angered someone, and when several canoes of warriors painted for battle approached his vessel, he fired his cannons at them. Fearing that Makahs might retaliate against him after suffering violence and insults from other whites, Hancock built a ten-foot-high palisade and breastwork around his post in early 1852.71
While tenuously accepting Hancock’s presence, the People of the Cape resisted when other non-Natives encroached on their sovereign spaces. This became evident when the US Pacific Coast Survey expedition established a base camp at Neah Bay while Hancock still traded there. Having heard that the People of the Cape antagonized whites who set foot on Makah land, the survey’s leader, Lieutenant George Davidson, worked through Hancock to convene a council with Chief isi·t. With Hancock translating, Davidson explained to the large group assembled in the chief’s longhouse that the survey crew was not there to “take away their lands, or interfere with their rights in any way; that our mission was for the benefit of shipping, and that in this they would share by having a trade with the whites.” But he also warned them that “if any attack was made upon us, or injury inflicted, a retribution was sure to follow.”72 Taking his cue from British and US officials, Davidson indicated his willingness to deploy retributive violence against aggressive Indians.73 Yet Davidson’s desire to secure isi·t’s permission for being on Makah land revealed that some indigenous leaders still possessed power that government officials respected.
The presence of the survey crew at Cape Flattery heightened the mounting tensions between competing Makah chiefs. Although one high-ranking title-holder, isi·t, allowed Hancock and the Pacific Coast Survey crew to occupy his people’s land temporarily, other chiefs were less welcoming. At the council, Chief Yelaub warned Davidson that his people were “equally willing to come to blows” if need be. Davidson’s crew worried about Yelaub, having heard that he was “a most incorrigible scoundrel, who by force of mental power and rascality had made himself of some importance to the tribe.” After setting up their camp in mid-July, the steamer Active, which had brought them to Neah Bay, left to survey the eastern part of the strait. They worried that the local Indian population greatly outnumbered them. James Lawson, topographical aide to Davidson, wrote, “All told in camp there were but nine of us, and when it is considered that in 24 hours about 500 Indians could be mustered against us, this might be considered a small force. But while we feared no danger we deemed it well to be prepared. We had in camp sufficient arms, rifles, revolvers, cavalry pistols and shotguns, to fire over sixty shots without stopping to reload.” Lawson’s assessment that superior fire-power and military training could overcome overwhelming Native numbers seems to reflect Victorian era assumptions about racial violence.74
Leveraging his influence within the borderland, Chief Yelaub demonstrated to expedition officials, Chief isi·t, and other Makahs his willingness and ability to strike at intruders. After the survey crew established their tent camp, “a large fleet of canoes” carrying around two hundred Nuu-chah-nulths from Vancouver Island came to Cape Flattery to exchange oil with Hancock via Yelaub. The trader overheard a conversation among the Indians regarding a plan to attack the survey crew. Darting over to the camp, Hancock informed Lawson and Davidson of the impending attack. The crew erected a breach work of logs, prepared their firearms for action, and posted guards at both the camp and Hancock’s post. The Nuu-chah-nulth did not camp on the beach that evening, instead staying in their canoes positioned in a kelp field to which they could anchor their craft. Throughout the night, two Indian men periodically sauntered by the camp to reconnoiter its defenses. In the morning, the fleet departed for home back across the strait. In hindsight, Lawson wrote in his autobiography that “the Mak-Kahs, on account of threats of punishment, were afraid to commit the deed, but the Vancouver [Island] Indians were to do so, and after sharing the spoils the latter would return home.” A keen borderlands strategist, Yelaub probably manipulated his kin on Vancouver Island to be his proxy. If these “northern Indians” had attacked, US authorities would have questioned Yelaub, who could have then accused the Nuu-chah-nulths instead of taking the blame himself.75
Much to Lawson’s frustration, Makahs resisted the US government’s effort to map colonial spaces on indigenous lands. They stole survey markers and ran off, with a pistol-wielding Lawson in pursuit. Eventually Lawson took out his frustration by shooting a village dog and threatening to kill any men or whip any women and children who interfered with the survey. Davidson drilled the small crew with weekly target practices, which he scheduled for times when large groups of Makahs watched. He hoped to create in them a “wholesome dread” of firearms. Instead, Makah chiefs just wanted the weapons even more, offering “fabulous price[s]” for the guns. After an absence of ten weeks, the Active returned on October 1 to collect the survey crew at Neah Bay, and the US intruders left.
Interactions between Makahs and whites—the US Pacific Coast Survey expedition, Hancock, visiting maritime traders, and the HBC—shaped contemporary impressions of the People of the Cape and their chiefs as formidable and aggressive. Newspapers carried this impression to a wider audience. The New York Daily Times informed readers that Makahs had been “exceedingly troublesome” to the US surveyors, who had only “finished their labors at imminent risk of their lives at this inhospitable point.”76 These events demonstrated that Makah chiefs still had substantial power and influence within the ča·di· borderland. Working with allied kin from across the strait, Makahs could intimidate non-Native intruders, forcing them to leave or accommodate to some Native protocols. Chief Yelaub possibly hoped that these displays of power would impress both rival titleholders in the borderlands and the newcomers. These incidents illustrated that indigenous leaders still possessed enough power to frustrate imperial processes during the early 1850s.
US intrusions did exacerbate tensions between these Makah chiefs. Lawson’s account drew from the dichotomy of Native stereotypes of the vanishing noble Indian and the hidebound savage in the way of progress.77 He presented isi·t as a leader willing to accommodate the expanding settler-colonial world. After isi·t witnessed one of the survey crew’s rounds of target practice, Lawson noted, “[isi·t] walked to the target, and placing his thumb and forefinger at an average distance of the shots from the bull’s eye, he measured off how many times it required to pass across his breast; then dropping his hand, and shaking his head as though to say, ‘Poor chance for an Indian there’ he walked slowly and sedately back, and without a word, seated himself. It was one of the most expressive movements I ever saw.”78 Although Lawson represented this action as a performance staged for the survey crew, he missed isi·t’s intended audience: the People of the Cape. He was trying to illustrate to his people the futility of violence against the Bostons, a path that his rival, Yelaub, had threatened to lead them down. As he had been doing for years, Chief isi·t was arguing that his strategies and leadership would provide for the best opportunities to profit from non-Natives.
Lawson mistakenly portrayed Chief Yelaub as the stereotypical savage who inhibited progress and hated all whites. Having been a kitchen scullion at Fort Langley as a boy, Yelaub was probably used to these aspersions. For years, patronizing HBC traders had lectured him for being “impudent” and castigating his followers as “ugly customers.”79 Yet he still appeared eager to engage with the expanding settler colonial world, albeit on indigenous terms. Drawing on an earlier practice from the maritime fur trade, at some point during 1851 or 1852, Yelaub either exchanged names with Albert or Lafayette Balch, two New England traders who had relocated to the West Coast in the mid-nineteenth century, or gave his son Sixey their surname; throughout the rest of the century Sixey also carried the name “Captain Balch” or “Billy Balch.” During the early 1850s while based out of San Francisco, Albert had engaged in the whale oil and salmon trade with West Coast Indians, while his brother Lafayette took out the first coasting license issued in Puget Sound. Lafayette established the town of Steilacoom, Washington, where he operated a trading post and sawmill, the latter of which would have required whale oil to lubricate its machinery. One of their employees, E. M. Fowler, was mate aboard the George Emery, a ship Lafayette captained—Fowler eventually captained his own ships, the Cynosure and the Potter, and both ships and captain became frequent visitors to Cape Flattery.80 Based on this evidence, it seems likely that both brothers stopped regularly at Neah Bay in the early 1850s. Trade with visiting, not resident, Bostons such as the Balch brothers gave Yelaub an opportunity to expand his authority among his people and throughout the region.
But neither chief spoke for the entire tribal nation. In fact, there were certainly other Makah titleholders, ones who do not appear in the archival record, jockeying for authority. Before the continuing rivalry between isi·t and Yelaub could develop into an intratribal conflict, however, a new crisis hit and transformed the balance of power in the ča·di· borderland forever.
CONFRONTING DISEASE AT NEAH BAY, 1853
Increased engagement with settler-colonial peoples brought Eurasian pathogens to the Cape Flattery villages. In the mid-nineteenth century, multiple afflictions hit the People of the Cape, compounding mortality as epidemics struck a people already weakened by earlier maladies. While Makahs suffered the severest effects of disease and their population plummeted, the number of non-Natives living in the region grew. These conditions combined to reverse the demographics of the borderlands: newcomers then outnumbered indigenous peoples. The smallpox epidemic of 1853 was particularly catastrophic because it killed the highest-ranking chiefs, including isi·t and Yelaub. Not only was this a severe emotional blow to Makahs, but it also meant that less experienced chiefs became the leaders forced to confront the expanding power of settler-colonial governments to control Indians. The high mortality and loss of experienced chiefs threatened to undermine the ability of the People of the Cape to control the ča·di· borderland.81
Numbering around 5,400 individuals before the arrival of Europeans, Makahs had suffered from Old World diseases before the mid-nineteenth century. At some point between 1775 and 1782, smallpox struck the People of the Cape and others in the borderlands, killing many.82 Although no maritime fur traders noted evidence of Makahs having suffered from this epidemic, members of the American Columbia observed smallpox scars among Ditidahts in 1791. Local borderlanders blamed the Spanish for introducing the disease. Because networks of kinship, trade, and warfare crossed the strait and connected Nuu-chah-nulths such as the Ditidahts to Makahs, if one group contracted smallpox, others did, too. By the mid-nineteenth century, the indigenous borderlands population had risen substantially but had failed to recover to the pre-smallpox level. When Natives confronted settler-colonial power during the mid-nineteenth century, they did so with fewer people than when they had encountered maritime fur traders.83
Some non-Natives took advantage of the “heritage of confusion and fear” the late eighteenth-century epidemic left behind. Duncan McDougall, head of the Pacific Fur Company’s Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River, reportedly told local Chinooks, “ ‘The white men among you,’ said [McDougall], ‘are few in number, it is true, but they are mighty in medicine. See here,’ continued he, drawing forth a small bottle and holding it before their eyes, ‘in this bottle I hold the smallpox, safely corked up; I have but to draw the cork, and let loose the pestilence, to sweep man, woman, and child from the face of the earth.’ ” The chiefs were struck with horror and alarm.84 Known as “the Great Smallpox Chief” after this 1811 speech, McDougall exploited indigenous fears of this Old World disease after hearing of the demise of the Tonquin in Clayoquot Sound. He hoped that this fear would help him control local Indians who might be emboldened to attack Fort Astoria. Natives and white traders spread the theory of bottled diseases that angry whites could uncork at will. In 1830, Captain John Dominis of the Boston brig Owyhee threatened to uncork a bottle full of disease, unleashing it among Makahs if they refused to trade beaver skins. Compounded by the “fever and ague” (malaria) that Dominis’s Owyhee brought to the People of the Cape and other indigenous borderlanders that season, this inaccurate explanation for disease shaped Makah understandings of pathogens into the 1850s.85
Northwest Coast peoples became part of a broader disease pool during the 1830s and 1840s. However, Makahs avoided many maladies that struck the region, including the influenza and smallpox outbreaks of 1836–38 and dysentery in 1844. Some evidence indicates that Makahs perhaps limited their contact with sick locations and affected peoples. The Fort Nisqually records indicate that from 1833 to 1836 Yelaub led annual Makah trading delegations there, arriving in the late fall and staying until January. But after January 1836, he no longer came to the fort. That fall, Makahs avoided Puget Sound possibly because they had heard about the influenza outbreak in March and April 1836 that struck Indians living near Fort Nisqually. The increasingly interconnected nature of the Northwest Coast, however, meant that the People of the Cape could not avoid all outbreaks of Old World diseases. In the spring of 1848, measles arrived at Fort Victoria, where Makahs contracted it. That summer, white passengers carried influenza to the fort, and Makahs, already weakened by measles, caught this, too. By the mid-nineteenth century, the People of the Cape regularly suffered from scrofula, a form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph nodes.86
During the summer or fall of 1853, the year following the US Pacific Coast Survey’s sojourn at Neah Bay, smallpox ravaged the indigenous communities of the ča·di· borderland. Mortality from this epidemic was higher than previous ones because Makahs had spent the months before the outbreak fighting off a bevy of other ailments, including malaria. During his time at Neah Bay with the survey expedition, Lawson suffered from “chills and fever” and took quinine. Malaria then spread to the People of the Cape. Lawson noted incidents of “serious illness” among the villages and even complained of their “avidity” for applying for and taking “Boston drugs”—Chief isi·t made the most frequent requests.87 Having seen his people suffer for the past five years from measles, influenza, and now malaria, isi·t sought non-Native cures to these afflictions.
But the US Pacific Coast Survey did not bring smallpox to Neah Bay. Instead, passengers and clothing on Captain Fowler’s brig Cynosure carried the disease north from San Francisco, infecting indigenous peoples along the Columbia River, at Willapa Bay, and at Cape Flattery. By November, the epidemic had reached deep into Puget Sound and was “raging” at the Puget Sound Agricultural Company’s farm at Tlithlow, near Steilacoom. When the Cynosure arrived at Neah Bay, two sick Makahs disembarked and infected their people. One of the returning men died, but the other survived. Many People of the Cape fled into the borderlands, crossing the strait to live among relatives at Ditidaht and other Vancouver Island villages. British Indian agent William Banfield reported that smallpox had “nearly annihilated” the Pacheedahts in the early 1850s. They likely contracted the disease from fleeing Makahs or neighboring Ditidahts who had taken in smallpox refugees from the Cape Flattery villages.88
From his trading post at Neah Bay, Hancock witnessed Makah efforts to combat the epidemic. In the beginning, when someone became sick in a longhouse, all the occupants fled to live in other houses after leaving behind some dried fish and water for the afflicted person. As the epidemic spread, sick people pulled themselves out to the beach to die. Many begged Hancock for help, promising to become his slaves for life if they survived. Beyond providing food and water, however, he believed he could do little. Many People of the Cape died in front of the trader’s post. Hancock had survivors dig large holes to deposit fifteen to twenty bodies at a time. When he tired of bodies filling his yard, he dragged them down to the beach at low tide, hoping they would drift away. In a matter of six weeks, the disease burned its course, taking almost two thousand Makahs, or three-quarters of the People of the Cape.89 Hancock reported that “the beach for the distance of eighteen miles was literally strewn with the dead bodies of these people, presenting a most disgusting spectacle.”90 What disgusted Hancock devastated Makah society.
Survivors hypothesized about whom to blame for the 1853 smallpox epidemic. Still believing that whites kept diseases in bottles, some blamed the US Pacific Coast Survey because they had left behind bottles to mark a coastal astronomical station. Fearing future outbreaks, some Makahs dug up and destroyed these bottles.91 Others blamed the survivor who had returned to Neah Bay aboard the Cynosure. Hancock observed, “Being determined to have satisfaction from some quarter for the loss of so many of their people, [they] apprehended the Indian who contracted the disease on the schooner, but recovered: as a punishment he was taken out in the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and placed in a small canoe barely large enough to hold him and set adrift, without a paddle or anything else. They thought he would drift out to sea and perish, but the night was calm and favorable, and paddling with his hands he succeeded in reaching by morning, Nerah Island [Waadah Island in Neah Bay], where he was discovered by the natives who went after him and shot him with their muskets.”92 Many Makahs also blamed Hancock, and he taxed his limited communication skills to convince them otherwise.
Despite his reassurances, Hancock never regained the Makahs’ goodwill. Before the 1853 epidemic, the presence of the Pacific Coast Survey had exacerbated tensions among Makah chiefs and with Hancock. He had lost his patron to the smallpox epidemic, and some continued to blame him for the catastrophe. The trader’s actions during the epidemic would have upset many. Not only had he failed to help those in need, but he also had dragged the dead to the waterline. From the Makahs’ perspective, this was a terrible insult because this was a common way to dispose of dead slaves. The People of the Cape made their feelings for Hancock known. He later recalled that hostile Makahs “threatened at various times to kill me if I did not leave the place.” After the epidemic, he concluded that he was no longer safe. By the end of 1853, he abandoned his trading post, exchanging the remainder of his goods with neighboring S’Klallams for passage to Whidbey Island in northern Puget Sound, where he lived “the quiet life of the farmer.”93
The high mortality from the 1853 diseases dealt a severe blow to the People of the Cape. Hancock reported, “It was really distressing to look at those who had survived this sad occasion, some of whom had lost all their near and dearest friends, and whose countenances showed their distress more plainly than words could have told; all seemed to realize their forlorn situation, and be ignorant what to do with themselves.” Makahs also appeared either reluctant or still too sick to engage in regular trade with vessels that came to Neah Bay that winter. A year later, Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens and his treaty commission visited Neah Bay. “Klah-pe at hoo” (Captain John Claplanhoo), younger brother of Chief Halicks—one of the three highest-ranked chiefs—told Stevens, “Since his brother died, he had been sick at heart.”94 Coming on the heels of previous afflictions, the combined onslaught of malaria and smallpox led to a demographic and social catastrophe unmatched by previous epidemics.
The loss of their most prominent leaders compounded the Makahs’ sadness. Among the casualties buried in pits around Hancock’s post, abandoned on the beach, or dragged to the waterline at low tide were isi·t, Yelaub, and Halicks. Smallpox struck them down at the peak of their lives. A year earlier, Lawson had remarked on isi·t’s physical health after witnessing the whaler at work: “Perfectly naked he stood in the bow of the canoe, one foot on each gunwale, a perfect specimen of an athlete, and never failed to strike his mark.”95 In his midthirties, Yelaub was a renowned war chief in the ča·di· borderland. Seeing these accomplished and healthy whalers and warriors—literal paragons of their people—waste away in a matter of weeks must have devastated the People of the Cape. Their loss also necessitated a reshuffling of leadership among the Makahs. Self-described “small chiefs” such as 
alču·t (“kuhl-choot”) of Neah Bay became the ranking titleholders. These less experienced leaders then became the ones to confront the US treaty representatives in 1855. At this point, only about a quarter of the Makahs remained—all demoralized survivors—to resist the outsiders.
Throughout isi·t’s and Yelaub’s lives, conditions in the ča·di· borderland began to shift in a way that challenged indigenous control of the region. They experienced the emergence of terrestrial colonial and settler spaces within the borderlands and non-Native attempts to intrude on Makah lands. New commercial competitors appeared, including fur trading enterprises such as the Pacific Fur Company, North West Company, and Hudson’s Bay Company, along with an increasing number of smaller, private US outfits operating ships sailing along the coast. Throughout the rising commercialization of the region, Makahs made conscious efforts to hold onto their position as middlemen by transforming these potential competitors into trade opportunities. Chiefs Yelaub and isi·t were able to do this because of their ability to exploit customary marine resources, a prime location along the Northwest Coast, and borderlands dynamics and networks. But they also became concerned about the growing power of colonial entities to deploy retributive violence along racial lines. A series of geopolitical changes began to transform the region and gave rise to a colonial borderlands and eventual boundary line separating US and British claims in the Pacific Northwest. However, many of the conditions and dynamics of the ča·di· borderland persisted alongside the colonial borderlands, even after it hardened into a borderline between nation-states.
The year 1853 was crucial for the People of the Cape. They began that year from a position of relative power in the ča·di· borderland. Leaders had reversed their people’s waning trade influence in the borderlands by bringing a non-Native trader to Cape Flattery. Selling tens of thousands of gallons of whale oil to this trader and the HBC had made chiefs such as isi·t and others wealthy. For the time, Makahs remained integral to the success of the HBC and early settler industries and processes. Their “pillaging” of the Una and purported “barbarous” punishment of those Makahs who preyed on helpless whites encouraged newcomers to the region to respect—even fear—them. Chiefs isi·t and Yelaub embodied the power of indigenous leaders to both interrupt and enable colonial processes such as trade, surveying, and settlement. The Northwest Coast of the early 1850s was a complex region where indigenous power, people, and commodities simultaneously worked with and against the governments, settlers, and markets of two of the most powerful empires of the time, the United Kingdom and the United States. At the beginning of 1853, Makah chiefs such as isi·t and Yelaub still possessed the ability to control space.
Part of this strength came from the competitive nature of authority in systems of Northwest Coast leadership. Influential Makah chiefs engaged colonialism in various ways in order to maintain or strengthen personal influence in the Northwest Coast. Colonialism did not create rivalry among titleholders; nor did these tensions represent a detrimental and growing schism within tribal communities such as the People of the Cape. Chiefs isi·t and Yelaub were not simply colonial collaborators or resisters.96 Instead, they both embraced and encouraged precise aspects of the emerging settler-colonial world to meet culturally specific Makah needs. Usually missing this dynamic, non-Natives such as HBC employees, American traders and ship captains, and government surveyors often became embroiled in these rivalries. Most important, though, competition among Makah chiefs had a productive quality, fueling non-Native respect for the power of the People of the Cape, who continued to be known for their formidability. During the crucial years of the mid-nineteenth century when settler-colonial pressures increased, this reputation helped to protect Makah sovereignty.
As 1853 unfolded, however, catastrophic challenges threatened the People of the Cape. A deadly smallpox epidemic hammered a population already weakened from an earlier affliction of malaria, reducing the Makahs from about 2,500 individuals to several hundred. Adding to the devastation of death on such a massive scale, other Makahs temporarily fled the Cape Flattery villages, deepening their desolation. The epidemic, moreover, claimed the lives of the two most powerful chiefs, isi·t and Yelaub, and other ranking titleholders. The high disease mortality rate of 1853 contributed to a dramatic demographic shift as increasing numbers of non-Natives began arriving. On February 8, 1853, Congress organized Washington Territory, which intensified non-Native emigration to the Northwest Coast. Unlike earlier non-Natives, these newcomers came with the intention of establishing homes and communities that would substantially limit indigenous sovereignty. How the People of the Cape recovered from one challenge to confront the next would determine their fate for future generations.