ISLAND RIVERS
Fresh Water and Place in Oceania
EDITED BY JOHN R. WAGNER AND JERRY K. JACKA
ASIA-PACIFIC ENVIRONMENT MONOGRAPH 13
Published by ANU Press
The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia
Email: anupress@anu.edu.au
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ISBN (print): 9781760462161
ISBN (online): 9781760462178
WorldCat (print): 1040273014
WorldCat (online): 1040272968
DOI: 10.22459/IR.06.2018
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Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover photograph by Eric K. Silverman. This edition © 2018 ANU Press
1. Introduction: River as Ethnographic Subject ...................... 1 JOHN R. WAGNER, JERRY K. JACKA, EDVARD HVIDING, ALEXANDER MAWYER AND MARAMA MURU-LANNING
2. The River, the Water and the Crocodile in Marovo Lagoon ........ 27
EDVARD HVIDING
3. A Source of Power, Disquiet and Biblical Purport: The Jordan River in Santo, Vanuatu 59
CARLOS MONDRAGÓN
4. Unflowing Pasts, Lost Springs and Watery Mysteries in Eastern Polynesia 83 ALEXANDER MAWYER
5. Riverine Disposal of Mining Wastes in Porgera: Capitalist Resource Development and Metabolic Rifts in Papua New Guinea 109 JERRY K. JACKA
6. ‘At Every Bend a Chief, At Every Bend a Chief, Waikato of One Hundred Chiefs’: Mapping the Socio-Political Life of the Waikato River 137 MARAMA MURU-LANNING
7. Waters of Destruction: Mythical Creatures, Boiling Pots and Tourist Encounters at Wailuku River in Hilo, Hawai‘i ......... 165 EILIN HOLTAN TORGERSEN
8. The Sepik River, Papua New Guinea: Nourishing Tradition and Modern Catastrophe ...................................... 187 ERIC K. SILVERMAN
9. Rivers of Memory and Forgetting .............................. 223 JOHN R. WAGNER
Table 3.1 Some prominent kin groups of North Santo ................. 70
Table 4.1 Primary lexical forms of water in Eastern Polynesia 95
Table 4.2 Lexical inventory of fresh water in Mangareva ............... 96
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure
Figure 5.3 Pes Bope at the Tokoyela ipa
Figure 5.4 Bathing in the Wateya River ..............................
Figure 5.5 PJV monitoring stations .................................. 128
Figure 5.6 The Porgera River flowing down the ‘glacier’ of waste rock 130
Figure 6.1 A socio-political map of the Waikato River and catchment .. 138
Figure 6.2 Children playing next to the Waikato River ................ 139
Figure 6.3 Geothermal activity on the Waikato River .................. 142
Figure 6.4 The place or ‘point’ where the Waipa River and the Waikato River meet ................................... 146
Figure 6.5 Sign at Rangiriri marking the British militia’s invasion of Waikato iwi territory in 1860 ................................ 150
Figure 6.6 Kapa Haka on the Waikato River at Tūrangawaewae Marae 153
Figure 6.7 Rangatahi Waka on the Waikato River, captained by Karihana Wirihana ......................................... 154
Figure 6.8 Waka Ama, a racing canoe co-sponsored by Mighty River Power and Waikato-Tainui ..................................... 157
Figure 7.1 The Wailuku River 171
Figure 7.2 Waianuenue/Rainbow Falls .............................. 173
Figure 7.3 Local boy dives into a ‘boiling pot’ in Wailuku River ......... 175
Figure 7.4 People gather at Wailuku River after Hurricane Iselle 176
Figure 8.1 Where village land was, is now only river .................. 189
Figure 8.2 Woman and child fishing ................................. 192
Figure 8.3 House ornamented with wave patterns 193
Figure 8.4 Women selling baskets with ‘PS’ and ‘Sepik’ ............... 195
Figure 8.5 Crocodile clock sold by a man from Tambunum to a tradestore in Wewak ...................................... 196
Figure 8.6 Decorated jeans: ‘PS trust me’ 197
Figure 8.7 Paddling to school ....................................... 199
Figure 8.8 Women cleaning fish .................................... 203
Figure 8.9 Aqwi floating islands ..................................... 209
Figure 8.10 Man paddling in the morning mist ....................... 211
Figure 9.1 Village shoreline dotted with canoes, with Blue Mountain foothills shrouded in clouds ................................... 224
Figure 9.2 Kamu Yali rivers and associated kin groups ............... 228
Figure 9.3 Ferry canoe at the mouth of the Tabale River 230
Figure 9.4 Fording the Bitoi River where it divides into Aleta and Daunawe branches ....................................... 238
Figure 9.5 Heading upstream from the mouth of the Alewili River ..... 239
Contributors
Edvard Hviding is a Professor of Anthropology and Founding Director of the Pacific Studies Research group at the University of Bergen.
Jerry K. Jacka is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Alexander Mawyer is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i in Mānoa and Editor of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs.
Carlos Mondragón is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and a member of El Centro de Estudios de Asia y África (Center for Asian and African Studies) at El Colegio de México.
Marama Muru-Lanning is a Senior Research Fellow and Director in the James Henare Māori Research Centre at the University of Auckland.
Eric K. Silverman, former Research Professor of Anthropology at Wheelock College in Boston, is currently a Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, USA.
Eilin Holtan Torgersen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen.
John R. Wagner is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
1. Introduction: River as Ethnographic Subject
JOHN R. WAGNER, JERRY K. JACKA, EDVARD HVIDING, ALEXANDER MAWYER AND MARAMA MURU-LANNING
Our intention in this volume is to make an original and innovative contribution to the ethnographic record of Oceania while also contributing to global debates about rivers and fresh water. Given the historical tendency for human societies everywhere to situate themselves near rivers, lakes, streams and other sources of fresh, flowing water, one might expect to find abundant, detailed descriptions of rivers in the early ethnographic record. But this is not the case.
Before 1950, when anthropological publications focused specifically on fresh water, the topic was most often folkloric in nature, about water beings, water divining or water symbolism (e.g. Hongi 1894; Holmes 1898; Piddington 1930). References to rivers as geographic markers were also very common, as when Murray and Ray (1918) published their article on ‘The People and Language between the Fly and Strickland Rivers, Papua’, but articles that actually describe rivers are rare indeed. Arthur Hayes (1906) published a description of the people of Abyssinia in a book entitled The Source of the Blue Nile, but wrote almost nothing about the river itself or about the riverine adaptations of the people he described. A 1912 article by Emmons about the Kitselas of British Columbia
is exceptional, by comparison to most of the literature of that period, by virtue of its detailed environmental and, at times, poetic description of the river and its people:
Where the Skeena River breaks through the eastern barrier of the Coast Range in British Columbia, 75 miles from its mouth, the pent-up waters have cut a deep cañon upward of a mile and a half in length, impassable during the spring and summer freshets and fraught with danger at all seasons. It is the most justly dreaded inland waterway of the Northwest, for, aside from the tremendous force of the contracted river over an uneven rocky bottom, forming great swirls and riffles, the upper entrance is obstructed by two high, narrow, rock ridges that divide the waters, forming two narrow channels at all stages and a third at extreme high water … The natives named this part of the river cañon Dsilasshoo, and those who lived here as Gitdsilasshoo, “people of the cañon,” but this is now written officially Kitselas. (Emmons 1912: 467–8)
By the middle of the twentieth century, however, water—and rivers in particular—came to occupy a more prominent place in the anthropological canon, as evidenced by the work of Julian Steward and others who were interested in the relationship of water to agriculture and political organisation. Steward published a seminal article about the role of irrigation in the development of ‘ancient civilisations’ in China, Mesopotamia, Peru and Mesoamerica in 1949. In 1955, with contributions from Karl Wittfogel and other authors, he published Irrigation Civilizations, a work that pre-dated Wittfogel’s subsequently more influential work on ‘hydraulic societies’ (Wittfogel 1956, 1957).
Steward and Wittfogel used mainly historical rather than ethnographic evidence to construct their theories, but ethnographic studies of irrigation systems also became prominent in the 1950s and have increased every decade since then. Thus, by mid-century, the field we now call the ‘anthropology of water’ came to be focused mainly on the value of water as a political and economic ‘resource’ rather than on its mythological and symbolic qualities (e.g. Geertz 1972). The post-war economic boom of the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, fuelled in part by the construction of ever more and larger hydro-power dams and massive irrigation diversions, consolidated this focus. The even more rapid pace of globalisation, population growth, urbanisation and agricultural intensification since the 1970s has led to a further re-inscription of rivers and fresh water, not just as a ‘resource’, but as a ‘scarce resource’ and ‘commodity’ (Bakker 2003; Strang 2004; Mehta 2005; Wagner 2012).
Introduction
Though Steward’s and Wittfogel’s early theorising was deeply flawed in many of its details, especially in its tendency towards over-generalisation and deterministic arguments, scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds continue to make use of their general hypothesis about ‘hydraulic societies’ (see Worster 1985). However, the most nuanced contemporary studies of water in relation to political and economic organisation tend to avoid over-generalisations and focus on a much wider variety of historical settings and issues (e.g. Davis 1996, 2013; Donahue and Johnston 1997; Mosse 2003; Strang 2004, 2009; Baviskar 2007; Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2013; Wagner 2013; Hastrup and Hastrup 2016). Climate change adds yet more intensity and urgency to the anthropological study of water (Crate and Nuttall 2009; Hastrup 2009, Hastrup and Skrydstrup 2013; Orlove 2009), and converges with studies that focus on water as a human right (Sultana and Loftus 2012; Hossen 2014) and water and health (Whiteford and Whiteford 2005).
Not surprisingly, most anthropological studies of water over the past few decades have been carried out by political ecologists, but the interest in water has now expanded well beyond the set of interests and perspectives that define that field. This has given rise to a rich, diverse and even chaotic body of work that is also increasingly interdisciplinary. Some of the themes that attracted the interest of early anthropologists, such as myth and symbolism, are attracting renewed interest, but the attraction is now less folkloric than epistemological and ontological (e.g. Carse 2010; Krause 2010; Edgeworth 2011; Helmreich 2009; Strang 2014, 2016; Hastrup and Hastrup 2016; see also the contributions to this volume). As Hastrup and Hastrup write in their introduction to Waterworlds, ‘anthropology now finds itself at a moment in time when the field is literally wide open’, where ‘there is no given anthropological object, but multiple and composite objects’, and where ‘fluidity on all accounts is the order of the day’ (2016: 2). They apply their comments not just to the anthropology of water but to anthropology as a whole in an ‘anthropocene era’.
The chapters in this volume are organised around the notion that rivers have social lives and therefore merit thorough ethnographic investigation and description.1 Water is social by virtue of the fact that it flows through
1 There has been a curious proliferation of book titles recently that attribute social lives to a whole host of animate and inanimate beings. The trend appears to have begun with Appadurai’s (1986) The Social Life of Things, a study of commodities, but has more recently been applied to ‘trees’ (Rival 1998), ‘information’ (Brown and Duguid 2000), ‘coffee’ (Cowan 2005), ‘numbers’ (Urton 2010), ‘science’ (Hastrup 2012), ‘water’ (Wagner 2013) and ‘climate change models’ (Hastrup and Skrydstrup 2013).
and animates all aspects of human life, not just at the cellular level but as a ‘total social fact’ in the sense proposed by Orlove and Caton (2010; see also Krause and Strang 2016). Using the term ‘social’ in its broadest sense to include political institutions, economic behaviour and cultural and religious practices, it is readily apparent that water informs every dimension of human social behaviour and is essential to the ways in which we construct class, gender and kinship.2
If one begins with the premise that rivers are fundamentally social in nature, then it is possible to treat rivers as the ‘subject’ rather than the ‘object’ of investigation. We are not collectively espousing a post-humanist approach to water, or an approach that depends on the argument that water possesses agency, though some contributors to this volume (e.g. Wagner, Jacka and Torgersen) are sympathetic to one or both of these approaches. Arguments about the agency of water are based on several distinct lines of thought, most of which are consistent with, but not essential to, the idea of rivers as ethnographic subjects. Scholars who adopt a posthumanist approach to their treatment of the non-human, for instance, argue that agency should not be defined in ways that restrict it to human beings. To do so, they argue, reinforces an anthropocentric approach that has imperilled the world, through pollution, over-exploitation of non-renewable resources, loss of biodiversity, climate change and other anthropogenic impacts. Actor-network theorists are also strong advocates for an approach that assigns agency to the non-human, defining agency not in terms of human intentionality, but in terms of measurable impacts within material-semiotic networks that include non-human as well as human actors. Other scholars embrace an animistic worldview in which all of nature is imbued with spirit and therefore intentionality and agency as well.
A recent publication by Strang (2014), with responses from several other scholars, effectively summarises many of the arguments for and against the agency of things. In this introduction, we would like to draw attention to two lines of argument not fully developed in that volume. The first of these is based on the work of Tim Ingold, who argues that the idea of nonhuman agency, despite its merits, is inherently self-contradictory. Strang (2014: 135) notes that Ingold’s approach is consistent with ‘a theoretical shift towards less anthropocentric visions of human-environmental
2 See also Strang (2004: 3–6) on the ‘essentiality’ of water.
1. Introduction
interactions’ and ‘a more egalitarian bioethic of relationality’, but that he nevertheless rejects the notion that things possess agency. Ingold argues that the ‘problem of agency’ is one we have created for ourselves:
[It is] born of the attempt to re-animate a world already rendered lifeless by an exclusive focus on the ‘objectness’ of things … It is indeed striking that the more theorists have to say about agency, the less they seem to have to say about life. To rewrite the life of things as the agency of objects is to effect a double reduction, of things to objects, and of life to agency.
(Ingold 2010: 97)
Ingold’s argument did not directly inform our collective approach to this volume but it is very consistent with our intent. Our goal is to treat rivers as subjects rather than objects, and to shed light on the ways in which human lives in Oceania are interwoven with the lives of rivers, the landforms through which they flow and the other species they sustain.
A second line of argument not discussed in Strang (2014), but pertinent to this volume, has been developed by Salmond in her account of how the Whanganui River in New Zealand came to be recognised in law as a ‘living being’. The Whanganui River is one of the first rivers in the world—though surprisingly not the only one—to have attained this status (Salmond 2014: 285–6). This was accomplished through the negotiation of a deed of settlement between the Māori and the New Zealand Government, known in Māori as Ruruku Whakatupua. In conferring ‘legal personhood’ on the river, Whanganui Māori are able to speak for their river in the country’s courts and to file lawsuits on its behalf when environmental protections are not upheld. This approach is a type of modern co-management, through which the rights and health of the river are upheld through shared decision-making involving local Māori and other resident communities. Concerning the divergent understandings of the river held by Māori and non-Māori, Salmond writes:
In the Whanganui deed of settlement with the Crown, ancestral Māori and modernist framings are juxtaposed, despite being incommensurable in certain respects. Drawing upon divergent forms of order, participants in the process have sought to weave together a concerted approach toward the management of New Zealand’s waterways. This interweaving avoids the need for a merging of horizons, a “theory of everything” in which only one reality is possible and only one set of assumptions about the world can prevail. (Salmond 2014: 285)
Despite the fact that Salmond never cites Ingold in her paper, she concludes by articulating a position that seems very consistent with his, and also with the work of Bennett (2010), whom she does cite:
In the Pacific and elsewhere, it is likely that the most intransigent obstacles to solving environmental (and other) challenges lie at the level of presupposition. As Jane Bennett has argued, ‘the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds … our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’ (Bennett 2010: ix–x). Thus, Homo hubris trumps Homo sapiens. In such a situation, despite scientific claims to the contrary, epistemological solutions will not work. Fundamental conceptions and forms of order will have to shift if more lasting, flourishing styles of living are to be found. Here, ontological styles in which matter has never been dead or separated from people may prove helpful. When Bennett urges us to ‘picture an ontological field without unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral’ where ‘all forces and flows are or can become lively [and] affective’ (Bennett 2010: 116–17), I think of the nineteenth–century Māori philosopher Nepia Pohuhu, who said, ‘All things unfold their nature (tupu), live (ora), have form (āhua), whether trees, stones, birds, reptiles, fish, quadrupeds or human beings’ (Pohuhu in Smith 1913: 13). (Salmond 2014: 305)
Neither Pohuhu’s statement nor Salmond’s argument should be read as an endorsement of animism, an idea invented by Western scholars and often misapplied to Indigenous societies around the world (Ingold 2006). The argument, rather, is about finding a way to think about rivers that is ontologically inclusive but also practical in political, economic and legal terms.
Understanding water as a subject in its own right, and not merely as ‘instrumentalised matter’, reinforces the distinction made by Ivan Illich (1985) between water as H2O and water as the substance of dreams. Addressing the citizens of Dallas, Texas, in 1984 about a proposal to create a downtown lake a dozen blocks in size, Illich begins by stating that: ‘I shall refuse to assume that all waters may be reduced to H2O’ (1985: 4). Relying on Bachelard’s (1999) Water and Dreams, which explores the primordial, archetypal and imaginative dimensions of water, Illich writes: Following dream waters upstream, the historian will learn to distinguish the vast register of their voices. As his ear is attuned to the music of deep waters, he will hear a discordant sound that is foreign to waters, that reverberates through the plumbing of modern cities. He will recognize that the H2O which gurgles through Dallas plumbing is not water,
1. Introduction
but a stuff which industrial society creates. He will recognize that the twentieth century has transmogrified water into a fluid with which archetypal waters cannot be mixed. With enough money and broad powers to condemn and evict, a group of architects could very well create out of this sewage a liquid monument that would meet their own aesthetic standards. But since archetypal waters are as antagonistic to this new “stuff” as they are to oil, I fear that contact with such liquid monumentality might make the souls of Dallas’s children impermeable to the water of dreams. (Illich 1985: 7)
In a more recent publication, Raffles, writing about the Amazon, also draws on Bachelard (1999) in order to emphasise the profound intimacy of the human/water relationship. He does so by discussing Bachelard’s argument that ‘the language of waters is a direct poetic reality’, that ‘murmuring waters teach birds to sing’, that there is ‘a continuity between the speech of water and the speech of man’ (Bachelard 1983: 15, quoted in Raffles 2002: 179). Raffles’ discussion recalls the earlier ethnographic work of Feld who, in an article entitled ‘Waterfalls of Song’, draws our attention to the ways in which the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea create songs that imitate the flow of water. Feld writes that singing ‘takes listeners on a journey that flows along local waterways and through local lands’, and that ‘the flow of these poetic song paths is emotionally and physically linked to the sensual flow of the singing voice’ (1996: 91).
Rich ethnographic descriptions of human/river interactions can be found in many publications that do not necessarily constitute river ethnographies in the sense that we use the term here. Raffles, for instance, includes detailed descriptions of the middle Amazon where he conducted his research, but his book is a ‘natural history’ focused on a comparison of different constructions of Amazonian ‘nature’ (Raffles 2002: 7–9).
Goldman (1963) provides a detailed physical description of the Cuduiarí River, a tributary of the Amazon, in his ethnography of the Cubeo people, and a thorough account of its religious significance in a more recent (2004) publication. But the river remains a supporting actor in these accounts, never the actual subject of the authors’ investigation. In another study situated in Amazonia, Harris describes the floodplain adaptation of the caboclo community of Parú. He provides a rich, ethnographic description of river-based activities and excellent detail about the ecological characteristics of the floodplain, but, as he states on the opening page of his introduction, his book is about ‘identity and change’ (Harris 2001: 7), not about the river itself.
But river ethnographies in the sense that we use the term here, though still small in number, are becoming more common. Krause’s recent (2010) study of the Kemi River in Finland is a prime example. He organised his study around the river itself, rather than a specific community or issue, and focused on the ways in which diverse individuals and communities participated in three dominant river activities—fishing, transportation and hydro-power generation. One of his main goals was to answer the question of whether ‘river dwellers’ in this setting ‘think like a river’. ‘To what extent’, he asks, ‘do the river and its flow pervade the imagination of those whose livelihoods are connected to its waters or along its banks?’ (Krause 2010: 14)
In her study of the Murray River in Australia, Jessica Weir focuses on the relationships to the river of Indigenous people who see it as the heartbeat of a ‘sentient ecology’ (Weir 2009: 50, citing Anderson 2000: 116). Settler culture descendants, by contrast, whom Weir refers to as ‘the moderns’, view the river mainly as an economic resource. She also notes that the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations are now calling for Indigenous water allocations based on the principle of ‘cultural flows’, meaning the amount of water required for them to maintain traditional cultural practices in all seasons (Weir 2009: 119).
Jessica Barnes takes a still different approach in Cultivating the Nile, an ethnographic study that emphasises the complex political and technological processes that determine how and when water will be delivered to farmers’ fields in Fayoum Province, Egypt. ‘This is a story about water politics’, she writes, ‘that takes the water itself, and the many ways in which that water is manipulated, as its beginning’ (Barnes 2014: x). But, in addition to her focus on the quotidian water experiences of Fayoum farmers, she also seeks to trace the international dynamics of the Nile Basin.
It is through close ethnographic observation of how people interact with water on a day-to-day basis that I am able to access the politics of the everyday. But I do not limit the view to Egypt alone. Rather, I situate this detailed, on-the-ground analysis within the context of processes, institutions, and technologies operating outside the nation’s borders, which also affect how the water of the Nile flows into and through Egypt. Thus my analysis moves back and forth across space, shifting the gaze from downstream to upstream, farmer to donor agency, local to global, international water conference to irrigation canal. (ibid.: x)
1. Introduction
Dancing with the River, another recent book-length river ethnography by Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta, focuses on the ‘chars’ that are constantly appearing and disappearing in ‘the shallow riverbeds in the lower Gangetic plains of deltaic Bengal’. ‘Nomadic chars’, sandy islands and riverbank accretions that come into being as the result of the combined forces of erosion and sedimentation, provide homes for ‘river-gypsies’, ‘wandering peoples’ who ‘inhabit a nonlegal, illegible, ungoverned, and ungovernable space, like many other peoples in Asia who have been, in James C. Scott’s concise phrase, extruded by coercive state-making’ (Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2013: ix).
The river ethnography genre also includes numerous shorter journal articles and book chapters. Stephen Lansing, best known for his studies of Balinese irrigation systems (Lansing 1991), has co-authored a study of the Skokomish River in Washington State that compares the ways in which the Indigenous Skokomish people value the river to those of the City of Tacoma, which operates a hydro-power facility on the river (Lansing et al. 1998). Studies of the impact of hydro-electric dams on the relationship of Indigenous peoples to their rivers constitute perhaps the largest single body of literature in the river ethnography genre (e.g. Baviskar 1995; Ettenger 1998; Colombi 2005; Féaux de la Croix 2011; also Muru-Lanning, this volume). Also worth noting, because of its relevance to contributions in this volume by Silverman and Wagner, is a paper by Harrison (2004), which focuses on the ways in which the Manambu people of Papua New Guinea use changes in the course of the Sepik River as a mnemonic device for both remembering and forgetting significant forms of collective experience.
As the ‘subjects’ of our ethnographic enquiries, we have given rivers free reign in this volume to inspire our imaginations in ways that sometimes converge with, and other times diverge from, the recounted experiences of our interlocutors, the river people who are equally the subjects of our various accounts. Also, though water as subject defies classification as mere H2O, scarce resource or commodity, we do not abandon our interest in water as resource, but rather attempt to enrich our accounts through an interweaving of different perspectives.
The rivers on which we mainly focus are, of course, only one form of fresh water, and are no more or less important in hydrological terms than lakes, aquifers, springs, glaciers, clouds and precipitation. It is also worth noting that excellent ethnographic studies have been published that feature lakes
(e.g. Orlove 2002) and estuaries, where fresh and salt water mix (Griffith 1999; Muehlmann 2013). Rivers do possess some unique social and ecological characteristics: the world’s largest rivers—the Amazon, Nile, Yangtze, Mississippi, Volga, Ganges and Mekong—drain large portions of entire continents, and typically flow through several countries and thousands of communities on their way to the sea. Each community along the way constructs and reconstructs its own particular sets of relationships with the river—economic, ecological, religious, aesthetic, gendered and differentiated by class, caste and kin group. And the much more numerous, smaller rivers of the world, such as those common throughout Oceania, give rise to similarly diverse and intimate forms of social relations. Smaller, low-elevation islands, mainly coral atolls, often do not have rivers per se, but do have flowing water in the form of small, perhaps seasonal creeks, subterranean water, aquifers and springs. Thus, although we use the term ‘rivers’ to refer to our subject of study, other forms of flowing fresh water are considered as well.
The Rivers of Oceania
While descriptions of the sea are prominent in countless studies of Pacific island peoples, many of whom live their lives on ocean and lagoon shores, and who use the maritime domain for subsistence, transport and commerce (e.g. Harding 1967; Hviding 1996; D’Arcy 2006; Hau‘ofa 2008), fresh water—a fundamental resource for everyday life everywhere—has remained largely absent from accounts of Pacific island environments and social lives. Only recently have the water resources of the Pacific Islands become a subject of some interest with regard to their vulnerability to the effects of climate change (Jacka 2009; Lazrus 2009, 2012; Duncan 2011; Rudiak-Gould 2013). In the case of atolls, with their precarious freshwater lenses supporting both people and cultivated crops (particularly swamp taro), thereby allowing for human existence in an environment not otherwise supportive of habitation, the absence of a research focus on the roles of fresh water is truly striking (but see Robertson 2013, 2016). And generally, given that most Pacific Islanders are not atoll dwellers, but for the most part live close to rivers, one might assume that ethnographers would have given more attention to rivers and what they provide in both material and symbolic terms. It is a great surprise then that scholarly attention has not been given to people’s lives
1. Introduction
with rivers, even in New Guinea, which is one of the world’s largest islands, with distinctive groups settled along the coast, by the rivers and in the valleys, hills and mountains of the interior.3
In the high islands of the Pacific, including those in the Melanesian archipelagos that approach the scale of small oceanic continents, and in some cases have substantial inland populations, the rivers that flow down from the central mountain ranges are of sufficient cultural significance to warrant closer ethnographic attention. Throughout the high islands of the tropical Pacific (excluding Papua New Guinea), there are far fewer people living inland than there were in pre-colonial times, yet some islands still have extensive settlements in the interior and provide reminders of a Pacific past when inland groups interacted with coastal groups in many different ways. These interactions were often structured according to economic specialisation, but also involved warfare as well as exchange, with rivers as a major scene for such interactions (Ross 1973; Gewertz 1983; Pomponio 1992; Lipset 1997; Bayliss-Smith et al. 2003). Today, rivers still represent important dimensions of everyday life, since they afford spatial mobility in the island topography and easy access to island interiors and their resources. Their headwaters and hilly tributaries provide water supplies for taro irrigation, and they are sources for the seasonal harvest of prized migratory fish species such as mullets. Most immediately, for those Pacific Islanders who do not live with the vulnerable groundwater sources on atolls and raised coral islands, it is the large and small watercourses in the hilly landscape of volcanic islands that provide for robust and stable supplies of often clean, high-quality water for drinking and other household uses in situations of typically high rainfall.
However, as Hviding emphasises in Chapter 2, rivers and fresh water occupy a significant place in the cosmological as well as material lives of Pacific Islanders. The Solomon Islanders whom he describes consider sea water and fresh water as opposing principles, and organise a good deal of their social and religious lives around that opposition. In that setting, large rivers descend from the dark and densely forested terrain of inland peoples and are perceived as inhospitable by those who live on the coast. Other contributors to this volume, while not focusing explicitly on this opposition, note its presence in their own Pacific island settings, but also indicate that it is constructed quite differently between one setting
3 The notable exception is anthropological work done along the mighty Sepik River (e.g. Gewertz 1983; Harrison 2004), which is itself constitutive of large-scale regional systems of exchange.
and another. Ultimately, as several contributors emphasise, the mouths of rivers are where fresh and salt waters mingle, and where particularly rich and biodiverse aquatic environments come into being. Thus, while many of the inland peoples of large Melanesian islands can accurately be described as river people, like the Eastern Iatmul of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea (Silverman, this volume), engagements with rivers elsewhere in Oceania do not define people as ‘riverine’ but are a more or less integral part of everyday life.
This volume is unique by virtue of its focus on the riverine adaptations of Pacific island peoples, and in that sense can be said to fill a gap in the ethnographic record. But the gap is much too large to be filled by a single collection of papers. We hope it will encourage other scholars of Oceania to pay more attention to rivers and fresh water in the future, not just as a contribution to Oceanic literature, but as a uniquely positioned body of knowledge with relevance to other river and river mouth peoples around the world. In addition to the previously mentioned studies of the economic, political and cosmological characteristics of human/river relations, this volume also demonstrates the value and need for studies that examine their ontological, toponymic and linguistic characteristics. Ontological approaches necessarily raise questions about the place of nature in culture, as well as the place of water. Cronon’s (1992) significant insights into the role of disciplinary narratives regarding ‘nature’ in the shaping of research agendas, and in choices about the objects scrutinised within those agendas, seem as relevant to one discipline as to another, and are certainly worth tracking in an interdisciplinary shift towards ontology.
Toponymy, the study of place names, offers particularly rich insights for those interested in studying fresh water from an ontological perspective. Place names provide insights into the eco-social anchoring of identity and social memory in watery sites, while also shedding light on the diverse ways in which such sites are categorised on the basis of diverse sets of values and experiences—whether economic, religious, historic or aesthetic. Place names often serve as anchors for the traditional histories through which knowledge, identity and social practices are transferred from one generation to the next. The study of place names also provides an entry point for the comparative study of water ‘languages’—that is to say, the lexicon of water-related terms that at some levels are fairly consistent across large language families such as the Austronesian family, widely distributed throughout Oceania, but are also very localised, rooted in the particular circumstances, history and adaptation of a place-based
1. Introduction
speech community. In addition to the themes and approaches already identified, several authors in this volume address the distinction between flowing and blocked or still waters. Jacka, for instance, writing about the Porgeran people of Papua New Guinea (in Chapter 5), notes that flowing and still waters are seen as opposites, and that still waters are associated with blockages and illness, while flowing water is associated with health. The theme of blockages is addressed most explicitly by Mawyer in his account (in Chapter 4) of lost springs on Mangareva Island in Eastern Polynesia. In that setting, springs are no longer located where local knowledge holders expect them to be, whether because of blockages to intergenerational flows of knowledge or blockages and rerouting of subterranean flows of water. The opposition between blocked and flowing waters, like that between sea water and fresh water, emerges, in fact, as one of the primary themes interwoven throughout the different chapters. Muru-Lanning does not use the term ‘blockage’ in Chapter 6, but describes a situation in which multiple dams have been built on the Waikato River in order to generate hydro-power, thus blocking the natural flow of a river the Māori consider to be their Tupuna Awa (‘River Ancestor’). Some Māori now find themselves in the difficult position of having to decide between becoming shareholders in privatised power companies created through the neo-liberal policies of the national government, which could possibly threaten their customary rights to rivers, or reject shareholder status in order to retain their more traditional guardianship relation, which is bound up with a spiritual and moral duty of care.
It is not surprising that the concept of flow emerged as a recurrent theme throughout this volume, given its prominence in other publications on water. Edgeworth (2011) has written an entire monograph on the Archaeology of Flow, pointing out the numerous ways in which rivers leave traces of their ‘entanglements’ with past human societies and constitute a form of cultural artefact. ‘Flowing waters’, he writes, also provide ‘models for understanding other kinds of landscape flows’ (Edgeworth 2011: 136), a comment reminiscent of Ingold’s use of the concept of ‘material flows’. Krause (2010: 264) has proposed that we should ‘reclaim’ the term ‘flow’ from its dominant use by anthropologists to refer to processes of globalisation, and instead deploy it, metaphorically and materially, to describe ‘a world constituted by movement’ (see also Mazzullo and Ingold 2008: 34–7; Linton 2010). Many scholars find water ‘good to think’, as Strang (2014: 134) has emphasised, and the concept of flow appears central to an ever-proliferating number of theoretical approaches. It is
probably too late, as Féaux de la Croix (2014: 98) argues in response to Krause, to limit the use of this trope in the manner he suggests, but she does see another possible reason to limit its use. ‘[The] imagery of flow works beautifully for talking about certain kinds of connections’, she writes, but ‘[it] works less well for talking about disconnection, inequality, injustice’ (ibid.: 99). Several authors in this volume find, however, that the concept of blockage—the reverse of flow—does provide a useful way of discussing disconnection.
In the Waikato case study (Chapter 6), blockages of water are associated with commodification, another important theme interwoven throughout the volume. Muru-Lanning, interestingly, discusses commodification in the terms proposed by Kopytoff (1986), who discusses the tendency for objects to move into and out of states of commodification, depending on their cultural, historical and economic context. He uses slaves as his main example, noting that people can be captured, transformed into a commodity through sale in a slave market, but later on returned to nonslave status, at least under some circumstances. Kopytoff’s juxtaposition of slavery with commodification is suggestive of another line of reasoning, one he did not pursue but which may still be relevant to our topic. The development aspirations of Pacific Islanders have been described in many publications, in both quotidian and archetypical contexts.4 Given water’s long history as an instrument of development, it is not surprising that water resources figure prominently in the development processes with which Pacific Islanders are now grappling. In situations where people feel desperate for development and are willing to risk their lives to achieve it, do they not become slaves of another kind, slaves of modernity, captured by processes of commodification that alienate them from the physical environment in which they live and from the products of their own labour (Graeber 2011)? This is a prominent issue throughout the island Pacific and all authors in this volume address it in one way or another. As Illich (1985) writes, contemporary industrial uses of water create a substance that is quite fundamentally different from the wild, flowing, archetypal waters that humans recognise as ancestors or the abode of ancestors, as healing or mysterious, and as the very source of life.
4 For example, see Lindstrom (1993) and Kaplan (1995) on cargo cults, and Errington and Gewertz (2004) on ‘Yali’s question’.
Organisation of the Book
In Chapter 2, our first case study, Edvard Hviding describes the coastal peoples of New Georgia Island, one of the larger volcanic islands in the Solomon island chain. River and sea, fresh water and salt water are ‘foundational opposites’ in this setting, and associated with them are other oppositions, most notably that between crocodile and shark. For the saltwater people of Marovo Lagoon, the large muddy rivers of New Georgia Island are a ‘hostile realm’ leading away from an open sunlit shore and lagoon to a dark, unknown and mountainous interior. Hviding thus provides us with a classic coastal Pacific island perspective on rivers, one that is shared, though with considerable variation, across Oceania. Having established the historical nature and cosmological significance of these classic oppositions, he concludes with the description of a newly constructed piped water system that now carries water from a New Georgia river across a lagoon to a small coral island offshore, an innovation that confounds and reconfigures classic oppositions in interesting ways. The piped water system is a practical convenience but also serves as a marker of modernity in this setting. So, in this chapter, we begin our examination of the relationship of development and modernity in Oceania to human/water relations.
Figure 1.1 Map of the Pacific Ocean, showing locations by chapter.
Source: Cartography by Jerry Jacka.
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Philip consulted the railroad folder with which he had supplied himself.
“We ought to be there in another hour I suppose you’ll be glad. It’s a long journey from Mississippi.”
“We’ll all be glad—for the Captain’s sake. It has been hard for him.”
“Your father was a soldier in the war?”
“Of course,” she nodded. “He is a Mississippian.”
“Was he—was he wounded?” Philip ventured.
“Not with bullets. But he spent a year in a Northern prison.”
Philip, abashed by the implication conveyed in this, relapsed into silence. Libby Prison and Andersonville were still frightful realities in the New England mind, and the remembrance of them extinguished the fact that there had been war prisons in the North, as well.
“War is a pretty dreadful thing,” he conceded; adding: “My father was wounded at Antietam.”
“Let’s not begin to talk about the war; we’ll be quarrelling in another minute or two if we do.”
“I don’t admit that,” Philip contended amicably. “As I said a little while ago, the war is over—it’s been over for fifteen years. But let it go and tell me about Mississippi. I’ve never been farther south than we are just now.”
“Dear old Mississippi!” she said softly. And after that the talk became a gentle monologue for the greater part, in which Philip heard the story duplicated so often south of Mason and Dixon’s line; of the hardships of the war, and the greater hardships of its aftermath; of ill health and property loss; of hope deferred and almost extinguished in the case of the invalid father; of the final family council in which it had been determined to try the healing effect of the high and dry altitudes.
Philip listened and was moved, not only by sympathy, which—again in strict accordance with his blood and breeding—he was careful not to express, but also by a vast wonder. No young woman of his
limited acquaintance in the homeland could ever have been induced to talk so frankly and freely to a comparative stranger. Yet there was also a proud reserve just behind the frankness, and after a time he came to understand that it was pride of birth. The Dabneys, as he gathered, were an ancient family, descended from the Huguenot D’Aubignys, and originally Virginians. As a Trask and a son of more or less hardy New England stock, family traditions meant little to him. But he was beginning to see that they meant very much indeed to the soft-speaking young woman beside him.
“It is evident that you believe in blue blood,” he ventured to say, after the Dabney lineage had been fairly traced for him. Then he added: “We don’t think so very much of that in New England.”
“Oh, I don’t see how you can help it,” was the astonished exclamation. “Don’t you believe in heredity?”
“Yes, I suppose I do, in a way,” he qualified. “We can’t expect to gather figs from thistles. Still, it is a long step from that admission to a belief in—well, in anything like an aristocracy of the blood.”
“You think there is no such thing as gentle blood?”
“Not in the sense that one person is intrinsically better than another. Unless all history is at fault, the ‘gentle blood’ you speak of is just as likely to go hideously wrong as any other.”
“I don’t agree with you at all,” was the prompt retort.
“I didn’t expect you would—after what you have been telling me. But we needn’t quarrel about it,” he went on good-naturedly. “I suppose you would call your family patrician and mine plebeian—which it doubtless is; at any rate, it is farmer stock on both sides as far back as I know anything about it, people who worked with their hands, and ——”
“It was no disgrace for them to work with their hands; that isn’t at all what I meant. It is something much bigger than that.”
“Well, what is it, then? A clean family record?”
“Honor above everything: not being willing—not being able to stoop to anything low or mean or——”
“Exactly,” said Philip. “I guess we’re not so very far apart, after all; though I doubt if I could tell you the Christian name of any one of my four great-grandfathers—to say nothing of the great-grandmothers. But look out of the window! Houses, if my eyes don’t deceive me. This must be Denver that we’re coming to.”
Rounding a curve so long and gentle as to make the changing direction approximate the slow inching of a clock’s minute-hand, the train was beginning to pass signs of human occupancy, or of former occupancy; on the right a collection of empty, tumble-down shacks and the ruin of what seemed to be a smelting works. A little farther along, the fringe of the inhabited town was passed, and the clanking of switch frogs under the wheels signalled the approach to the freight yards. Over a swelling hill to the northward the mountains came into view in peaks and masses against which the plain seemed to end with startling abruptness.
When the brakes began to grind, Philip excused himself and went to get his hand luggage out of the rack over the seat he had formerly occupied.
“If I can be of any assistance?” he offered when he came back.
“Oh, I think we can manage, thank you; there are so many of us to carry things,” the young woman replied. “Besides, we’ll have to take a carriage—on the Captain’s account.”
With his attention thus drawn again to the invalid, Philip had a sharp recurrence of the doubt as to whether the change of climate had been determined upon soon enough to warrant any hope of recovery for the hollow-eyed man in the seat ahead. For the past half-hour the sick man had been coughing unobtrusively, and he seemed to have increasing difficulty in breathing. Since Kansas City was the gateway for westbound invalids, as well as for the mineral-mad treasureseekers, Philip had heard stories of the marvelous cures effected by the Colorado climate; also he had heard that those who went too late were apt to die very quickly, the swift railroad flight from an altitude of a few hundred feet to that of a mile high proving too sudden a change for the weakened lungs.
Acting wholly upon an impulse which he did not stop to define, or to square with the New England reticences, Philip bent to speak to the card-playing giant who had freed the young woman of her persecutor.
“Have you much hand baggage to take care of?” he asked.
“Nothin’ on top of earth but my gun and my blankets. Why?”
“If you wouldn’t mind taking my satchel and dropping it off outside?” Philip went on, “I want to help the sick man.”
“Right you are, cully,” returned the giant heartily. “Reckon yuh can handle him alone? Because if yuh can’t, we’ll chuck the plunder out o’ the window and both of us’ll tackle him.”
“Oh, I think I can do it all right. Maybe he won’t need any help, but I thought he might.”
“Look’s if he’d need all he can get; ’s if it wouldn’t take much of a breeze to blow him away. Shouldn’t wonder if he’d put it off too long —this yere trailin’ out to the tall hills. Well, this is the dee-po: leave me yer grip and jump in.”
Philip turned quickly to the group in the double seat and again offered his help in the matter of debarking. This time it was accepted gratefully. Picking up one of the Dabney valises, he gave an arm to the sick man. The progress through the crowded aisle to the car platform was irritatingly slow and fatiguing, and before the door was reached the invalid was seized with another coughing fit. Through the open car door the thin, keen wind of the April evening blew in the faces of the outgoing passengers, and even Philip, who was as fit and vigorous as an indoor man ever gets to be, found himself breathing deeply to take in enough of the curiously attenuated air to supply his need.
In due time the descent of the car steps was accomplished, but the exhausting coughing fit persisted, and Philip felt the invalid leaning more and more heavily upon him. It was some little distance from the tracks over to the line of waiting busses and hacks, and before it was covered the oldest daughter gave her hand luggage to one of her sisters and came back to help Philip with his charge. Philip was
prodigiously thankful. The painful cough had become almost a paroxysm, and he was shocked to see that the handkerchief the sick man was holding to his mouth was flecked with bright red spots.
“Just a little way farther, now, Captain, dearest!” Philip heard the lowtoned words of encouragement, and was overwhelmed with an unnerving fear that the man would die before he could be taken to wherever it was that the family was going. But with the fear, and presently overriding it, was a kindling admiration for the daughter. She knew what the red-flecked handkerchief meant, but she was not letting the frightful possibility submerge her.
The hack rank was reached at last, and with the driver of the chosen vehicle to help, the sick man was lifted into his place. While the mother and the younger daughters were getting in, Philip spoke to his late seat-sharer.
“Have you friends in Denver?” he asked.
“No; we shall go to a hotel for the present—to the American House.”
“Shall I go with you and try to find a doctor?”
“There will probably be a doctor in the hotel; anyway, we’ve no right to trouble you any further. But I—we don’t forget. And I’m sorry I said things about Yankees and the Philips, and about—about your waking up. It was mean and unfriendly, and I’m sorry. Good-by—and thank you so much for helping us. And please try not to remember the meannesses. Good-by.”
Philip watched the laden hack as it was driven away and wondered if he would ever see the black-eyed little Mississippian with the heroic nerves again. He was still wondering when the good-natured giant came along and gave him his valise.
“Got the little gal and her hull kit and caboodle on their way, did yuh?” said the big one, with a fierce grin which was meant to be altogether friendly.
“Yes,” said Philip. Then he picked up his valise and trudged off in search of a horse-car that would take him to his own temporary destination, a modest hotel on the west side of the town, to which a
travelled fellow clerk in the Kansas City railroad office had directed him.
II
B and early on the morning following his arrival in Denver, Philip presented himself at the general offices of the narrow-gauge mountain railroad to the officials of which he had been recommended by his late employers in Kansas City, and was promptly given a desk in the accounting department; the department head, whose thin, sandy hair, straggling gray beard and protuberant eyes gave him the aspect of a weird but benevolent pre-Adamite bird, asking but a single question.
“Not thinking of going prospecting right away, are you?”
“No,” said Philip, wondering what there might be in his appearance to suggest any such thing.
“All right; the bookkeeper will show you where to hang your coat.”
The employment footing made good, the newcomer’s spare time for the first few days was spent looking for a boarding place, the West Denver hotel, regarded from the thrifty New England point of view, proving far too expensive. The after-hours’ search gave him his earliest impressions of a city at the moment figuring as a Mecca, not only for eager fortune seekers of all ranks and castes, but also for mining-rush camp followers of every description. With the railroads daily pouring new throngs into the city, housing was at a fantastic premium, and many of the open squares were covered with the tents of those for whom there was no shelter otherwise. Having certain well-defined notions of what a self-respecting bachelor’s quarters should be, Philip searched in vain, and was finally constrained to accept the invitation of a fellow clerk in the railroad office to take him as a room-mate—this though the acceptance involved a rather rude shattering of the traditions. Instead of figuring as a paying guest in a home-like private house—no small children—with at least two of the daily meals at the family table, he found himself sharing dingy sleeping quarters on the third floor of a down-town business block,
with the option of eating as he could in the turmoil of the dairy lunches and restaurants or going hungry.
“No home-sheltered coddling for you in this live man’s burg. The quicker you get over your tenderfoot flinchings, the happier you’ll be,” advised Middleton, with whom the down-town refuge was shared, and who, by virtue of a six-weeks’ longer Western residence than Philip’s, postured, in his own estimation at least, as an “oldtimer.” “‘When you’re in Rome’—you know the rest of it. And let me tell you: you’ll have to chase your feet to keep up with the procession here, Philly, my boy. These particular Romans are a pretty swift lot, if you’ll let me tell it.”
Philip winced a little at the familiar “Philly.” He had known Middleton less than a week and was still calling him “Mister.” But familiarity of the nick-naming and back-slapping variety seemed to be the order of the day; a boisterous, hail-fellow-well-met freedom breezily brushing aside the conventional preliminaries to acquaintanceship. It was universal and one had to tolerate it; but Philip told himself that toleration need not go the length of imitation or approval.
Work, often stretching into many hours of overtime, filled the first few weeks for the tenderfoot from New Hampshire. The narrow-gauge railroad reaching out toward Leadville was taxed to its capacity and beyond, and there was little rest and less leisure for the office force. Still, Philip was able now and again to catch an appraisive glimpse of what was now becoming a thrilling and spectacular scene in the great American drama of development,—a headling, migratory irruption which had had its prototypes in the rush of the ’49-ers to the California gold fields, the wagon-train dash for Pike’s Peak, and the now waning invasion of the Black Hills by the gold seekers, but which differed from them all in being facilitated and tremendously augmented by a swift and easy railroad approach. Vaguely at first, but later with quickening pulses, Philip came to realize that the moment was epochal; that he was a passive participant in a spectacle which was marking one of the mighty human surges by which the wilderness barriers are broken down and the waste places occupied.
With a prophetic premonition that this might well be the last and perhaps the greatest of the surges, Philip was conscious of a growing and militant desire to be not only in it, but of it. The very air he breathed was intoxicating with the spirit of avid and eager activity and excitement, and the rush to the mountains increased as the season advanced. The labor turn-over in the railroad office grew to be a hampering burden, and now Philip understood why the auditor had asked him if he were a potential treasure hunter. Almost every day saw a new clerk installed to take the place of a fresh deserter. After the lapse of a short month, Philip, Middleton and Baxter, the head bookkeeper, were the three oldest employees, in point of time served, in the auditing department. Two railroads, the South Park and the Denver & Rio Grande, were building at frantic speed toward Leadville, racing each other to be first at the goal; and from the daily advancing end-of-track of each a stage line hurried the mixed mob of treasure-seekers and birds of prey of both sexes on to their destination in the great carbonate camp at the head of California Gulch. To sit calmly at a desk adding columns of figures while all this was going on became at first onerous, and later a daily fight for the needful concentration upon the adding monotonies.
By this time some of the first fruits of the carbonate harvest reaped and reaping in the sunset shadow of Mount Massive were beginning to make themselves manifest in the return to Denver of sundry lucky Argonauts whose royal spendings urged the plangencies to a quickened and more sonorous wave-beat. One victorious grubstaker was said to be burdened with an income of a quarter of a million a month from a single mine, and was sorely perplexed to find ways in which to spend it. A number of fortunate ones were buying up city lots at unheard-of prices; one was building a palatial hotel; another was planning a theater which was to rival the Opéra in Paris in costly magnificence.
These were substantials, and there were jocose extravagances to chorus them. One heard of a pair of cuff-links, diamond and emerald studded, purchased to order at the price of a king’s ransom; of a sybaritic Fortunatus who reveled luxuriously in night-shirts at three thousand dollars a dozen; of men who scorned the humble “chip” in
the crowded gaming rooms and played with twenty-dollar gold pieces for counters.
Philip saw and heard and was conscious of penetrating inward stirrings. Was the totting-up of figures all he was good for? True, there were money-making opportunities even at the railroad desk; chances to lend his thrifty savings at usurious interest to potential prospectors; chances to make quick turn-overs on small margins, and with certain profits, in real-estate; invitations to get in on “ground floors” in many promising enterprises, not excepting the carefully guarded inside stock pool of the railroad company he was working for. But the inward stirrings were not for these ventures in the commonplace; they were even scornful of them. Money-lending, trading, stockjobbing—these were for the timid. For the venturer unafraid there was a braver and a richer field.
“How much experience does a fellow have to have to go prospecting?” he asked of Middleton, one day when the figureadding had grown to be an anæsthetizing monotony hard to be borne.
Middleton grinned mockingly. “Hello!” he said. “It’s got you at last, has it?”
“I asked a plain question. What’s the answer?—if you know it.”
“Experience? Nine-tenths of the fools who are chasing into the hills don’t know free gold from iron pyrites, or carbonates from any other kind of black sand. It’s mostly bull luck when they find anything.”
“Yet they are finding it,” Philip put in.
“You hear of those who find it. The Lord knows, they make racket enough spending the proceeds. But you never hear much about the ninety-nine in a hundred who don’t find it.”
“Just the same, according to your tell, one man’s chance seems to be about as good as another’s. I believe I’d like to have a try at it, Middleton. Want to go along?”
“Not in a thousand years!” was the laughing refusal. “I’ll take mine straight, and in the peopled cities. I’ve got a girl back in Ohio, and I’m
going after her one of these days—after this wild town settles down and quits being so rude and boisterous.”
Philip looked his desk-mate accusingly in the eye.
“It’s an even bet that you don’t,” he said calmly.
“Why won’t I?”
“I saw you last night-down at the corner of Holladay and Seventeenth.”
Middleton, lately a country-town bank clerk in his native Ohio, but who was now beginning to answer the invitation of a pair of rather moist eyes and lips that were a trifle too full, tried to laugh it off.
“You mean the ‘chippy’ I was with? I’m no monk, Philly; never set up to be. Besides, I’m willing to admit that I may have had one too many whiskey sours last night. Cheese it, and tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I’ve already told you. I think I’ll try my luck in the hills, if I can find a partner.”
“Good-by,” grunted Middleton, turning back to his tonnage sheet. “As for the partner part, all you have to do is to chase down to the station and shoot your invitation at the first likely looking fellow who gets off the next incoming train. He’ll be a rank tenderfoot, of course, but that won’t make any difference: there’ll be a pair of you—both innocents. Why, say, Philly; I’ll bet you’ve still got your first drink of red liquor waiting for you! Come, now—own up; haven’t you?”
“I should hope so,” said Philip austerely. “I didn’t come all the way out here to make a fool of myself.”
This time Middleton’s grin was openly derisive.
“My, my!” he jeered. “The spirit moves me to prophesy. I know your kind, Philly—up one side and down the other. When you let go, I hope I’ll be there to see. It’ll be better than a three-ring circus. Wine, women and song, and all the rest of it. Speaking of women——”
“You needn’t,” Philip cut in shortly; and he got up to answer the auditor’s desk bell.
The process of securing a partner for a prospecting trip was scarcely the simple matter that Middleton’s gibing suggestion had made it. Though there were many haphazard matings achieved hastily at the outfitting moment, a goodly proportion of the treasure hunters were coming in pairs and trios hailing from a common starting point in the east. In spite of the free-and-easy levelling of the conventions, Philip found it difficult to make acquaintances, his shell of provincial reserve remaining unchipped, though he tried hard enough to break it. Besides, he felt that he was justified in trying to choose judiciously. He could conceive of no experience more devastating than to be isolated in the wilderness for weeks and perhaps months with an illchosen partner for his only companion. The very intimacy of such an association would make it unbearable.
It was while he was still hesitating that a small duty urged itself upon him. It concerned the Mississippi family with the death-threatened husband and father. In a city where all were strangers he had fully intended keeping in touch with the Dabneys, if only to be ready to offer what small help a passing acquaintance might in case the threatened catastrophe should climax. Since he would shortly be leaving Denver, the duty pressed again, and he set apart an evening for the tracing of the Mississippians, going first to the American House to make inquiries.
Fortunately for his purpose, one of the hotel clerks, himself a Southerner, remembered the Dabneys. They had remained but a few days in the hotel; were now, so the clerk believed, camping in one of the tent colonies out on California or Stout Streets somewhere between Twentieth and Twenty-third. Yes, Captain Dabney had been in pretty bad shape, but it was to be assumed that he was still living. The clerk had been sufficiently interested to keep track of the obituary notices in the newspapers, and the Dabney name had not appeared in any of them. Inquiry among the tenters would probably enable Philip to find them.
Reproaching himself for his prolonged negligence, Philip set out to extend his search to the tent colonies. It was after he had reached the more sparsely built-up district, and was crossing a vacant square beyond the better-lighted streets, that a slender figure, seemingly
materializing out of the ground at his feet, rose up to confront him, a pistol was thrust into his face, and he heard the familiar formula: “Hands up—and be quick about it!”
It is probably a fact that the element of shocked surprise, no less than the natural instinct of self-preservation, accounts for the easy success of the majority of hold-ups. Sudden impulse automatically prompts obedience, and the chance of making any resistance is lost. But impulsiveness was an inconsequent part of Philip’s equipment. Quite coolly measuring his chances, and well assured that he had a considerable advantage in avoirdupois, he knocked the threatening weapon aside and closed in a quick grapple with the highwayman. He was not greatly surprised when he found that his antagonist, though slightly built, was as wiry and supple as a trained acrobat; but in the clinching struggle it was weight that counted, and when the brief wrestling match ended in a fall, the hold-up man was disarmed and spread-eagled on the ground and Philip was sitting on him.
When he could get his breath the vanquished one laughed.
“Made a complete, beautiful and finished fizzle of it, d-didn’t I?” he gasped. “Let me tell you, my friend, it isn’t half so easy as it is made to appear in the yellow-back novels.”
“What the devil do you mean—trying to hold me up with a gun?” Philip demanded angrily.
“Why—if you must know, I meant to rob you; to take and appropriate to my own base uses that which I have not, and which you presumably have. Not having had the practice which makes perfect, I seem to have fallen down. Would you mind sitting a little farther back on me? I could breathe much better if you would.”
Philip got up and picked up the dropped weapon.
“I suppose I ought to shoot you with your own gun,” he snapped; and the reply to that was another chuckling laugh.
“You couldn’t, you know,” said the highwayman, sitting up. “It’s perfectly harmless—empty, as you may see for yourself if you’ll break it. You were quite safe in ignoring it.”
Philip regarded him curiously
“What kind of a hold-up are you, anyway?” he asked.
“The rottenest of amateurs, as you have just proved upon my poor body. I thank you for the demonstration. It decides a nice question for me. I hesitated quite some time before I could tip the balance between this, and going into a restaurant, ordering and consuming a full meal, and being kicked out ignominiously for non-payment afterward. This seemed the more decent thing to do, but it is pretty evident that I lack something in the way of technique. Wouldn’t you say so?”
“I should say that you are either a fool or crazy,” said Philip bluntly.
“Wrong, both ways from the middle,” was the jocular retort. “At the present moment I am merely an empty stomach; and empty stomachs, as you may have observed, are notoriously lacking in any moral sense. May I get up?”
“Yes,” said Philip; and when the man was afoot: “Now walk ahead of me to that street lamp on the corner. I want to have a look at you.”
What the street lamp revealed was what he was rather expecting to see; a handsome, boyish face a trifle thin and haggard, eyes that were sunken a little, but with an unextinguished smile in them, a fairly good chin and jaw, a mouth just now wreathing itself in an impish grin under his captor’s frowning scrutiny.
“Umph!—you don’t look like a very hard case,” Philip decided.
“Oh, but I am, I assure you. I’ve been kicked out of two respectable colleges, dropped from the home club for conduct unbecoming a gentleman, and finally turned out of house and home by a justifiably irate father. Can I say more?”
“What are you doing in Denver?”
“You saw what I was trying to do a few minutes ago. The outcome dovetails accurately with everything else I have attempted since I parted with the final dollar of the even thousand with which I was disinherited. Failure seems to be my baptismal name.”
“What is your name?”
“Henry Wigglesworth Bromley. Please don’t smile at the middle third of it. That is a family heirloom—worse luck. But to the matter in hand: I’m afraid I’m detaining you. Shall I—‘mog,’ is the proper frontier word, I believe—shall I mog along down-town and surrender myself to the police?”
“Would you do that if I should tell you to?”
“Why not, if you require it? You are the victor, and to the victors belong the spoils—such as they are. If you hunger for vengeance, you shall have it. Only I warn you in advance that it won’t be complete. If the police lock me up, they will probably feed me, so you won’t be punishing me very savagely.”
For once in a way Philip yielded to an impulse, a prompting that he was never afterward able to trace to any satisfactory source. Dropping the captured revolver into his coat pocket, he pressed a gold piece into the hand of the amateur hold-up.
“Say that I’ve bought your gun and go get you a square meal,” he said, trying to say it gruffly. “Afterward, if you feel like it, go and sit in the lobby of the American House for your after-dinner smoke. I’m not making it mandatory. If you’re not there when I get back, it will be all right.”
“Thank you; while I’m eating I’ll think about that potential appointment. If I can sufficiently forget the Wigglesworth in my name I may keep the tryst, but don’t bank on it. I may—with a full-fed stomach—have a resurgence of the Wigglesworth family pride, and in that case——”
“Good-night,” said Philip abruptly, and went his way toward the tent colony in the next open square, wondering again where the impulse to brother this impish but curiously engaging highwayman came from.
III
I circumstances in which it would have been easy enough to fail, Philip found the family he was looking for almost at once; and it was the young woman with the dark eyes and hair and the enticing Southland voice and accent who slipped between the flaps of the lighted tent when he made his presence known.
“Oh, Mr. Trask—is it you?” she exclaimed, as the dim lamplight filtering through the canvas enabled her to recognize him. “This is kind of you, I’m sure. We’ve been wondering if we should ever see you again. I can’t imagine how you were ever able to find us.”
Philip, rejoicing in the softly smothered “r’s” of her speech, explained soberly. It was not so difficult. He had gone first to the hotel; and once in the tented square, a few inquiries had sufficed.
“I’m sorry I can’t ask you in,” she hastened to say. “You see, there isn’t so awfully much room in a tent, and—and the children are just going to bed. Would you mind sitting out here?”
There was a bench on the board platform that served as a dooryard for the tent, and they sat together on that. For the first few minutes Philip had an attack of self-consciousness that made him boil inwardly with suppressed rage. His human contacts for the past few weeks—or months, for that matter—had been strictly masculine, and he had never been wholly at ease with women, save those of his own family. Stilted inquiries as to how the sick Captain was getting along, and how they all liked Denver and the West, and how they thought the climate and the high altitude were going to agree with them, were as far as he got before a low laugh, with enough mockery in it to prick him sharply, interrupted him.
“Excuse me,” she murmured, “but it’s so deliciously funny to see you make such hard work of it. Are there no girls in the part of Yankeeland you come from?”
“Plenty of them,” he admitted; “but they are not like you.”
“Oh!” she laughed. “Is that a compliment, or the other thing?”
“It is just the plain truth. But the trouble isn’t with girls—it’s with me. I guess I’m not much of a ladies’ man.”
“I’m glad you’re not; I can’t imagine anything more deadly. Are you still working for the railroad?”
“Just at present, yes. But I’ll be quitting in a few days. I’m going to try my luck in the mountains—prospecting.”
“But—I thought you said you wouldn’t!”
“I did; but I was younger then than I am now.”
She laughed again. “All of six weeks younger But I’m glad you are going. If the Captain could get well, and I were a man, I’d go, too.”
Philip was on the point of saying that he wished she were a man and would go with him; but upon second thought he concluded he didn’t wish it. Before he could straighten out the tangle of the first and second thoughts she was asking him if he knew anything about minerals and mining.
“Nothing at all. But others who don’t know any more than I do are going, and some of them are finding what they hoped to find.”
“It’s in the air,” she said. “You hear nothing but ‘strikes’ and ‘leads’ and ‘mother veins’ and ‘bonanzas.’ Lots of the people in these tents around us are here because some member of the family is sick, but they all talk excitedly about the big fortunes that are being made, and how Tom or Dick or Harry has just come in with a haversack full of ‘the pure quill,’ whatever that may mean.”
“You haven’t been hearing any more of it than I have,” said Philip. “Not as much, I think. The town is mad with the mining fever. I’m only waiting until I can find a suitable partner.”
“That ought not to be very hard—with everybody wanting to go.”
Philip shook his head. “I guess I’m not built right for mixing with people. I can’t seem to chum in with just anybody that comes along.”
“You oughtn’t to,” she returned decisively Then, again with the mocking note in her voice: “They say the prospectors often have to fight to hold their claims after they have found them: you ought to pick out some big, strong fighting man for a partner, don’t you think?”
Philip was glad the canvas-filtered lamplight was too dim to let her see the flush her words evoked.
“You are thinking of that day on the train, and how I let the husky miner take your part when I should have done it myself? I’m not such a coward as that. I was trying to get out of my seat when the miner man got ahead of me. I want you to believe that.”
“Of course I’ll believe it.” Then, quite penitently: “You must forgive me for being rude again: I simply can’t help saying the meanest things, sometimes. Still, you know, I can’t imagine you as a fighter, really.”
“Can’t you?” said Philip; and then he boasted: “I had a fight with a hold-up on the way out here this evening—and got the best of him, too.” Whereupon he described with dry humor Henry Wigglesworth Bromley’s attempt to raise the price of a square meal; the brief battle and its outcome.
“You haven’t told all of it,” she suggested, when he paused with his refusal to accept Bromley’s offer to arrest himself on a charge of attempted highway robbery.
“What part have I left out?”
“Just the last of it, I think. You gave the robber some money to buy the square meal—I’m sure you did.”
“You are a witch!” Philip laughed. “That is exactly what I did do. I don’t know why I did it, but I did.”
“I know why,” was the prompt reply. “It was because you couldn’t help it. The poor boy’s desperation appealed to you—it appeals to me just in your telling of it. He isn’t bad; he is merely good stock gone to seed. Couldn’t you see that?”
“Not as clearly as you seem to. But he did appear to be worth helping a bit.”
“Ah; that is the chord I was trying to touch. You ought to help him some more, Mr. Trask. Don’t you reckon so?”
“‘Mr Trask’ wouldn’t, but perhaps ‘Philip’ would,” he suggested mildly.
“Well, ‘Philip,’ then. Don’t you see how brave he is?—to laugh at himself and all his misfortunes, the hardships his wildness has brought upon him? You say you are looking for a prospecting partner; why don’t you take him?”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Certainly I mean it. It might result in two good things. If you could get him off in the mountains by himself, and live with him, and make him work hard, you might make a real man of him.”
“Yes?” said Philip. “That is one of the two good things. What is the other?”
“The other is what it might do for you. Or am I wrong about that?”
“No,” he said, after a little pause. “I still think you are a witch. You’ve found out that I live in a shell, and it’s so. I guess I was born that way. You think the shell would crack if I should take hold of a man like this Bromley and try to brother him?”
“I am sure it would,” she replied gravely. “It couldn’t help cracking.”
Then, as a low-toned call came from the inside of the tent: “Yes, mummie, dear,—I’m coming.”
Philip got up and held out his hand.
“I am sorry I’m going away, because I’d like to be within call if you should need me. If you should move into a house, or leave Denver, will you let me know? A note addressed to me in care of the railroad office will be either forwarded or held until I come back.”
“I’ll write,” she promised, and the quick veiling of the dark eyes told him that she knew very well what he meant by her possible need.
“And about this young scapegrace who tried to hold me up: what you have suggested never occurred to me until you spoke of it. But if you think I ought to offer to take him along into the mountains, I don’t
know but I’ll do it. It wouldn’t be any crazier than the things a lot of other people are doing in this mining-mad corner of the world just now.”
“Oh, you mustn’t take me too seriously. I have no right to tell you what you should do. But I did have a glimpse of what it might mean. I’m going to wish you good luck—the very best of luck. If you really want to be rich, I hope you’ll find one of these beautiful ‘bonanzas’ people are talking about; find it and live happily ever after. Good-by.”
“Good-by,” said Philip; and when she disappeared behind the tent flap, he picked his way out of the campers’ square and turned his steps townward.
It was after he had walked the five squares westward on Champa and the six northward down Seventeenth, and was turning into Blake, with the American House only a block distant, that a girlish figure slipped out of a doorway shadow, caught step with him, and slid a caressing arm under his with a murmured, “You look lonesome, baby, and I’m lonesome, too. Take me around to Min’s and stake me to a bottle of wine. I’m so thirsty I don’t know where I’m going to sleep to-night.”
Philip freed himself with a twist that had in it all the fierce virtue of his Puritan ancestry. Being fresh from a very human contact with a young woman of another sort, this appeal of the street-girl was like a stumbling plunge into muddy water Backing away from the temptation which, he told himself hotly, was no temptation at all, he walked on quickly, and had scarcely recovered his balance when he entered the lobby of the hotel. Almost immediately he found Bromley, sprawled in one of the lounging chairs, deep in the enjoyment of a cigar which he waved airily as he caught sight of Philip.
“Benedicite, good wrestler! Pull up a chair and rest your face and hands,” he invited. Then, with a cheerful smile: “Why the pallid countenance? You look as though you’d just seen a ghost. Did some other fellow try to hold you up?”
Philip’s answering smile was a twisted grimace. “No; it was a woman, this time.”
