where the salmon run - Washington Secretary of State

spirit of the father 21
to Grandmother. “Don’t know what’s wrong with us.” “You’re down
there making fun . . . where we pray down there,” Grandmother
scolded. “We got these sticks that are powerful. You guys are down
there and you’re making fun . . . that’s why you don’t feel good.”
Qu-lash-qud was just a kid the first time he spied a white man. A
group of whites “menacingly approached” the longhouse and ransacked
the place while the boy watched through a crack in a rain
barrel. The memory of the armed horsemen never left his mind.
“Gramps would sometimes have fears and he’d relate back to raids
against Indians when he was a little boy,” Hank Adams recalls. “White
marauders would come in with guns and be threatening Indians, or
beating Indians. He’d talk about hiding under barrels and hiding
under different things. This would be in the 1880s and 1890s.”
Throughout his life, Qu-lash-qud told chilling stories of disease
ravaging the Indian people. “Let me tell you about this one—what I
heard. A ship come here on Puget Sound and the ship was throwing
brand new blankets, suit of clothes, underwear and the Indians on
the shore got in their canoes and went and got all that stuff. And
brought them ashore. And come to find out all those clothes and
blankets were smallpox. The ship had smallpox. And so all the Indians
got smallpox, from the mouth of the river to La Grande. They all died
off. Smallpox killed them all. See when I come to, there was just a few
Indians. I’d say just about 300 living on the reservation.”
The staggering losses drove many to drink, writes Norman Clark
in The Dry Years: Prohibition and Social Change in Washington: “In
their sorrow . . . the Indians finally reached for the bottle of rum
which the fur traders had been offering them. In the white man’s
liquor they found a source of ecstasy and release from their grief.”
“Pretty soon American come over in wagon trains and they had bad
whiskey,” said Qu-lash-qud. “Indians now fight and kill each other
after they had bad whiskey American brought over.”