5

“AN ANOMALY IN THE INDIAN SERVICE”

In June 1865, Henry Webster, US Indian agent at Neah Bay, composed the agency’s annual report for the commissioner of Indian affairs, characterizing his Makah charges as “an anomaly in the Indian service.” From his vantage at the most northwestern point of the United States, the people living in a collection of cedar longhouses hugging the rugged shore of Cape Flattery must have appeared this way. Violent storms swept across heavily forested, mountainous terrain and regularly dumped more than a hundred inches of rain each year. With the nearest US settlement several days away by Indian canoe, Neah Bay felt isolated from the world. After one of his earliest visits to Cape Flattery, James Swan described Webster as living an “almost Robinson Crusoe residence on this bleak, extreme northwest portion of the domain of the United States … the farthest west of any settlers on American soil.”1 But in this seemingly isolated and unwelcoming environment of Cape Flattery, Makahs anomalously thrived.

This was no “bleak,” remote edge of the world for the indigenous people who made this their home. Networks of trade, kinship, and conflict knit together village communities and growing non-Native towns in the ča·di· borderland and Puget Sound. Makah whalers, sealers, and fishers harvested a wealth of resources from customary waters. Agent Webster reported that they did not “procure a scanty and temporary supply, but have abundance to dispose of in trade with the Indians and whites.” He advised the commissioner that the federal government should encourage their fisheries so that they could remain self-supporting and attain a “state of civilization.” This also made them anomalous to the Indian service: rather than civilizing Makahs by transforming them into Jeffersonian yeoman farmers, Webster contradictorily believed that the federal government should support customary marine practices to help them progress.²

Perhaps the People of the Cape appeared anomalous to Agent Webster in a third way, for he came from a culture that defined whites and Indians as opposites.3 Euro-Americans pictured themselves as modern, civilized, prosperous, masculine, and dynamic, believing themselves to be agents of the future who would usher in progress and develop the Northwest Coast wilderness. Conversely, American Indians were supposed to be traditional, uncivilized, impoverished, feminine, childlike, and static. Nearly all non-Natives saw Indians as a part of nature, relics of the past, and impediments to the inevitable progress and economic development of the continent. Men like Webster regarded Makahs as anomalous because they did not fit the Indian stereotype.⁴ During the second half of the nineteenth century, the People of the Cape bought and used expensive vessels and prospered as dynamic actors in regional and international markets of exchange. Their labor in modern extractive industries of the North Pacific strengthened their ability to continue living as Makahs even though the United States attempted to tighten control over indigenous peoples in the West. They labored and engaged in new economic experiences in order to maintain cultural practices, thereby establishing new paths to capitalist development.⁵ Agent Webster witnessed the beginning of a Makah version of economic development that was part of the rise of indigenous entrepreneurs in Gilded Age America.

Some historical narratives that detail the rise of regional and global markets continue to cast indigenous peoples as either tragic victims or ignorant dupes who could only accept or react to European and Euro-American actions and changes. These narratives simplify the role of indigenous peoples in commercial exchanges. Natives appear at the fringes, as peripheral hunters or fishers swept aside or exploited by dynamic non-Natives, “the utmost antithesis to an America dedicated to productivity, profit, and private property.”⁶ These characterizations obscure the way indigenous entrepreneurs created roles for themselves within market societies in order to maintain and strengthen distinct cultural identities. Reports such as those written by Agent Webster perpetuated this false conclusion and framed successful Makahs as anomalous, as the exception to the rule.

A marine-oriented approach to Makah history of the late nineteenth century reveals that these whalers, sealers, and fishers combined new opportunities and technologies with customary practices to maintain their identity, much as other Native peoples of North America did as they confronted settler-colonialism and growing capitalist markets.⁷ Rather than allowing expanding networks of capital to overwhelm and replace indigenous practices, these fishers and sea mammal hunters engaged markets of exchange and attracted—even made—capital investments in North Pacific extractive industries. When examined from a Makah perspective, these actions reveal dynamic, indigenous actors who exploited new opportunities within their own cultural framework. The subsequent success of the People of the Cape stemmed from measures Makah chiefs had taken to protect access to customary marine space while negotiating the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay.

During this period, the Claplanhoo family exemplified Makah prosperity. Prominent patriarchs such as John, James, and Jongie emerged as indigenous entrepreneurs and occupied the ranks of tribal leadership for more than a century, from the early 1850s to the late 1950s. Although James engaged in the pelagic sealing industry and Jongie both sealed and fished commercially, all three Claplanhoo chiefs whaled. Similar to other Northwest Coast whaling chiefs, these men married women from prominent families around the ča·di· borderland, which enabled them to maintain close ties with influential in-laws. In 1860, John married Ši·a·štido (“shee-ahsh-ti-do”), sister to Chief Quistoh (Ditidaht of Port Renfrew) and originally betrothed to Chief isi·t (“klih-seet”), a casualty of the 1853 smallpox epidemic. James married Mary Ann George, daughter of Tsat-tsat-wha (Makah chief of Tatoosh) and Mei-ye-te-tidux (Ahousaht). In 1897 Jongie married Lizzie Parker, daughter of Wilson Parker and Babitsweyklub, two Makahs. James married his daughter Minnie to Chestoqua Peterson, the son of Peter Brown and nephew of Wha-laltl as sá buy, the Makah chief whose murder in 1861 perpetuated the conflict with the Elwhas.8

Claplanhoos first appear in the documentary historical record during the negotiations of the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay with Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens. Early in the treaty council, a Neah Bay chief named Klah-pe at hoo (John Claplanhoo) spoke about his continuing sadness at the death of his brother, Halicks—whom he identified as the third-highest chief—from smallpox.⁹ After Halicks died, his chiefly position, titles, and other property passed on to his brother. But John also inherited his brother’s responsibilities. This meant that during the treaty negotiations, a distraught John still focused on what his people needed: access to customary marine waters, whales, seals, and fish.

To varying degrees, all three Claplanhoo chiefs during the post-treaty decades engaged new opportunities—schools, local and global markets, influential whites, and non-Native technologies—that accompanied settler-colonialism in the region. Yet they continued to participate in cultural practices ranging from lengthy potlatches to ritual preparations for customary hunting and fishing practices. Other Makahs also succeeded during this period; the Claplanhoos were not unique among their community. These accomplishments, tracked through archival and oral sources, reveal that the People of the Cape combined customary practices with new opportunities to attain high standards of living. Their participation in the expanding settler-colonial world supported their ability to continue forging a unique Makah identity and to resist the cultural assault of federal assimilation policies.

However, Makahs of the second half of the nineteenth century experienced enormous challenges that eventually undercut their success and autonomy. These challenges illustrate the limits of Makah agency in the face of unequal power held by non-Natives and historical trends outside their control.10 The People of the Cape and other indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast were not the only ones who hunted whales and seals. The growing number of non-Native whalers and sealers in local waters and the larger Pacific Ocean devastated marine species that provided for Makah subsistence and commercial economies. As more users overhunted Pacific resources, nation-states established conservation measures that legally privileged non-Natives over Natives and large over small operations. By the early twentieth century, Makah hunters of the sea found themselves excluded by law from once-lucrative fisheries then collapsing. Without the wealth and subsequent power Makahs accrued from customary marine harvests, the People of the Cape became susceptible to assimilation and poverty.

MAKAH WHALERS, 1850–1928

A customary practice for more than two thousand years, whaling had secured substantial wealth and power for the People of the Cape, but this situation began to change in the second half of the nineteenth century. As non-Native commercial whalers depleted Pacific stocks, Makahs experienced greater difficulty finding iapuk (“chih-tuh-pook,” whales) in local waters. Subsequently, these indigenous whalers petitioned the federal government for new technologies to expand their Pacific hunting range. Yet Makahs received inconsistent levels of support for these requests, which prevented them from securing access to modern technologies for whaling to the degree that they wanted. Troubled by the dearth of whales migrating past Cape Flattery, Makahs suspended the active practice of whaling in 1928 until stocks rebounded at some point in the future.

Whaling had always provided the foundation of the subsistence and commercial economies of the People of the Cape. They hunted many species of leviathans found in the Pacific. In 1852, they caught more than two dozen whales, which provided them with more than 60,000 gallons of oil, an amount exceeding the average take of a whaling ship returning to its northeastern port after a two-year voyage. A ship returning to New Bedford, Massachusetts, that same year carried an average number of 1,343 barrels, which represented between 40,290 and 47,005 gallons, of oil harvested during a two-year period.¹¹ Makahs exchanged oil for a wide range of Native and non-Native goods, which made whalers wealthy individuals within the community and the ča·di· borderland. One Makah elder today recalls stories of his grandfather Hiškwi (“hish-kwee”), a Waa (“wuh-uhch”) chief born in 1845 who had earned substantial wealth from whaling. When federal Indian agents in the late nineteenth century forced him to give up two of his three wives, Hiškwi provided these women with enough money to live in comfort for the rest of their lives.12 But overhunting by non-Natives in the Pacific Ocean eventually changed the fortunes of Makah whalers.

Initially, the arrival of non-Native whalers to the Pacific brought further wealth to Makahs, much as maritime fur traders did. In the late eighteenth century, these outsiders sailed into the Pacific as they sought new hunting grounds, and their numbers grew rapidly. In 1787, the English whaler Amelia took the first sperm whale in the Pacific, and by 1791, Yankee whalers from Nantucket and New Bedford hunted in the ocean, too. Maritime historians sometimes aggrandize the role of white whalers, characterizing them as “part of the advance guard of civilization” because they explored uncharted seas and brought unknown areas and peoples—unknown at least to the United States and Europe—into global markets. But this assessment becomes complicated when we consider the role of indigenous peoples in these pursuits. The Butterworth, one of the earliest ships to return to England after trading along the Northwest Coast and generally credited for commencing North Pacific whaling, brought back about twenty thousand gallons of whale oil in 1795. The Butterworth’s crew, however, did not procure this oil from whales they had hunted; they had purchased it from indigenous whalers in the ča·di· borderland. By the early nineteenth century, a few whaling vessels from England and New England told port authorities that they were bound for the Northwest Coast to hunt leviathans.¹³ After making the long trip around Cape Horn, these ships needed fresh provisions, which encouraged them to interact with indigenous peoples along the Northwest Coast. Savvy Native traders also offered whale oil to these outsiders, meaning that perhaps indigenous whalers harvested and processed a substantial portion of oil landed in Atlantic ports by these ships.

After the War of 1812, the Pacific whaling industry grew as the fleet expanded and engaged new ports along the northeastern seaboard of the United States. Whalers targeted sperm whales because of the high quality of their oil, which was used for illumination. The “golden age” of whaling began in 1835 with the taking of the first right whale—called this because it was the “right” whale to hunt due to its high oil content and ease of capture—off the Northwest Coast above 50°N latitude. This coincided with a booming demand for whale oil lubricants used by textile factories filled with power looms. In 1851 alone, one factory in Lowell, Massachusetts, used 6,772 gallons of whale oil, which represented the harvest of three sperm whales.14 By 1846, more than seven hundred barks, brigs, and schooners from US ports whaled in the Pacific, most of them cruising right-whaling grounds in the Gulf of Alaska and off Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands.¹⁵

Whaling vessels often came into the ča·di· borderland, where they interacted with Makahs and other indigenous peoples. Whalers anchored at Neah Bay to procure fresh provisions and whale oil from the People of the Cape. But because of the legacy of violent encounters during the maritime fur trade, some feared Makahs and neighboring communities. In September 1843, the Caroline (US) and Réunion (French) fled Cape Flattery despite a brief and friendly encounter. After whaling together off Alaska’s Kodiak Island, the two vessels approached the cape to seek provisions and new hunting grounds. Seven canoes of Makahs greeted them, offering fresh fish and whale oil for sale. An English-speaking chief tried to persuade them to come into Neah Bay where they could sojourn for several weeks until whales migrating north came into the strait. But Captain Daniel McKenzie of the Caroline “d[id] not like the appearance of things” and feared a trap. Over the strenuous objections of the French captain, whose crew needed provisions, McKenzie departed the area and sailed for San Francisco. Fearing to anchor alone at Neah Bay, the Réunion followed the Caroline south. Although anxiety marked this encounter, enough whaling ships visited Neah Bay that Makahs knew what crews needed and wanted.¹⁶

Some vessels came into the Strait of Juan de Fuca looking for new whaling grounds or for locations to establish shore whaling operations. In the fall of 1847, the General Teste, a French whaler from Le Havre, cruised into the strait to hunt in the Gulf of Georgia and northern Puget Sound, sixty to eighty miles east of Cape Flattery. But the General Teste did not do well—the crew killed only one whale and lost even that one—and they had left by early 1848. Non-Native shore whaling operations in this region also faltered in the beginning. From 1867 to 1871, just under a dozen companies—all operating from shore stations on the British side of the border—formed and collapsed, and none lasted longer than two seasons. They suffered from stormy weather, lack of proper equipment, low oil prices, vessel losses, and perhaps unskilled workers. In the dense fogs characteristic to the area, these nonlocal hunters often lost slain whales, which drifted off or sank. The most successful venture captured only nineteen whales and produced about thirty-three thousand gallons of oil in 1869, about half of what Makahs had processed a decade earlier.¹⁷

As with similar expansions of the settler-colonial world into the region, Makahs engaged in the non-Native whaling industry. Along with other Pacific peoples, some, such as i·tap (“kee-tuhp,” David Fischer) and General Jackson, labored on non-Native whaling ships and explored the larger world. Shipping out of Neah Bay in the 1850s, Fischer joined cruises lasting years in length and even traveled as far abroad as Africa.18 A few indigenous borderlanders also labored at local shore whaling stations, although white operators ignored the whaling expertise of these people, limiting them to tasks such as towing carcasses to shore and stripping the flesh and blubber. Native women lived with some non-Native men working at the shore stations and probably contributed by rendering blubber into oil, a customary activity back in their home villages. Indigenous whalers often picked up the prey struck but lost in the fog by their non-Native counterparts. Although whites complained in local papers that Indians “appropriated to their own use” carcasses belonging to shore whaling operations, Natives probably sold to traders oil processed from these “losses.”¹⁹ Through this wage work and by harvesting drift whales that had escaped from white shore whalers, Natives continued to mark historical and cultural places in the ča·di· borderland as theirs.²⁰

The eastern Pacific whale fisheries followed a similar pattern of declining returns as non-local, commercial whalers depleted a given stock within a decade and then moved on to another species. During the 1840s, whalers targeted right whales in the North Pacific, and by the 1850s, returns had plummeted to a quarter of those from the previous decade. These whalers often lost many they harpooned. In 1841, the Superior struck fifty-eight whales along the Northwest Coast but only recovered twenty-six, noting that another five sank before retrieval. After examining numerous logs from whaling’s golden age, one historian concluded that the death of unrecovered whales was high because nearly every logbook made references to encountering the carcasses of right whales that had died from harpoon strikes.²¹ After discovering bowhead grounds in the Bering Sea in 1849, whalers shifted to this baleen whale, and by 1865, they had reduced the bow-head population by more than half. Due to decreasing numbers of bowheads—and the actions of the Shenandoah, a Southern privateer steamship that burned thirty-four Yankee whaling vessels in the Bering Sea toward the end of the Civil War—non-Native whalers shifted their focus to hunting gray whales in calving grounds off Baja California. Intense commercial whaling also caused this fishery to collapse, and the gray whale population plummeted from a high of twenty-four thousand at the beginning of the century to two thousand by the 1880s.²²

Overhunting of Pacific whale populations caused the New England whaling industry to wither and die during the 1870s. Decades of fluctuating prices for oil and baleen made it difficult for investors to sustain steady returns. Profitable years resulted in the growth of the fleet and new ports, which in subsequent years flooded markets with whale products and drove prices down. This situation meant that voyages were too expensive for the meager returns. Once lasting just two years, cruises in the 1870s stretched from four to six years, yet amounts of oil and baleen decreased. Longer voyages required a more substantial outfitting of vessels, an expense that grew out of proportion with profits. Only the Northern Pacific and Arctic fisheries—“where disasters were the rule and immunity from them the exception”—retained any hope of profit. The whaling fleet in the Arctic suffered a catastrophe in 1871, when ice crushed thirty-four ships. The financial losses from this numbered in the millions of dollars. More than a thousand survivors eventually made it to Honolulu, where they languished while seeking employment in a dwindling industry. As whaling profits plummeted, the output from the nation’s petroleum wells increased, providing a plentiful, high-quality, and cheap alternative to whale oil for lighting and lubricants.23

For New England laborers and investors, other industries beckoned. By the 1870s, whaling captains, experienced sailors, and “green hands” were earning little; crewmember income averaged between $3 and $7 a month. These laborers felt that “a strenuous and dangerous voyage of a year yielded not a penny besides the food.” They found better wages in the booming manufacturing industry of the Northeast. Pacific Rim gold discoveries encouraged desertions as whaling became less profitable. Sailors—and even captains and officers—joined whaling ships simply to get to the region. Profits also diminished for shipowners. After the 1871 catastrophe in the Arctic, insurance premiums rose to “almost prohibitive heights.” The transition from sail-powered ships to more successful steam-powered vessels was too expensive for many who had already invested their capital in sailing ships.²⁴

Although the end of the industry in the Northeast was not the end of US whaling, the demise of Yankee whaling in the 1870s affected the People of the Cape, illustrating just one way that larger trends undercut Makah opportunities. After the Civil War, San Francisco grew into the leading port for whalers, and competition from this new center of the industry contributed to the waning influence of Northeastern ports, whose vessels had once frequented the Cape Flattery villages. By 1883, San Francisco had whale oil refineries and sperm candle works. Instead of shipping oil and other whale products around Cape Horn—an arduous and long voyage, at best—merchants used new transcontinental railroads to transport commodities east. By 1893, thirty-three whaling ships were based out of the Pacific port, and twenty-two of these were steamers. Instead of anchoring at Neah Bay to resupply, steamships put in at other ports, which had access to abundant coal. With no Yankee whalers stopping at Cape Flattery and the new steam-powered whaling fleet bypassing Makah villages, the People of the Cape lost an important market for whale oil. The shift to expensive floating factory ships at the turn of the century moved whaling even farther from the coast and indigenous whalers. Twentieth-century whaling focused less on whale oil, a commodity easily provided by Makahs, and more on goods indigenous peoples could not provide, such as fertilizers, bone meal, animal fodder, glue, cosmetics, and other products requiring expensive industrial processes.25

Most important, the overall decline of whales in the Pacific affected Makah whalers such as John Claplanhoo. Known as Captain John by whites, this patriarch was a whaling chief. But he seemed to doubt his whaling ability when he measured his kills against those of other hunters. To bolster his hunting prowess and prove his lineage as a whaler, he made theatrical shows of his ancestral “whale medicine,” pieces of dead whales and a bone of the ii·ktu·yak (“hih-heek-too-yuhk”), a sea horse–like snake that stuns whales with lightning. According to Northwest Coast legends, Thunderbird uses the ii·ktu·yak when he comes down from his alpine nest to hunt whales. When John had trouble hunting in the mid-1860s, he underwent extra ritual preparations, including fasting, sleep deprivation, and bathing in saltwater with his whale medicine.²⁶

Others who noticed the declining number of whales attributed it to various causes. In 1858, Makahs complained to an Indian agent that they objected to the government lighthouse at Tatoosh Island not only because it was built on land that belonged to the tribal nation but also because “it keeps the whales from coming as usual.” Several decades later, Lighthouse Jim (Makah) joked to James Swan that they had a harder time catching iapuk “as [they] now drink coffee at each breakfast before going out as the whales smell their breath.” However, John’s poor whaling skills, the new lighthouse, and Lighthouse Jim’s coffee breath probably did not make it harder to catch whales. Instead, their experiences reflected the changing ecology of the Pacific, namely the removal of vast numbers of leviathans by non-local commercial whalers.²⁷

Despite the increasing difficulty of securing whales throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, whaling remained important to the People of the Cape. The continued prominence of whalers among tribal leadership indicates that these chiefs must have provided tangible benefits. John Claplanhoo maintained his position as a recognized leader of his people, and detailed census records of the 1860s show his longhouse as one of the largest. From 1861 to 1865, average longhouse populations fell from 18 to 12.6, whereas the Claplanhoo longhouse grew from 22 to 24 individuals. In the first American-style election held on the reservation, the residents of Neah Bay chose John as one of their four chiefs, who, in turn, elected him tribal chairman in 1879. Although Claplanhoo drew his profits from a variety of economic activities—his slaves cut wood, cleared land, and did chores for the Neah Bay Agency; he fished; and he engaged in regular trade with Native villages and colonial towns—he continued to value his identity as a whaler. In 1878, during a grand ceremony, he took the name Łutka·bałid (“lthoot-kah-buh-lthihd,” Thunder on the Ocean), which tied him to his family’s whaling heritage.28

Whaling statistics from the second half of the nineteenth century are difficult to ascertain because no one kept complete returns for the entire community, yet available evidence indicates that Makahs regularly landed around a dozen whales each year. Based on statistics provided by the whaling chief Wha-laltl as sá buy (Swell) in 1859, Swan noted that thirty canoes of Makah whalers harvested thirteen whales that year and produced about thirty thousand gallons of oil.²⁹ During his tenure at Neah Bay as the agency teacher, Swan noted occasions when Makahs hunted whales; but these numbers were less accurate than the 1859 statistics provided by Wha-laltl because Swan could not be everywhere on the reservation at all times. He never heard of some hunts—especially those from the coastal villages of Waa, u·yas, and Ozette—and there were probably times when he did not report whaling about which he did hear. Yet some of Swan’s numbers are close to those reported by Wha-laltl, as are those reported by Indian agents who also occasionally noted the number of whales taken that year. Agents’ numbers are lower than they actually were because they, too, were not in a position to report every hunt.

These whaling returns compared favorably to contemporaneous non-Native operations along the West Coast. In 1872, Makahs hunting in canoes produced an estimated 20,700 gallons of oil from the nine whales the agent reported among this community of 604 individuals. Two years earlier, San Francisco, a growing city with nearly 150,000 people, landed 4,013 barrels (or about 130,423 gallons) of whale oil from six vessels that identified the city as their homeport. This oil resulted from four-to-six-year cruises in the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean, and 1870 saw one of the highest oil returns recorded by the city’s port officials until the advent of steam-powered whaling ships later that century. When we consider that this non-Native oil came from leviathans harvested during voyages lasting several years, this statistic represents an average of 27,590 gallons per year, an amount not much higher than what Makahs produced in 1872.³⁰

Table 1. Snapshot of Makah whaling returns during the second half of the nineteenth century

Sources: From Swan’s Diaries, 5–7, 55, Swan Papers, 1833–1909; E. M. Gibson, Agent Report, ARCIA (1873), 308; W. L. Powell, Agent Report, ARCIA (1888), 225; John P. McGlinn, Agent Report, ARCIA (1891), 448; Samuel G. Morse, Agent Report, ARCIA (1897), 292.

As whale oil returns dwindled at similarly sized white operations, Makah harvests remained high during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In 1888, Makahs again harvested at least nine whales, which produced approximately 20,700 gallons of oil. In comparison, a shore whaling station occupied by Portuguese at San Simeon Bay, California, took seven gray and humpback whales in 1888 and the same amount in the following year. From these whales, this station produced only 180 and 260 barrels (or 5,850 and 8,450 gallons) of oil, respectively. With twenty-one men and nine boats at the time, this operation was “one of the principal whaling stations on the Pacific Coast” and had operated since 1865.31

Comparing the oil returns of Makah whalers to a similar whaling operation along the coast of California reveals two important conclusions. First, during a period when leviathans were “disappearing from the Pacific Ocean,” as reported by the New York Times, Makah whalers harvested more whales than non-Natives engaged in the same industry. Second, Makah women were more then twice as efficient when it came to processing oil—either that or Makahs hunted larger specimens than their Portuguese counterparts in California did. The fact that the People of the Cape on average rendered 2,300 gallons of oil from each whale is significant. This number might appear unusually high because scholars commonly assume that commercial whalers in the nineteenth century harvested between 20 and 30 barrels (anywhere from 600 to 1,050 gallons) of oil per whale. Butchering a whale on the high seas was dangerous because it produced a large amount of blood and oil, making the deck of a whaling vessel slick. Sailors slipped in the mess and sometimes ended up overboard in waters filled with sharks drawn to the carnage. Add to this the way large waves or storms would rock a ship, and it is easy to see that whalers probably sacrificed thoroughness for speed when it came to butchering a whale, which could take many hours or even days. When compared to Long Island shore whaling stations of the eighteenth century, Makah returns appear reasonable. Lord Cornbury, the British governor of New York and New Jersey (1702–8), reported in 1708 that two-year-old whales often yielded nearly 2,000 gallons of oil, with the largest specimens resulting in more than 3,000 gallons. Industrial whaling of the early twentieth century sometimes resulted in yields of 7,500 gallons of oil from the blubber of large whales.32

Despite their success as whalers, the People of the Cape could do little about the impact of modern whaling on sea mammal populations in the Pacific. Claplanhoo oral histories recall that 1909 marked the last whale hunt completed by a family member. Jongie, grandson to John Claplanhoo, killed this whale and added the one-hundred-and-forty-second notch to the harpoon that his forebears had used for four generations. Makahs took the occasional whale during the second decade of the twentieth century, but by this time, they rarely saw iapuk in local waters. A whale sighting resulted in tremendous excitement and the immediate launch of whaling canoes. In 1928, nineteen years before non-Natives decided to suspend the hunt of gray whales, concern over the dearth of whales caused the tribal nation to suspend the active practice of whaling until populations had rebounded. Makahs took their responsibilities to nonhuman kin such as whales seriously, and this tough decision made sense. To provide the youngest generation with the experience of welcoming a whale to Neah Bay, whalers held a final hunt. The tribal nation always intended to revive an active whaling practice at some point in the future.³³

Charles White harpooning a whale. The whale has already been harpooned; White is making a second thrust and has a sealskin float attached to the harpoon line. This is thought to be a photo of the hunt in 1928, the last one for more than seventy years. Photograph by Asahel Curtis, courtesy the Makah Cultural and Research Center, Neah Bay, WA.

Before deciding to suspend whaling, the People of the Cape looked to new technologies that would allow them to expand their hunting grounds deeper into the Pacific, much as non-Native commercial whalers were doing at the time. In 1862, John Claplanhoo spoke with Swan about the possibility of purchasing a schooner from a local trader. Already finding it more difficult to locate whales along the coast, John hoped to use the larger vessel to hunt far from the safety of the coast. In 1884, a hundred Makahs met in council with an Indian inspector and urged him to convince the government to provide them with a steamship so they could more easily haul in whales from the Pacific. Some of these individuals had been present at the 1855 treaty negotiations, and they recalled that Governor Stevens had promised to support tribal marine industries. By making these requests in the decades following the treaty, the People of the Cape attempted to hold the government responsible for its promises.34

Some officials supported Makah requests for modern vessels, despite federal efforts to transform all American Indians into farmers. In his annual reports for 1865 and 1867, Henry Webster, the Makah agent, forwarded the tribe’s requests to his superiors, as did agents Elkanah M. Gibson (1873) and Charles A. Huntington (1876). They questioned the department’s wisdom in sending agricultural implements to coastal peoples such as the Makah, who found the intended purpose of these tools nearly pointless. Instead, the People of the Cape fashioned them into fishhooks, blubber knives, and points for whaling lances.³⁵ During the 1860s and 1870s, the Indian Affairs Department ignored Native entreaties for vessels. In the 1880s, however, the department agreed to finance the Makah request for a steamship due to a favorable review by an Indian inspector. Unfortunately, the final decision rested on the advice of the current Makah agent, Oliver Wood, who apparently thought that all American Indians, including those living on the Pacific Coast, should abandon fishing in favor of farming. Even though many Makahs were experienced deckhands aboard local steamships plying Northwest Coast waters, Wood considered the request unreasonable because a steamer would cost $8,000, plus the cost of fuel and wages for white crewmembers. If they had acquired either of these vessels earlier, Makah whalers could have possibly met the challenge of a dwindling number of whales migrating past Cape Flattery by expanding their hunting range farther into the Pacific.36 Instead, they spent more time seeking fewer whales that swam into coastal waters. In this way, a combination of environmental (non-Native overhunting) and policy (federal policies and assimilationist agents) factors outside their control curtailed a fundamental Makah practice.

Although customary whaling methods endured throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the People of the Cape sought more efficient ways to hunt whales. In 1861, James Swan observed Peter Brown—an individual from a long line of whalers—use a rifle during a casual hunt. Eighteen years later, after seeing a mortar fired, older whalers expressed interest in acquiring one to use for whaling. When the opportunity presented itself, whaling crews hired powered ships to haul harpooned whales into Neah Bay. In 1905, two vessels, the Wyadda and the Lorne, witnessed a hunt and competed for the opportunity to bring in the carcass. The Makahs chose the Wyadda, a tugboat that pulled ships into or out of the strait. Because the federal government had failed to honor Makah requests for a modern vessel, the People of the Cape turned to local ships to assist in their hunts.³⁷ Using tugboats to tow whales ashore, employing rifles to hunt, and expressing interest in other modern gear did not dilute the customary practice of whaling. Nor did these modifications and participation in local and global markets make these hunters any less Makah. By engaging non-Native tools and opportunities during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Makah whalers continued what they had been doing for generations—adapting to a changing world in ways that maintained their wealth and distinct identity as the People of the Cape.

MAKAH PELAGIC SEALING, 1871–1897

When Makah families such as the Claplanhoos combined customary practices with modern opportunities and technology in the case of pelagic (oceanic) sealing, they accumulated considerable wealth.³⁸ This strategy enabled them to better resist assimilation and to control both their marine space and reservation lands. Not only did Makah hunters labor on vessels owned by non-Natives, but they also became important investors in this extractive industry, purchasing expensive, modern schooners that the federal government would not. Sealing from ships allowed this tribal nation to expand Makah marine space substantially as they hunted pinnipeds in local waters, to the south off the coast of California, to the north in the Bering Sea, and eastward to Japan. The environmental cost of this industry—in which Makahs were particularly successful hunters—prompted the United States to focus the nation’s first international conservation efforts on fur seals, the target of pelagic sealers. At the end of the nineteenth century, Congress passed laws that ended commercial pelagic sealing for Makahs and other laborers while allowing well-capitalized and politically connected non-Native corporations to continue hunting. When nations grappled with conservation issues on the international stage, diplomats not only shut out indigenous investors from a profitable industry but also denied them compensation opportunities. Wealthy Makah entrepreneurs found themselves shackled to the timeless stereotype of the Native subsistence hunter. The US prohibition on pelagic sealing reversed the fortunes of the People of the Cape, transforming many from wealth to poverty as they entered the twentieth century.

Like his father, John, James Claplanhoo took advantage of modern opportunities to secure and strengthen his leadership position among Makahs. Although James whaled, his financial success in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century came from sealing rather than whaling.39 By the 1870s, the skins of iładu·s (“kih-lthuh-doos,” fur seals)—a sea mammal long hunted by Makahs for their flesh, hide, and oil—had become a valuable commodity. Skins from the North Pacific ended up in London, where furriers turned them into stylish, ebony sealskin coats worn by the likes of wealthy, urban women and Mark Twain. An early twentieth-century reference book for English women called a sealskin coat a “precious possession” and carefully detailed how to select one, which usually cost around £200.⁴⁰ By 1871, Makahs were trading sealskins for clothing, flour, and other items. London merchants prized skins from fur seals caught off Cape Flattery; these skins garnered the best prices in the 1870s. As local traders on both sides of the international border competed for sealskins, Makahs began demanding cash. In 1873, James and about 150 Makah hunters together earned over $10,000 (nearly $200,000 today) selling 1,500 skins from seals they had taken up to forty miles offshore during the first five months of the year. A year later, they sold twice the amount of sealskins and made $15,000.⁴¹

By the late 1870s, Makah sealers began accumulating substantial cash by joining crews aboard white-owned schooners based out of Victoria, Port Townsend, Seattle, and San Francisco. Nuu-chah-nulths from the West Coast of Vancouver Island had been sealing from schooners for more than a decade before this. For one-third of the catch, schooners took sealers and their canoes and gear out to sea for weeklong voyages. By the mid-1880s, indigenous hunters could make almost twice as much in one sealing season as non-Native laborers in other industries earned in a year because of the high price of sealskins. Some chiefs earned fees for brokering labor agreements with ship captains, traders, and Indian agents. A local trader agreed to pay Lighthouse Jim $30 at the end of the sealing season if he persuaded his friends to sell their skins to him. Occasionally, a sealer’s wife joined the crew as cook and skinner. Makah women also processed seal blubber into oil—around 1,500 gallons each season—reserving the cleanest oil for consumption. In 1880, the Makah-organized Neah Bay Fur Sealing Company chartered the Lottie, a Port Townsend schooner, and made over $20,000 during the four-month season. Competition for sealskins enabled skilled hunters to command high values for their catches and choose the captains and vessels for which they would hunt.42

The People of the Cape understood the benefits of schooner ownership. James Claplanhoo was one of the first Native borderlanders to acquire one of these vessels. After spending the previous year considering several, James purchased the thirty-one-ton Lottie from a local trader at the beginning of 1886. He paid $1,200 cash, some of which he borrowed from Ditidaht relatives across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with another $600 due at the end of the sealing season. Crewing his new ship with Makah sealers, James employed it in the spring hunt along the Washington and Vancouver Island coasts. The Lottie transported canoes to sealing grounds up to one hundred miles offshore. At night, the sealers ate and slept on the Lottie, which allowed them to stay out on cruises for a week or longer. After purchasing the schooner, James increased his profits from commercial pelagic sealing. That year Makah sealers earned $16,000; although the Indian agent did not record the division of profits, the Claplanhoos and the hunters they took with them on the Lottie probably cornered a large share of these profits.⁴³

Nuu-chah-nulth pelagic sealers aboard the Canadian schooner Favorite, 1894. For one-third of the catch, schooner owners took Indian sealers aboard their vessels to hunt fur seals in the Pacific, from California to the Bering Sea. This photograph was taken in the Bering Sea. Photograph by Stefan Claesson. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association/Department of Commerce.

Other Makahs also invested in pelagic sealing. A year before James bought the Lottie, the high-ranking chief Peter Brown purchased the Letitia for $1,000. In 1886, the same year that James acquired his first schooner, Klahoowik and Haspooey bought the twenty-six-ton Sierra from three San Franciscans for $1,500. A month later, Lighthouse Jim paid over $1,000 for the C. C. Perkins. These owners recruited Makahs and other Natives from neighboring villages on both sides of the strait to work their vessels, and occasionally they hired white captains and sailors. By 1887, five Makah-owned schooners engaged in sealing out of Neah Bay, and that number more than doubled by 1893. As the People of the Cape integrated schooners more deeply in their society, they made toy schooners for boys so they could envision themselves growing up to become ship captains and owners.44

In the 1890s, local whites mistakenly assumed that the motivation—and perhaps even funds—for Makah schooner ownership came from the federal government, not entrepreneurial Native families. A popular history of the time surmised that “somehow the proprietorship of several well known sealing vessels has come to them without any effort on their part; it was something of a parental care on the part of a thoughtful government.”⁴⁵ Yet the archival record and oral histories prove that the People of the Cape acted on their own initiative when making capital investments in the North Pacific extractive industry of pelagic sealing. By working hard, taking risks, and pooling and investing money, Makah families—not a paternalistic or helpful government—made this possible. Like late nineteenth-century Cherokee farmers and ranchers who had “a passion for building family fortunes in business ventures,” Makah schooner owners sought new entrepreneurial opportunity to build their own fortunes. Like Navajo coalminers and weavers, Menominee loggers, and Tsimshian, Tlingit, and Haida fishers and cannery workers, these Makahs exemplify yet another way that indigenous peoples situated their industries in a capitalist marketplace, even operating within capitalist modes of production, while adhering to local values to create unique economic accommodations and outcomes.46

By employing schooners as floating bases to hunt seals, the People of the Cape not only earned larger profits but expanded their hunting range. Whereas canoes alone had once limited Makahs to hunting pinnipeds within thirty miles of Cape Flattery and in the strait, schooners allowed them to extend their spring coastal sealing from the mouth of the Columbia River to the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Makah sealing also expanded into the North Pacific. In the summer of 1887, James took the Lottie farther north, for cruises in the Bering Sea made the greatest profits. Hunters could harvest many more seals, and these skins fetched high prices on the London market. The Bering Sea voyages were lucrative, netting James $3,600 in profits during the 1889 season in the Bering Sea. In following years, the Lottie’s profits from North Pacific pelagic sealing brought the Claplanhoos between $7,000 and $8,000 annually (about $180,000 to $200,000 today).⁴⁷

Makah sealing schooner Columbia, with sealing canoes, 1894. Chestoqua Peterson (Makah) purchased this schooner on October 22, 1893, and took it sealing in the Bering Sea. Photograph by Stefan Claesson, 1894. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association/Department of Commerce.

With these profits, James expanded his investment and purchased a small fleet of vessels. After the 1891 sealing season, he began shopping around for a second schooner, traveling to San Francisco aboard a steamer to inspect vessels. He eventually commissioned a boat builder in Seattle to construct the larger, forty-two-ton Deeahks, which he named after an ancestor and sailed back to Neah Bay in January 1893. That year, he also purchased the Emmett Felitz, a thirty-ton vessel. And sometime between 1887 and 1893, he bought the fifteen-ton Puritan. His son Jongie commissioned a new schooner for $2,500 at the beginning of 1897. James also maintained his vessels regularly. During the stormy winter months, he paid for sheltered moorage at Scow Bay near Port Townsend. He had them repaired by non-Native carpenters in Hadlock, another Puget Sound port, and bought new sails for his ships. The Claplanhoos and other Makahs insured their vessels with local white merchants, such as Frank Bartlett, owner of one of Puget Sound’s largest mercantile establishments, and J. Katz, a German immigrant who had become a successful mercantilist.48

Although less well documented than shipbuilding, pelagic sealing also supported the canoe-building industry among Northwest Coast peoples because it generated a demand for medium-sized hunting canoes. Sealing required hundreds of canoes across the ča·di· borderland. Many of these saw hard use; frequently damaged and broken canoes needed constant replacement. In the 1890s, top-quality sealing canoes cost as much as $300. Financial benefits from this industry flowed to more than just the handful of chiefs who owned the growing fleet of sealing schooners.⁴⁹

Makah pelagic sealers such as the Claplanhoos succeeded as entrepreneurial capitalists, an identity that scholars rarely ascribe to indigenous people. As one historian explains in her analysis of “rich Indians,” the gaze of historians is drawn away from enterprising Natives by the “seductive paradigm … [that] contrasts an egalitarian, spiritual, traditionalist Indian ethos with a competitive, materialistic, activist non-Indian ethos.”⁵⁰ Like other successful investors, James diversified his assets in 1890 when he bought out the reservation trader for $3,000, purchasing his inventory and operation. A year later, he deposited $5,000 in Port Townsend’s Merchants Bank, where his money earned 6 percent interest. Some Makahs invested their sealing profits in other ventures, including Koba·li (“koh-bah-lee”), a “full-blooded Indian” who owned a hotel and had saved $1,000 to erect “a more pretentious building for accommodation of his guests,” as one surprised Makah agent reported. The financial actions of the People of the Cape were part of a larger indigenous engagement with settler-colonial economies in the region. Aboriginal entrepreneurs of British Columbia made important contributions to the emerging capitalist economy of the colony—then province—during the second half of the nineteenth century. They traveled from one village to the next, buying Native products such as furs, fish, and oil to exchange in Victoria for goods they would resell up the coast. Indigenous artists created works for sale in non-Native markets, and Indian-owned stores and sawmills dotted the Northwest Coast. The diversity and scale of these financial and commercial activities reveal that many indigenous peoples of the ča·di· borderland were important investors in North Pacific extractive industries. Bucking the stereotype, these American Indians were highly sophisticated venture capitalists.51

Although sealers such as James embraced certain elements of non-Native technology and business acumen, they did not abandon Makah hunting methods. Instead, they combined the best aspects of both to increase their success in a customary practice. Even in the dangerous and new waters of the Bering Sea, Makahs preferred using customary gear. As along the coast, they conducted the actual seal hunt from specially adapted canoes. Most used a double-headed harpoon that they hurled with both hands instead of noisier rifles or shotguns that scared away seals. They adapted the harpoon’s design, incorporating iron or sheet copper tips instead of mussel shells. The reservation’s blacksmith, hired by the Office of Indian Affairs to support the tribe’s agricultural pursuits, instead became busy in the weeks before the coastal sealing season, fashioning metal tips for spears, lances, and harpoons. Prominent sealers in the community continued using traditional gear during important ceremonies, thereby indicating their enduring cultural value. By employing traditionally designed gear, Makahs rarely lost seals they struck. Some men used guns to hunt seals, but only when they worked from white-owned schooners in the Bering Sea.⁵²

Pelagic sealing in the late nineteenth century supported and complemented other Makah labor and industry. Based out of Neah Bay, the coastal sealing season typically began in mid-January and lasted until early June. Beginning in mid-May some years and usually lasting until early October, Makahs sealers and their vessels hunted in the Bering Sea.⁵³ In the 1880s and 1890s, sealing was the most important occupation for Makah males. Chestoqua Peterson, a prominent Makah by birth and marriage—he had married James Claplanhoo’s daughter—told Swan that 112 Makah males had hunted seals during the coastal season in 1892. This represented about three-fourths of the community’s hunting-age males, who began sealing at the age of ten with their older male relatives and continued into their mid-sixties. Unlike whaling, sealing was not limited to high-status Makah men, so anyone with access to a canoe and hunting gear could participate. During the coastal hunting season that year, these sealers made $21,242 (over $500,000 today), a substantial injection of cash and goods to the reservation community.54 A smaller percentage of Makah men sealed in the Bering Sea, earning thousands of dollars more during the summer. Those not sealing in the Bering Sea often headed to regional salmon canneries to labor as fishers, earning in the early 1880s nearly $60 per month, which compared favorably to wages of a skilled tradesperson.⁵⁵ Seeking to get the most from their investments, indigenous schooner owners chartered their vessels for other purposes when they were not sealing. Makah ships transported goods around Puget Sound, hauled lumber and dynamite, and salvaged shipwrecks. Lighthouse Jim even shipped cargo to Honolulu aboard his vessel, the C. C. Perkins. Makahs also made their schooners available for family and friends who traveled around the region, such as groups of hop pickers headed to fields south of Seattle. Part of a larger migration of seasonal indigenous laborers, Makah hop pickers headed into Puget Sound in late August, returning to Cape Flattery in mid-October. Like other indigenous workers of this period, Makahs blended seasonal labor opportunities and extended their maritime customary practices well into the era of assimilation.⁵⁶ Makah families spent the profits from their labors on various goods and services, including potlatches, vessels, homes and housing material, clothing, food, and photographs.⁵⁷

As with Pacific whaling, commercial hunting rapidly exacted a catastrophic toll on fur seal numbers. Native and non-Native hunters took pinnipeds from the Pribilof herd, a once-massive population that migrated along the Northwest Coast to their breeding grounds on the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea. After the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, various fur companies flocked to the Pribilofs the following year, slaughtering more than three hundred thousand seals on Saint Paul and Saint George Islands. Concerned that a continued free-for-all would wipe out the herd, Congress designated the islands a government reserve and restricted hunting to a single leaseholder. In 1870, the Alaska Commercial Company (ACC) agreed to pay the US government $500,000 each year for a twenty-year hunting lease, which allowed them to harvest 100,000 fur seals annually. This lucrative arrangement allowed the federal government to net $10 million during the lease period, while the company paid more than $22 million to company shareholders, many of whom were congressmen. During the lease period, ACC hunters clubbed dead an average of 98,823 seals each year in their rookeries. In 1890, Congress awarded the second twenty-year lease to the North America Commercial Company (NACC). Attempting to conserve the Pribilof herd, the Department of Treasury limited the annual quota of seals killed on land to 60,000. NACC employees harvested well below this number, normally taking between 12,000 and 30,000 seals any given year. In 1892 and 1893, the government limited them to 7,500 seals annually in an effort to relieve hunting pressure on the herd.⁵⁸

Seal fishery, Saint Paul Island, 1895. During the nineteenth century, the Alaska Commercial Company and North American Commercial Company used Aleut wage labor to club and skin seals. Photograph by Stefan Claesson. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association/Department of Commerce.

Convinced that seals belonged to no one until caught, pelagic sealers plied the North Pacific and Bering Sea, taking their prey from the same Pribilof herd from which the ACC and NACC hunters harvested. During the Alaska Commercial Company’s lease from 1870 to 1889, pelagic sealers took 269,276 fur seals, for an average of just over 14,000 seals a year, a number substantially below the lessee’s catch. However, this situation reversed in the mid-1880s as more vessels hunted seals in the North Pacific. In 1883, three hunters aboard the American City of San Diego caught 900 seals in the Bering Sea, which inspired a geographic expansion of the pelagic industry.59 By the time the North American Commercial Company assumed the Pribilof lease in 1890, the catch at sea outnumbered the land harvest by nearly three to one. From 1890 to 1897, pelagic sealers took 364,203 fur seals (an annual average of 45,525), while the NACC land hunters caught only 135,976 (an annual average of 16,997). Employing shotguns, non-Native pelagic hunters lost from half to three-fifths of what they shot, a wasteful practice deplored by Makah hunters who largely kept to using spears. Osly, a Makah who had sealed in the Bering Sea three separate times on both white-owned and Makah-owned schooners, complained, “The white hunters who used guns in the Bering Sea were banging away at the seals sometimes all day long, and they would lose a great many of those that they had shot. I do not think that they brought to the schooner one-half of those that they killed.” More concerning for conservationists, 75 to 80 percent of the pelagic catch consisted of breeding females, which undercut the ability of the Pribilof herd to sustain its numbers. When considering the additional loss of unborn pups and nursing ones that starved to death after the loss of the mother, pelagic sealing resulted in the loss of nearly two million seals from 1868 to 1897. Hunting pressure at sea and in the terrestrial breeding grounds triggered the collapse of the fur seal population.⁶⁰

Among the first to notice reduced seal numbers in coastal waters, the People of the Cape went farther out seeking seals, which brought them into the ocean where sudden storms could capsize canoes or push them even farther away from home. Seven Makah men died at sea in 1875, and in 1881, on his way from Port Townsend to Honolulu, Captain Rufus Calhoun picked up two exhausted Makahs and their canoe more than fifty miles west of Cape Flattery. The 1883 season appeared particularly dangerous—“West Coast” Indians from Vancouver Island reported that “between 40 and 50 men of the different tribes, who ventured too far out to sea in their frail canoes, in search of seals, have been overtaken by gales and perished.” Although maritime accidents were not uncommon, schooner ownership enabled sealers to expand their customary activity from overhunted local waters to the greater North Pacific and into the Bering Sea with relative safety.⁶¹

Makah hunters faced an even greater obstacle: seal conservation backed by the power of the state and the London fur industry. As pelagic sealers, Makah hunters and shipowners such as the Claplanhoos found themselves on the losing side of a diplomatic struggle over the Pribilof seal herd. When he began investing in schooners in 1886, James Claplanhoo confronted Treasury Department officials keen on discouraging pelagic sealing in the Bering Sea. That year, he asked for permission to take the Lottie to Alaska to hunt sea otters and seals. The acting secretary of the Treasury replied that his department would not authorize any sealing permits for anyone other than the leaseholder of the Pribilofs, the Alaska Commercial Company, so James did not take his schooner into the Bering Sea. Fearing that they were getting cut out of the more lucrative hunting grounds in Alaskan waters, he and other Makahs repeated the request the following year. When federal officials neglected to reply, James took his schooner to the Bering Sea that summer, thereby expanding Makah marine space.62 Makahs did not extend ownership or control over these far northern waters as they did with more local waters off Cape Flattery. Instead, they began to make this space “theirs” through the shared experience of labor. For many Makah men in the late nineteenth century, sealing in the Bering Sea became an important part of their marine identity.

The People of the Cape brought their vessels into the Bering Sea at the same time that the federal government attempted to make the North Pacific into a more “legible” space. States attempt to arrange populations and resources in ways that simplify functions such as taxation, conscription, and order.⁶³ From the perspective of the US government administering the District of Alaska, the most orderly and profitable way to benefit from the seal catch was by leasing to a single corporation the rights to hunt fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Enforcing licensing fees on more than a hundred individually owned vessels and collecting taxes on the sale of skins from these ships was nearly impossible for any single nation-state. Many of the shipowners and individual hunters were not even US citizens—they instead hailed from Russia, Japan, and, most especially, Canada. When shipowners found any one nation’s licensing fees or hunting restrictions too onerous, they simply registered their vessel in another country.⁶⁴ Schooner captains had numerous places in the North Pacific—many not even in the United States—where they could dock to sell their skins. From the view of US officials, pelagic sealing was anything but orderly, and it threatened the profitability of a lucrative national resource.

To curb the depredations on the American herd by foreign sealers, US Revenue cutters stopped twenty Canadian schooners from 1886 to 1890. They turned five foreign vessels out of the Bering Sea and confiscated the rest. Masters and mates of captured ships were imprisoned and fined, while the hunters were set “adrift several hundred miles from homes, without food or shelter,” as one contemporary commentator noted.⁶⁵ Harry Guillod, the Indian agent for the West Coast Agency on Vancouver Island, detailed the difficulties Nuu-chah-nulth hunters experienced after US Revenue cutters seized the W. P. Layward in the Bering Sea: “These Indians suffered exceptional hardship having to find their way home from Sitka by canoe, it taking them 19 days to Port Simpson where they parted with their canoes for provisions also personal property, being there 26 days finally working their passage to Victoria on the Boscowitz. They lost their sealing gear and everything they had with them.” The US Treasury Department auctioned some of the seized vessels, such as the Anna Beck, a Victoria schooner that Chestoqua Peterson, the son of Peter Brown and husband to James Claplanhoo’s daughter, bought and renamed the James G. Swan. The US confiscations of Canadian vessels triggered a twenty-year-long diplomatic struggle between the United States and Great Britain—and eventually Japan and Russia, two other sealing nations—over the Pribilof herd.66

The US Revenue cutters also targeted Makah vessels in the Bering Sea. Narrowly escaping the cutters in early July 1889, Claplanhoo’s Lottie stayed in Alaskan waters for the summer and returned to Neah Bay at the end of August with 600 sealskins for a profit of $3,600. Peterson’s newly purchased James G. Swan was not as lucky; the Revenue cutter Rush seized it with 190 sealskins at the end of July. Fearing that the loss of the schooner and the summer’s returns would be a great hardship, Peterson pled ignorance of the law, arguing that he believed that the Revenue cutters had been in the Bering Sea to protect US schooners from foreign competitors.⁶⁷ In previous years, the few Euro-American-owned vessels the Revenue cutters had seized had been either released or cleared of all charges by Treasury officials, a fact that infuriated Canadian sealers. At the urging of W. L. Powell, the Indian agent at Neah Bay, the commissioner of Indian affairs asked the attorney general’s office to provide legal protection to the schooner’s owner and Makah crew. But the Office of the Attorney General refused to offer them legal protection. Unlike Euro-American owners of vessels, Makah schooner owners suffered prosecution from the federal government.⁶⁸

Peterson then hired James Swan, after whom he had named the schooner, as his attorney to help settle the case with the government. Swan petitioned the secretary of the Treasury on Peterson’s behalf, but the department declined to intervene in the case. When Judge Cornelius Hanford of the US district court decided against Peterson and ordered him to pay a $350 fine and nearly $100 in court costs, Peterson paid to get the vessel released immediately, and Swan filed an objection. He argued that the Bering Sea was an open sea and that no law of Congress could make it a mare clausum, or closed sea. He told the court that the ruling had made Peterson “suffer hardship and consequent loss” and that although the schooner owner would like to appeal the ruling, he lacked the financial means to do so. Swan wanted the district court to forward Peterson’s case as a claim for consideration by the court of arbitration in Paris, which would be adjudicating illegal seizures of Canadian schooners by US Revenue cutters. Agent Powell concurred, asking the Office of Indian Affairs to tell him how Makahs could file for their share of the $470,000 award issued by the Paris court.⁶⁹ The department ignored this request, however, because the award applied only to British vessels seized by US Revenue cutters. During the tribunal’s hearings in Paris, arbitrators made it clear that they would not consider claims of British-licensed vessels owned by US citizens. Closing a potential loophole in the settlement, the tribunal would determine claims to be valid only if British citizens owned these vessels.70

At the same time, Makahs of the late nineteenth century encountered local courts and judicial officials increasingly hostile to Native sealers and indigenous vessel owners. In November 1893, Koatslanhoo (Makah) leased the Mary Parker to Captain Frank Bangs of Seattle for coastal trading. Bangs insured the schooner and cargo in his name, scuttled it in December, and pocketed the insurance money. When Koatslanhoo sued, the federal court acquitted Bangs because he employed “able counsel” and Koatslanhoo recovered nothing, despite the jury’s acknowledgment that the captain had scuttled the ship.⁷¹ In 1895, Judge Hanford—the same official who had decided against Chestoqua Peterson several years earlier in the case of the James G. Swan—refused to hear the case of a white sealer, Henry Anderson, accused of murdering Philip Brown (Makah) as the two divided their catch of seals at Ozette. Although a Port Angeles judge ordered Anderson to appear before the US district court and set bail at $5,000, Hanford referred the case back to the local court, whose jury released the white murderer.⁷² With growing numbers of Euro-Americans in the new state, officials and colonial juries were more interested in privileging whites over Indians.

But even in this settler-colonial regime growing increasingly hostile to American Indians, not everything hampered the ability of the People of the Cape to continue succeeding in the sealing industry. In 1894, the US and British governments agreed to follow a modified version of the recommendations of the tribunal of arbitration in Paris. Unknowingly echoing James Swan’s argument from two years earlier, the Paris tribunal decided against the US claims that the Bering Sea was a mare clausum and that seals swimming in the North Pacific were exclusive government property. Instead, the tribunal made several recommendations to conserve the Pribilof herd. They proposed a closed season from May 1 to July 31 in the North Pacific and Bering Sea and prohibited firearms and other explosive devices in the hunting of seals. These conservation measures provided both confusion and opportunity for Makah sealers and schooner owners.⁷³

The closed season caused some trouble for indigenous sealers. Although required to notify schooners of the beginning of the closed season, US Revenue cutters passed the Makah fleet anchored at Neah Bay for weeks without telling them of the upcoming date. Instead, in June the Revenue cutter Grant seized two Makah schooners, the Puritan and the C. C. Perkins, weeks after they had reportedly sealed during the closed season. Citing the fact that the cutters ignored Euro-American vessels in Puget Sound ports, even though everyone knew that they, too, had sealed illegally in the Bering Sea, Agent Powell begged Captain Dorr Tozier of the Grant to release the schooners. It appeared that the cutters had unfairly targeted Makah schooners once again. The cutters released the vessels only after Swan petitioned the secretary of the Treasury on behalf of the Makah owners. Makah sealers lobbied federal officials for a partial exemption to the closed season because it prohibited sealing during May, one of the best months for marine conditions off the Washington coast. Although their agent and the acting secretary of the Interior supported this request, the government failed to grant an exemption.74

The Paris tribunal’s 1894 prohibition on firearms, however, worked in favor of indigenous sealers because they alone were proficient in the use of spears. After learning about the 1894 regulations, a local newspaper noted jealously, “Ten schooners for sealing voyages are being fitted out by the Makat Indians of Neah Bay. The fleet will be worth over $20,000, and will be entirely owned, officered and manned by aborigines. As the regulations as laid down in the Paris tribunal forbid the use of firearms in sealing, the Indians will have a decided advantage in the industry, since at handling the spear they are experts.”⁷⁵ Anticipating an attitude that would resurface in many US treaty rights debates in the twentieth century, this white Canadian commentator objected to the “special rights” the regulations appeared to confer on Indians. This situation must have been especially galling to non-Natives already suffering from the global depression of the 1890s.

Under the new conservation regulations, Makah sealers did very well. During the first year of the firearms prohibition, the People of the Cape caught more than 2,500 seals off the coast of Washington. In 1895, Jongie took the Deeahks to the Bering Sea and brought back nearly six hundred skins after two months of hunting. According to the agent at Neah Bay, this was one of the best years for Makah sealers, who earned over $44,000 ($1.2 million today) during several months of work. The following year, the Claplanhoos hired Henry Hudson, an experienced Quileute captain, as master to take the schooner into the Bering Sea, which netted them over five hundred skins.⁷⁶ These returns compared well to those taken from the Bering Sea in the years before the Paris tribunal’s regulations. This success demonstrated to the federal government and the North America Commercial Company, the new lessee of the Pribilof Islands, that the firearms prohibition was no disadvantage to experienced indigenous pelagic sealers. Further steps were necessary for conserving the herd from Indian hunters.

The late 1890s were a critical turning point for Makah sealers because national laws privileged powerful and well-connected business interests over small, family-run operations such as the Claplanhoo fleet. Darius Ogden Mills, the principal NAAC shareholder, had strong ties to the Republican Party. His political connections with President Benjamin Harrison likely helped to secure the twenty-year lease in 1890, and they probably served the company well when the Republicans took back the White House and won strong majorities in Congress in the 1896 election. Big businesses such as the North American Commercial Company supported William McKinley and contributed to his victory, so it should come as no surprise that in the first year of his presidency, McKinley backed and signed a congressional act protecting the monopolistic company at the expense of small sealing operations. This measure prohibited all US subjects from pelagic sealing in the North Pacific and Bering Sea.77 From the perspective of the federal government and the North American Commercial Company, this legislation was necessary because the pelagic catch from 1890 to 1896 was nearly three times higher than the land catch, and pelagic hunters killed more than they caught. Coastal Natives such as the Makahs would be exempt from the prohibition, as long as they hunted seals for subsistence purposes and from canoes with spears. They would not be able to use schooners to support their hunting efforts, nor could they engage in any form of commercial sealing, the cornerstone of the economy of the People of the Cape at this time.

This new law exemplified the confusion over the legal status of American Indians at this time. Ironically, this legislation would treat Makahs as US subjects in an era when other government policies and actions limited their citizenship rights. The logic that the proposed act applied to Makah hunters stemmed from the mid-nineteenth-century assumption that American Indians, similar to slaves, were subject to US jurisdiction despite their lack of citizenship status. United States Attorney General Caleb Cushing stated this clearly in 1856: “The simple truth is plain, that the Indians are subjects of the United States, and are not, in mere right of home-birth, citizens of the United States. The two conditions are incompatible.” More than four decades later, US Attorney General Judson Harmon came to the same conclusion, arguing specifically on the question of Makah sealers in early 1897 that they fell under the nation’s laws “because they owe obedience to our laws as subject.” Although some US officials and politicians disputed this legal interpretation, the prevailing opinion in Washington State was that American Indians were under the nation’s jurisdiction. This was why the state’s original constitution in 1889 specifically barred indigenous people from voting, with language stating “that Indians not taxed [i.e., members of federally recognized tribes, such as the Makah] shall never be allowed the elective franchise.”78 Delegates to the state’s constitutional convention worried that without this specific exclusionary language, some county officials might allow members of tribal nations to vote. Technically, American Indians in Washington State could gain citizenship rights and become eligible to vote if they took individual allotments and “had adopted the habits of civilized life,” as vaguely stated in the 1887 Dawes Act—indeed, some in Puget Sound did vote in the late nineteenth century.⁷⁹ But this option was not open to the People of the Cape in the late 1890s; at this time, their reservation remained un-allotted. Even if any of them did qualify, a Makah voter would then need to satisfy the voting qualifications of amendment 2 (1896), which required fluency and literacy in English.

But their “anomalous legal status” was not what concerned Makah sealers.⁸⁰ Anxious about the effects the proposed law would have on their livelihood and likely aware that the attorney general would offer them no protections, Makah leaders took action. In December 1897, the Claplanhoos led a petition effort for an exemption to the impending prohibition. The formal, typed petition and the language expressed in this document illustrated the way Makahs adapted certain non-Native strategies and the rhetoric of progress for their own cultural purposes, specifically the protection of the sovereign right to develop resources as they saw fit.⁸¹ The petitioners began by connecting their contemporary commercial sealing activities to cultural traditions: seals had always furnished them with clothing and food. Then they invoked the specific 1855 treaty “right” to take seals forever and to never have this right limited by the government. Objecting to the meager exemption allowing Natives to seal from canoes, they worried that “permission to hunt seal in open canoe, 50 miles from shore is but permission to go to certain death.” For a generation of hunters then used to the safety that schooners offered in deep ocean waters, this anxiety must have appeared all too real. They drew on assimilation rhetoric to demonstrate the progress they had made through sealing: they had invested all their “capital” in schooners and appliances for sealing, a “trade” they understood very well. Seeking the attention of fiscally conservative officials, the petitioners pointed out that they supported themselves without government aid through this industry. The petitioners also cast themselves as Christians, arguing that “God gave us the Seals for our sustenance.” Finally, they attempted to appeal to a sense of fairness: “We think we ask only what is justice and equity is due us. You call us your wards and the care of our interest is in your hands, to prohibit us from Sealing would take us our livlihood, and destroy all our capital which is invested in boats and appliances for Sealing. The Misery and want which would come to us would be such as would come to your people if from them were taken at once lands and tools and stock and factories and mines and they were left to face ruin and starvation.” Pelagic sealing defined them not only as Makah but also as productive members of a modern, American society. In their minds, the Makah right to seal was no different from a miner’s right to extract ore, a rancher’s right to raise livestock, or a factory owner’s right to manufacture goods.

Despite the concerted efforts of the Claplanhoos and others, the 1897 law that prohibited pelagic sealing by US citizens ended this commercial industry for the People of the Cape. Shortly after the law’s passage, Revenue cutters steamed into Neah Bay and confiscated the largest schooners, including three owned by James and Jongie. The cutters towed a dozen Makah ships to the nearby Life-Saving Service station at the western edge of Neah Bay, beaching them there, where they remained until storms and waves destroyed them. Ironically, part of the station was located on Claplanhoo land that Swan had recommended that the Department of the Interior appropriate for this coastal outpost in 1877. It must have been especially upsetting for James and Jongie to see their vessels wasting away just yards from family property. Decades later, the grandchildren of Jongie played in the rotting hulks of stolen Claplanhoo schooners.82 Those owning smaller schooners fared slightly better. Some Makahs sold them, but with pelagic sealing outlawed, these ships sold under market value.⁸³

Others turned to ča·di· borderland networks to prolong their sealing careers by looking north for employment on Canadian ships. In his first report for the new century, the Makah agent complained of ten “educated, young” Makah men who went to Victoria and shipped out on British schooners to go sealing in the Bering Sea, despite his explicit prohibition on doing so. From his perspective, the fact that they were “educated” meant that they knew they were breaking US law. Ironically, their education enabled them to read the shipping articles Canadian schooner owners in Victoria required Natives to sign, thereby making them desired crewmembers.⁸⁴

The continued decline of the Pribilof fur seal herd at the hands of foreign sealers—and the desire of the federal government and the London fur industry to protect their long-term profits via conservation—resulted in the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911, the first such international treaty to conserve marine mammals. A year earlier, the federal government declined to renew the NACC lease of the Pribilof Islands, thereby taking over the monopoly of hunting seals on land. Through an elaborate financial arrangement, Japan, Russia, and the United States, countries that held seal rookeries, agreed to pay pelagic sealers a percentage of future annual returns. The majority of these payments went to Japanese and Canadian sealers. The US Department of Treasury bought out the sealing fleets of these two nations for $200,000 each.⁸⁵

Funds for American and, most especially, Makah sealers were significantly smaller and more difficult to secure. When the United States began considering a buyout of foreign sealing fleets in the 1890s, they refused to consider claims made by American citizens.86 By 1911, the US sealing fleet no longer existed, and compensating the Japanese and Canadian fleets commanded the attention of the negotiators of the Fur Seal Convention. Politicians made no plans to compensate Makah schooner owners because they assumed that they only—and had always only—hunted from canoes and for subsistence. In fact, lawmakers likely believed that Makah schooner ownership derived from government encouragement and funds, not indigenous entrepreneurial activity, a common attitude at this time.⁸⁷ In the eyes of non-Native diplomats, American Indians had lost nothing because the 1894, 1897, and 1911 regulations, laws, and conventions had enshrined subsistence hunting rights. But rather than reflecting indigenous practices, this legislation constructed a limited definition of “traditional” activities, thereby stifling innovation and entrepreneurial efforts that could have met the changing needs of the People of the Cape.⁸⁸ Under the subsistence exemption, some coastal Natives did continue sealing into the twentieth century, and they were eventually allowed to sell small quantities of skins to the reservation trader, with careful oversight from the agent. But Makah profits were never as high as they had been during the 1880s and 1890s.⁸⁹ The stereotype of the Native hunter who only kills enough to feed himself and his family encouraged non-Native officials to ignore the investments—at least more than $20,000 (over $500,000 today) in schooners from 1886 to 1897—Makahs had made in the North Pacific sealing industry.⁹⁰

Government officials in contact with the People of the Cape appear to have known better. After passage of the 1897 law prohibiting pelagic sealing, a “Navy man” had promised Jongie Claplanhoo and other schooner owners that the government would compensate them for their losses. Jongie followed the diplomatic battle over pelagic sealing in the Bering Sea because he hoped to recover his family’s financial losses. As a regular and literate visitor to Victoria, Jongie learned about the Anglo-Canadian position in local papers and from other shipowners. Canadians refused to consider any cessation of pelagic sealing unless the US government would buy them out. In 1899, Jongie wrote to James Swan, seeking information on a government plan to buy out the Victoria sealing fleet at $150 per ton, arguing that “we have all the rights to sell our Schooner the same.” Years later, officials repeated these promises, albeit garbled and sometimes confusing. In 1919, Schuyler Colfax, another Makah sealer, wrote to federal officials, reminding them that “Government officials” in 1911 had promised that they could continue to hunt annually up to four thousand seals for commercial purposes, perhaps as a new concession that was part of the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention. These same officials had told the People of the Cape that if they could not hunt commercially, the government would compensate them at this amount. Because Makahs had never received any compensation, Colfax wanted permission to use his small, nine-ton Elsie Allen as a tender to support eight sealers who would hunt from canoes and with spears. In reply, the Indian office, informed by the commissioner of fisheries, stated that it could not grant Colfax the right to use his schooner to seal commercially.91

Although Makah schooner owners could sue for compensation, expensive lawsuits required years of patience and rarely guaranteed success. Thirty-one years after the passage of the 1897 law that ended pelagic sealing for Americans, Chestoqua Peterson’s widow received an estimated $20,000 settlement from the government on a sealing claim she filed. However, the lawsuit cost her thousands of dollars, requiring her to borrow $1,500 from the local trader and more than $500 from other individuals. Despite decades of effort, Jongie never secured any compensation for the substantial loss of his property, an unresolved complaint that still angers his descendants.⁹² During the first half of the twentieth century, few Makahs had the money to pursue these claims. Any cash they had was invested in gas-powered fishing boats and other expensive, modern gear used for halibut and salmon fishing.

As Makahs still recall, the US prohibition on pelagic sealing was a turning point that undermined their economic security. Samuel Morse, the Neah Bay agent in 1899, reported on the tribal nation’s impoverishment: “There was a time once when they had plenty, when whale oil brought a good price and they were permitted to kill seal; then they had money and had everything they wanted that money could buy. At that time they owned several schooners and made regular trips to Alaska sealing, and were very successful. In their native canoes they went many miles out in the Pacific and killed whales of great size, and now the market for whale oil is gone. They are prohibited from sealing, their schooners were seized and sold.”⁹³ Commercial pelagic sealing continued for another fourteen years by Japanese and Russian vessels and the occasional Canadian schooner. Managed by the US government, sealing also continued on the Pribilof Islands. Conservation efforts indeed saved the fur seal species and allowed for continued systematic exploitation. By 1941, the Pribilof herd had rebounded, increasing in population by an order of ten.⁹⁴ But conservation diplomacy cut out the People of the Cape from these profits, even though sealing was a customary commercial activity protected by the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay. After the end of the nineteenth century, they could hunt seals, but now only for subsistence purposes and by using “Native” gear. Laws inaccurately recast entrepreneurial Makah sealers as anachronistic hunters separate from and irrelevant to the commercial economy of the North Pacific.

BEING MAKAH IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Makah whalers and sealers strove to overcome the environmental challenges and government policies that threatened the livelihood of their people. For decades, they succeeded by combining customary practices and new opportunities to participate in the settler-colonial economy, to maintain their identity, and to push back against assimilation policies and efforts to confine them to the reservation. These labors and industries—operating schooners, hunting seals and whales, processing and selling whale oil, picking hops or fishing for wages, or hiring out their vessels to haul cargo locally or across the Pacific—did not represent a radical departure from earlier Makah economic practices. Much as they had been doing for generations, their lives revolved around the ocean, both as a highway of exchange and as a space from which they created their wealth and identity through work. In fact, the labor and capital investments of the People of the Cape exemplify a “moditional economy” that many Northwest Coast peoples practiced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.95 In this way, they bridged the indigenous Northwest Coast and non-Native cultures and carved out a way to continue being Makah during a time when American Indians seemed to be under assault across Indian Country.

Long after the establishment of the boundary separating US and British territory in the Pacific Northwest, networks crossing and binding together the ča·di· borderland gave advantages to the People of the Cape as they participated in a moditional economy. Makahs continued to experience the sea as a space of connections rather than a boundary of confinement, even after decades of reservation policies and the residencies of eleven Indian agents from 1861 to the end of the century. The diaries of James Swan sketched out the contours of these networks in the early 1860s. After leaving his post as the reservation schoolteacher in 1866, Swan moved to nearby Port Townsend. Renowned as a “rascally old drunkard” suspected of “debauchery among Indian women,” Swan struggled to make a living in this port at the eastern edge of the ča·di· borderland. He held numerous positions, including working for the Pilot Commissioners of Puget Sound, for the county as a probate judge, and for the Northern Pacific Railroad in helping that company choose a western terminus for its transcontinental line. Drawing on his Native contacts from Puget Sound to the Queen Charlotte Islands north of Vancouver Island, he also collected hundreds of American Indian artifacts for the Smithsonian Institution and was likely the most important collector from the Northwest Coast. In 1878, Henry Webster, a friend and former Indian agent to the Makah (1861–69), appointed Swan as customs inspector at Neah Bay, a position he held until August 1, 1881. Once again, Swan left a voluminous record of daily accounts of his time there, including more than thirteen hundred observations about the comings and goings of people to and from Cape Flattery over a three-year period, which can be plotted to uncover the contours of Makah marine space at this time.96

As they had in the first half of the 1860s, the People of the Cape and others in the ča·di· borderland continued to experience the coastline as a permeable zone and site of cultural interactions among diverse peoples, despite the efforts of federal officials at making and enforcing boundaries. Makahs hosted and attended potlatches with many Northwest Coast peoples, including Clayoquots, Ditidahts, Kyuquots, and Ucluelets on Vancouver Island, and Quileutes south along the Olympic Peninsula. Family ties still crossed the marine borderlands, connecting villages in ways that non-Natives sometimes misunderstood. On March 5, 1879, some Pacheedaht in-laws of Tadahie (Hosett George) brought dried salmon and potatoes across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to their Makah relatives at Neah Bay. One of the reservation traders mistakenly accused them of trafficking British goods without paying duties. At other times, Makahs took advantage of the porous nature of the marine border, especially when dealing in indigenous products. Swan suspected Makahs Beershad and Tokeva of illicitly transporting oil from Ditidaht on Vancouver Island to sawmills at Port Blakely in Washington Territory in October 1879.⁹⁷

The frequency of Makahs, other indigenous peoples, and non-Natives coming to and from the Cape Flattery villages attests to the permeability of the reservation’s marine boundary and the continuation of indigenous borderlands characteristics. Participating in these fluid borderlands dynamics rather than accepting the confinements of the reservation was a key part of being Makah in this period. More than 38 percent of Swan’s observations included Makahs traveling alone, in small groups, or in the company of non-Natives or other Native peoples. This represented a slight drop (7 percent) from the 1859 to 1866 period. Percentages of non-Makah Native visitors to the People of the Cape dropped even less, from just over 15 percent in the first set to slightly under 15 percent in the second. In both cases, these reduced percentages did not result from Native peoples traveling the ocean less frequently. Instead, the number of incidents involving some indigenous maritime traveler rose in both cases during the second set of Swan’s observations. Others noted Makah mobility as well. Reports of the People of the Cape traveling off-reservation showed up in local newspapers, such as when a young Makah woman drowned when caught by a “large devil-fish” while swimming near Victoria during a family visit with Lekwungens.98

Map of the frequency of marine connections to Cape Flattery, 1878–81. Map by Bill Nelson.

A far greater number of incidents of non-Natives crossing the reservation’s maritime boundaries outpaced those of indigenous peoples from 1878 to 1881. Nearly 81 percent—and more than twice the number of specific observed incidents from the earlier period—included non-Natives. As in the early 1860s, non-Natives en route to somewhere else continued to use Neah Bay as an anchorage, coming into Makah waters for shelter or to await changing winds. The Cape Flattery villages drew non-Native vessels for trade, cargo shipments, reservation and territorial business, marine resources, and Makah labor. On February 26, 1879, the steamer Mastick, owned by the Mastick and Company sawmill at Port Discovery in Puget Sound, delivered to the reservation lumber that Makah laborers unloaded. Later that year, Young Siac (Makah) shipped twenty bushels of potatoes grown at Cape Flattery to Ahousaht aboard the Victoria-based schooner Anna Beck. In 1880, Makah hunters shipped out on the US schooner Three Sisters to hunt seals and sea otters off Kuril Island, Japan, and Okhotsk.99 The increase in non-Native vessels coming into Neah Bay reflected the growth in Puget Sound and North Pacific industries and shipping. Taking advantage of these opportunities from their prime location constituted another aspect of being Makah in the late nineteenth century.

Comparing the data from Swan’s two extended residencies at the reservation also reveals the changing nature of Makah relationships with settler-colonial places. The connections between the Cape Flattery villages and non-Native ports reoriented as Washington Territory grew in population and capital. The number of trips to or from the nearby British port Victoria dropped from 132 to 71 from one set to the next as local US ports such as Port Townsend (151 to 261 incidents), Seattle (3 to 26 incidents), and smaller towns in Puget Sound grew in importance. These Puget Sound towns replaced the early influence of San Francisco (55 to 22 incidents) as local networks of capital took hold and more settlers moved to the Pacific Northwest. The data also illuminate shifts in local places, as better connected and more profitable ports such as Port Townsend and Seattle eclipsed the settlements of Port Angeles (108 to 4) and Steilacoom (9 to 0).¹⁰⁰

But more than just local ports connected Makahs to the settler-colonial economy of the region. Although Swan’s data from 1878 to 1881 do not represent this well, the People of the Cape also engaged the regional moditional economy through networks of labor. Many Northwest Coast peoples, including Makahs, traveled deep into Puget Sound to pick hops for wages from late summer to fall, thereby illustrating another example of the contradiction between the late nineteenth-century trope of the vanishing Indian and Native workers participating in modern wage labor. Characteristic of a moditional economy, Native hop pickers combined several purposes when traveling upsound, including important pantribal gatherings outside Port Townsend on the way home from the hop fields. On August 30, 1879, Swan noted that a large number of canoes headed upsound; during the first week of October, Makah families returned to the reservation, sometimes aboard the weekly mail steamship Dispatch or in canoes laden with goods they had purchased at Port Townsend. Although he did not record at this time why they went upsound, a later entry illuminates the possible purpose—to pick hops. In January the following year, Agent Charles Willoughby lectured Makahs about “going to Nisqually to pick hops and told them if they had remained at home and caught salmon they would have made more money and that they would not be permitted to go to Nisqually this year.” Perhaps he worried about the vices whites believed hop pickers engaged in: prostitution, smuggling, drinking, possible collective Indian action or resistance, and participation in customary practices such as Native medicine and gambling. For the rest of Agent Willoughby’s time at Neah Bay, Makahs appeared to abide his prohibition on traveling upsound to pick hops. Some even followed his advice and fished for salmon instead, selling four hundred pounds after one day of fishing to a cannery at nearby Clallam Bay. However, they did not let this prohibition prevent them from attending the pantribal gatherings at Port Townsend. Swan’s diaries from the autumns of 1880 and 1881 noted numerous Makahs heading to Port Townsend for a few weeks to “visit” their friends. After Agent Willoughby’s departure in September 1882, Makahs resumed their travels upsound to pick hops, often stopping in at Port Townsend to see Swan. Picking hops for wages and participating in the pantribal gatherings constituted yet another component of being Makah in the late nineteenth century.101

By the late 1870s, competition among several steamship companies serving regular routes connecting Puget Sound and West Coast ports reshaped Makah engagement with the growing settler-colonial economy. In the early 1860s, Makahs often transported cargo, ran errands for the Indian agent, and paddled non-Natives throughout the ča·di· borderland in their canoes. Swan paid four Makah men each four buckets of potatoes—the going rate was 25 cents per bucket—for three days of paddling him around the Cape Flattery villages so he could conduct the annual census in October 1864. These labors accounted for 36 percent of all Makah travels at midcentury but only 5 percent from 1878 to 1881. When shipping rates dropped, non-Natives relied more on steamships. Regular maritime transportation networks kept the reservation traders better supplied, which likely contributed to the decline in Makah trips off-reservation to engage in trade—these incidents dropped from about 15 percent of Makah voyages to 7 percent from one period to the next. The People of the Cape also made use of these growing transportation opportunities, as they took passage or shipped cargo aboard non-Native vessels, such as when a Makah had the steamer Mastick deliver a shipment of lumber in 1880. The increase in Puget Sound shipping brought even more ships and their crews to Neah Bay because it was a convenient and safe harbor for waiting tugboats and pilot vessels. None visited Makah villages during the early 1860s, but Swan counted 108 instances of tugboats and pilot vessels anchoring at Neah Bay later in the century.102

Swan’s data reveal continued, yet important, changes to Makah use of local marine resources that were foundational to their identity. Compared to other maritime industries such as fishing and sealing, whaling experienced a relative decline, dropping from over 4 percent to just under 1 percent from the early 1860s to the late 1870s. This statistic highlights one of the limits of Swan’s observations. The People of the Cape indeed continued whaling, which remained a culturally and commercially important activity throughout the nineteenth century, even if it did not capture the attention of this collector of customs. But living at Biida (“bih-ih-duh”) along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, about five miles from the Pacific coast villages that served as the best bases for launching whaling canoes, Swan was not in a position to note most—much less every—whale hunt. Swan’s data, though, do show that Makahs continued to harvest great quantities of halibut from their fishing banks. In two days at the end of May 1880, several canoes of Makah fishers caught over 550 halibut at a time when they regularly pulled specimens weighing more than a hundred pounds from the waters off Cape Flattery.¹⁰³ By fishing customary halibut banks, the People of the Cape continued to mark these as propertied Makah places.

As collector of customs, Swan also kept track of sealing vessels during a period when Makah involvement in this industry first grew. In the early 1860s, Swan noted only a single instance of Makahs heading into the Pacific to hunt seals. Similar to the whaling counts Swan made, this number is substantially lower than it actually must have been because the best places for launching sealing canoes were the coastal villages and not Neah Bay. From 1878 to 1881, Swan counted more than 350 separate incidents of Makah sealing, which represented over 70 percent of all Makah trips off-reservation. During the coastal and pelagic sealing seasons in 1879, Swan observed forty-four times that the People of the Cape hunted pinnipeds from canoes and Anglo-owned schooners. In the 1880 and 1881 seasons, this number grew threefold as increasingly more British and US schooners hired Makah hunters. This was likely a conservative estimate because Swan could not observe the even higher frequency of sealing from coastal villages, which pairs of Makahs would have done from canoes. Throughout the rest of the century, as Makahs invested their initial profits into a fleet of schooners, this number only grew.

The Claplanhoos exemplified the ways that the People of the Cape combined new opportunities with customary practices in the moditional economy of Northwest Coast peoples to be Makah during the late nineteenth century. This family fostered ties among neighboring Indians, traders, Indian agents, and other key members of the non-Native community on both sides of the international border. One of the family’s most important white contacts was James Swan. As teacher, notary, judge, secret agent for the North Pacific Railroad, deputy collector of customs, and Hawaiian consul, Swan was a useful family friend. He helped the Claplanhoos and other Makahs sort through the legal issues concerning the purchasing and licensing of schooners. When James Claplanhoo bought his first schooner, Swan helped him negotiate the deal with the previous owner, Henry Landes, and file the correct paperwork with the Customs House in Port Townsend. In later years, James and Jongie kept Swan on as the family retainer, having him file bills of sale, apply for licenses, and handle mortgage and insurance paperwork for their vessels. Family ties across the Strait of Juan de Fuca also helped the Claplanhoos in their entrepreneurial efforts, illustrated when James borrowed cash from Native relatives to purchase his first schooner. Captain John still valued recognition from chiefs across the ča·di· borderland, evident when he discussed with Swan some ways to maintain James’s authority among the S’Klallams, Ditidahts, and Clayoquots.104

Claplanhoo success in the moditional economy of the second half of the nineteenth century relied on their ability to bring benefits and gains to their people while abiding by Makah cultural expectations. John Claplanhoo maintained his chiefly position with elaborate potlatches, some lasting nearly a month. During these ceremonial feasts, the Claplanhoo family organized and performed ritual dances, fed hundreds of guests from villages on both sides of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and gave gifts. Claplanhoo oral histories recollect the size and scale of the potlatch held at Pacheedaht on Vancouver Island to celebrate John’s marriage to Ši·a·štido (Ditidaht). They invited twenty-five tribal nations from around the ča·di· borderland, feasting the guests for more than a week and giving each individual $20 in gold and several Hudson’s Bay Company blankets.¹⁰⁵ John also raised James to be prominent in the moditional economic culture of the mid-nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. When he went to Victoria, he often took James along so he could learn from an early age about the non-Native economy. John supported government efforts to teach his son and other children to read and write in English. He organized fifty men to help raise the schoolhouse and even lectured antsy students when they caused trouble for Swan in school. John’s actions complicate the traditional narrative of indigenous resistance to non-Native education. He believed that an American education in the fledgling Neah Bay school could provide James with expanded opportunities.¹⁰⁶ Although John pursued opportunities to familiarize James with the settler-colonial world, at the same time he taught the boy Makah dances and saved his powerful whale medicine for him. He even arranged to have more successful whalers teach James how to whale.¹⁰⁷ John knew that in order for James to be a successful leader of his people, he would need to feel comfortable in British, American, and Northwest Coast societies.

Claplanhoo family and Peter Brown, 1864. Makahs occasionally had their photographs taken when they traveled to nearby towns. This group likely sat for this photograph while visiting Victoria in April 1865. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, NA1410.

Like his father, James pursued similar strategies to satisfy his people’s expectations. With some of his sealing profits, he continued to host potlatches, spending an estimated $3,000 on one in 1890. During another held on Tatoosh Island three years later, the family spent $6,000 (over $150,000 today) of “American silver dollars” on food, blankets, flannels, and other goods, which they gave away to the assembled guests.108 Fulfilling his chiefly obligations, James also spread his profits and influence in the non-Native world throughout the greater Makah community. Beyond hiring Makah crews and captains, he helped others purchase their own schooners, loaning money and expertise to close deals. James brought in his son-in-law Chestoqua Peterson as part owner of the Lottie, and three years later, Chestoqua—probably with help from James—purchased the Anna Beck. Although he invested in the settler-colonial economy, James did not abandon his obligations as a chief.109

As his father did for him, James groomed his son Jongie for leadership in the late nineteenth-century Northwest Coast. Born in 1877, Jongie attended the reservation school to learn English and accompanied his father to the growing towns of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When James bought out the reservation trader, he put the teenage Jongie in charge of the store, a move supported by the Indian agent on the grounds that the young Claplanhoo would gain a business education. Most important, James also taught Jongie about his chiefly responsibilities. He took Jongie and his other children to potlatches and regional Northwest Coast gatherings. Family histories recall that Jongie learned to whale from his father, and he inherited the family’s whaling gear that had been passed down for generations.¹¹⁰ James wanted Makah culture to shape the upbringing of his children; but he also wanted them to be conversant with the opportunities of the settler-colonial world. Made across three generations, these efforts exemplified the ways that the People of the Cape participated in a moditional economy to mark out a unique Makah identity in the late nineteenth-century Northwest Coast.

THE MEANING OF MAKAH SUCCESS AND THE PRICE OF POVERTY

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the People of the Cape remained a successful and influential people in the ča·di· borderland. Makahs continued to benefit from the wealth of the sea and from networks that crossed marine space to connect them to other Native and non-Native communities. Families such as the Claplanhoos engaged markets of exchange in a moditional economy and made significant capital investments in North Pacific extractive industries. Not only did this strategy make Claplanhoos and others wealthy, but it also enabled them to strengthen their identity as Makahs in the face of mounting pressure from US assimilation policies.

The success of the Claplanhoos and others convinced various government officials, including Indian agents on the frontline of assimilation, that Makah methods worked and should receive support. Initially, federal agents tried to “civilize” the People of the Cape by transforming them into farmers, but both the reservation landscape and Makahs frustrated assimilation efforts. Nearly every Indian agent posted to this agency commented on the unsuitability of Cape Flattery for agriculture, a situation common to many reservations but most especially there.111 Agent Charles Willoughby (1878–82) described the reservation as “mountainous and densely wooded, with a climate proverbial for its moisture, its scarcity of game, limited tracts of land fit for cultivation, and poorness of its soil … a country scarcely desirable for cultivation.” But he did note that the wealth of the ocean made it “all that can be desired” for a “fishing people.”¹¹² Environmental realities and successful Makahs appeared to create a difficult situation for agents such as Willoughby, tasked with assimilating American Indians through farming. Makah families who accumulated substantial wealth through customary practices—yet in very modern ways—made the case for alternative approaches.

The active participation of Makahs in marine markets of exchange integrated them into Euro-American society better than agriculture ever could. Their maritime profits convinced some agents, such as the Reverend Charles Huntington (1874–77), to recommend to the commissioner of Indian affairs that the government should civilize the Makah by encouraging fisheries and teaching trades that would support customary marine practices. Considering the cultural characteristics of the People of the Cape and their environment, Lieutenant Joseph Hays, Indian agent from 1869 to 1870, put it best when he wrote, “It would be worse than folly to attempt to change these expert fishermen into a tribe of farmers.” Many believed that customary Makah marine pursuits were legitimate markers of civilization. In 1885, the agency teacher, an educated Makah, suspended school for two weeks so that the older boys could go sealing. Agent Gibson lauded Makah mariners for the benefits their labors brought the nation: “The products of the waters around Cape Flattery, which amount to many thousand dollars annually, would be lost to the country were it not for these Indians, as there are perhaps no other people who would or could take their places and obtain a support as they do, and beside produce annually what is worth thousands of dollars to the several interests of our country.”¹¹³ When families such as the Claplanhoos combined their labor with capital investments in schooners and trading posts, agents saw what they wanted to see—they believed that Makahs were distancing themselves from traditional, “savage” ways.¹¹⁴

A few non-Natives even commented that Makahs were more successful than most whites. At the close of the century, Hazard Stevens, son of Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens, reflected back on the last four decades of Washington’s history, declaring that “in their remote, rocky stronghold, protected by the strong arm of the government extended over them by this treaty, but depending upon the sea and their own efforts for a livelihood, [Makahs] have prospered greatly, putting up vast quantities of fish, furs, and oil for market; and there are few white communities that have so much wealth per capita, or wealth so evenly distributed, as these industrious and manly Indians.”115 In this passage, Hazard emphasized his perspective on the legacy of his father’s treaties, namely that they had protected the territory’s indigenous peoples and allowed them to prosper. His assessment of Makah success reveals that many in the state recognized the important contributions this community made to the state’s development.

Makah success also allowed them to confront allotment, the cornerstone of assimilation efforts, by adhering to their marine identity. In 1890, when asked by the Indian agent about dividing the reservation into individual agricultural plots, they expressed no interest. Instead, two years later they pushed for—and received—ten-acre allotments, each with frontage on Neah Bay, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Pacific Ocean, or one of the rivers flowing into these saltwater bodies. Individuals wanted a “fair distribution of the most desirable location on the water front,” according to the Indian agent.¹¹⁶ Marine-oriented Makahs rejected the pastoral and abstract “imaginative geography” that the Office of Indian Affairs attempted to create across all reservations in the United States.¹¹⁷ Unfortunately, a subsequent agent voided these allotments after removing the previous agent for corruption. The new 1907 allotments—divided for paltry agricultural purposes and not oriented toward ocean access—angered many Makahs who had been pleased with the earlier division of the reservation.¹¹⁸ But in the 1890s, the People of the Cape repudiated farming as the only path to civilization and rejected the stipulation that reservation lands should be allotted for agricultural purposes. By asserting their marine identity and engaging in a moditional economy, Makahs articulated culturally specific alternatives that combined customary practices, characteristics of their identity, and new opportunities presented by settler-colonialism. The success of the Claplanhoos and other Makah families even convinced off-reservation bureaucrats that the sea best supported the tribal nation. Concluding that “little can be done” to encourage farming, horticulture, and raising cattle at Cape Flattery, one federal inspector who visited the reservation in 1890 advised the community to continue relying on marine resources. Subsequent federal officials in the Interior Department came to the same conclusions, arguing that “there seems little hope of the Indians doing anything in the way of agriculture” and that they “[get] along very well” from sealing and fishing.¹¹⁹

By the close of the nineteenth century, the situation for the People of the Cape had changed. Oral histories recall that the century’s end marked a turning point: Congress made it illegal for Makahs to engage in commercial pelagic sealing, Revenue cutters confiscated the best Makah vessels, and families became poor. Former sealers and whalers even tried their hand at farming because customary marine practices that had made them wealthy were no longer tenable. Restrictions on maritime pursuits discouraged Makah families from living at some coastal villages, such as u·yas (“tsoo-yuhs”), Waač (“wuh-uhch”), and Ozette. Another government policy accelerated abandonment of these villages. At the end of the nineteenth century, when the reservation school switched to a day school system and required all Makah children to attend, many families from the Pacific villages relocated to Neah Bay to live closer to their children. Those who grew up in Neah Bay while attending school in the early decades of the twentieth century then settled there afterward instead of returning to the old villages. By the 1940s, only a few old people remained at the most distant village of Ozette. The days of suspending school to allow Makah boys to hunt sea mammals were over. Instead, teachers at the Neah Bay day school focused more intently on a curriculum taught at Indian schools across the nation, teaching Makah children farming skills, making and repairing harnesses, blacksmithing, horseshoe making, woodcutting, silversmithing, sewing, keeping house, and staying clean. Increased missionary efforts and a rigid government education system altered customary social and spiritual systems, especially those tied to the ocean.120

The Barker family on the beach at Neah Bay, 1910. Sonny Barker and his family pose with a whale he recently hunted. Photograph by Asahel Curtis. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, NA664.

At a glance, the example of Makah whalers and sealers might resemble a narrative of declension common to most histories of American Indians. Their story, however, complicates many usual assumptions. The example of the Claplanhoos overturns the stereotype that Natives are “traditional” and have no role in a “modern” world. Individuals such as John, James, Jongie, and others combined modern opportunities and technologies with customary marine practices to maintain a Makah identity. They purchased schooners, trading posts, and hotels and deposited money in local banks. Many of their financial dealings and commercial activities followed the older but still relevant networks of the ča·di· borderland, while others took advantage of the more recent international border separating the United States from Canada. With new equipment, they expanded their marine space into the Bering Sea. At the same time, they hosted extravagant potlatches, used their influence and money to help other Makahs, and passed on their cultural values to sons and daughters. During the first four decades after the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay, many Makahs profited in their moditional economy. They used their success to blunt the harshest edges of federal assimilation policies, even shaping some to fit their unique maritime needs.

Makah whalers and sealers also confronted significant environmental and legal challenges during the late nineteenth century. As whale numbers decreased, they scaled back commercial whaling to a moderate level that they could sustain into the twentieth century. When seals became harder to find in local waters, they took to the high seas in larger vessels. They wrote letters, signed petitions, and hired lawyers to protect rights they had secured for themselves in the treaty. Once again, they pursued strategies that adapted modern opportunities and technologies within their own cultural framework.

But Makah sealers found themselves on the losing side of a battle over a valuable marine resource. The federal government and the London fur industry used conservation measures to cut smaller, independent pelagic sealers out of a profitable industry. The wasteful practices of gun-wielding, non-Native pelagic sealers made the entire industry an easy target on the international stage of conservation diplomacy. At the same time, regulations, laws, and conventions redefined the role of indigenous sealers by limiting them to the stereotype of the Native subsistence hunter. This codified into law the assumption that indigenous peoples could not be modern and denied most Makah sealers compensation rights that were extended to non-Native sealers.

Just how “anomalous” were the Makah of the second half of the nineteenth century? Other indigenous peoples also thrived in complex moditional economies and environments that non-Natives found hostile and challenging. The story of the Claplanhoos and other Makah whalers and sealers forces us to set aside the assumption that Natives cannot be prosperous and dynamic on their own terms. Instead, they exemplify the larger narrative of indigenous peoples who engaged modernity within their own cultural framework and in order to pursue their own ends.121 Perhaps the only anomaly was the way in which some government officials perceived Makahs as so different from other American Indians.