❖ TUG GOLIAH ❖

The below undated original photos are from one collection just archived from descendants of mariner, Harry D. Wilkins, who worked on the GOLIAH. No story came with the images other than a few short inscriptions on the back, but included below are some GOLIAH words from the historian/author Gordon Newell.  

GOLIAH
ON 204800
414 G.t./221 N.t.
500 Ind. HP.
Owned at this time by Puget Sound Tug Boat Company.

Tug HERCULES
ON 204801
414 G.t./ 221 N.t.
500 Ind. HP.
Built 1907, Camden, N.J.
According to Pacific Tugboats,
 she is GOLIAH'S sister ship who
towed her around Cape Horn from the east coast to CA.

"In many ways, Puget Sound's second GOLIAH was typical of the Northwest's big deep-water steam tugs, both in appearance and in the work she did. Built in 1907 by John Dialogue of Camden, N.J., the GOLIAH and her sister tug, HERCULES, were massive, powerful steel steamers, 151' long, 27.1' beam and 15.2' depth, with a speed of better than 13 knots.
      The two boats came to the West Coast, via Cape Horn, the HERCULES towing the GOLIAH, which was loaded with extra fuel for the HERCULES' boilers. In San Francisco they went to work for the Shipowners' and Merchants Tugboat Co, but in 1909 the Puget Sound Tug Boat Co sent Capt. Buck Bailey and port engineer J.F. Primrose to the Bay to have a look at the GOLIAH. Their report was enthusiastic and the PSCo bought her. Capt. T.H. Cann piloted her north from San Fran.
      Shortly after WW I, the GOLIAH returned to the East Coast, having been sold as the sailing-ship trade of the PSTBC diminished. During the years she operated in the Northwest she had the comfortable reputation of a 'lucky ship.' This in spite of the many hazardous exploits in which she engaged.
      In 1916, skippered by Capt. T. Nielsen, the GOLIAH snatched the disabled Norwegian freighter NIELS NIELSEN from almost certain destruction on the lee shore of Vancouver Island, a feat which has been vividly described by R.H. "Skipper" Calkins, in his book High Tide (1952.)

Photo inscribed:
"Ship REUCE in tow of tug GOLIAH,
bound for Chignik, AK.
A slight list to starboard;
in smooth water after 3 days of pounding.
If there is such thing as a 'Hoo-doo Ship',
this is it."
ON 110498
1,924 G.t./ 1,601 N.t. 
Built 1881 in Kennebunk, ME.

      One of the GOLIAH's specialties was the towing of big Cape Horn windjammers up the coast when they had a deadline charter to meet on the Sound. In January of 1914, the GOLIAH set a new speed record for herself by towing the big American square-rigged ship ARYAN from the Golden Gate to Victoria in 89 hours and 30 minutes. The ARYAN, last wooden square-rigger built in America, was a heavy-hulled cargo carrier due to load nearly two million feet of timber for south Africa, and tugboat men agreed that her fast trip north was quite an accomplishment, even for the GOLIAH.

SEYMOUR NARROWS, B.C. 
Text on verso from this Wilkins collection:
"A more treacherous body
of water does not exist."
These photos were taken before Ripple Rock was
successfully drilled and blasted with dynamite in 1958.
Original photo from the archives of the S.P.H.S.©

      In June of the same year the GOLIAH set a new Alaska towing record, beating the one she had set two years earlier. Towing the barge JAMES DRUMMOND northbound and the barge ST. JAMES southbound, she completed the round trip between Seattle and Gypsum, AK.––1,900 miles––in 10 days and 12 hours. 

GYPSUM, Chichagof Island, near Iyoukeen Cove, AK.
A destination for part of GOLIAH'S work, as mentioned
in this piece by author Gordon Newell.
From the GOLIAH photo collection from the family of
mariner Harry D. Wilkins.
Original, undated photos from the archives of S.P.H.S.©

Both barges were loaded to capacity, but in their younger days they had been noted clipper ships, their fine-lined hulls helping the powerful GOLIAH to set another towing record.      
      In October 1910, GOLIAH ran into bad luck while engaged in towing a big barge, with tragic results. At the time the tug was hauling rock from Waldron Island, in the San Juans, to Grays Harbor, where it was used in the construction of the jetties at Westport. A fleet of nine seagoing barges was used to transport the rock, all of them tripped-down sailing ships like the PALMYRA, BIG BONANZA, CORONDOLET, JAMES DRUMMOND, and ST. JAMES, all of the staunch and seaworthy, and all of well over a thousand tons register. The smallest of the fleet was the ex-schooner WALLACUT, built at Portland, OR, in 1898, and rated at 798 gross tons. This was the barge that GOLIAH was towing to Grays Harbor. The story of what happened is contained in a shipping bulletin datelined Port Townsend, 5 Oct. 1910:

      "The loss at sea of Andrew Henderson, aged 24, and Hans Christensen, aged 25, from the rock barge WALLACUT is the latest of the long list of casualties due to the gale in the North Pacific Sunday. The men were swept from the barge while it was in tow of the tug GOLIAH at six o'clock in the morning off Destruction Island, while the craft, deep-laden with stone for Grays Harbor jetty work, was contending against a sea so furious it seemed almost certain to cost the lives of the five men constituting the barge's crew.
      A report of the tragedy was brought here by Capt. John Jarman, master of the barge, whose command was forced to return to Neah Bay after vainly trying for 30 hours to cross the bar into Grays Harbor.
      A point near Grays Harbor Bar was eventually reached, the barge leaking badly, and under weather conditions that prevented making an effort to pass into Aberdeen. With this plan frustrated, the tug turned for a return course to the Sound. While Henderson was about to relieve Christensen at the wheel, a wave more furious than any of the others that had threatened to send the barge to the bottom, broke in a big curling comber over the weather rail, sending both men clear of the ship and into the sea. The accident was witnessed by Capt. Jarman and his two other sailors, but no aid could be given. 
      Capt. Jarman is a veteran on the North Pacific and describes the storm through which he passed as the most severe experienced in these waters."

      Capt. Buck Bailey, who was skipper of the GOLIAH that trip, was noted for laughing in the teeth of the North Pacific when it was in its worst moods, frequently taking whatever big PSTBC craft he was piloting into danger which kept all other deep-sea towboats safe at anchor. If he mis-calculated that time, at the cost of two lives, he made it up many times over in daring rescue operations which made him famous the whole length of the Pacific Coast. 
      At the termination of the Waldron Island rock-towing contract, the GOLIAH steamed down the coast to take her station off the Columbia River mouth. 

CURZON
From the GOLIAH collection.
Possibly preparing for a pilot from the GOLIAH,
when the big tug was stationed off the Columbia Bar.
Undated original from the S.P.H.S.©

The Puget Sound Co. had decided to set up a pilotage and towing service there in opposition to the established bar tugs. The GOLIAH, with ample accommodations and oil tanks capable of stowing a month's supply of fuel, was well designed for such service, and she spent most of her time cruising off the lightship day and night, with her bar pilots aboard." Pacific Tugboats. Newell, Gordon. Superior Publishing. Pg 116-119.

Aboard the tug GOLIAH.
Unidentified mariner.
If you can identify this man, please let us know his name
for our history files.
Original photo from the archives of the S.P.H.S.©

❖ The Happy Warrior ❖ of Waldron Island

 June Burn
author of Living High
Faculty of Creative Writing of U of WA.
celebrating National Book Week 12 Nov. 1944.
Original photo from archives of S.P.H.S.©

" 'Pixilated,' I thought; 'thoroughly pixilated.'
      This estimate raced across the top of my coffee cup as June Burn and I had coffee in a restaurant the other morning. June Burn is the author of Living High, a different kind of book, published recently by Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, New York.
      It was with the first sip of coffee that I made the mental reservation 'pixilated.'
      By the time I'd reached the bottom of my coffee I was convinced June Burn is the most thoroughly refreshing, fascinating, absolutely free soul, I've ever met. Here is a woman who outwardly seems haphazard in her living but who truly has not one whit of irresponsibility in her soul––perhaps her early Methodist training, plus the advent of two sons, put a stabilizing strain in her whimsicality, and yet never wore that whimsicality threadbare.
      There she sat across the restaurant table from me, her blue eyes looking like huge drops of the Puget Sound she loves so well; the sighing of the big firs and the rumble of stormy waters in her marvelous voice. Somehow she didn't belong there in the restaurant having coffee. Rather she belonged to the great outdoors and I had the feeling she is a captive soul the minute four walls close in on her.
      'You just come up to my island, Waldron Island,' I'll make you the finest hoecake you've ever tasted––it's made from whole wheat I grind by hand. And cook over the fireplace. Sure, I've got a kitchen in my cabin, and a kitchen range, too, but I like to cook over the open fireplace.'

Philosophy of Life Given

      Then June told me first of her philosophy of life:
      'You've got to get your wants down if you want to be happy. There are so many riches in the world that are not covered by economic security. I've had little cash but lots of color in my life. Queer, too, how I love to be alone in the woods and yet I adore people... .no, that's not queer, either, for people are a great deal like trees––when they're real people.' And then she told me in chronological order of her life, as revealed in Living High, An Unconventional Autobiography.
      June Burn was born in Alabama, and her father was a Methodist circuit-rider preacher. She finished college at the Oklahoma A & M and then went to New York. She got a job on McCall's Magazine (she describes herself at that time as a 'wide-eyed, green kid'). Later, she decided she'd become a short-story writer so she went to live in a Maryland cabin, not so far from WA., D. C. with another girl. There she wrote and there she met Farrar Burn, an ensign in the Navy. They knew each other a month and then married. Farrar leaving the Navy for civilian life.
      Their dream was an island. The atlas showed them the myriad of Puget Sound islands, so it was Westward-Ho! for the Burns. They homesteaded on Sentinel Island; there they followed out their own homespun philosophy, 'enjoy life first and settle down later,' They called their little island, one of the San Juans, the Gum Drop, it was so lush and green looking.
      The Burns' life on Sentinel Island is a book within a book. In fact, Mrs. Burn admitted that 'their life had been a series of Islands––first Sentinel, then St. Lawrence Island in Alaska, then the present Waldron Island,' where she now makes her home.
      'I wonder why everybody doesn't do their retiring first,' Mrs. Burn writes in Living High, 'while they have the zest for everything and settle down later on when they don't feel like doing anything but work, anyhow.'
      The second part of her book is called The Pale Green Year, and that was the year that the Burns spent in AK on the Aleutian Islands, specifically on St. Lawrence Island, teaching school with the natives as their pupils. There they met an eccentric old man who thought he was Christ come to save the world, and he offered them many thousands of dollars to take him across the Bering Sea to Russia and around the world. They flipped a coin to see whether they'd go around the world or come back to Puget Sound and raise a family.
      They flipped a coin, they came back to Sentinel Island, they had a son, North, who arrived in a terrible storm. The baby was born with Mr. Burn and a neighbor woman attending, who in lieu of a doctor––he could not reach the island on account of the storm––read instructions from a government bulletin directing her husband and the neighbor woman on childbirth procedure.
      Then came a trip from St. Louis to WA., D. C. by donkey cart. Then a conventional business venture, which netted the Burns $8,000 annually––she wrote advertising and lectured, he ran a public market in Sacramento. But the open road called and soon the four Burns (Bob, a son, had joined the family before the California adventure) piled into a specially constructed automobile and started across country. They called it Burn's Ballad Bungalow, this touring theatre, which had a collapsible stage at the rear of the automobile, where the four Burns sang Farrar's self-composed songs to the tune of his guitar.
      After this whirl around the country, they went back to Bellingham and there bought some land and built a cabin. Mrs. Burn wrote a daily column for The Bellingham Herald. It was called Puget Sounding and in it she wrote of everything from life in logging camps to stories of the Indians.
      Then came the depression and back to Waldron Island went the Burns––they had by this time purchased 44 acres on Waldron, also one of the San Juan group. There the four of them lived for 26 months on $200.
      After that, they founded a weekly paper, The Puget Sounder. It was first published in Bellingham, then Seattle. It was a literary success but a financial failure. Then came the time when Farrar had to go to New York, where he did lecturing and radio work. June and Bob, the younger son, hitchhiked to California. Later they joined Farrar in New York and there they lived in an 'undiscovered' New York. Mrs. Burn returned to write her book on Waldron Island and she's still there. North is attending the University of WA. Bob is a student at Bellingham HS. Farrar is making recordings for NBC in New York and lecturing. Right now Mrs. Burn is trying to decide if she is going to New York or on an eastern lecture tour.
      You find all this and much more in Living High. You find the beauty of nature served up as only June Burn can serve it up. There's philosophy, too, served up a la Burn. Here's a pinch of philosophy from Living High:
      'Washdays were fun. We had learned from the Eskimos that if you don't live as you go, you don't live at all. Since occupations fill most of our time, they must be made interesting, lively, delightful. They have got to be, or at least seem, important. Farrar and I had determined that we would never again do anything that wasn't rewarding in the doing. We had a theory that a good life, right and true and independent, could be lived on that principle. The Eskimos loved all the everyday activities of their lives. What could be more fun than hunting seals? What's more fun than gathering boot grass in summer? Yet their economy was as complicated as ours.'
      Farrar and the instinct for economy of effort, which we so aptly call laziness. He loved large leisure for trying out new tunes, new word combinations, new ideas. His more gracious attack on everyday living was hard work to me at first, for I cared for white clothes and immaculate houses, clean corners, and tidiness.
      '''Don't you see,' he kept at me, 'that energy margin, time-margin left over from doing washing is more important than getting the clothes to a certain degree of whiteness? If I'd wanted a housekeeping wife I'd have married a servant and gone out for friendship and companionship.'
      Then some of her touches of 'high living close to nature,' She speaks on sleeping on the ground and comments:
      'You sink down into a sleep that is like a rebirth, and awaken refreshed, and healed.'
      And then of Puget Sound:
      'Suddenly you round a curve or top a hill and there is Puget Sound before you, glittering in the sunshine or misty gray in the rain. There are ships coming and going in every direction, sidestepping the myriad green islands that pattern the Sound. Behind you are the mountains you have crossed, snowy white, and another range to the south, another to the north. You are encircled by snow-capped ranges. You have come home!'
      June Burn can speak of salmon leaping below a sturdy bluff, lighthouses throwing their long beams down a starlit channel, long-remembered hours by glowing campfires, cooking at fireplaces and ––well, we who are shackled to desks, immediately start straining at the bonds.'
      June calls this zest for living 'the technique of living.' Right now she's living all alone in her cabin on Waldron Island. She's working on a juvenile walking book, which gives most of the walking trails in the US (recently, with another woman, she hitch-hiked from New York). Farrar Burn will be back on Waldron Island in the spring.

    New York Parties

Mrs. Burn also tells you of:
Catching and hauling a half-ton of dogfish to her Waldron home, where she planted this dogfish for fertilizer in her garden.
      Liking to give lectures but not liking all 'the palaver that follows the lectures.'
      Keeping up a correspondence with more than 100 persons, including letters to Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt––'My biggest creative job these days is writing letters,' says June Burn. 'They say if I keep up I'll make a third-class post office out of Waldron, which is now just a fourth class, as I receive so much mail.'
      Giving parties in New York off the docks, when they caught eels out of the Hudson River, and living near an old blacksmith shop in Chelsea––'We found a New York that few people know and I called my lectures on this subject 'The New York that Nobody Knows.'
      And as you talk to this woman, who first appears to be pixilated and then convinces you––she's just natural, however, and doesn't for one moment try to impress or convince you––that she is 'dern smart' you know that she just told you a partial truth in the closing line of her book, 'From now on everything is gravy.' You know that June Burn's life 'always has been all gravy'...because she made it that way!
Above text by Virginia Boren for The Seattle Times, 1941,

A re-issue of June Burn's Living High, an unconventional autobiography was published in  1999.

LIVING HIGH book search––

❖ "SMUGGLER" KELLY ❖

KATY THOMAS
 ON 161054
Sloop built on Waldron Island, WA., by A. J. Hinckley in 1894,
for the Thomas brothers, Ashton, Elery, and John, of that island.
38.1' x 12' x 3.6' 
8 G.t. and 7 N.t.
Later owned by smuggler Larry Kelly, Guemes, & Sinclair Islands.
Photo from Thomas family, courtesy of the Anacortes Museum.
Vessel data from federal document (MCC) in SPHS records.

"A legendary character who sailed San Juan waters was Lawrence Kelly, better known as 'Smuggler' Kelly. One can still hear the most lurid accounts of his supposed bloodthirstiness, yet Kelly himself always insisted he was an 'honest' smuggler who never harmed his fellow man.
      The surviving evidence seems to bear out Kelly's claim. Part of the problem is that for decades Sunday Supplement writers have carelessly confused Larry with a hoodlum and sometimes smuggler named Jim 'Pig Iron' Kelly (no relation), who did terrorize the Puget Sound country during much of the same period.
      Larry Kelly sometimes trafficked in wine and Chinese illegals, but his main stock in trade was opium. In those days drugs were not illegal in the US, but they were dutiable. Uncle Sam's customs officials were supposed to see the government got its cut in the lucrative business of supplying Chinese laundry and cannery workers with their drug of choice. Kelly used to claim customs men themselves were the most active opium smugglers of all, and that the real reason they pursued him so relentlessly was to cut down on the competition.
      Kelly hailed from the Emerald Isle and went to sea as a young lad, seeking adventures that took him to the ports of Europe, Asia, and the South Seas. A ship chanced to land him in New Orleans just as the Civil War was getting underway, and Kelly decided to stay and join the fun. Records of Louisiana's Confederate soldiers show that he joined a volunteer company of the 22nd and 23rd Infantry on 2 September 1861.
      Perhaps the war wasn't as much fun as he had expected. The records show he was only present until February 1862.
      Presumably, there was another sea voyage and then Kelly landed on the shores of Puget Sound in 1865. He did some honest labor at the little village we now call Tacoma, loading lumber on board a sailing vessel.
      Sometime in the 1870s, Kelly settled on the southwest shore of Guemes Island at a spot which is still known as Kelly's Point. It afforded him a view through Bellingham Channel to the Strait of Georgia which was useful in monitoring the movements of customs boats. He married an Indian woman named Lizzie Katz and began raising a family.
      In Helen Elmore's book about Guemes, there is a description of Kelly: short, barrel-chested, wiry brown hair,  bushy beard, small bloodshot eyes, dirty shirt and overalls, bare sun-tanned feet. Bill Rosler of Friday Harbor told me years ago that Kelly also had a scar across his forehead and was a "nice fellow".
      Kelly would purchase opium in Victoria, where there were at least two factories openly manufacturing the drug. Then came the illicit dash over the border on his fast sloop, first to one of several hideouts in the San Juans, then on to some Puget Sound city with a large Chinese population. A frequent destination was Pt. Townsend, where Kelly used to land at night and let opium down the chimneys of Chinese laundries.
      Apparently, it was a most profitable business. By 1886 Kelly was able to buy up the western half of Sinclair (also known locally as 'Cottonwood') Island where he moved and became a leading citizen. He was even elected to the school board, in spite of his occupation.

William Rosler, Friday Harbor, WA. 

Son of Christopher Rosler (d.1907) 

who was one of Capt. George Pickett's soldiers 

who helped build American Camp.

(Writer Richardson interviewed Bill Rosler in 1960.)

Original photo from S. P. H. S.© 

As Bill Rosler recalled, 'everyone knew he smuggled, but the trick was to catch him.' Kelly was a first-rate sailor and pretty hard to catch. He mastered the old smugglers' trick of going out in bad weather when the law stayed close to shore. The customs boat at the time was a steamer, the WOLCOTT; but it was pretty slow in any kind of wind, Kelly could sail faster than the WOLCOTT could steam! In any case, Kelly knew every inch of coastline and if pressed too hard he would head for shallow water where the larger vessel couldn't follow.
      In time, they caught him and Kelly paid several fines for carrying contraband. But he was a thorn in the side of customs officers who were determined to 'put him away'––and they did.
      In March 1891, Kelly was traveling to Portland to board a train that, whether by accident or design, was also carrying two customs inspectors. They opened Kelly's large, new leather suitcase and found 65 half-pound cans of prepared opium. Kelly was arrested at Castle Rock and returned to Tacoma for arraignment, where he protested long and loudly that the customs men themselves had planted the drug among his effects while he was in the wash room.
      Larry Kelly wound up in McNeil Island pen for a couple of years, in spite of the petition his Sinclair Island neighbors put out for his pardon. During his incarceration, his small son was drowned in a shallow well on Sinclair.
      When Kelly emerged from the federal clink he was a beaten man. Federal agents had raided his home and seized and sold his sloop. He needed $500 to pay back bills and had to mortgage his property to raise the money. There were domestic disagreements and Lizzie moved out. By 1896, the last of the Sinclair Island property had been sold and Kelly was living in Anacortes.
      He was in and out of just about every jail on Puget Sound in the course of the next ten years. The last record of Larry Kelly in an item in the San Juan Islander for 16 May 1911, reported that his sloop had just been boarded again off the north end of Lummi Island. Kelly gave a fictitious name and claimed he was on his way to Alaska, but the boarding officer was sure Kelly was headed for Victoria for another buy.
      It's claimed Kelly finally retired from the smuggling business, went back to Louisiana and lived out his days in a Confederate soldiers' home. Some years ago this writer tried to find some documented record of Kelly's last days but a fairly lengthy correspondence with Louisiana archivists, including the curator of the state's Confederate Cemetery, failed to turn up Kelly's name.
      Kelly used several sailing vessels in his career, the last two of which were seized by agents. Some years ago the Anacortes Bulletin ran an article claiming that one of Kelly's boats, a ketch-rigged sloop, 38-ft long, weighing over seven tons, was still in use in local waters. The boat in question had been built on Waldron Island, [WA] in 1894, named the KATY THOMAS.
      In one of those strange twists Fate seems to delight in, Kelly happens to have two great-great-grandchildren still living in Bellingham. And their names just happen to be Katy and Thomas."
Above text by author, historian, long time San Juan County resident David Richardson, for The Islands' Sounder, 9 December 1981.
From the collection of the Saltwater People Historical Society.
1971: 
This year the KATY THOMAS was the subject of a news article by Marine Editor Glen Carter of the Seattle Times.
      At that time the sloop was on the hard on property owned by the City of Anacortes, next to the Washington State Ferry terminal, Anacortes, WA. She was owned by the Northwest Seaport who had plans to save her but in the next decade she fell apart and was scrapped. 
 

❖ Sage of the San Juans ❖ by Beatrice Cook

Ethan Allen, Waldron Island, WA, 1943.

Original  photograph from the S.P.H.S.©

"In five years, by actual count, I rowed ten thousand miles. I've shivered through a December night fighting the waves of President Channel while I clung to my over-turned rowboat and I've rowed a cow and her calf from Orcas to Waldron Island during a storm. But this is the first time I've ever been interviewed. 'Fraid I'm not halter-broke to this!'
      Ethan Allen, the grand old man of the San Juans smiled up at me. He was sitting on the porch of the log cabin which he had built himself some thirty years ago, or, rather added to the fifty-year old cabin which is still his bedroom. It faces the shimmering waters of President Channel that flows between Orcas and Waldron islands. Turtleback Mountain on Orcas is a wavy green line against the deep blue sky.
      He smoothed back his white hair and surveyed the rolling pasture with eyes which had lost little but gained much with the passing of the years.
      'I've had seventy-two birthdays--but none of 'em have took yet. I like Waldron Island real well. But I've only lived here forty-five years and I haven't really located yet. Someday, I'm going to settle down--mebbe.'
      This old patriarch with his friendly smile and his sly humor is a tradition of the San Juan Islands. He is loved as much today as he was respected back in '95 when he was Superintendent of Schools of San Juan Islands. He was one of the first homesteaders of Waldron Island and knows how history is made because he has made a lot of it himself. 
      'No, I don't get lonesome, people are always dropping in. My little cove is a perfect harbor for cruisers. Lots of folks come to see my Indian things. News seems to ravel, too, for when this Bing cherry tree is going great guns, I'm almost swamped with guests. Seems like I'm one of the sights to be seen around here!'
      He is. Yachtsmen all over the Northwest swap stories of his hospitality. He is as entertaining as he is instructive. Waldron Island can boast of no ferry service, electricity, or telephone among its ten families, and newspapers are a week old before they get there. But Ethan Allen can tell you what Hitler has just done and, moreover, what he is going to do next!
      He settled his powerful back against the log doorjamb and gazed out across the waters--and the years. 'Back in '95, I got a homestead grant here on the island, six dozen eggs, two incubators, and a wife. I had intended to raise chickens, but when the eggs hatched out, I was sort of discouraged. Running around her were eighty-two varieties of chickens, some two kinds and some three. So I took the job of school master here at Waldron for the summer. Three months was all that the law required in those days. Kept me busy, teaching school and running a farm. But I managed to slash twelve acres of timber in my spare time that summer.
      Later, when I was appointed Superintendent of Schools of San Juan County, I received one hundred and fifty dollars a year for the job. I would have been in the white collar class--if I'd had a collar! But I earned it. Every Friday, come fair wind or foul, I had to row to Friday Harbor to report at the office. That's only about ten miles as the crow flies but a rowboat ain't a crow. Of course I always took advantage of the tides but now and then, the winds took advantage of me. Once it took me three days to row home. There was three inches of snow on McConnell Island when I beached the boat for night and ate some apples that were all I had with me. I made Spring Channel by the next night--and ate apples. The next night the remaining apples and I spent in the old lime kiln on Orcas. When I finally got home, the crows tried to drag me off to the corn field!
      But that was a regular rest-cure compared to the time I was swamped off Bald Point here on Waldron. It was freezing cold December night and I was rowing like mad trying to get home as there was good reason why I didn't want my wife left alone that night. The boat was topping the huge waves like a herring gull until I hit the point. There the tides meet. But I didn't have any time to worry about it for the next thing I knew, I was gulping down saltwater. When the boat cracked up against my head, I grabbed the gunwale--and hung on. I figured the tide would carry me ashore if I could only hang on long enough. There was no swimming in that wild water and, anyway, the snow was coming down so fast that I couldn't tell where land was. It must have been about two hours later when I felt sand under my feet. After I had made shore, I was so cold that when I fell down, I didn't know if I fell on my face or on my back. My clothes froze stiff on my back as I fought the blinding snow all the four miles home. Worst of it was, I couldn't even chew tobacco, 'cause I could't get my jaws apart. I'd be a gentleman today if I hadn't thawed out.
      I chopped half an acre of timber next day before I limbered up right. I kept one eye on my wife and the other on the tide but it was eight o'clock before I could put her in the rowboat, and start out for Anacortes. That was a tough trip for both of us but a certain Washington college would be shy a professor today if I hadn't pulled on them oars mighty hard!
      Next day I had a son and the son had to have a cow so I started figuring how to get the beast over to the island. Wasn't hard landing a cow and her calf at the town of Orcas. But it was plenty tough walking them around some ten miles of beach that night, had to do it when the tide was out. 'Bout sunrise, I tied 'em up at West Beach on Orcas Island which is right across the channel from my farm on Waldron. Now all I had to do was to get those critters across three and a half miles of rough water!
      Worked all day building a raft of driftwood and by sunset I had the beast stalled up on it. Now, I had rowed that stretch of water lots of times in twenty minutes, but a cow, a calf, and a log raft, can sure slow a man down!
      But I enjoyed those years. The winters were sort of long but we never once missed have a Spring! Visiting twenty-six school districts by rowboat tends to keep a fella out of trouble. Then I had the farm to run. I cut wood to pay for the few staples we needed. I've rowed many a barrel of flour over from the mainland.
      Life's been hard. In the old days it took a class 'A' man to prove up a claim. It took a hard head and a strong back to make these islands give you a living. The first white men to really settle here were tough timber all right. They were the Hudson Bay Co. fur traders. They cleaned up every beaver on the islands but left a lot of descendants with funny French names to remember them by. 
      I asked Allen about the Indians of whom he knows so much--those Lummi, Skagits, and San Juans. Did they make good neighbors in the early days?
      'Yes, they did for those who had 'em. Orcas was sort of a meeting place for them, 'round Coal Point because the salmon were there. I've seen a mile stretch of beach packed with their canoes. They never stole a thing and if you ever gave them any firewood they wouldn't forget. Every once in awhile you'd find a salmon on your porch. Only after their debt was paid would they be your friends. That's just one of the things they could teach to white people.
      But after 1850 there weren't many Indians around here--smallpox cleaned 'em out. No wonder, for the native treatment was a trifle severe. When an Indian was suspected of having the disease, his friends placed him on blankets in a pit dug some three feet in the ground. Slender poles secured over the top caged him in--also the evil spirits causing the trouble. From then on, once a day a raw salmon on the end of a long stick was poked at him. When he couldn't reach out and take it, he was considered dead and was covered with the handy pile of dirt already beside the pit. But those Indians weren't so stupid in all things, though. Look here!'
      He showed me two arrow tips with a hair-fine line running through them.
      'See? These stone arrow tips have been mended by the Indians with heat-proof cement just as strong as anything on the market today.  When I found this tip, it was broken, but as you see, not in the place where it was mended. George Vancouver commented on this type of cement in his journal back in 1792. No one knows the secret.'
      Sitting there in the sunshine, shading my eyes against the reflected sunlight on the water I was entranced with stories of the days when $1.50 was tops for cutting and delivering a cord of wood. He told about the Robinson brothers' trading sloop which serviced these islands in the days of '63 when kerosene was $2 a gallon. There were stories about the forty-niners who settled in Victoria when they dared not return to the southern states because all personal fortunes were being confiscated by the North.
      He makes history live and breathe again. So, when cruising in the Northwest, and looking for a port of call, drop anchor for a while in that lovely cove on the Northeastern side of Waldron Island. Ethan Allen will be there to meet you with a smile."
Above text by author Beatrice Cook
Formerly of Seattle and Orcas Island, WA.
Published in Pacific Motor Boat
January 1939