The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

  In the elaborate potlatches, the chiefs of rival tribes tried to outdo each other in gift-giving. Trading goods, canoes, even slaves were offered as one tribe tried to show the other how well off they were. Though potlatches served as a sort of intertribal welfare system, they were repellent to the early Christian missionaries and government Indian agents, who outlawed them. Give away food? “An unsurmountable barrier to their material progress and civilization,” said one American Indian agent of the potlatches. Here, the government men said, handing the maritime Puyallups hoes and plots of ground, start farming. Turning their backs to the sea brought instant starvation. And within a few years following the arrival of Europeans, there was no food to give away.

  Of all the Indians in North America, possibly no tribes other than the Aztecs were more prosperous than the natives who lived near the Pacific Coast from northern California to southeast Alaska. In the Salish-speaking area, from midway up the Oregon coast to southern Vancouver Island, there were perhaps 100,000 people at the peak, living near the mouths of salmon rivers surrounded by thick forests—the densest population of aborigines on the continent. They were never big communities bound by geography or race, but rather a series of extended families whose members intermarried with other bands, or raided other tribes for their women. They had been living here—fat and happy—for more than ten thousand years. That much has been surmised from recent archaeological finds. The conventional scholarly wisdom is that the first people of North America crossed the ice corridor of the Siberian land bridge perhaps fifty thousand years ago and then spread out down the length of the continent, following herds of oversized creatures, chased one way or the other by ice sheets. A few clues have been left behind, bits of litter that tell a slice of a story, a hint of history. A 27,000-year-old stone tool was found in the Yukon. A rock spearpoint wedged inside the bone of a mastodon was unearthed on the Olympic Peninsula, dating back to 11,000 years ago; a Klamath Basin tool from southern Oregon dates to 13,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, camels, American lions and other creatures of the late Pleistocene roamed this country just as the ice receded.

  When North America was discovered for the third time—following the Siberian land-bridge travelers and the Norse seamen—the Northwest natives had already developed a fishing industry to rival that of New England today. They used seines, herring rakes, large nets and dozens of hooks attached to fishlines fashioned from kelp. In the streams a variety of weirs and traps were used to snare migrating salmon. Whales were hunted, speared by athletes in large canoes bobbing on the mean surf of the Pacific. They wore robes of water-repellent cedar bark trimmed in fur, conical cedar hats, and elkskin shoes. As woodsmen, they cut huge, even planks from trees, using nothing more than stone wedges. Some homes had gabled roofs. They had no agriculture, but they were among the few hunter-gatherer societies to develop a sophisticated culture of art, theater and mythology. They are best known for totem poles, but Coast Indian masks, figurines and dances are just as elaborate. When, after living thousands of years off the sea, they were forced in a single generation to become farmers, they gave up almost all cultural pursuits. The grim task of subsistence agriculture on rocky glacial till took up too much time to leave any for mask-making or totem-carving.

  Captain James Cook did not expect to find any natives on the wind-lashed shores of the Northwest when he arrived in 1778. Although the temperature was mild, the rain was persistent, and the mountains that rose from the saltwater inlets appeared too inhospitable for human habitation. Of course, the land had long since been given away without regard for whether anybody might actually be living here. In 1493, one year after Columbus returned from the Caribbean, Pope Alexander VI divided between Spain and Portugal the New World outside of Europe. Spain acquired all of the Western Hemisphere except Brazil; Portugal got the rest, including most of Africa. The Pope ordered the two countries to convert as many of the natives as possible, by sword or fire, to Roman Catholicism. At first, there was some confusion about these people. What were they? Monkeys without tails, or wild children of God? The dilemma was solved by Pope Julius II, who issued an encyclical in 1512 declaring that the North American Indians were in fact descendants of Adam and Eve, and therefore had souls.

  The missions of California were established before Cook set foot on Vancouver Island. San Diego was the first, in 1769. In the next two decades, the Spaniards made it as far north as Neah Bay, on the Olympic Peninsula, but gave up that fort in less than three months. The rain proved stronger than the faith, and so Catholicism did not penetrate the forests of the Northwest for many years.

  Following Cook’s path came George Vancouver, whose assistant, Peter Puget, encountered the Nisquallies and Puyallups. The first recorded face-off between Puyallups and whites happened when Puget, after whom the inland sea is named, and some crewmen went ashore for water. The British found a band of naked men, their ears and noses perforated, guarding a salmon stream. Some of them had potbellies, much like the average American who now explores this territory in his living room on wheels, the ubiquitous Winnebago. Puget traded buttons for fresh clams, and he relayed his intent to stay away from the salmon waters. “Their appearance was absolutely terrific,” Puget wrote. “Their paint only differed in the color and not the quantity used by our own fair countrywomen.”

  Spruce beer, given to Cook, Vancouver and other English explorers, kept the Europeans from dying of scurvy. In return, the King George men offered dairy products—cheese, in particular, which was considered odorous and vile—and alcohol, which the Indians could not tolerate. If the whites had left nothing but religion and other social diseases with the natives, the tribes might have held on to their land a bit longer. But the newcomers brought something stronger than any army: smallpox, against which the natives had no immunity. From the time of Cook’s visit to the time of Winthrop’s journey—little more than half a century—as much as ninety percent of the Northwest native population was wiped out. As young America grew and matured, a plague blew through the promised land of the Oregon Country, clearing away the original inhabitants as if they were scrub weed. No early white account of the Northwest is without a description of the bodies littered along the beaches, or in piles in the village center, or of babies sucking the dry breasts of their dying mothers.

  In the year Winthrop found Columbia River natives “dying in crowds” and huddled in rancid huts at Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula, another Yankee traveler, Samuel Hancock, wrote that, “It was truly shocking to witness the ravages of the disease here at Neah Bay.… The beach, for a distance of eight miles, was literally strewn with the dead bodies of these people.”

  In the lower Columbia River region, where the Chinook tribe lived and American society in the West began, 13,500 Indians were counted in 1811, six years after Lewis and Clark retreated. Thirty years later a census came up nearly empty of natives—this at a time when there were still less than a hundred whites living north of the Columbia. To some, especially the Protestant missionaries, the wave of death was the hand of God, wiping away one order to make room for the next. “The doom of extinction is over this wretched nation,” wrote Methodist historian Gustavus Hine in 1850. “The hand of Providence is removing them to give place to a people more worthy of so beautiful and fertile a country.”

  The Jesuits were a bit more sympathetic, viewing the decline in typically logical, realistic terms. “The poor Indians of Oregon will finally disappear, victims of vice and malady, under the rapacious influences of modern civilization,” wrote Father Pierre Jean de Smet, who was considered a friend of the natives. These “blackrobes,” as they were called, conducted a bitter rivalry with Presbyterian missionaries over how to treat the tribes of the Northwest. The Catholics had been introduced through the Hudson’s Bay Company, who built their fur-trading network without trying to take Indian land. Many of the Gentlemen traders married Indians and shared their cultural views while clinging to a hybrid Catholicism. The Protestant missionaries
, on the other hand, were Americans fired by Manifest Destiny and fundamentalist irrationality. By divine design, they felt, it was their duty to convert the Indians and then clear their land for settlers. They demanded that the native people cover their bodies, then they told them to abandon hunting and fishing and take up farming. Once the Indians were domesticated, the missionaries thought, they would be easily Christianized.

  As the short history of the Northwest was written, the missionaries were given a free ride, pegged into the blank holes that promoter-historians reserved for martyrs. In Washington one such missionary, Marcus Whitman, is celebrated as a kindly saint and hero. Thousands of people flock to his mission site near Walla Walla to read about the good doctor. Close by, just over the Idaho border at a state park near Lewiston, an Indian snitch and traitor, Chief Timothy of the Nez Perce, is held up as a model native because he became a Christian and farmer. The truth is a bit muddier.

  For centuries, the Nez Perce and their ancestors had been living continuously in the desert high country where the Snake River roars out of Hells Canyon and joins the Columbia. Of all the natives whom Lewis and Clark came in contact with, they were most impressed by the Nez Perce. They were a huge tribe, six thousand members living in forty-one bands at the time of white contact, superb horse-riders, powerful in build, wealthy, with a structured society. In a place where extreme landforms meet—the second-deepest canyon in the Western Hemisphere, bordered by desert on one side and mountain meadows on the other—these people lived the best of both Northwest Indian worlds. They built homes with underground basements, sheltered by sod-covered roofs and driftwood, that were cool in the 105-degree days of August and warm in the subzero temperatures of January. In the summer, they crossed the Continental Divide and hunted bison. In the fall, they fished for the goliath salmon which swam six hundred miles up the Columbia to spawning grounds in the desert. Camas bulbs, dug from the ground in late spring, provided spice and other nutrients to season meals of fish and meat. They formed bread into flatcakes, twisted reeds into snowshoes, made huge fishing dipnets from pine poles and twine. But, as strong and established as the Nez Perce were, they had one other quality which perhaps led to their doom. “Their hearts,” Lewis and Clark noted in their official journal, “were good.”

  Try as they might, at first the whites could not break the Nez Perce. In 1812, French-Canadian fur trappers set up a trading post near the village of Alpowai. But the Nez Perce considered fur-trading to be the work of weaklings; so, while tribes on the coast, from the Puyallups to the Nootkas, were knocking each other out to find pelts for the Europeans, the Nez Perce wanted no part of it. They were plenty wealthy, and didn’t need to chase beaver for a few bullets and beads. Next came the Presbyterians, Henry Spaulding and Marcus Whitman. In the late 1830s, they managed to convert one local Indian, christened Chief Timothy, set him up with a wood-frame house and garden, and dressed him in the clothes of the white man. He was held up to the Nez Perce as a role model; they called him stooge and traitor.

  Dr. Whitman established a mission near the present-day town of Walla Walla, just southwest of Alpowai, and tried to get all the Indian children to attend his stern sessions on death and the devil. He spent much of his time chasing them out of his garden; at one point, he spiked selected melons with ipecac to sicken the children. By the late 1840s, wagon trains were disgorging newcomers into the Oregon Country at a rate of six thousand people a year, and smallpox was killing a nearly equal number of Indians. Whitman, seeing the tribes as headed for extinction, tried to get the Nez Perce, the Cayuses and the Walla Wallas to give up fishing and hunting and move into grounds near his mission and become Christian gardeners. The Nez Perce, except for Timothy and a few others, stayed away and held to their freedom. But the Cayuses gave in. In 1847, several Cayuse children enrolled at Whitman’s school came down with measles, which spread among the already ravaged tribe. The disease killed half the tribal population in one year.

  Dr. Whitman proclaimed himself their savior, medical and spiritual. But as they came into the mission, they continued to die in droves. The tribes, by then, knew all about the power of white men to spread disease. Downstream, at Fort Astoria, one fur trader used to toy with a small black jar wherein resided the dread smallpox virus. Or so he said. He lorded this jar over the Chinooks whenever he wanted to control them. Feeling that the missionaries had plotted to spread the disease among them, the Cayuses at Walla Walla went on a rampage. On the night of November 29, 1847, two warriors went into the mission and split Dr. Whitman’s head with a tomahawk, killing him on the spot. Then, joined by other Cayuses, they murdered Whitman’s wife and ten other mission hands, and took about fifty men, women and children hostage. They were eventually released, unharmed. But for the next fifty years, the whites used the Whitman massacre as an excuse to pummel, hang, starve and cheat the Nez Perce, the Cayuses, the Walla Wallas and other tribes of the inland Columbia River region.

  The year Winthrop directed his gaze up the Puyallup River valley at Mount Rainier, a child was born nearby, the son of a Hudson’s Bay Company trader and his Puyallup bride. Jimmy Cross would live his first months as the child of a free nation of Puyallups, and every year after that, would fight to retain what he’d lost in infancy. Washington became a territory in 1853, when Jimmy Cross was born. The land was carved from the Oregon Territory at the Columbia and stretched east beyond the Idaho panhandle to the present western boundary of Montana. In 1850, a census count came up with less than five hundred whites living north of the Columbia, or about the same as the number of Puyallups around Commencement Bay. To encourage settlement of an area still controlled by Hudson’s Bay Company traders and commerce-smart tribal leaders, the United States Congress in 1850 passed the Oregon Donation Land Act, a singular act of thievery given the full legal blessing of the young democracy. Under this act, any white American could claim 320 acres and his wife another 320, regardless of whether that property was part of Indian country or not. In just a few years, all the choice land in the Puget Sound basin and in the Willamette Valley was taken by homesteaders and the surrogates of real estate speculators. Coupled with the smallpox epidemic, this set the stage for an initial round of treaty-making that would cede the most heavily populated Indian country in America—more than 200,000 square miles—to the government in Washington, D.C.

  Isaac Stevens, arrogant and blustery, Napoleonic in height and self-confidence, was the first territorial governor of Washington. Stevens, called “a tiny, bandy-legged tyrant” by his personal secretary, was an officer with the Army Corps of Engineers, age thirty-four, when he was sent west to govern the new territory. A reputed alcoholic, he had the temper of a Brazilian soccer fan. He was sent to the Northwest with a twofold mission: to extinguish all aboriginal title to the land, and to survey the mountains for a railroad pass.

  On Christmas morning, 1854, seven hundred Indians from lower Puget Sound gathered in the rain and chill at the Nisqually Delta to sign a treaty with Stevens. “The Great Father feels for his children,” Stevens told the shivering natives. “And now he wants me to make a bargain with you in which you will sell your lands, and in return be provided with all these things.…”

  His speech was translated into Chinook Jargon, the trade language used up and down the Northwest Coast, a blend of French, English and Salish with a three-hundred-word vocabulary. Winthrop was fluent in this shorthand language, and his book was the first to print a glossary of Chinook Jargon. Many of the treaty nuances were lost on the tribes, but they understood one thing, and to them that was the most important: they would retain fishing rights. In the Medicine Creek Treaty signed that day on the delta, the Puyallups and nearby Nisquallies gave up 2,240,000 acres in return for $32,500 to be paid over a twenty-year period and three reservations of 1,280 acres each. Article 3 of that treaty stated: “The right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations is further secured to said Indians in common with all citizens of the territory.”

  In the ne
xt few months, Stevens made four other treaties, until all six thousand Indians in Puget Sound had given up their homeland. The next year, two-year-old Jimmy Cross was ordered off the land near the Puyallup River and sent to the new 1,280-acre reservation on a bluff above the river. In that first winter of the treaty, 1855, the Puyallups saw that the tiny plot of ground assigned them would never do. The Nisquallies, accustomed to roaming the banks of the swift river that drained Rainier’s longest glacier and plying south Puget Sound in their dugouts, were equally angry. A few of their members, as instructed, took up fanning; but glacial till produced dust compared to the gold of elk, salmon and berry country. A Nisqually leader, Chief Leschi, who claimed a thumbprint had been forged next to his name on the Medicine Creek Treaty, called for war. Only a handful of the natives joined him, but there were enough of them to put a scare into Stevens, who had called the Coast Indians “a docile and harmless race.” In 1856, Leschi’s guerrilla band attacked the fledgling settlement of Seattle, but were driven back by cannon fire from the Army ship Decatur, anchored in Elliott Bay. Minor skirmishes followed for much of the next year, a shot here and there, a settler killed, a native ambushed, a farm set on fire.