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spirit of the father 21to Grandmother. “Don’t know what’s wrong with us.” “You’re downthere making fun . . . where we pray down there,” Grandmotherscolded. “We got these sticks that are powerful. You guys are downthere and you’re making fun . . . that’s why you don’t feel good.”Qu-lash-qud was just a kid the first time he spied a white man. Agroup of whites “menacingly approached” the longhouse and ransackedthe place while the boy watched through a crack in a rainbarrel. The memory of the armed horsemen never left his mind.“Gramps would sometimes have fears and he’d relate back to raidsagainst Indians when he was a little boy,” Hank Adams recalls. “Whitemarauders would come in with guns and be threatening Indians, orbeating Indians. He’d talk about hiding under barrels and hidingunder different things. This would be in the 1880s and 1890s.”Throughout his life, Qu-lash-qud told chilling stories of diseaseravaging the Indian people. “Let me tell you about this one—what Iheard. A ship come here on Puget Sound and the ship was throwingbrand new blankets, suit of clothes, underwear and the Indians onthe shore got in their canoes and went and got all that stuff. Andbrought them ashore. And come to find out all those clothes andblankets were smallpox. The ship had smallpox. And so all the Indiansgot smallpox, from the mouth of the river to La Grande. They all diedoff. Smallpox killed them all. See when I come to, there was just a fewIndians. I’d say just about 300 living on the reservation.”The staggering losses drove many to drink, writes Norman Clarkin The Dry Years: Prohibition and Social Change in Washington: “Intheir sorrow . . . the Indians finally reached for the bottle of rumwhich the fur traders had been offering them. In the white man’sliquor they found a source of ecstasy and release from their grief.”“Pretty soon American come over in wagon trains and they had badwhiskey,” said Qu-lash-qud. “Indians now fight and kill each otherafter they had bad whiskey American brought over.”