Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

David Douglas at Play
October 2009

Scottish naturalist David Douglas, whose name is forever attached not only to the Douglas fir but also to several dozen other Pacific Northwest plants, birds, and animals, spent most of the decade between 1824-34 collecting specimens from New York to Brazil to Hawaii. The bulk of his work took place in the Columbia country, where his every movement had to be approved by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The fur trade business dominated our region so completely back then that when Douglas arrived in 1825, he was the only white person in the entire Columbia district who was not on the company’s payroll.
Still in his mid-20s when he first arrived here, the naturalist projected the kind of childlike enthusiasm and restlessness that he maintained throughout his life. He preferred fishing and hunting to all other endeavors. He laughed and played games. From rocks to insects to tribal artifacts, he couldn’t stop himself from picking things up. When a situation didn’t go his way, Douglas sometimes pouted or threw “little fits,” but if any person showed genuine kindness, he reciprocated with loyal friendship. All these traits connected Douglas to the families he met throughout the Northwest, including the women and children — two groups of people not often mentioned in fur trade journals of the time. In the long run, both had a lot to do with Douglas’s success in scientific realms.
            One of his first acquaintances on the coast was a lower Chinook headman named Cockqua, who graciously welcomed the naturalist into his village near Willapa Bay. There Douglas showed off his marksmanship by shooting out the crown of a tossed hat, started fires with a magnifying glass, and blew teapot steam out of his mouth to impress the natives. Since the Chinooks had been entertaining European travelers for several decades by this time, their applause may have less appreciative than he imagined.
When that initial show was over, however, Douglas changed his focus to how Chinook people actually lived, watching women and children gather and prepare a variety of edible plants. They pried the large tendrils of a beach peavine from the sand to eat raw, and roasted those of a seashore lupine. They cooked tasty sword fern roots over embers, and strung the green fronds as decorative garlands. Inside Cockqua's lodge, Douglas examined “baskets, hats made after their own fashion, cups and pouches, of very fine workmanship.” One of the craftsmen who made these beautifully practical goods turned out to be a relative of Cockqua’s, “a little girl of twelve years of age.” Before Douglas left the village, he placed an order with her for four hats, including one bearing the initials “DD,” to be woven into the crown with the purple-brown lower shoots of beargrass.
Later that summer Cockqua delivered three of the hats to Douglas, explaining that his relative had not yet finished weaving those special initials into the fourth. A grateful Douglas paid for the entire set with a seven-shilling blanket, as well as “a few needles, beads, pins, and rings as a present for the little girl” who crafted them. Cockqua also delivered a packet of seeds from evergreen huckleberries, which almost certainly would have been picked by youngsters as well.
Throughout his time in the Northwest, Douglas continued to interact with the children. In letters to the sons of a friend back in Scotland he offered fishing tips, fly-tying instructions, adventure stories, silly jokes, and reading recommendations. At Fort Vancouver (across the river from modern Portland), he was introduced to the mixed blood culture of the fur trade in the person of Archibald McDonald, who had fathered a son called Ranald with a Chinook woman named Raven. When Raven passed away suddenly, her sister cared for the boy, but Archibald kept close track of him and, with the help of a mail-order tribal bride who arrived from eastern Canada, eventually took Ranald back under his care.
David Douglas saw Ranald steadily during the boy’s formative years, at one point accompanying him on a trip from Fort Nisqually to Fort Vancouver. In an autobiography describing his own wild adventures in Japan and the Northwest, Ranald recalled his naturalist friend’s love of the chase and the shock of his sudden death: “Everybody who had known him lamented him, for with all his enthusiasm in his pursuit, he was ever the most sociable, kindly and endearing of men.”
Douglas also formed close ties with the fur trade veteran Finan McDonald, entrusting him with a box of seeds to carry over the Rocky Mountains. He knew Finan’s Kalispel wife Peggy, and traveled clear across Canada with four of their five children. Finan and David hunted buffalo together, and after Finan was attacked by a wounded bull, it was Douglas who bandaged his leg and dosed him with laudanum to soothe his pain.
During the spring and summer of 1826, Douglas used the newly-constructed Fort Colvile as his base of operations while he canoed the Kettle River, gathered trilliums along Pinkney Creek, tasted edible valerian from a tribal earth oven near Colville, and fell asleep under a cedar tree somewhere east of town. When the naturalist damaged his musket hunting curlews and sharp-tailed grouse, the local agent sent him to visit the Jaco Finlay family at the company’s abandoned Spokane House. While Jaco fixed Douglas’s firearm, the naturalist recorded his Spokane wife Teshwintichina’s recipe for lichen cakes and taught some of Finlay’s several sons how to preserve mammal and bird skins as museum specimens.
In late June of that same year, Douglas trekked into the Blue Mountains above Fort Walla Walla in search of alpine plants. Since he did not speak the language of his Cayuse guide, the agent there offered to send along the twelve-year-old son of the fort’s interpreter, a lad named Little Wasp who spoke both French and Cayuse. Little Wasp proved to have a will as strong as Douglas’s, and when a terrifying lightning storm drenched the travelers their third night out, Little Wasp managed to turn them back towards the fort despite the protests of the naturalist.
            A cranky Douglas followed the boy home, then immediately tried to mount another expedition up the north fork of the Walla Walla River. This time his original Cayuse guide refused to lead the trip – apparently Little Wasp had convinced the Cayuse that the white naturalist was a powerful medicine man who could transform anyone who displeased him into a grizzly bear and leave him to run in the woods for the rest of his life. Upon learning the circumstances, Douglas admitted, "it is not to be wondered that these fears acted powerfully on the Indian, and caused him to behave in the way he did."
Four years later Douglas returned to Fort Walla Walla, ascended the Blues again, and again was turned back without achieving his goals. He made no mention of Little Wasp, but this setback didn’t seem to dampen his spirits in the least. Back at the fort, Douglas and an agent friend hired some of the local Indian boys to help them catch lizards. They watched while the kids crawled about the shrub-steppe searching for the small holes that marked the entries to the “reptile’s apartments.” Armed with horsehair lassos attached to long noosing sticks, the boys would throw themselves flat on the hot sand beside a promising hole until their victim showed his head. Then "they would quickly suspend him with one jerk, and bring him like a culprit to our sides: a slight reward would put them in ecstasies, and they would again scamper off for renewed captures.”
The boys’ captures included not only the short-horned lizard or “horned toad” that still carries the Latin name of Phrynosoma douglasii, but also a “beautiful long-tailed little lizard” with iridescent blue flanks – either the male sagebrush or the western fence lizard. And you can bet that Douglas himself was laughing and cavorting with just as much ecstasy as his hired hands each time a new reptile was laid in his hand, reveling in the wonder of all creation, as if he were seeing it for the very first time, through a child’s delighted eyes.

Illustration by Emily Nisbet: short-horned lizard, Phrysnosoma douglasii

Jack Nisbet Homepage