- identify the location of “Gumbay”
- In order to lull suspicion, I decided not to attempt a capture immediately, but to await our return from Bellingham bay. We started in the afternoon and were carried almost through the Swinomish slough. This is a natural canal through the tide flats, several hundred feet wide and about twenty feet deep. At high tide large boats are able to go through. The country is principally inhabited by Swinomish and Skagit Indians. White men have not yet thought of settling on these rich flats, which will certainly become very valuable on account of their productiveness.
- This broad salt marsh is covered by rich grass and intersected by canals, which could not be more suitable for navigation if they had been made artifically. The Indian houses are built after the fashion of the buildings of the Hudson Bay Company. I visited one of the camps, of which there are a great many, and found the Indians gambling, as usual. They have ten little chips of wood. Nine of them are supposed to be klootchmen(Indian women) and the tenth one a man. These they shuffle in cedar bark, and an Indian takes five in each hand and his opponent guesses which hand holds the four klootchmen and one man. They play in this manner for whole days and nights. Gambling seems to be inherent in the savage as well as the civilized man. The propensity to plunder our fellow creatures without giving an equivalent other than an equal risk is so widespread that it may be regarded as natural, if not right in the light of Christianity.