Unique, and so distinct from its surroundings
as to suggest rather the handicraft of man than a
whim of Nature, it looms up at the entrance to the
Narrows, a symmetrical column of solid grey stone.
There are no similar formations within the range
of vision, or indeed within many a day’s paddle
up and down the coast. Amongst all the wonders,
the natural beauties that encircle Vancouver, the
marvels of mountains shaped into crouching lions and
brooding beavers, the yawning canyons, the stupendous
forest firs and cedars, Siwash Rock stands as distinct,
as individual, as if dropped from another sphere.
I saw it first in the slanting light
of a redly setting August sun; the little tuft of
green shrubbery that crests its summit was black against
the crimson of sea and sky, and its colossal base of
grey stone gleamed like flaming polished granite.
My old tillicum lifted his paddle
blade to point towards it. “You know the
story?” he asked. I shook my head (experience
had taught me his love of silent replies, his moods
of legend-telling). For a time we paddled slowly;
the rock detached itself from its background of forest
and shore, and it stood forth like a sentinel erect,
enduring, eternal.
“Do you think it stands straight like
a man?” he asked.
“Yes, like some noble-spirited,
upright warrior,” I replied.
“It is a man,” he said,
“and a warrior man, too; a man who fought for
everything that was noble and upright.”
“What do you regard as everything
that is noble and upright, Chief?” I asked,
curious as to his ideas. I shall not forget the
reply: it was but two words astounding,
amazing words. He said simply:
“Clean fatherhood.”
Through my mind raced tumultuous recollections
of numberless articles in yet numberless magazines,
all dealing with the recent “fad” of motherhood,
but I had to hear from the lips of a Squamish Indian
Chief the only treatise on the nobility of “clean
fatherhood” that I have yet unearthed.
And this treatise has been an Indian legend for centuries;
and lest they forget how all-important those two little
words must ever be, Siwash Rock stands to remind them,
set there by the Deity as a monument to one who kept
his own life clean, that cleanliness might be the
heritage of the generations to come.
It was “thousands of years ago”
(all Indian legends begin in extremely remote times)
that a handsome boy chief journeyed in his canoe to
the upper coast for the shy little northern girl whom
he brought home as his wife. Boy though he was,
the young chief had proved himself to be an excellent
warrior, a fearless hunter, and an upright, courageous
man among men. His tribe loved him, his enemies
respected him, and the base and mean and cowardly
feared him.
The customs and traditions of his
ancestors were a positive religion to him, the sayings
and the advices of the old people were his creed.
He was conservative in every rite and ritual of his
race. He fought his tribal enemies like the
savage that he was. He sang his war songs, danced
his war dances, slew his foes, but the little girl-wife
from the north he treated with the deference that
he gave his own mother, for was she not to be the
mother of his warrior son?
The year rolled round, weeks merged
into months, winter into spring, and one glorious
summer at daybreak he wakened to her voice calling
him. She stood beside him, smiling.
“It will be to-day,” she said proudly.
He sprang from his couch of wolf skins
and looked out upon the coming day: the promise
of what it would bring him seemed breathing through
all his forest world. He took her very gently
by the hand and led her through the tangle of wilderness
down to the water’s edge, where the beauty spot
we moderns call Stanley Park bends about Prospect Point.
“I must swim,” he told her.
“I must swim, too,” she
smiled with the perfect understanding of two beings
who are mated. For to them the old Indian custom
was law the custom that the parents of
a coming child must swim until their flesh is so clear
and clean that a wild animal cannot scent their proximity.
If the wild creatures of the forests have no fear of
them, then, and only then, are they fit to become
parents, and to scent a human is in itself a fearsome
thing to all wild creatures.
So those two plunged into the waters
of the Narrows as the grey dawn slipped up the eastern
skies and all the forest awoke to the life of a new,
glad day. Presently he took her ashore, and smilingly
she crept away under the giant trees. “I
must be alone,” she said, “but come to
me at sunrise: you will not find me alone then.”
He smiled also, and plunged back into the sea.
He must swim, swim, swim through this hour when his
fatherhood was coming upon him. It was the law
that he must be clean, spotlessly clean, so that when
his child looked out upon the world it would have
the chance to live its own life clean. If he
did not swim hour upon hour his child would come to
an unclean father. He must give his child a
chance in life; he must not hamper it by his own uncleanliness
at its birth. It was the tribal law the
law of vicarious purity.
As he swam joyously to and fro, a
canoe bearing four men headed up the Narrows.
These men were giants in stature, and the stroke of
their paddles made huge eddies that boiled like the
seething tides.
“Out from our course!”
they cried as his lithe, copper-colored body arose
and fell with his splendid stroke. He laughed
at them, giants though they were, and answered that
he could not cease his swimming at their demand.
“But you shall cease!”
they commanded. “We are the men (agents)
of the Sagalie Tyee (God), and we command you ashore
out of our way!” (I find in all these Coast
Indian legends that the Deity is represented by four
men, usually paddling an immense canoe.)
He ceased swimming, and, lifting his
head, defied them. “I shall not stop,
nor yet go ashore,” he declared, striking out
once more to the middle of the channel.
“Do you dare disobey us,”
they cried “we, the men of the Sagalie
Tyee? We can turn you into a fish, or a tree,
or a stone for this; do you dare disobey the Great
Tyee?”
“I dare anything for the cleanliness
and purity of my coming child. I dare even the
Sagalie Tyee Himself, but my child must be born to
a spotless life.”
The four men were astounded.
They consulted together, lighted their pipes and
sat in council. Never had they, the men of the
Sagalie Tyee, been defied before. Now, for the
sake of a little unborn child, they were ignored,
disobeyed, almost despised. The lithe young
copper-colored body still disported itself in the cool
waters; superstition held that should their canoe,
or even their paddle blades, touch a human being their
marvellous power would be lost. The handsome
young chief swam directly in their course. They
dared not run him down; if so, they would become as
other men. While they yet counselled what to
do, there floated from out the forest a faint, strange,
compelling sound. They listened, and the young
chief ceased his stroke as he listened also.
The faint sound drifted out across the waters once
more. It was the cry of a little, little child.
Then one of the four men, he that steered the canoe,
the strongest and tallest of them all, arose and,
standing erect, stretched out his arms towards the
rising sun and chanted, not a curse on the young chief’s
disobedience, but a promise of everlasting days and
freedom from death.
“Because you have defied all
things that came in your path we promise this to you,”
he chanted; “you have defied what interferes
with your child’s chance for a clean life, you
have lived as you wish your son to live, you have
defied us when we would have stopped your swimming
and hampered your child’s future. You
have placed that child’s future before all things,
and for this the Sagalie Tyee commands us to make
you forever a pattern for your tribe. You shall
never die, but you shall stand through all the thousands
of years to come, where all eyes can see you.
You shall live, live, live as an indestructible monument
to Clean Fatherhood.”
The four men lifted their paddles
and the handsome young chief swam inshore; as his
feet touched the line where sea and land met, he was
transformed into stone.
Then the four men said, “His
wife and child must ever be near him; they shall not
die, but live also.” And they, too, were
turned into stone. If you penetrate the hollows
in the woods near Siwash Rock you will find a large
rock and a smaller one beside it. They are the
shy little bride-wife from the north, with her hour-old
baby beside her. And from the uttermost parts
of the world vessels come daily throbbing and sailing
up the Narrows. From far trans-Pacific
ports, from the frozen North, from the lands of the
Southern Cross, they pass and repass the living rock
that was there before their hulls were shaped, that
will be there when their very names are forgotten,
when their crews and their captains have taken their
long last voyage, when their merchandise has rotted,
and their owners are known no more. But the tall,
grey column of stone will still be there a
monument to one man’s fidelity to a generation
yet unborn and will endure from everlasting
to everlasting.