FIRST CROATIAN FISHERMEN
ON VANCOUVER ISLAND
By Zelimir B. Juricic
Matica
June 2001
Gig
Harbour is a small, picturesque maritime community. Nestled in the heart of
Puget Sound in the state of Washington, near the major urban centers of Tacoma,
Seattle, Bremerton and Olympia, it commands a breathtaking view of the Olympic
and Cascade mountain ranges. For much of its century-old history, fishing and
boat building have been the lifeblood of this closely-knit coastal community.
At one time Gig Harbour had one of the largest commercial fishing fleets in the
Pacific Northwest. 'Some seventy vessels, and ferries, and fishing boats up to
seventytwo-feet-long, had been built here. Still today, the commercial and
tourist pulse of Gig Harbour is most intensely felt'down by the water', along
the Harbourview Drive. 'That's the place to be if you truly want to
experience
this place,' proudly observed a local old-timer. 'Just look around you, there
is history, everywhere. Overlooking the water and the docks, are the string of
houses belonging to some of the oldest Gig Harbour families. In days past, the
town's fishermen readied their boats for the annual trip north to fish, and
annual ceremonies such as the Blessing of the Fleet, were regularly held here.
At the foot of Rosedale Street, in this historic part of town, is a small park
- the Jerisich park. It had been named after a Croatian fisherman Sam Jerisich
who, along with his family and two fishing partners, rowed down from Vancouver
Island some hundred and thirty years ago, to become the first white settlers in
Gig Harbour. In 1976, city fathers placed a cairn at the entrance to the park.
The text, carved in stone, reads:
In
1867 Samuel Jerisich and two Vancouver Island fishing partners arrived in Gig
Harbour. They had rowed a flat-bottomed skiff from British Columbia and like
men of the Wilkes expedition 26 years before, found shelter from the storm in
the Harbour. The bay was to their liking and thus they became the first white
settlers. Farragut and Goldsmith later moved on, but Samuel, his wife Anna, and
family remained. It was not until 1883 that other pioneers came. The family
lived in a cabin on the east side before building on the west side near the bay
entrance. Jerisich, a fisherman, also rendered dog fish oil and smoked fish,
rowing his products to Steilacoom or Olympia to sell. The fishing industry
begun by this Kotor, Yugoslavia native, continues to today through his and the
descendants of other pioneers who settled in Gig Harbour.
Who
was Samuel Jerisich? And how did he come to settle in Gig Harbour, thousands of
miles away from his native Kotor in the Gulf of Boka? What prompted this young
Croatian to leave his family and friends in the'old country'and begin a new
life on the distant shores of the Pacific? A worsening economic and political
situation in the Balkans in the middle of the nineteenth century, induced many
a young Dalmatian to seek a better life for themselves and their families in
distant parts of the world.
With
the invention of the steamship in 1807, which soon began to dominate the sea,
sailing vessels were made obsolete. Sails continued in use however, as
auxiliary power in the fleets of all the nations for several years, but the
'wood and sail'vessels could hardly compete with those made of I steel and
driven by motors.'The latter were not only cheaper, but more dependable, for
they no longer had to rely on wind as the sole source of power. Revolutionary
advancements made in shipbuilding had a profound impact on the Croatian sailing
trade. Formerly rich captains of Kotoran windjammers came to know poverty, and
many sailors found themselves without work. The approaching twentieth century
found the Kotor Bay harbours neglected and abandoned. 'On the shores of the
Boka bay one sees dead towns and dream-like streets fined with deserted villas
now all out of proportion to the needs of the trade.
The
economic woes of Dalmatia were amplified by natural calamities, the effects of
which would seriously alter a demographic pattern in the region. The grape
phylloxera ravaged Dalmatian vineyards, depriving people of their chief source
of income. The situation was made worse by the Italian wine merchants lowering
the prices of their wine, causing the Dalmatian wine market to plummet. The
long queues of unemployed Dalmatians were made longer by the addition of people
employed in the rapidly 'declining wine industry. Moreover, the lack of
drinkable water - an age old problem in the karst regions of the country - and
the ever smaller fish catch in the Adriatic - due chiefly to the failure of the
fishermen to follow an effective policy of conservation - augmented the
suffering of the food distressed population. Faced with malnutrition, and in
extreme cases death from starvation, people began to leave the impoverished
region. Those accustomed to working the land, migrated into the interior of the
country, where the soil was more fertile and agriculturally promising. Leaving
their aged parents, wives and children behind, many a young and more
adventurous men took to the sea. The most popular destination points were North
and South America, Africa and Australia Sime Jerigic:, a young Kotoran sailor,
set his eyes on the gold-rich state of California.
Jerisic:
was born in 1833, in Kotor. He was christened Simun. Simun - Sime and Simat for
short - was a popular folk name given to male offsprings by peasants in Lika,
the part of Croatia on the Karst, the bare, rugged limestone behind the
Dalmatian coast. It is possible that the child's parents were of peasant stock,
and from Lika (in Croatian, Licani). When condition of their lot began to
deteriorate due to heavy taxes, unjust land allocation, and government
regulation prohibiting goat raising for the sake of preserving rapidly
diminishing forests, which resulted in the virtual disappearance of milk and
milk products from the peasants' table, many a Lican descended the Velebit
mountains to Dalmatia in search of work. The Jerisic’s chose Kotor, and it was
there where their son Simun was born. Throughout the empire, the Licani were
known as tough, strong, and courageous people. They distinguished themselves as
soldiers and frontiersmen on the former Military Frontier in the Balkans and
the battlefields of Europe. But, as was characteristic of many a young man in
the region, the Licani had one principal failing - most were illiterate.
According to the census of 1900, nearly seventy percent of men, between thirty
and fifty years of age were illiterate, and nearly ninety per cent of the women
of the same age. Even among young men between ten and twenty, over half could
neither read nor write. Simun Jerisic: was illiterate. Education
notwithstanding, in the eyes of his descendants, Sam was 'one helluva strong,
tough, guy - a hero. He had no fori-nal education because his parents could
probably not afford to give him one. But, one must respect a man. He sure had
guts. It's amazing how a man who could neither read nor write, and with
practically no money in his pockets, could come all this way! Did you know that
he rounded the Horn several times as a sailor9 Can you imagine achieving
something like this in those days?
When
the sordid cry of'Gold! Gold! Gold! come echoing out of California in 1848,
interest in California's gold quickly spread beyond its borders and by the end
of that year reached a fever pitch. A long list of ships were available in New
York to carry people to the land of wealth. In the last month of that year and
early in the following, eleven thousand people sailed from New York and
Baltimore in one hundred and seventy-eight vessels, and the numbers grew at a
crazy rate. Jobs were a plenty for men to crew the ever increasing number of
ships. Sime Jerisic: readily found work on one of them. It was an Austrian
ship, which was plying the waters from Europe via New York, to California.
Our
great-grandfather sailed from Dalmatia on a sailing ship - which would be a
freighter of sort at that time - to New York, then round the Horn. It was a
long haul from New York. He sailed this same route, round the Cape and into California,
the second time a long haul, a couple of three years. There was no Panama Canal
then, so the trip around the Horn was something else, long way, six months or
so, and you had to do it during summer. The second trip he made he stayed in
San Francisco, since his ship was only San Francisco bound. This was in 1854. 1
don't know how long he stayed in San Francisco and what he did there, before
moving up the coast on another ship.
The
land his compatriots called 'Zlatna Kalifornia', Golden California was not
totally alien to the newly-arrived, twenty-oneyear old Kotoran sailor. The
climate, the surrounding mountains and the sea, resembled that of his native
Dalmatia. The olive and fig trees, oranges and cypresses, grew in profusion
upon the land. And the several thousands of his countrymen residing in and
around the city, could help him during a critical period of adjustment from the
old world to the new. The San Francisco Dalmatians were found in a variety of
businesses ranging from coffee saloons, restaurants, to fruit and vegetable
vendors, and wine merchants. Dalmatian pilots, captains, and mates, were known
for their mastery of the treacherous waters of the San Francisco Bay and Delta
waterways. Captain John Silovich, a master mariner from Dalmatia, was renown
for guiding ships up and down the California coast and into the Golden Gate.
And in the Bay itself, Dalmatians - many owned their own boats - had a
reputation of being superb fishermen Further afield, Dalmatians were found
working on a number of coastal steamers running to and from San Francisco to
more remote regions of the Pacific coast, as far north as Canada and Alaska.
Every day the harbour was the scene of coal and lumber schooners arriving from
the northern coast, scows discharging coal or hay, and transpacific steamers
landing passengers and freight. 'We don't known what our great-grandfather did
during his four-year stay in San Francisco. What we do know, however, is that
during his stay in the city he changed his name from Croatian Simun
Jerisic" to the more American sounding Sam Jerisich, and that he left San
Francisco and moved up the coast, to Canada, when the gold was discovered
there, in the 1860's.
In
1858, throughout California, the word spread like a brush-fire of the possible
gold rush, this one to the north, on the Fraser River, in British Columbia, and
that men would be needed to crew boats expected to take gold-diggers to new
Eldorados there. Gold was everywhere plentiful, more plentiful the miners
think, than formerly in California; strange someone should not have found it
before. In March and June, 1858, ocean steamers from California, crowded with
gold-seekers - carrying perhaps three times the complement allowed by law -
arrived every two or three days at Victoria. At the lowest computation, at the
beginning of the rush, some eighteen thousand people from California, Oregon,
and Washington, arrived in Victoria. Among the many boats which entered
Victoria harbour in 1861, the British Colonist recorded the arrival of a brig, the
Ivich, from San Francisco. Captained by one Vacorsovich, possibly a Croat, the
vessel plied the waters between San Francisco and Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island,
hauling coal. The 260 ton Ivich was registered at the port of Trieste, and
carried a crew of nine men. 'It was on one such cargo vessel from San Francisco
that my great-grandfather Sime came to Nanaimo. As far as I know, he jumped the
ship there to become a fisherman in Canada.
In
the late 1860's, Nanaimo, seventy miles north of Victoria, was still just a
pocket of settlement in a surrounding wilderness. The great world came to it in
the form of sailing ships from all comers of the world, to pick up cargoes of
coal and/or sandstone from the near-by Newcastle Island quarry. The San
Francisco Mint, for example, was built from stone from the Newcastle quarry.
Coal, however, was Nanaimo's main export. Between 1852 and 1853 alone, 2,000
tons of coal are reported to have been shipped out, chiefly to San Francisco.
By 1865, over thirty thousand tons were exported to California. There was a
handsome profit to be made in the early days of coal-mining on the Island; the
price of coal at Nanaimo was eleven dollars, and sold at San Francisco for
twenty-eight dollars a ton. Nanaimo coal mines offered employment to several
hundred men, mostly white, Chinese and some Indians. Besides coal, lumber and
fishing began to make inroads into the Island's economy. The sea, channels,
bays, rivers, and coastal waters of Vancouver Island teemed with fish and
marine life in an endless variety; halibut, smelt, haddock and whiting, herring
and herring spawn, shrimps and prawns, trout, rock and link cod, oysters, dog
fish, seals and sea lions. A person with good knowledge of and respect for the
sea could make a decent living extracting these sea bounties from the Island
waters. Sam Jerisich wasted no time in entering the lucrative fishing business.
He bought himself a boat and took in two fishing partners. The decision to
become a fisherman was probably the most important decision he had made in his
life. When my great-grandfather came to Nanaimo, aboard a cargo vessel out of
San Francisco, he decided to go into fishing. That decision would change his
life forever. He would remain a fisherman for the rest of his life. He would fish
up and down the coast of Vancouver Island, and the whole Puget Sound. He fished
for salmon and was harvesting dogfish for oil. He was making a good living.
While in British Columbia, he married and started a family. Soon after, he
rowed his boat from Vancouver Island down here, to Gig Harbour, where he
settled with his family for good. His first home, a cabin, was right here
across the Bay, above the sand spit; my home looks right at it.
Jerisich's
first boat was a long, flat-bottomed skiff, built of well-seasoned cedar boards
and powered by sixteen-foot oars. Until his death, in 1905, at age seventy two,
the Kotoran sailor turned fisher never used motors in his boats. He powered
them in the old fashioned way - by pure 'muscle' power. He and his two fishing
partners Petar Zlatarich (In English, Peter Goldsmith), a Croatian, and John
Farragut (also known as John Farrague), a Portuguese, took turns at rowing and
pulling in the catch. The nets were drawn in by 'muscle power', too. The trio
fished either from the harbour shore, rowing out to corral the fish and
returning to the beach to draw the nets in by hand, or by trolling with
hook-and-line, a method of fishing which was practiced by native fishermen in
virtually all areas of the North Pacific coast. As they ven tured out in search
of salmon, the Slavic-Portuguese trio frequented all the known fishing grounds
in the Georgia and Juan de Fuca Straits, and the Puget Sound. The delta region
of the lower Fraser Valley was most popular, especially at spawning time,
because the valued Chinook (spring), sockeye (red) and coho (silver) salmon
weremost abundant there. The fish were plentiful, and surplus could be easily
preserved to remain edible for considerable periods. Jerisich and his fishing
partners traveled up and down the coast of Vancouver Island and the Olympic
Peninsula, selling fish and dogfish oil. It is known that they often traded
with the Indians and were frequent guests at their ceremonies and potlatches.
In the Gulf Islands, on Kuper Island, Jerisic met his future wife, Anna (dimin.
Annie). She was a full blooded Indian from Kuper Island. Due to lack of
ecclesiastical, civil, or native evidence, the exact date of marriage between
Anna Willesh Henemat and Samuel Jerisich, can only be estimated. It had probably
taken place on Kuper Island in late 1866 or early 1867, that'is before the
birth of their first child, Caroline, in Victoria, on May 12,1867. Less than
six months following the birth of their daughter, the Jerisichs abruptly left
Kuper Island for Gig Harbour, in the Washington Territory. They settled on the
west side of the bay in a one room split-cedar board cabin. Life in their new
surroundings was hard and primitive. Sam continued to fish, selling his catch
in Steilacoom, Olympia and the Hudson's Bay Store at Fort Nisqually. In time,
this enterprising Kotoran expanded his business by building a dock and
rendering plant to extract dogfish oil in Gig Harbour, as well as a smokehouse
and a warehouse for the storage of smoked and salted fish. Anna was just as
enterprising. Putting her native skills to use, she made fishing nets for her
husband, knitted, sawed and split wood, picked and dried berries, and even made
her own candies. She maintained good and peaceful relations with all her
neighbors; a small tribe of Puyallup-NisquaIly Indians, who lived at the head
of the bay, in a village complete with a long house, and the two new Slavic
arrivals, John Novak and Joe Dorotich, who with their Indian wives settled in
the nearby Millville, now a part of Gig Harbour. The Jerisichs prospered and,
in time, the family grew. In the Tenth Census of the United States for the
Washington Territory, 1880, Samuel and Annie Jeresich are listed as having five
children, three boys (John, Michael, and Samuel Jr.), and two girls (Caroline
and Melissa). In the next decade, three more children, all girls (Catherine,
Julia and Mary), were added to the pioneering Jerisich family. Samuel Jerisich,
formerly known as Sime Jerisic, died in Gig Harbour, in 1905. He was
seventy-two years old. His wife, Anna, died in 1926, at the age of eighty-two.
Both are buried in the Artondale Cemetery, in the city which they helped found.
On November 11, 1976, the citizens of Gig Harbour dedicated a park - Jerisich Park - in perpetual memory to
one of their founding fathers. In the memory of his many descendants and
friends, Sam Jerisich will forever be remembered as an example of an honest
breed of tough Dalmatian fisherman, a unique yet typical example of those whose
hard work and perseverance built the fishing communities all along the Pacific
Northwest coast of Canada and the United States. 'What our greatgrandfather did
was quite an accomplishment. Hard work, deep respect for the sea and its
bounties, helping his fellow men, love and respect for all those who came in
contact with him, these were his trademarks. We're all extremely proud of him.
And he did all this without, practically, a dollar in his pocket and the
ability to even sign his own name. But he instilled a love for learning in all
his children. This is what kind a man he was. He left his mark on all of us.
Dr.
Zelimir B. Juricic is a Professor Emirutes in the Department of Slavonic
Studies, University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C., Canada. This is an excerpt
from his forthcoming book Croatians on Vancouver Island: Echoes from the past.
Dear
Adam; Nice to hear from you again -- its been a long time since
we
met (In Zagreb, I believe?) and corresponded. I've retired three
years
ago, but am still fairly active, academically and physically.
My
manuscript Croatians on Vancouver Island; Echoes from the past, is
currently
being serialized in the CFU's Zajednicar. A short excerpt
--
on the miners on Vancouver Island -- appeared, I'm told -- I am
still
to receive the paper !!- in the latest issue of the "Z". Have
you
read it? And, of course, I'm hoping to find a publisher for my
book,
preferably in the US. A Zagreb publisher is interested in the
Croatian
version of it.
Re
your request, go ahead and use my Sam Jerisich article in your
study.
Hopefully, it should soon appear in the "Z, " in its entirety.
Hope
life is treating you well and you're as active as ever, srdacan
pozdrav
vama i vasima, Zelimir
Dr.
Zelimir B. Juricic
Professor
Emeritus
University
of Victoria
Victoria,
B.C., Canada
e-mail:
zbj@uvic.ca