Billy Fife: Self-Taught Caricaturist of Frontier Seattle

THE UNTUTORED ARTIST OF PUGET SOUND.

OUR TERRITORIAL CRUIKSHANK

Nearly twenty years ago, a sailor-like looking young man, called in at the superintendent's office at the Port Gamble mills and asked for work. On being asked if he had ever worked in a saw-mill before, he replied in the negative; but added that he was hungry and willing to work.

His was a remarkable head mounted on a diminutive though athletic body. Surmount that face with a red cap and tassel, and you would have sworn it for one of the daring Turcos that stormed the great Redan, or planted the tricolor on the frowning bastions of the Malakoff.

The short, arching upper lip, with its crisp black moustache curling at the corners; the aquiline nose and pointed chin; and above all, the piercing, restless eye, spoke the PRESENCE OF LATIN BLOOD.

This man was none other than the untutored artist, the pure lover of nature, William Fife. He did not long remain at Port Gamble, but soon afterwards came to Seattle, where he spent the residue of his life. Under such influences as his genius merited, he might have achieved signal fame, for no man ever had a greater natural ability. But he never improved his opportunities and let slip golden chances. Yet his works remain behind him, to attest his great powers, not merely as a painter, but a humorist.

When we reflect that he had no education, we wonder at his mastery of language, and the subtle humor couched in many of his caricatures.

OF HIS BIRTH

But little is known, save that his mother was Greek woman and his father an Englishman; and that he was born at Cape Town, on the Cape of Good Hope in 1835. Any allusions to this subject seemed to vex him and queries about his boyhood always were rewarded by his avoidance of the questioner, in future. “D—n your eyes,” he roared savagely at a questioner of this sort, one day. “what odds does it make where I was born, or anybody else? Christ was born in a stable and he was better than either of us.” But Billy was kind-hearted and, when poverty asked for aid, forgot how scanty were his own earnings.

But it is of THE ARTIST, NOT THE MAN, That we propose to speak. So far from having any artistic education, he actually did not know the first principle of mixing paints or blending colors. Yet some of his sketches evince rare artistic merit. His “Innocents Abroad,” for instance, has the best likeness of Mt. Clemens (Mark Twain) that we ever saw; yet Billy Fife never saw the author of the “Jumping Frogs.”

But it was in the delineation of marine subjects that the Cape Town boy most excelled. His View of the race at sea, between the two American clipper ships, WHITE SQUALL AND ARCHER, Both cracking on every thread of canvass that the yielding spars would hear, is ample proof of this.

At the time this little brush took place, Billy was a sailor on the Archer and made a pencil sketch of it, which he transferred to canvass, fourteen years later. Then take his picture of the beautiful but unlucky pilot-boat Dancing Feather; what life there was in that. Also his view of Seattle front, in the Spring time, with the steamers coming and going.

The only picture extant of the ill-fated steamer George S. Wright, is one from his ready crayon. His picture of the Pensacola, was another graphic likeness. But it was AS A CARICATURIST That Billy Fife was in his element.

His native wit saw the ridiculous side of everything. Look at his sepia sketch of “No bottom at Tacoma,” with the Saranac trying the deep-sea lead. Were there ever two such likenesses as those of “Skookum” Smith and Gen. Sprague. The former of these gentlemen carried one of these sketches for months and insisted that it was the only correct likeness he ever sat for.

His “Elopement of the Ununa” was not long—but the “Railroading on Puget Sound” was a gem, and the quiet, honest face of our neighbor, HENRI L. YESLER, Was never so faithfully depicted as in that cartoon.

His first work was “Life on Puget Sound,” executed in India ink, in which the festive loggers caught a polite dose of his pungent satire. His last was an illustrated parody on Longfellow’s Excelsior, written in “pigeon English” and illustrated by outrageously funny views of Chinamen.

He was a singular, self-poised and yet faulty character, but we do not seek to warm and no ssnit. For we know full well that could the dark face come back from “the pale realms of shade, where each shall take his chamber in the silent halls of death,” he would say—“If you speak of me at all; speak of me as I was”—nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.

The right to applaud carries with it the right to censure; so we speak of one whose merits outweighed his foibles. A cloud hung over his life, that no mortal eye ever penetrated. Charles Anderson and James Osborn were his true friends and did all they could to render his latter days peaceful and free from pain.

But even to them he revealed not the mysterious weight of care that crushed him at a time when life is most enjoyable. One cold day last March THE WEARY HAND RESTED And the subtle brain ceased to throb. Billy Fife had gone to rest, and carried the secret of his strange life before One whose queries may not be evaded.

That a mighty grief underlay his whole life, more than one is aware. But its cause slumbered in the breast that bore it, as the restless black eye grew filmy and the bold spirit took its flight beyond the gates which Death’s hand alone can unbar. Where he is buried we do not know, or whether a tombstone tells his resting place, we cannot say; but if there is none above him, he shall have one ere the lapse of another year.

He was a man who imitated no one, and coveted no followers. He lived an enigma, he died a charade.