is listening to what is said?” The Northwest Indian story contains humor and dark tragedy and poetry; fierce action and passive resignation; fanaticisms of loyalty and revenge; farce, wisdom, folly, and every type of mysticism including even voodoo.
Northwest native cookery would make a fascinating book also, with its mingling of many elements: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, New England, Old South, and more than a flavor of Scandinavian and Russian. There are famous dishes in the Northwest indigenous to this part of the country: Geoduck steaks cut from a gigantic clam; Captain Doane’s famous oyster pan roast, made from the little native Olympia oysters—a dish, accompanied by whiskey, which played its part in many an informal political caucus of the early days; barbecued hard-shelled crab, served with curry sauce; pies of wild blackberry and salal; Oregon grape jelly; smoked brook trout prepared over a willow fire; goat’s milk cheese from Pistol River or the rich creamy American cheddar from Tillamook.
For genuine campfire and fireside yarning it is doubtful if any other part of America can surpass the Northwest. There are all the elements necessary for folk tales and apocrypha: Indians, prospectors, miners, loggers, woodsmen, and fishermen; cowboys, outlaws, and cattle country sheriffs; sea captains and river captains, hermits and mystics, pioneers and old-timers. Yarners like Hathaway Jones of the Rogue River appear, give their prodigious imaginations a good stretch, die, and leave behind a body of humorous legends. Loggers in the land of the big trees add their picturesque quota to the still-growing saga of Paul Bunyan, the mighty giant. The Oregon seacoast which saw Drake fresh from Spanish plunder has many an ancient tale of white men and buried treasure; the most famous concerns the cache of beeswax with its mysterious inscriptions found in the sands of Nehalem. And there are classic yarns expanded into rich fictional proportions from a kernel of interesting truth which no amount of factual denial will ever succeed in killing. Among these is the famous tale of the Rawhide Railroad from Walla Walla to Wallula which was eaten by coyotes in a severe winter; and the Spokane yarn of the lawsuit over the ownership of the errant donkey who discovered the famous Bunker Hill and Sullivan mine of the Coeur d’Alenes.
There is the story of the people of the Northwest themselves, as seen through their own legislation; Oregon’s combination of conservatism and innovation; Washington’s extravagance and the horseplay and corruption of many of its political figures, along with some genuine liberal fervor. There is the story of Northwest Labor; the marching of Coxey’s local army under the leadership of General Jumbo Cantwell, a “bouncer” in a famous Tacoma gambling resort; the rise of the revolutionary I.W.W.; the “massacres” at Centralia and Everett; the early Socialist and Anarchist colonies of Aurora, Freeland, Burley, Home; the far-reaching activities today of Seattle’s Dave Beck and his notorious Teamsters’ Union.
Finally there is this very moment’s drama of hydroelectricity, the Northwest’s great new challenging potential; and along with it, an inseparable part of it—tied up with the promise of reclaimed lands and cheap electricity—the new migrations toward the Pacific; the jalopy caravans of defeated people moving out of exhausted country, moving westward filled with hope and fear.
The geologic history cannot be surpassed for mystery and marvel in all this continent. Where else could one find so varied a record of the action of ancient convulsive forces on the surface of the earth? Snowcapped mountain ranges like the Cascades and the Olympics; mighty rivers like the Snake and the Columbia; mountain passes six thousand feet high connecting Canoe and Horse country; gentle rich western valleys like the Skagit, the Puyallup, the Willamette; vast dryland acreage like the Oregon cattle counties of Malheur and Harney; wheat lands like the Palouse; apple country like the Wenatchee and Yakima, Hood River and the Valley of the Rogue—and all the riddles of lost rivers, dry falls, cones and craters and lava blankets that tease the scientific mind.
Is it to be wondered at that in a country of such scope and richness and dimension the people fell victim to the American weakness of the worship of the Big Thing—dimension admired just for dimension’s sake? Not long ago I saw the first copy of a Junior Historical Quarterly issued by the University of Oregon extension service. In it there appeared an article which showed, by the aid of old maps, that Gulliver’s Land of Giants, the fabled Brobdingnag, was actually the Olympic Peninsula. Swift created this mythical kingdom after reading Hakluyt and Purchas and their tales of the legendary kingdoms of Quivira and Anian which lay along the great unknown western ocean. This same magazine quoted from Harper’s of 1883, “They have discovered footprints three feet long in the sands of Oregon, supposed to belong to a lost race.”
Small wonder the Northwestern myth hero is Paul Bunyan, the logger giant. And in truth the far western country was not built up by weaklings. It took strong men to dare the trip westward in the first place, to accept for themselves and their wives and children seemingly endless hardships and solitude; to hew the great trees and make little clearings in the green gloom of formidable forest; to believe wholeheartedly in the future of dry desert lands; to resist the lure of goldfields south, north, and east; to keep exhausted and homesick women on the track; to exert pressure for wagon roads and later for railroads, adequate defense measures against Indians, representation in the states “back home” and all the rest of it. A Northwesterner who knows his history is always anxious to point out to the inquiring stranger that this country was won for America—in the face of marked indifference at the national capital—by the men who settled it, set up their own government, and prepared if need be to fight to keep it. This way of acquiring territory is unique in the history of America.
There’s a good deal that the descendants of pioneers might well be proud of in this Northwest country, and there are some things of which they should be heartily ashamed: curious prejudices, tendencies to exclusion and bigotry for which today we have created the word Fascist without at all altering the quality of the thing described. The descendant of pioneers is apt to look with a wary and suspicious eye on the somewhat less glamorous pioneers of the present: those migrants from the Middle West who have been pushing westward since 1935 at an estimated one hundred and ninety a day, searching for green land, rainfall, and a future for their children.
Minority groups in the Pacific Northwest—notably Chinese and Japanese—have not had a very happy history. When the Chinaman ceased to be useful as a railroad builder he was no longer welcome, and the shameful way in which he was ousted from coast and inland cities does not make very pleasant reading, although then, as so often today, there was the curious anomaly of the big interest and the liberal pleading together for racial tolerance, while on the other side of the fence stood the little man who was feeling the Chinese wage scale right in his stomach. Today liberal-minded people are already organizing to prevent the occurrence of similar treatment of a minority in the Northwest with the rising tide of anti-Japanese sentiment that now dominates the coast.
In the Pacific Northwest are clearly set forth those powers of destruction and construction by which man affects the land in which he lives. The Northwest country is still too new to hide its scars and shames. Ugly and meaningless waste has followed in the wake of the mining and lumber industries; towns which just “grew” are usually eyesores in a spectacular landscape. In a ghost town along the Eastern seaboard, when the essential industry has closed its doors and departed, the sight is not always immediately shocking or deeply depressive, for there is some rather gentle air of the past lingering about the place; the houses not infrequently possess the graciousness of line and simple dignity that belonged to a slower-paced era, and there are old trees to hide the illness that has fallen upon the community. Most of the dead towns of the Pacific Northwest, on the contrary, are apt to be grotesquely naked and ugly; for they grew up in a period when architecture, along with all the other arts, had died a shameful death. Here is post–Civil War America set forth with little softening detail from a less “commercial” earlier period. There are exceptions of course—towns that grew and died, or faded, with an air: Jacksonville, Oregon, and Port Gamble, Washington.
Yet not all the picture of the Pacific Northwest’s use of resources is a dark or negative one. The great new projects for irrigating land and for generating cheap electricity challenge the imagination with the scope of
