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dropping near the end of the Strait as it does in summer. We leave the Spit before dusk, heading back to Seattle to spend New Year’s Eve in our traditional geographically diverse game of penny-ante poker. Baltimore—“Ballumer,” she says it—will play her challenging, by-God-you’re-not-going-to-get-away-with-it style. Texas, behind a cigar which would credit J. P. Morgan, contents himself until a strong hand, when he raises and reraises relentlessly. Carol—New Jersey—is the steadiest of the bunch, and wins regularly from the rest of us. By way of Montana—me—comes an uncharacteristically fevered kind of style which can swathe through the game, devastating everybody else for three or four hands in a row, or obliterating my own stake.
    Swan would approve the pastime, if not our particular card-table temperaments. He once passed up a chance to visit with the lightkeeper at Dungeness because he and the others
concluded to remain on board, devoting our energies to the successful performance of a game of seven-up, or all-four, or old sledge, as that wonderful combination of cards is variously termed.

Day Twelve
    The new year.
    On Sunday, January 1, 1860, his first New Year’s Day on the coast of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Swan creased open a new tan pocket diary and inscribed on its first page:
    May it be not only the commencement of the week, the month and the year, but the commencement of a new Era in my life, and may good resolve result in good action.

Day Thirteen
    Today Mr Brooks, William Ingraham & myself finished setting the posts for the main building of the school house and when we had all ready which was at noon, I told Capt John to call the Indians. Some twenty-five or thirty came out and when Mr Brooks was ready I told John who then gave the word and the sticks were lifted into their places and the whole of the sills for the main building fastened together in about an hour. I told John that when the buildings were done Mr Webster would give them a treat to pay for the good feelings evinced on this occasion. They have been opposed to having the building erected back of their lodges and I have had a deal of explanation to make, to do away with the superstitious prejudices of the old men. But by the exercise of a great deal of patience I have succeeded in inspiring them with a confidence in me, which
makes them believe not only what I tell them is true, but what we are doing is for their good.
    The noontime came on the fifteenth of October 1862, and the exertions which overtopped the cedar longhouses of the Makahs with the framework of a schoolhouse lofted more good for James G. Swan than he let his pen admit.
    Precisely when his mind had become set on securing the job as teacher at Neah Bay, there is no direct evidence. But hints murmur up from the diary pages. Likely as early as those first visits to Cape Flattery in 1859 Swan divined that Henry Webster would try for the appointment as Indian agent when the Makah Reservation came into being. Even more likely is that Webster, noticing Swan’s knack of getting along with the Indians, advised or asked him to seek a Reservation job.
    Those discernments and Swan’s rummaging curiosity about Makah tribal life were the pulls to Neah Bay. The push was that Port Townsend had not worked out well for Swan, and a fundamental reason seems to have been whiskey.
    Once I happened across the lines of a diarying compatriot o£ Swan’s, a Scot named Melrose who also had alit to the Pacific Northwest—to Victoria, north on the Canadian coast of the Strait—early in the 1850s. The alcoholic atmosphere of this frontier enthused Melrose to near rapture. “It would almost take a line of packet ships,” he wrote cheerily, “running regularly between here and San Francisco to supply this isle with grog, so great a thirst prevails among its inhabitants.” Melrose took care to note down how far his companions