1 A Boy’s Life
1923–1945
I had a lonely childhood.
—Harry Smith
As Harry Everett Smith told it, he was born into a family of theosophists and Freemasons. Though his account of his family history was always sketchy, he did want it known that his was not your normal family, and that he attributed much of what he had become to their idiosyncrasies. His father, he said, was “deeply into Mohammedanism,” his mother, Buddhism, and that his father was a descendant of important Masons. If it was true, “to a degree,” as Harry once put it, it was perhaps not quite so exceptional. The early part of the twentieth century was an era when Freemasonry was widespread, theosophy was as trendy as other forms of esotericism and early New Age thinking, and they were both widely known in the same way that a somewhat exotic book like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet could become a bestseller and be found in even the smallest of backwater communities. On Orcas Island, near where he was raised, on Puget Sound in Washington, the Theosophical Society had (and still has) a family summer camp named Indralaya.
On the other hand, Harry said that he had been sent to different Sunday schools and was exposed to a number of religions. One of his grandfathers was Catholic, and Harry said he was influenced by the beauty of the church’s ceremonies. But then he also said his grandmother was a friend of the theosophists Annie Besant and Bishop Charles Webster Leadbeater. On yet another hand, he said that after lunch on Sundays the family would gather around the radio to listen to a pastor’s sermon, after which his mother would question him on its meaning. Both of Harry’s parents declared themselves to be Episcopalians, and were cremated as such.
Sometimes he pushed the family story over the edge, as when he said he might be the bastard son of Aleister Crowley, the English occultist and magician, and then spun out the scene on a beach in Washington where this coupling might have occurred. Or when he declared that his mother might be Anastasia Romanov because she had taught at an Indian school in Alaska funded by the czarina of Russia. He seemed to be joking, and on another occasion said it was a fantasy of his mother’s. But a surprising number of people took his claims at least semiseriously. With a past as murky as Harry’s, any background scenery he might provide helped prepare his various audiences for something special, even when they didn’t always quite grasp what he was talking about. What little is known about his life between birth and his early teens is largely from a number of asides in school documents, brief local newspaper mentions, and comments he dropped in interviews or to a few friends who still recall them.
What is certain in Harry’s family history, and something he was proud to tell, was that his father was descended from the distinguished family of John Corson Smith, a brigadier general in the Union Army, and later the treasurer and lieutenant governor of the state of Illinois. The general had also revived the rite of the Masonic Knights Templar in the United States after a split with the Scottish Rite Masons. His son, Harry’s grandfather, Robert Ambrose Smith, was the assistant general manager of the Pacific American Fisheries, one of the largest canneries in the world, and later the president of the smaller Sehome Cannery, where Harry’s father, Robert James Smith, was an assistant foreman.
If Harry’s mother’s family was not as notable as his father’s, it was nonetheless noteworthy. His mother, Mary Louise Hammond, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and when the family moved westward to the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington, Mary Louise’s mother, Esther, became a teacher and a political radical, and ran for county school superintendent for the People’s Party in 1900, a time when women were not allowed to vote. Mary Louise studied to be an artist and a teacher, and taught at schools near Bellingham, Washington, where she had gone to college. After a divorce, Esther moved to Alaska in 1907 to teach at the Native American school on Afognak Island, a few miles north of Kodiak. Afognak village was the third community founded in Russian America, and the school was attended by the Alutiiq (or Sugpiat), the Native people of the island. Over the next two years Harry’s mother and her sister, Constance, joined Esther as teachers at the school. The U.S. government had taken over previously Russian-run schools, and as government employees, the Hammonds were relocated frequently. In 1910, Harry’s mother was moved to the Inuit Native school in the tiny village of St. Michael south of Nome on the Norton Sound, and again in 1911 to an even smaller village, Eagle, on the Yukon River, where she taught Han Native American children. In 1912, she returned to the United States and married Robert James Smith, whom she had met on a boat between Orcas Island and Bellingham.
Harry’s father began working as a marine engineer at various canneries and also worked in logging. He and Mary first lived on a farm on Orcas Island, and in 1921 he joined his brother in running a hardware store in Estacada, Oregon. Two years later, Harry Everett Smith was born on May 29, 1923, in Portland’s Wilcox Hospital. The hardware business never prospered, and the Smiths returned to Washington in the fall of 1924, this time living with Robert’s parents in Fairhaven, in South Bellingham, along Puget Sound near the Canadian border. Before Euro-Americans arrived in the mid-1800s, it was the home of tribes of Coast Salish–speaking peoples such as the Lummi, the Samish, and, nearby, the Swinomish.
In the second decade of the century the prosperity produced by salmon fishing and canning declined drastically from overfishing and environmental issues, and many businesses closed or downsized. Harry’s father then began working for the Pacific American Fisheries, and the Smiths moved to a smaller house in Fairhaven, where their back porch overlooked Bellingham Bay and the company’s cannery.
At an early age Harry suffered from rickets or some form of digestive disorder that resulted in spinal problems and left him a foot shorter than most of the boys in his class. He was never fit for the games and sports of other children, but he could say that he began to read when he was four by a method his mother and grandmother had developed to teach Native Alaskan students. The first thing he recalled reading on his own was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” a short story that impressed him with its use of two forms of arcane language—cryptography and a text version of the speech of the Gullah people of the South Carolina Sea Islands. Harry was free to read anything in a house stocked with books on travel, music, alchemy, adventure, art, and esoterica—but not his grandfather’s secret books on Freemasonry stored in the attic, which he was once caught reading. Throughout the house there were also a number of Asian relics, such as Tibetan prints and a Japanese wakizashi samurai sword. Harry recalled that he “insisted on dressing in Chinese style until I had to go to school. I can remember weeping and wailing. And I had all these Chinese things laid out.” Harry was forbidden to play with guns, even a cap pistol on the Fourth of July.
In fall 1930, seven-year-old Harry entered first grade at the Campus School of Washington State Normal School at Bellingham (now Western Washington University), an elementary school within a teacher-training college noted for its commitment to progressive education—a child-centered curriculum focused on creativity, exploration, and freedom of movement and thought. Students raised vegetables and animals; wrote books; learned photography; built teepees, Greek temples, and model cities; and staged children’s versions of nearby Lummi Indian longhouse ceremonies. It was a curriculum that shaped Harry’s activities for the next ten years and beyond.
I had built [the Emerald City] many times as a child. I had fairly severe hallucinations, and I had built something called my Fairy Garden for many years. I actually used to see little gnomes and fairies, and stuff until I was seven or eight. It’s a typical psychic phenomenon, I mean, I wasn’t nutty or anything. All children see that stuff. Up until I was 18 or so, I worked hard on my Fairy Garden and then started building Oz.
As Harry finished the second grade, the Smith family moved again in 1932, this time to Anacortes, a town on Fidalgo Island south of Bellingham, still on Puget Sound, an area where the Swinomish, the Lower Skagit, and the Samish were again the original inhabitants. Euro-Americans were late settlers, and there was no town recognized there until the late 1800s, when lumber, fishing, and canneries turned it into a boomtown. But by the time the Smiths arrived, the depression of the 1930s and the decline in salmon had slowed the town’s progress, and Harry’s father was a watchman of what was left of the giant Apex Fish Company.
At age nine, Harry began third grade at the Whitney School but was absent with bouts of illness for three different weeks out of eleven in his first term, then missed almost half of his classes in the second term, and though he began to improve in the spring was still absent many days in his third. Despite his missed classes, he kept up with his work and, recognizing his interest in art, his mother and father joined with three other children’s parents to find a teacher to give their children art lessons. The teacher they found, Louise Williams, was a well-trained painter and poet who was part of an arts project for the Works Progress Administration. Harry first studied with her in her studio in a sailmaker’s loft in one of the abandoned cannery buildings and later in the Anacortes Hotel. Williams encouraged her students not to copy things photographically but to create their own images. Her focus was on fundamentals such as color and structure, and she left it to the children to use their individuality on whatever they chose. Harry was serious about art and had saved all his work from his first drawings at age two. By the time he finished high school they amounted to thousands. As he grew older, he copied designs from theosophical tracts and the forbidden Freemason books, and his father taught him to draw a geometrical representation of the Tree of Life, a map of creation, the central mystical symbol used in Judaic Kabbalah, also known as 10 Sephirot. It was something he would repeat for years in various configurations.
On Harry’s twelfth birthday, his father gave him a set of blacksmith tools that had been left behind at the cannery. “He had me build all these things like models of the first Bell telephone, the original light bulb, and perform all sorts of historical experiments,” Smith recalled. He learned how to play the piano, explored classical music, and taught himself how to write down the music that he heard. By his early teens he knew how to record speech and music on a 78-rpm disc-cutting machine. The first recordings he made were of his mother singing Irish ballads, and his father, cowboy songs. Songbooks like Sigmund Spaeth’s Read ’Em and Weep: The Songs You Forgot to Remember, and Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag were among his parents’ favorites.
Over the next three years, Harry’s health began to slowly improve, though he was still absent from many classes. Nonetheless, his grades were high, with the exception of mathematics and spelling, and by the time he was ready to enter the seventh grade, the junior high school newspaper, Searchlight, would single him out as a “scientific genius” and one of the two best artists in the incoming class. By the end of the eighth grade his achievement tests showed him to be years above his grade level. He was also on the staff of the Searchlight, and in a list of students’ “Secret Ambitions” published by the paper, Harry said he would like to “break one of the fire alarms in the hall.”
* * *
In the Smiths’ neighborhood there was a wide view of the bay and the sea. The waters were filled with a large variety of marine life, and pods of orcas could be seen, their distinctive cries reaching the shore as if they were calling to earth dwellers. In stories told by the original peoples of the Northwest Coast, whales were rulers of the sea and lived in underwater cities. They embodied the souls of dead tribal leaders and had the ability to turn themselves back into humans when they surfaced. Harry grew up with such stories, both those of the Native peoples and others from the white settlers, as the mysteries of the sea were an ever-present thread in coastal life. When his father built a rowboat for him, he spent hours floating on waves deep with kelp, watching and calculating their rhythm and amplitude, seeing their undulation, how they grouped together—an odd project perhaps, especially for a young boy, but one with which Leonardo da Vinci also filled his notebooks and used to develop ideas for new forms of waterworks. Asked years later if the occult had been an influence on the films he made, Harry answered, “sort of, but mainly looking in the water, because I lived this kind of isolated childhood.”
He could often be seen walking the beach below his house in Anacortes, collecting things cast up by the sea—bits of driftwood and shells—and the skeletons of birds and small animals. His father arranged for him to store his collection in an unused one-room house of the cannery company, not far from their home. Harry soon turned it into his own museum, with neatly organized birds’ nests, seagull feathers, agates, sea creatures in formaldehyde, various other beach findings, and some unidentifiable objects—everything in it marked DO NOT TOUCH. He would conduct tours for the occasional child or adult who might wonder what a boy could be doing in there.
At one point his mother and father moved into two separate small houses, the only buildings left behind by the Apex cannery on a block of Sixth Street. They communicated by a system of bells, ate meals and played chess together. Harry would later say that his parents were not compatible—his father was gone much of the time, and he thought his mother may have had “boyfriends,” because she would sometimes drop him at the movie theater for an hour or two. The Smiths remained for ten years in Anacortes, where Harry said they were considered a “low family” by their neighbors despite his grandfather and other well-respected relatives living nearby.
LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY
Like other children of his era, Harry was fascinated by American Indians. But unlike those who read about them in comic books, went to Saturday matinee cowboy films, stuck feathers in their hair, and played with dime-store bows and arrows, Harry saw them as real people, living close by, and in his school. This was the beginning of what would become a long search to understand their lives, improbably crossing lines of race, age, and history. It was a quest worthy of an early twentieth-century boys’ adventure novel.
The indigenous people of the Northwest Coast had lived for thousands of years in parts of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Northern California on a coastal stretch broken by inlets and bays, separated in part from the rest of North America by mountains. Trees a hundred feet high once lined that misty coast and kept it in shadows. Those trees were sometimes carved and painted with faces of animals and humans, and in some places the dead were suspended high in them. As one scholar put it, “It looked like a place that could keep a secret.” It was so secret that the coast was missing from European maps of North America for years, left blank, a cipher that tantalized geographers, sailors, and those who dreamed of salmon, furs, and even gold, as if it were the true location of El Dorado.
It was also home to a culture far different from that of most of North America’s Native peoples. In a region whose climate was moderated and warmed by the Pacific Ocean current, and with vast aquatic resources and forests rich with wildlife and cedar, fir, spruce, and redwood, lives were sustained by fishing, hunting, and gathering, but as part of a more complex social order than those subsistence terms would suggest. The distinct geography allowed for far-reaching travel by water, for large wooden houses, for stability of settlements, and for the development of social classes (including slaves)—trade, division of labor, production lines and schedules—a form of early indigenous industrialization. When the smallpox plague of the late eighteenth century devastated the population and weakened social ties between local communities and more distant Native American groups, the traditional practice of gift exchange called potlatch was elaborated on and extended. The cultures of the Northwest Coast were so complex that much was misunderstood by missionaries, government officials, and anthropologists alike, resulting in laws that were illogical and repressive.
One element of the cultures of this area that survived devastation and occupation, and even flourished, was their art. The two-dimensional carvings on boxes, masks, canoes, memorial markers, and funerary containers, their unique flowing line figures spreading over the surfaces, forming eyes, faces, and mouths, and depicting bears, ravens, whales, eagles, humans, legendary creatures, and nonrepresentational images, captivated and puzzled non-Indians. Most famous are the totem poles and interior house posts depicting sacred beings, family legends, revered animals, and historical events. It’s hard to resist describing Indigenous peoples’ works using terms like “abstractions” or “visual puns,” but that is what outsiders see when a fish has the face of a human on its tail, or a mask of a bear opens to reveal a raven behind it.
There was no part of the Northwest Coast without an Indian community or reservation nearby, and between 1938 and 1944 Harry visited as many as he could, certainly as far north as Vancouver Island. Those seven years among the Indians had enormous influence on him, and in spite of his later works in film, painting, and folk music, and his study of the occult, he would always identify himself as an anthropologist, and over the years continued his studies of Indian life in Northern California, Colorado, Florida, and Oklahoma.
The Smiths kept alive family stories of contacts with Native peoples, as Harry’s mother had taught their children in Alaska and his father had worked with them in the canneries and logging. Harry’s grandfather Robert A. Smith had given the Smithsonian Institution a pictographic autobiography of Sitting Bull that he had received from his father, General Smith. Harry remembered the moment at which he first became fascinated by Native American culture: “When I was a child, somebody came around to school one day and said they’d been to an Indian dance, and they saw somebody swinging a skull on the end of a string, so that I thought, ‘Hmm, I have to see this.’” What he had seen was a bull-roarer—an animal skull that was spun around to make a whirring sound, an instrument widely used in curing and religious rituals. It was the beginning of a lifelong adventure of immersion in other cultures that would give a sickly, undersized, severely nearsighted, and, by his own accounts, lonely boy with social problems a sense of purpose that would lead him far beyond anyone’s expectations.
When he was a teenager and in the eighth grade, Harry began bicycling, or remaining on the bus with Native children, to visit the Swinomish reservation near Anacortes. Soon he was spending days there on weekends and during summer vacations. There is no record of what the elders thought of this young white boy when he first appeared, or why they allowed, and even encouraged, him to use a notebook, sketch pad, camera, and recording machine. They clearly saw him as something more than a curious child, perhaps even as another means of preserving their culture against all odds: compulsory public education, the intervention of missionaries and the police (some of the rituals Harry witnessed were banned at the time by U.S. law), and the seductiveness of radio, phonographs, and movies were reducing the number of young people interested in preserving tradition. Harry’s seriousness, persistence, and humility gained him the respect of tribal leaders, who allowed him to use technology they might otherwise have had good reason to fear to document their songs, narratives, customs, language, and games. Over the next five years he would pursue this work, year-round, and would later continue it on the Lummi reservation near Bellingham.
A few anthropologists had made recordings of Native peoples of the coastal area as early as the 1920s, but Harry was the first to record the Lummi, and to record them with a disc-cutting machine that produced higher-quality sound than the then popular wire recorders. After the mid-1940s such recordings were forbidden by the Indians, and today people of the Northwest Coast find it difficult to understand why he was given such freedom.
Harry also made watercolor paintings of these events, and even painted dances and rituals that were no longer practiced. In the only painting that survives, the dance is as Harry saw it, but the clothing is from an earlier era and based on what the elders had told him.
To record and document what he saw, Harry had learned how to photograph with minimal lighting, to use a recording machine, and to translate the words of songs. Because he had no way to film dancers, accurately describing the dances was a problem. Dance notation is notoriously complex and difficult, and usually applicable to only a few specific forms of dance (such as ballet). No method existed for writing Native American dances, and anthropologists showed little interest in it. Even sketches of the movement of body parts would require a large series of frames that would take many viewings to do and at best would end up as a flip-book. But Harry thought it was important, maybe more important than the music, since dance was also a cultural universal, but one that was less abstract, perhaps more primal, and was connected to everyday bodily movement in social and work activities. He had to invent his own system:
I got interested in the designs in relation to music … It was an attempt to write down the unknown Indian life. I made a large number of recordings of that, which are also unfortunately lost. I took portable equipment all over the place long before anyone else did and recorded whole long ceremonies sometimes lasting several days. Diagraming the pictures was so interesting that I started to be interested in music in relation to stuff.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE NORTHWEST COAST IN THE 1930S
There would seem to be very little for a boy to find in his local library about anthropology, a field of study that had existed in university departments for scarcely twenty years. Yet that was where Harry discovered the writings of Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology, whose research work was done largely in Alaska and British Columbia. His accounts of the people who lived just up the coast resonated with Harry, opening a door into the lives and history of people who were often thought of as living outside of history. They offered Harry a model for his research well before he ever met an anthropologist.
Though Boas was trained as a physicist, he first came to North America as a geographer on Baffin Island in the 1880s, and he traveled across Canada to continue research on the upper Northwest Coast. As a scientist he was concerned with facts more than theory, and his reports, articles, and monographs were filled with what he had observed as he moved among different groups of people with different cultures—housing, language, means of subsistence, children’s games, folk art, eating habits, kinship terms, tools, clothing—all of which Boas thought should be documented before they disappeared. As these lists and descriptions piled up, their variations and similarities noted, he began to see them all as fundamental to understanding what it means to be human.
To begin with: Was there anything that could be called human nature? Was anything innate? Was it possible that one people’s way of life was better than another’s? Did “race” as it was understood in the West even exist? Were there any cultural universals, and if there were, were they independently invented or the result of diffusion across the globe? How did cultures come into being? What roles did environment and biology play? What could we learn about ourselves by learning about others? None of these questions were rhetorical. These were issues that the United States and Canada were facing as a world war began. Race, eugenics, and immigration were politically and ethically divisive, and Boas addressed them both academically and personally in his writings, public lectures, and testimony to Congress. The local libraries of Washington had diverse books by Boas, such as The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Primitive Art (1927), and Anthropology and Modern Life (1928). For Harry, Boas’s vision of anthropology was something more exciting, more real than anything he had been taught, and something that might offer an alternative to the solitary life he faced.
After Boas immigrated to the United States in 1887, he eventually became a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and then formed the first American anthropology department to train PhDs, at Columbia University. His students were the founders of the first anthropology departments on the West Coast. One of these doctoral students, Alfred Kroeber, the head of the new Department of Anthropology at Berkeley, wrote the first introduction to the subject, his 1923 Anthropology, a book that Harry read. Under the word “Anthropology” on the cover was printed: “Race, language, culture, psychology, prehistory.” What might seem like a carnival tent show poster was a serious statement, a declaration that a new field of knowledge, a new human science, had been established. Kroeber had first studied literature and drama, and this textbook contained a staggering breadth of knowledge: the fossil record and its meaning for evolution, ecology, the concept of race and the problems it caused, language, the processes of culture, the story of the alphabet’s creation, prehistory, the origins of civilization, and a discussion of psychoanalysis and its implications for culture (Kroeber was himself a lay analyst, one of the first in the San Francisco Bay Area). He had no doubts that it was possible for a single field of study to analyze and understand almost every aspect of human behavior, and his book and other publications were evidence of what one person could accomplish. (He had even written a comparative study of the rise of the novel in Europe and Japan.) The book was a challenge to beginners, but it could also incite them to do whatever interested them. Anthropology at that moment was something of a calling, a mission, and to a young person like Harry, living in the West among some of the oldest cultures of the world, it could seem an imperative on which one could make a life.
Copyright © 2023 by John Szwed
