Legends of Vashon
By O.S. Van Olinda
This account of a day’s shopping in 1878 is from the diary of a fifteen-year-old boy, whom I shall call Bill Jones. His real name is John Smith, but he might not wish that his identity be disclosed.
Bill’s father was among the first settlers on Vashon Island, having taken a homestead near the shores of Quartermaster Harbor in the spring of 1878. The family, father, mother, Bill and two sisters, lived in a tent while the men folks (meaning Bill and his father) cleared a little patch of ground, planted a little garden, and then built a log cabin. Bill, of course, (according to Bill), doing by far the greater part of the work.
There were plenty of deer and grouse on the Island and Bill kept the family well supplied with fresh meat. Even unto this day he admits that he was a first class hunter, but “store grub” was getting very low and a trip to Tacoma must be made. Bill gave me, in 1890, this copy of the entry in his diary describing the trip, slightly elaborated, I suspect, but a good picture of a pioneer shopping day:
October 9. No chance to write anything yesterday. Dad and I went to Tacoma. We got away about eight in the morning, took turns rowing the old flat-bottomed boat, and when we got into Old Town, it was pretty well along towards noon.
Tide was running pretty strong out in the middle of the channel, and for a while I wished that we had two pair of oars in the old tub. Anyway, we finally got there, bought the stuff we wanted and packed it down to the boat. Got a lot of beans, four sacks of flour, a chunk of sow-belly, some stuff Mother needed to make clothes for the girls, and some other little things – Oh yes, there was a little package of sugar too. I bought me a new mouth organ. Cost two bits, and that’s a lot of money these days, but, gosh! I had to have it.
Dad looked around town for a while to see what the prospects were for getting a job during the winter, and we didn’t get started home or home until about four o’clock. The weather had been fine all day –sunshine and no wind – only pretty hazy with smoke from the forest fires, but fog began rolling down out of the Puyallup Valley pretty soon after we started, and before we were halfway home, it was as thick as the pea soup kind you read about. Couldn’t hardly see a boat length.
Dad got out his pocket compass and it told us which way was north, but it wouldn’t say a word as to what speed we were making or what the tide was doing to us, which we thought must be plenty. Dad figured we’d best head straight to the South point of Vashon, Neill Point, and then we could work along close to shore until we could be sure of where we were.
But when we got there, the Island wasn’t there. We rode around for half an hour trying to find it, hammering on an oil can to try to get an echo from shore, but no luck. What with the fog and smoke and all, it was good and dark by this time, and we didn’t have a Lantern, as we had expected to be home long before night. Only way we could keep cases on the compass was by lighting matches and, luckily, we had plenty of them.
After a while, Dad says: “Which way is north now, Bill?” I lit a match and told him. “Are you sure? It don’t seem like it can be!” I told him it must be, unless he’d forgotten to wind the compass and let it run down on us or, something. He said that was a bum joke, but that he was going to head our Glory of the Seas into the north and keep going until we hit something, if it had to be the North Pole.
We put our slickers over the stuff in the boat, to keep it dry, so we couldn’t wear them, and it was getting pretty chilly, so we took about ten-minute turns at the oars in order to keep warm. I know we didn’t hold anything like a straight course, but we “averaged” north as well as we could and we rode for hours – weeks, it seemed like – and it was so pitch dark we couldn’t see a thing.
I wasn’t afraid, but it sure gives a fellow kind of a queer feeling. You suspect that it’s two or three hundred feet to land, straight down, but you don’t know how far it is in any other direction. You’re going somewhere, but you don’t know where, and the darkness seems to press in around you until you imagine you can just feel it.
Dad was rowing and he had just started to say something to me when we smashed into something and stopped so quick that I nearly skinned my nose on the bottom of the boat. It was a rock, and it was on a beach, and that was enough for us.
We climbed out into the water and pulled the boat up on the beach a little way – it was near high tide anyway – and tied up to some bushes. We hadn’t the least notion in the world as to where we were, but we were somewhere and there we’d stay until daylight.
The fog was heavier than ever now – almost a drizzling rain, and the trees and brush were weeping like they were sorry to have us around. By the time we had found enough dry stuff to start a fire, we were soaked to hide. Dad kept piling driftwood on until we had a noble fire, but we just freeze on one side while we were roasting the other.
In a few more years. it began to get daylight. The fog had thinned out some, too, and as soon as it was light enough to see our way, we started walking up the beach. We didn’t go more than a hundred feet before things began to look familiar and within less a hundred yards of our landing point, we found the trail which led up to our own house.
I can laugh at it today, but I’ll be darned if I could last night.
