LAMP LIGHTER LOUIS at TURN POINT

Light Keeper Louis A. Borchers
(1867-1923)
Turn Point Lightstation,
Stuart Island, 
San Juan Archipelago, WA.
Gelatin-silver photograph from the archives 
of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

Mr. Louis A. Borchers, born in San Francisco, was employed in the Lighthouse service for twenty-five years, twenty-one of those years at Turn Point Light in the San Juan Archipelago, Washington. 

He was an enthusiastic photographer of ships and marine scenes and had a collection of photographs that included nearly every vessel that regularly operated via the Haro Strait route. The international shipping lanes were right below him. The photographs included here were from the camera in the above photograph. 

Possibly a driftwood dugout canoe 
aboard Turn Point Light Station grounds,
planted with flowers by the keeper 
Louis A. Borchers
On station at this Light for 21 years
of his career.
Original gelatin-silver photograph by Louis,
 from the archives of the 
Saltwater People Historical Society©

Photograph notated in ink
by the Keeper  
and photographer, Mr. Borchers, 
"Fog signal and light, Turn Point."
Stuart Island, San Juan Archipelago, WA.
He made this into a photo postcard
& mailed it from Prevost, WA, in 1907.
From the archives of the 
Saltwater People Historical Society©

He also had great beds of red carnations on the grounds surrounding the lighthouse and kept his friends liberally supplied with flowers during the spring and summer. With the climate zone of Stuart Island, he grew a Lemon tree, which must have shared inside quarters in the winter. The huge fruit from the tree he used in pies to delight his family and neighbors. He was also known for sharing strawberry desserts and for his skill in canning salmon. 

When he passed away his ashes were scattered on the waters of Puget Sound from the bridge of the Lighthouse tender Heather. 

Please note that the photos in this post are originals in the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society and not for lifting, thank you.  

LEAVING HOME ON THE MAILBOAT

Mailboat M.V. CHICKAWANA
Arriving Orcas Island, WA.
Click image to enlarge.
Original photo from the archives of 
the Saltwater People Historical Society©
Photograph by Mr. Geoghagen of Orcas Island.

Chickawana in 1933.

"I had lived above the bay since childhood and was familiar with its beaches and nearby islands, but I never had to venture farther than could be seen from the tallest hill in the city.
      That was to change, however, when I first met the Chickawana, a mailboat that served the San Juan Islands in the 1930s.
      It was early on a cool misty morning in September when we arrived at the dock where she waited.
      She was due to sail at seven, and while we waited, I watched in fascination as the freight and produce were loaded, swinging beneath the tall derrick to be deposited on the deck to the hoarse commands of the deckhand.
      I studied the Chickawana, a typical mailboat of the time. Thirty-five feet long with an open deck behind the wheelhouse in the bow, she carried a crew of three.
      Other than a covered engine well in the center of the deck the only part below decks was the low-ceilinged passenger cabin, lined with benches below the portholes, entered by a short stairway at the stern.
      Since there were no other passengers that morning I would occupy it by myself until, getting bored, I ventured forth to view the scenery and visit the crew on the bridge.
      Eventually, all was in order and I made my way across the gangplank, which was then hauled aboard.
      Lines were cast off, the boat gave a shrill whistle, and we were underway. It would be the first time in my 19 years to live away from home.
      The Chickawana plied the Sound between Bellingham and the San Juan Islands, making three round trips weekly and laying over each second night in Friday Harbor.
      My destination was the next to the last stop, which would take seven hours to reach as we sailed into inlets and harbors among the islands, delivering and picking up freight and mail and an occasional passenger.
      Some of the ports of call were indistinguishable villages above a single dock, but the names linger in my memory like a litany: Eastsound, West Sound, Orcas, Deer Harbor, Roche Harbor. All in exquisite settings.
      Eventually, we rounded a small island and entered beautiful little Prevost Bay, in the most northwesterly corner of the contiguous US.
      As the motors slowed and we drifted up to the dock I could see a small group of curious strangers, some of the thirty-odd residents of Stuart Island who had come to see the new schoolteacher.
      The landing was without incident for the tide must have been just right so that the 
gangplank reached across to the level of the dock.
      If the boat lay a few feet below the dock I might have to perch precariously on the rail and be helped across the narrow gap, clutching strong hands extended for support.
      If the tide was completely out the gangplank could be laid from the roof of the wheelhouse, but I had to clamber up there to get it.
      Sometimes I started the trip in the passenger cabin but was careful not to be caught there after the time we carried a young heifer to one of the islands.
      I watched her being lowered to the deck, her legs dangling below the sling, until she was set down on the slippery surface where her hooves tended to slide out from under her.
      It must have been a frightening experience, for she responded during the long hours by making frequent and copious deposits that spread from port to starboard.
      I was unaware of this state of affairs until I came up on deck and found my way completely cut off.
      I was held hostage below until we reached the port where the cow was to be delivered and the crew had sluiced the deck clean enough to walk on.
      I imagine the Chickawana was old in 1933, and probably she has retired now for many years, but she will always have a special place in my memory."
      Words by Esther R. Ditmer. Guest column Friday Harbor Journal, 8 February 1987.

The Chickawana was lost to fire in 1948.

 

❖ San Juan County Parks ❖

Jonette and two other pleasure boats are tied up to
mooring facilities at Reid Harbor on Stuart Island,
San Juan Archipelago, August 1956.
This was one of 10 moorages built and maintained by the
Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission.
No charge was made for the service, which made the
state parks and other recreation areas accessible to
small-boat enthusiasts. There was launching facilities
for small boats installed at 20 state parks.
Original photo from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society

⭆  The four San Juan County Parks are closed for camping at least until 30 May 2020. There is day-use area available but the drinking water is shut off and we are asked to follow the guidelines from the CDC for social distancing. 
San Juan County Parks

👻 HAPPY HALLOWEEN 🎃

Stuart Island,

San Juan Archipelago,

rock formation reflection...

rock and saltwater, sideways.

Photograph courtesy of the 

clever Maggie Wjolter,

crew on PIA cruising this date,

14 August 2019

❖ SIX GENERATIONS OF REEFNETTING IN THE SAN JUAN ISLANDS❖

1978

Charles Chevalier snapped the starting cord on his outboard motor.
      "It looks like a great day for fishing," he said.
      At 10:00 AM, the sun was already bright in the clear blue sky over the San Juan Islands and a light breeze ruffled the water.

Fisherman Charles Chevalier
Photo by the late great Josef Scaylea.
Date stamped verso 1978
Original print from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©

      Charles Chevalier is a part-Indian, sixth-generation reefnetter. His comment about the fish conditions was based partly on instinct, inner knowledge. It proved to be accurate.
      A grebe, floating in front of him, took a dive deep into the water to avoid Charles' boat as it headed out of Friday Harbor around the bay bound for Stuart Island. Chevalier was in a hurry. He wished to meet his crew at the reefnet site well before high tide at noon.
      Though bare-foot, Charles had tossed his tennis shoes into the seat in front of him, together with a light jacket and a sack lunch. He would not be home until dinner, and the late afternoon wind on the cold waters of the San Juans could be chilly.
      Charles passed a few gillnetters coming in late from their night's fishing off the salmon banks. Purse seiners, their huge nets wrapped around hydraulic drums, beat past him.
      And all around him, first in one direction and then the other, a quick eye could catch the flash of silver spray as the beautiful sockeye jumped out of the water to take a look around.
      Stuart, the most westerly of the San Juan Island group, is close to the Canadian boundary. Here off a kelp bed near the entrance to Reid Harbor, Charles came upon his reefnet rafts. His crew was already there cleaning drift out of the lines.
      This reefnet location has been fished continuously by members of Charles family for six generations. It is licensed by the State––one of 71 stationary sites still being fished commercially in Puget Sound waters. [1978]
      Reefnet gear includes two canoes or rafts anchored parallel to each other 200' from shore in a spot where the ebb tide and floodtide currents will carry salmon into the 50' square net spread between the canoes or rafts.
      Setting out the net was the job Charles and his crew set about doing. The net was heavy; its four-inch mesh had been dipped in black tar so that the fish wouldn't 'tangle up in it.'
      The crew pulled one side of the net tightly between two rafts, the line stretched taut on the surface of the water. The opposite side of the net, secured to anchor lines, was held down in the water by weights.
      A few salmon, running ahead of the tide, evaded Charles' net. The current was not yet strong enough to make the net 'bag back.'
      "Fish traps blocked most of the reefnet sites by 1890, and many of the native owners of the locations were forced out. But in 1934 fish traps were outlawed and some of the old locations were reclaimed.
      Our spot at Stuart has been fished continuously for as many years as we can search back. I've fished it myself since I was 12––some 35 years."
      "Grandpa Bill Chevalier and his partner, Al Drouillard, started fishing this site in 1905," Marge went on. "Grandpa made a ceremony out of setting the anchors for the nets.
      He would pick the huge rocks carefully for their shape, wrap cedar-branch cables around them, lash them to the canoe and wait for the tides to float the rocks to the reefnet location."
      Charles' father, Alfred Chevalier, and his uncle Louie (like their ancestors) used to 'call' fish to the net. They learned the call from Charles' Great-Great Uncle Ned, a medicine man.

Marge Chevalier Workman
Cousin to Charles Chevalier.
Photo by Josef Scaylea.
Original print from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©

Charles and Marge also occasionally use the call to coax fish into their nets and describe it as a soft, rather high-pitched cry not unlike that of an owl.
      "You have to feel it, they say. You have to be in tune with the fish. It's almost a spiritual thing."
      Traditionally, the first salmon caught is accorded special respect.
      "In days long ago," Charles says, "our people believed that the salmon had come to feed the people with their own flesh. So the first sockeye of the season (sockeye being the most powerful of all fish) received the special rite."
      Charles and Marge recall that no one would ever step across the first fish caught and that as the fish was cut, people would give thanks for the survival of the fish and the related survival of the people.
      Marge's father, Bill Chevalier, who is 81 and still living on San Juan Island, followed another custom which may have been unique to the area. He always took his first salmon of the season and laid it out for the yellow jackets, knowing that when there were lots of yellow jackets, there were also good salmon runs.
      Although Marge and Charles, being three-eighths and one-fourth Indian, respectively, no longer follow many of the ceremonies of their Indian ancestors, they say that descendants of the tribe on San Juan Island would like to get together and teach their children the traditions they've learned.
      But it was time to go back to work.
      Chugging down Speiden Channel was the 50' fish packer PRIMO, skippered by Clarence Mead. Clarence is the fish buyer for Whitney-Fidalgo at Anacortes, and it is he who makes the rounds of the reefnet positions daily during sockeye season.
      He maneuvered the PRIMO close to the rafts and the crew put off the salmon, using dip nets called 'brailers' to throw them aboard the fish packer for weighing.
      Clarence passed down a fish ticket indicating how much money would be credited to Charles for his day's catch.
      Is reefnetting a profitable venture? Both Marge and Charles laughed.
      "It varies," they agreed.
      "I remember one year," Marge said, "when I made $25 total. It was during WW II when all the boys were in the service. Grandpa asked me to come on up to Stuart and help him fish.
      Financially, no, it wasn't rewarding, but I love these islands and I love being here."
      Marge was born on Waldron Island, lived on John's Island, and went to school on Stuart, rowing across the bay and walking three miles through the woods to the little one-room schoolhouse. She played on Henry Island and visited her grandmother often on Speiden Island, which the family-owned.
      In the late afternoon sunshine, rocking gently on the reefnet raft, the two cousins reminisced.
      They remembered their grandmother's cousin Sara who used to fish from a canoe with a three-pronged spear.
      They repeated tales told to them of their great-great-grandmother who was from the Songish tribe and lived to be almost 100 years old in a little cedar-shake shed on the north end of Speiden Island. She always sat on a little box by her fire in the shed, never wore shoes and never learned to speak English.
      Their great-grandfather, Robert Smith, was a British marine stationed at English Camp on San Juan Island during the Pig War. He bought his way out of the Marines for $20 and married the old Granny's daughter, Lucy, establishing a homestead there that would be occupied by the family for many years.
      The Smith's daughter, Mary, (Charles and Marge's grandmother) was a beautiful woman who married Ed Chevalier, and together they 'ruled' for many years what became known as their 'island kingdom.'
      According to the book, Pig War Islands, Ed and Mary Chevalier were as widely known and loved as anyone in the San Juans. With their family of five children, they raised turkeys for market, tended a fruit orchard, grew all their own produce, kept sheep and horses, milked two cows, logged and cut wood. In addition, Ed built boats and held down a full-time job at Roche Harbor, rowing the two miles or so to work and back each day in fair weather or storm.
      He also fished commercially, and did so well at developing the technique that 'islanders looked on him as the local father of reefnet fishing.'
      "Grandmother," Marge says, passed down many of the Indian ways to our generation.
      She had regal bearing and a very gracious manner. I remember Sam Buck, Sr.. saying that he would like to take her to WA, DC, to present her to the President. She knew so much about the history of these islands."
      A maternal great-uncle of Marge's, Prosper Graignic, was "reputedly the most successful rum-runner on the Puget Sound." His father was a French sailor who jumped ship in Victoria in the 18870s, marrying an Indian girl from LaConner and settling on Waldron. "The large family they reared on Waldron grew up, it would seem, with seawater instead of blood in their veins. One of Prosper's brothers is said to have sailed the family sloop to Victoria and back at the age of 7. Another, although deaf, earned his way as a fisherman. His knowledge of local tides and currents is described by island people as uncanny. Even the girls in the family learned, early on, to be as much at home afloat as on dry land."
      While they were talking, Charles had pulled the reefnet out of the water and stowed it away, tying it down, and securing the lines.
      Their day's work was over now, in their ancestors' "gentle way to fish."
Above text was written by Patricia Latourette Lucas
For The Seattle-Times, 1978.

Charles R. Chevalier (1930-2015)

❖ SEVEN KNOTS BY MOONLIGHT ❖ by June Burn

Day 64 of 100 Days in the San Juans. June Burn, 
Author of Living High and former San Juan County islander, June Burn, on contract with the Seattle P-I in summer of 1946.
We don't need any photographs with words by June Burn.

Stuart Island: Named by Wilkes for Frederick D. Stuart, captain's clerk of the expedition.

Detail of Chart 3450
East Point to Sand Heads
Corrected through notices to mariners to July 1968.
Published by Canadian Hydrographic Services.
Max Kuner Co. dealer stamp, Seattle ,WA.
Click to enlarge.
Out of date chart from the archives of the S.P.H.S.©

     "A raw, windy Sunday morning beside a comfortable fire, breakfast just over, a seagull winging over the tidy little Stuart Island dock, swallows dipping, our smoke blowing towards this incredible bluff, picoted, scalloped, braided and neatly stitched in tight waves of paper-thin layers of rock.
     Last night as we came in under the light of an almost full moon at 10 PM this bluff looked like a smooth cement bulwark, man-made. There were bridges and viaducts along it and if we hadn't a mast, we could surely have rowed under one of the fine arches made, we see this morning, with shadows.
     It took us four hours to get across this wind-swept meeting of San Juan Channel with Haro Strait from Sandy Point to Prevost. The tide divides somewhere in this broad triangle, half going towards Canada, the other half towards Friday Harbor. We got caught in the half that goes toward Canada and I wanted just to go on with it. We had never been there at all. But Farrar is a more law abiding citizen and he wouldn't. So we rowed and we rowed and we sailed and went backwards and we rowed again. We went to Canada and back a time or two, in actual mileage––or knotage–I think, wind-driven, tide-ripped and moonlit. It was wonderful.
     This little Prevost Harbor of Stuart looked like a sailor's heaven when we finally got here, though. We had seen the sunset in a clear yellow sea of sky above South Pender Island and, at the same moment, the almost invisible face of the nearly full moon rise in clean blue over Orcas.
     We had seen Mt. Baker white at first, rich saffron in the sunset, blue-white in the moonshine, and at last nothing. Cascades, Canadian Coast Range, Olympics stood quietly while the day and sunset and moonrise and night colors washed over them.
     At 7:30 I saw the first star. I said my wish––that we'd be there in half an hour––and it began to come true at 9:30.
     We saw big ships being towed by the International Boundary line past Saturna Light on up to Vancouver. Our sails were up and we were both rowings at the same time. I thought what a funny silhouette we must have made if anybody on a ship had happened to be looking down the wide moon path, just as we crossed it.
     Island shapes look different at night. Stuart, Johns, the Cactus Islands, Spieden, even distant San Juan would suddenly look strangely near and then discouragingly far. We were watching familiar outlines, as people do, completely un-noticing of the Canadian Gulf islands just as near-by. Then I did glance over that way and said: "Why we're in Canada!"
     "Darned if we're not,," Farrar said and lit out from there, his arms just stepping it off! Heigh ho! I guess we'll be amateurs at everything until we die. Here we've boated in these waters longer than you're old, likely, and we still blithely imagine that as long as we've got our bow pointed in a certain direction, we're going that way. We rowed on back to America.
     At last we rattled and bumped over the kelp bed in Prevost Harbor and began to draw near to the dock with the little white warehouse perched on top. Two people were standing there.
     'Ship, ahoy!' they said.
     'Land, ahoy!"'we said and told them who we were.
     'We're the Ericksons,' they said and guided us to the ladder, took our line, helped us up, gave us the city fathers' permission to sleep in the warehouse that night. That was the most comfortable floor!
     It was late, for us, as we stood there on the dock talking to young Ralph and Florence Erickson but they have always been storybook people to us, like the Lofoten fishermen of Norway. We began to ask them about fishing and they began a story of the shark and halibut and tuna and salmon season that ran on into the next day.
     This is the next day, as I write. I'm sitting on a log on the Lofgren beach where we had permission to make a fire. Farrar has just gone up onto the dock to get the sleeping bags and make the boat shipshape for the day. I look at him as he moves down the dock against a background of high blue-green hills and think how he becomes this country! He's going along thinking about man and the earth, likely. He's always thinking about that. In the middle of any task he will look up and say what I always expect to be something like,' I can't get the egg off this damn plate!' and instead it will be, 'you know, a man can't have any more than this. The earth, this sea, a beach, food, companionship. This is all any man can get. And when he dies, he simply gets it more completely. He becomes part of it, when he dies. What else could a man want?"

❖ TWELVE DAYS OF WINTER ❖

Day Five from the Archives

Stuart Island, San Juan Archipelago, WA.

Santa by Ship, 1978

1978

from the archives of the S.P.H.S.

Click to enlarge.

❖ REEFNET FISHING in the SAN JUAN ISLANDS ❖ 1946 with June Burn

Lummi Island reefnet fishermen
making a haul, in Whatcom County, WA.
Photo by Mary M. Worthylake; dated July 1949.
Tap image to enlarge.
Original from the archives of the S. P. H. S.©

Stuart Island––Day 70 of One Hundred Days in the San Juan Islands, one in a series of newspaper columns June Burn wrote under contract with the Seattle P-I in 1946.

Before the white men came, Native Indians were reefnet fishing. They made nets with string woven of the inner bark of cedar, fished from their dugout canoes.
      Now we have string nets, ropes, plank boats, lead for weights, but the principle of reefnetting hasn't changed a particle.
      When traps were outlawed in this state [1934], fishermen began to take to reefnetting by the hundreds. But Dad Chevalier has been reefnetting off the same bluff of Stuart Island for 45 years. Before that, when he was only 18 he began fishing, making his nets with cedar bark as the Indians taught him.
       The principle of reefnetting is based on the rather tragic fact that salmon hug the shores on their historic run for their home spawning streams. They swim around every shore, a little way up into the mouth of every stream until they find their own stream, when they go on up and up, over every difficulty, to make their shallow "nest" in the gravel on the bottom-up where the stream is shallow, clear, swift, clean. There they lay their eggs, die, and yield up their own bodies as feed for whatever young are just then hatching. Thus, each salmon feeds young salmon, though never it's own, for, by the time its young are hatched, its body is long since consumed. The body of mother salmon is there ready, however, in this unique cooperative borning and dying. So that in reality, in this wholesale nature's way, each salmon does feed its own young with its own dead body.
      Hugging the shore, in search for the home stream, the salmon run headlong into the reefnets hung there between two longboats. This is how it works:
      You have two very long, narrow, deep, dory-like boats––oh, 35-ft long. At the bow of one, you build a high platform on which the fifth man of the crew stands for hours, looking down into the water to watch for fish. Two men in each of the boats wait for the watcher's signal, when they start pulling with all their might, hauling up the filled––or sometimes empty––nets.
       Down between the boats, the net swings for 24-ft below the surface. Out in front of the boats, reaching out down the bank for 30, 40, 50-ft or more, depending on the location, there is a rope lead, long rope, top, and bottom held 18-ft apart by floats and weights. Ropes six-ft apart are strong between them, making a squarish lead which the salmon obediently follow right into the net. Now and then the ropes of the lead must be taken out and washed so that the salmon will stay between them––afraid, you know, of the bright rope lines of a fence that isn't a fence––like the ones we'd stay inside of too, for lack of imagination and courage to get out.
      Right down the rope fence with pickets six-ft apart, the salmon swim. The watcher gives the signal. The men back in the boats, make ready. The watcher says when. They begin to haul in the nets. If it is heavy they begin to gloat, to shout, to jive, to holler, and laugh. If there are watchers onshore, we begin to shout, too, as if we were at a ball game, egging on the players.
      It doesn't take long to pull in 24-ft of the net. One of the boats is already full, say. We'll dump the load into the other boat. The men in hip boots do not mind the wet, slithery, spray that comes over the gunwale to fall all around them. They haul away on the lines, bring in the last beautiful sockeye. If it's 500 fish they've got on that haul, all the men shout and wave their hats. The men on the other two locations shout in sympathy––and wish it had been their boats that had made the haul.
      The boys and men––now and then a woman––fishing at this Stuart Island location are mostly Dad Chevalier's sons and grandsons and the Indians and their sons who have worked for him for 50 years. Johnny Sam is his bookkeeper. Old General is now pensioned, but he gives up his pension for the reefnetting––he wouldn't miss this fishing season if he starved the rest of the year!
      The men share and share alike except that Dad gets a share of each location for his boats and gear. Last year was the best they ever had. Each man made $2,000 a share on No. 1 net. In nine weeks of fishing, that isn't bad unless you're depending on that for your year's income as some do. Some years the fishing is woefully bad. This looks to be a bad year, so far, but it may pick up. (Though by the time you read this, it will be nearly over and the tale will be told, whatever it was.)
      Bill and Alfred, Bill's and Alfred's son, all Chevaliers, are fishing this year and General, and old Isaac, the rainmaker, and General's sons, and Johnny Sam and Louis Smith. In three locations, 15 men are employed. Norman Mills, a son-in-law, is on his own boat, the ALOMA, buying fish.

Norman Mills and his 46.8-ft fish tender
ALOMA (O.N. 243877),
buying salmon from Whatcom County
reefnetters in 1943, the same year ALOMA
 was launched at Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, WA.
Original dated photo from the S. P. H. S. ©

Caroline, his wife, and little Wilma Jean are living in a little house taken off a PAF barge, and planted on a Stuart beach. Lizzie Chev, from Waldron, is there with her menfolk and Adelaide Chev lives on Stuart. Sarah and Katherine, the Indian women, cook for their men and so all the crew gets fed. Reefnet fishing time is a time of work and picnic and camping and nobody would miss it for the world.
See you tomorrow"
June Burn