*

ERROR STILL CLINGS to the

name of Tzouhalem, cruel chief-

tain of a rebel Cowichan Indian
gang a century ago.

His devilish zeal to kill, torture and
destroy made him such a legendary
monster of Indian lore that one can
scarcely separate the man from the
myth. Yet he was without doubt an
unhappy waif with a grudge against a
world which mocked him because he
was deformed and strange.

Even from this distance one can
pick out the familiar pattern of causes
which make a criminal: physical in-
feriority, rejection by the group, shock
and encouragement to violence in
childhood, a twisted desire to revenge
himself for slights and force people to
accept him.

He lived among people who sanc-
tioned murder and pillage as part of
their everyday code. But even they
observed some rules. T'zouhalem ob-
served none. He spread blood, fire and
horror across his narrow world, and
gloried in the task.

Spirit of Storm Entered Infant

Legend says a howling thunder-
storm raged on the night of his birth
near the present town of Duncan in
the closing years of the eighteenth
century. The wind tore out trees by
the roots.

“The spirit of storm and destruc-
tion seems to have entered the infant

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‘ Demented

By G. E. MORTIMORE

Tzouhalem with the first breath of
his life,” wrote the late O. T. Smythe,
“and to have ruled his nature until
the day of his death.”

Tzouhalem was not born a chief.
His father was a Quamichan, and his
mother was of the Comiaken band.

As a new-born infant he was said
to have been very scrawny, with an

From now peaceful
Cowichan Bay, Indian
Bluebeard spread ter-
ror across entire Paci-
fic northwest.

enormous ugly head which looked as
though it should belong to a child
two years old.

“Ah, see what the spirits have sent
me!” his father was quoted as saying.
“This will never be a man. Throw it
out on the shell piles.”

But the baby’s old grandmother re-
strained him and said the child would
grow up to be a formidable fighting
man.

When three-year-old Tzouhalem
was out in the bush gathering berries
with his grandmother, raiding Haidas

*

from the Queen Charlotte Islands
descended on the village, slaughtered
Cowichan warriors and carried off
women and children.

Mother Dragged to Slavery

Tzouhalem’s mother was one of
those dragged away to slavery, along
with Tzouhalem’s baby brother, only
a few months old. The women were
bound by their hair to the thwarts of
the canoes.

A Haida warrior threw the baby
overboard because it kept screaming.
The mother cried and struggled so
much that they cut her loose and
threw her to drown with her son.

A woman who escaped brought the
news back to the village. Tzouhalem’s
old grandmother took him to live
with her. Every day she told him how
his mother had died. She fed him
hatred and hope of revenge, and made
him promise that some day he would
fight the Haidas.

She taught him how to bathe him-
self daily and rub his skin with hem-
lock boughs, and run in the woods,
where, it was said, “the spirits would
come and talk to him.”

“You must be a fighter,” she told
him. “Trust no man.”

An old Indian story-telling woman,
now long dead, described him in a
way that showed a fine psychological
understanding:

“And hacmwe he looked like a bad

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