1891: Poor old Angeline, getting tooted on?

Not do diminish the importance of this substantial human-interest piece about a major Native figure, but I suspect we have a rare Chinuk Wawa ‘fart’ sighting here…

Read the whole thing, and see what you think…

POOR OLD ANGELINE

Only Living Child of the Great
War Chief Seattle.

A VISIT TO HER CABIN.

She Remembers When the First White
Men Came — Her Father Didn’t Want
the City Named After Him.

Princess Angeline, the daughter of the Indian
chief Seattle, for whom this city was named, is
one of the most familiar sights and at the same
time one of the most interesting to be seen in
Seattle at the present time. Not every city is so
favored that it can boast of a real, live princess
who walks the streets every day. But no
stranger meeting this royal personage upon the
street would recognise in her the nobility
which she rightfully claims. She wears no
crown, unless a tangled mans of half-gray,
half-black hair, covered by a red bandana
handkerchief, can be construed to constitute
one; her robe of purple is an old red
shawl; her queenly skirts are made of no richer
material than calico, and when she revels in
the luxury of shoes, which is not often, they
are as unlike the traditional royal footgear as
two old, water-soaked, musty, dusty
pieces of hard leather are unlike the
finest pair of shoes ever turned out.

When George Francis Train was going to start
around the world for Tacoma a purse of several
thousand dollars was raised to send Angeline
with him, as a counter advertisement for Seat-
tle. A delegation visited her to propose the
scheme. To their surprise, however, she refused
to go, saying that her father would be so mad at
her running off with a crazy man that he would
turn over in his grave. So she stayed at home.

Many years ago Chief Seattle, her father, was
the head of a tribe numbering many people — ac-
cording to Mr. A. A. Denny’s estimate,
probably 500 to 700, including women and child-
ren. The old chief was very friendly to the
whites who came to Alki point in 1852, and
within a few years there came a time when
his friendship stood the pioneers in
good stead. War broke out among
the Indians, and for a while the settlers had to
look sharp to the safety of their families and
themselves as they went about their work in the
thick forests. Pat Kanim and Seattle, two
chiefs, who, unlike the savage caders [leaders?] of other
tribes, refused to slaughter the whites, were
always held in high esteem by Mr. Denny,
Dr. Maynard, Charles Terry, Mr. D. T. Denny,
Hillory Butler, Mr. H. L. Yesler and
others of the early settlers. To Dr. Maynard,
many years dead, is ascribed the act of naming
the city after Chief Seattle, aud Mrs. Dr. May-
nard, according to Angeline, has the credit for
naming the princess herself. So great was the
respect in which Chief Seattle was held that last
fall Mr. A. A. Denny, assisted by Hillory Butler,
H.L Yesler and others, erected a fine monu-
ment over the old Indian’s grave at Port Madi-
son. The inscription on this monument gave
the name of the dead chief as “Sealth,” which
more nearly resembles the name as pronounced
by the Indians.

Angeline is probably about 80 years old, but
her withered skin and bent form make her ap-
pear twenty years older than that. Her cabin
on the beach was discovered the other day by a
POST-INTELLIGENCER reporter. Yesterday, in
company with Mr. Samuel L. Crawford, who is
an old-time expert Chinook interpreter, the re-
porter called on the old lady.

The cabin or “shack” is about 8×10 feet in size,
with a roof of split cedar “shakes.” Half of one
of the gable ends has the clapboards put on di-
agonally, with the upright pieces paralleling
one side of the roof. At one corner of
the house is a huge pile of driftwood,
gathered from the ruins of fallen cabins in the
neighborhood, or picked up from the bay near
by. In the front yard are half a dozen tin and
wooden buckets rusty and dirty. Two abbrevi-
ated clothes lines are strung at one end of the
house, and hanging on them are a handful of old
rags, long strangers to soap and water. An old
heap of staves, representing what was once a
tub, and a dozen dilapitated boxes scattered
about the shack, complete the scene. A narrow,
dwarfed door and a little dirty pane of glass
constitute the means of getting light into the
interior of this palace. A horseshoe and a
mule’s shoe are nailed immediately above the
entrance. The door stands open all the time,
but hanging over the upper half of the aperture
is a curtain, its texture being gunny sack fresh
from some generous ash barrel.

“Karta mika, Angeline?” [qʰata mayka?] (How are you, An-
geline?) said Mr. Crawford, looking in through
the open doorway. Angeline was lying down,
but she instantly rose to a sitting posture and
answered the salutation. The reporter followed
Mr. Crawford into the cabin. There was hardly
room for such a crowd, the only space in which
the floor was visible being about three feet
square. Two low buuks and a shorter one, cov-
ered with remnants of dirty blankets, a rickety
little cook stove, a few rude cooking utensils
and a wagon load of rags, old shoes, pans,
boxes, etc., were stacked up on the beds, under
the beds and on the floor. Across the middle of
the room was stretched a rope, on which hung
other clothing, mostly that of Angeline’s grand-
son, Joe Foster, who lives with her. Cleanliness
was not one of the virtues of the cabin or its
contents. The ceiling, the walls and the floor
were covered with soot and cobwebs.

Angeline w.is very willing to talk, and under
the clever cross-examination ol Mr. Crawford,
she told many things that have never been pub-
lished.

She said that when Dr. Maynard came she was
a good looking young widow. Her husband was
a half Skagit, half Cowichan Indian chief, his
name being Dokub Cud. Kick-i-sum-lo was her
name before Mrs. Dr. Maynard re-christened
her. Angeline had three brothers and two sis-
ters, and she also had two daughters — one being
the mother of Joe Foster. All of these relatives
are long since dead. When Angeline was born,
she said, her father, Chief Seattle, was about 25
years old. He was a great chief, and the Boston
men [bastən-man ‘White people’] liked him very much. When her mother
died Mr Denny and Mr. Bell built a coffin for
her. There were no white men here when she
was a girl. Dr. Maynard came first, Mr. Bell
and Mr. Denny next. She remembered the first
Boston house [bastən-haws ‘White people houses’] that had been built, and she re-
membered the Indian war very well. She spoke
of many of the old settlers — Mr Denny, Mr.
Bell, Charles Terry, Mr. Yesler and Bob and
Tom Russell. Bob Russell, she said, was a
“kloshe tillicum” [ɬush tilixam] (good triend) of hers, and
since he died she had been very poor. The old
settlers had been good to her, however, and had
always given her food when she asked for it.

When Mr. Crawford asked Angeline how long
she lived in her present house, she held up her
two hands, spreading out her fingers to indicate
ten years. As she did so she exposed a broken
wrist, the result of a fall several years ago. Pre-
vious to that time she had lived further up the
hill. Never in her lifetime had she been further
away from Seattle than Olympia. The trip that
she did make was before the Indian war, and its
purpose was a novel one. The Indians have a
superstition that if the name of a dead Indian is
pronounced aloud he will turn over in his
grave. When Chief Seattle learned that this
city was to be named for him he was very much
displeased and remonstrated with the whites.
He said that when he died he would have no
rest, for he would be turning over all the time.
His pleadings to have the name of the city
changed were in vain. As a last resort he
picked up his family and went to Olympia to in-
tercede with Governor Stevens to have the name
changed. That trip Angelina remembered dis-
tinctly and related in Chinook to Mr. Crawford,
who immediately translated the story into Eng-
lish. Angeline also said that she knew Chief
Leschi, the leader of tbe hostile Indians, who
came across Lake Washington to attack the city,
and she saw him when he was afterwards ar-
rested and shot.

Angeline was wonderfully pleased when she
recollected and recounted an incident that hap-
pened twelve or fifteen years ago. Van Whykoff [i.e. Wyckoff]
was then a mischievous small boy, and he did
not stand in very great awe of the princess.
Every time he met her on the street, he would
“pooh” [p’uʔ ‘fart’?] in her face. Queen Angeline did not
like that at all, and she finally complained to
Van’s mother. The mother chided her son, but
it did no good. The next time Angeline met the
boy it was the same story. A day or two after
the last offense, she met Van in Meydenbaur’s
store, on Commercial street. He ran behind the
counter to escape the irate princess, and with a
mocking laugh he poked his head out and once
more repeated the obnoxious word. Angeline
was ready for him, and the moment his head
came up she hurled a big potato at him, striking
her enemy full in the eye. The eye swelled up
and Van was a very sorry-looking young man
for a week or two, but his spirit was irrepressi-
ble and he continued to worry Angeline. Then
Angeline went to Van’s father, who was for
more than twenty years sheriff of King county,
and told her story. The father secured a big
switch and, calling his son,administered to him
a sound thrashing. Angeline laughed heartily
as the scene came up again in her memory. The
boy never troubled her after that, she said, but
since arriving at man’s estate he has always
treated her with the utmost kindness.

In answer to an inquiry as to where she
wanted to be buried when she died, Angeline
expressed a decided preference for Seattle. She
said she had always lived here and she wanted
to be buried among her “tillicums” whom she
had known nearly all her life.

While the interview had been going on, Joe
Foster, Angeline’s grandson, had come in and
thrown himself upon one of the rude couches.
He can talk English very well, and Indian and
Chinook excellently. His father, Joe Foster,
waa a white man, and he married Angeline’s
daughter, afterwards treating her unmercifully
and making her life so miserable that she com-
mitted suicide by hanging herself. The son is a
worthless sort of fellow, but appears to be good
to Angeline, his grandmother.

“After my mother hung herself,” he said un-
concernedly, “my father wanted me to go with
him, but I wouldn’t do it. He was a bad man,
so I told him he must give my grandmother
$1,000 before I would go with him. He’s dead
and buried now.”

Though the few remaining members of Ange-
line’s tribes, the S[u]quamish and the Duwamish,
do not look up to her with any particular rever-
ence, the people of Seattle regard her with very
charitable feelings, and Angeline never goes
hungry when she is able to be about the streets.
Her photograph has been taken many times, but
today’s picture in the POST-INTELLIGENCER is
the best likeness of the old woman ever seen in
print.

— from the Seattle (WA) Post-Intelligencer of August 2, 1891, page 5, columns 3 and 4

In this story, did “pooh” mean ‘shoot’, as in making the sound of a gun, or did it mean ‘fart’?

qʰata mayka təmtəm?
What do you think?