nd 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 lips 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
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