Legends of Vancouver | Page 5

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 has 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 lip 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,