Course Overview: History of Washington State and the Pacific Northwest

What is Covered HSTAA 432, History of Washington State and the Pacific Northwest is an upper-division, undergraduate course on local and regional history. It focuses primarily on the three American states of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, with additional attention to British Columbia, Alaska, western Montana, and California, from the mid-18th to the late 20th century.

The course begins by introducing students to today’s Pacific Northwest and placing current issues and concerns into historical context. It then moves to consider Pacific Northwest history over two broad eras. Part I, “Contacts and Contests: Non-Indians, Indians, and Resources, 1741-1900,” considers the years when different groups of peoples both interacted with one another and tried to assert or retain control over the region. It examines the native peoples of the Northwest; the arrival, influence, and impact upon Indians of European and American explorers, fur traders, and missionaries; and the eventual success of the United States in colonizing a part of the region and asserting control over native peoples through treaties and reservations. Part II, “The American Northwest: Urban And Industrial Growth, 1846-Present,” considers the emergence of a modern American region by looking at economic, political, urban, and cultural developments during the later 19th and 20th centuries.

Three connected sets of themes provide a focus for the course. One is the changing circumstances of and relationships between the diverse peoples and cultures of the region. The chronology of the course begins with the advent of European explorers in the 18th century, but it pays ample attention to the experiences of both native peoples in the Northwest and the assorted immigrants who arrived from other parts of North America and from Europe and Asia. Another set of themes revolves around diverse people’s uses for and attitudes toward natural resources. Of course, different groups and cultures had different uses for and ideas about such things as forests, fish, and land, and these uses and ideas changed over time. It is important to understand how some peoples were able to assert their values and uses for natural resources over those of others. The third set of themes, intimately linked to the first two, is how a sense of regional identity evolved over time in the Pacific Northwest. Two aspects of this identity especially preoccupy us—the question of who supposedly belonged and did not belong in the region, and the matter of how regional residents related to and identified with the natural environs of a distinctive place. To a large extent, the answers to these questions were shaped by the agendas of the many newcomers who came to colonize, settle, and exploit opportunity in the Northwest.

Sources of Information Students in HSTAA 432 are responsible for the information presented in three different venues. First, there is basic course content presented in lectures, which serve as both interpretive overview and “textbook.” Second, a substantial amount of reading on specific topics and events is required for the course. Assigned reading includes two paperback books (Dietrich, The Final Forest, and Sone, Nisei Daughter) and a packet consisting of xeroxed copies of primary sources and scholarly articles. Each reading assignment will be accompanied by a sheet of “study questions” designed to stimulate thinking and discussion in sections. Students are also required to do additional, independent readings to complete the research-paper assignment. Third, weekly sections will discuss the readings and lectures. Students are expected to attend sections having completed and thought about the readings and to participate in an informed fashion in discussions. Readings The required readings for HSTAA 432 are available as follows. Two paperback books for the course are available for purchase at the University Book Store. They are: William Dietrich, Final Forest: The Battle for the Last Great Trees of the Pacific Northwest (New York, 1993), and Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Seattle, 1979). The remainder of the readings consist of eleven different selections, which are chapters, articles, and excerpts from a variety of primary sources and secondary materials. These selections have been photocopied and are available in a packet for sale at the Suzzallo Copy Center, 5th floor, Suzzallo Library. If you would feel more comfortable following along in an optional textbook, I suggest Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History, rev. ed. (Lincoln, 1996). Additional readings will be mentioned throughout the course, and you should feel free to inquire about them. Schwantes’s textbook also contains a useful bibliography.

Goals of the Course One major goal of HSTAA 432 is to have students become familiar with the course content as presented in the different venues and be able to write effectively about it in a mixture of assignments. This entails learning a variety of facts about and perspectives on the Pacific Northwest—one kind of thinking. Some memorization is involved, as is close and careful reading. It is also important to link past events and trends with present-day conditions.

Another goal is to improve students’ abilities to think historically—about the Northwest after 1750 or so as well as about other places and times. Historical thinking entails: the recognition of complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty in human affairs; the development of a critical—and often skeptical—attitude toward sources of information; and the understanding that events occur sequentially and that the sequence matters. Historical thinking also requires that one try to understand past events and trends from the different points of view that people living at the time had, and to recognize that those points of view from the past are generally substantially different from our own today.

To encourage better historical thinking, HSTAA 432 relies on a good deal of reading of primary sources, i.e. documents created by people who were eyewitnesses to the events and developments of past times. Students are required to read and think critically about these primary sources, to try to appreciate where their authors “were coming from” and why they arrived at the conclusions that they expressed. On at least one occasion, students must write a short paper about the primary-source documents they are readings. Students are also asked to read and write about secondary sources, i.e. the writings of several historians who have themselves used primary sources to construct arguments about the past. Finally, the course requires that students write their own research papers, based at least in part on the reading of primary sources, to demonstrate their own abilities to read sources critically and to think and write historically.

Another goal in HSTAA 432 is the ability to think conceptually. Coming to terms with the past requires that one impose some intellectual order on the numerous, diverse, sometimes chaotic set of facts from previous times, to make connections between different trends and events and historical persons. This is done by working carefully with concepts that help to clarify the past by explaining patterns in historical development. Conceptual thinking links various events together. For example, conceptual thinking has produced the three major themes of this course (relations between diverse peoples; relations between peoples and environs; and the emergence of regional identities) and it also has enabled us to divide the course chronologically into two cogent periods. Conceptual thinking also links local and regional history to broader contexts, such as national and international developments. For example, the late-18th-century rise of the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest and the late-19th-century emergence of the logging and fishing industries can both be regarded as aspects of a changing global system of market capitalism.

Conceptual thinking permits us to pull together selectively a variety of issues, sources, and events into explanations of the past. Students will be asked to develop such explanations in essays composed for a midterm and a final examination. Essay exams require the integration of material from all parts of the course—lectures, readings, discussion sections—into essays that argue a thesis in response to an exam question, and demonstrate historical and conceptual thinking.

Unit one: Whose Washington? Whose Northwest?

Lesson One: Who Belongs in the Pacific Northwest?

In recent years it has seemed that people in the Pacific Northwest (i.e. the American states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho) have shared two things. The first is a growing identification with salmon. As runs of wild Pacific salmon have become threatened, people in the region have latched on to them as a critical symbol of Pacific Northwest identity. (I take up the issue of the salmon in the next lesson.) The second thing we have in common is California, or, I should say, a pronounced aversion to California and all things and people Californian. Many people in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington have developed strong opinions about California and Californians in recent times. Oregon actually led the way during the 1970s, with a both humorous and serious campaign to keep Californians away. Washington and Idaho became more vociferous during the 1980s and 1990s. The anti-Californian sentiment first crested in the Seattle area during the late 1980s. I took note of the trend, and started discussing it with students in my classes on Pacific Northwest history. I also started surveying students in my courses as a way of examining attitudes toward California and Californians, and tracking their change over time. (I only consider the attitudes of students from western Washington toward California and Californians. Students from areas other than western Washington are requested to answer different questions, which are also discussed below. If you are a registered student in HSTAA 432, you have been asked to fill out a this survey, and your responses are being added to my data.)

I have been doing this survey for about ten years, and over that time students’ attitudes toward “California” and “Californians” have been fairly consistent. Each year when students are asked to list phrases that come to mind when they hear the word “California” or “Californian,” they regularly mention the following: “bad drivers,” “pollution,” “overcrowded,” “busy” or “fast-paced,” “wealthy” and “powerful,” “crime,” “in love with their cars,” and various combinations of “pushy,” “vain,” “self-centered,” “loud,” “rude,” “disrespectful,” “superficial,” “immoral,” “uptight,” “plastic,” “artificial,” and “mindless.” A number of respondents have claimed that Californians are “taking over” the Pacific Northwest, or that too many are “coming to Washington.” In 1997 one student spoke for many when she or he wrote, “Californians: 1) are invading our beautiful area; 2) as [former Oregon governor] Tom McCall said, ‘Come and visit but go home’; 3) Californians are crazy drivers who cause accidents; 4) they are driving up the housing prices; and 5) as my mother says, ‘I hate Californians.'”

It is important to realize that newcomers in the Northwest from California have clearly gotten the message. One professional man in Seattle claimed in 1991 that “The hostility toward Californians is worse than race prejudice in the South. It’s just open season for contempt of Californians.” A 16-year-old whose family had moved from California to Idaho complained in 1996 of the “California bashing” she received in high-school, where even the teachers—who were supposed to set an example—put down newcomers from the Golden State. She went on to list “unfair treatment and blatant prejudice” as important reasons why students who had come from California were dropping out of school.

Or, consider the findings of Californian sociologist Glenn T. Tsunokai. In the mid-1990s he took a standard survey designed to measure prejudice against African Americans, homosexuals, and other minorities, and inserted the word “Californians” for “blacks” or “gays.” He then mailed 600 surveys out to Oregonians, and received 319 replies. Tsunokai found what could be described as a substantial amount of prejudice. A large majority of Oregonians expected that Californians would “create ‘problems'” in their communities by moving there. Oregonians also tended to describe Californians with the same kind of adjectives that students in my courses have used—”shallow,” “ruthless,” “competitive.” (It is worth noting that Washingtonians were more highly regarded. Sixty-eight percent of Oregonians believed that Californians would bring about negative changes in their communities by moving there; only twenty-four percent of the respondents said the same thing about Washingtonians.) When interviewed for a newspaper story, Tsunokai said that he was not so afraid of Oregonians that he would not move there. However, he did think he would need to take a few precautions: “I would change my license plates real fast, and not wear any of those kinds of shirts that identify you as being from California.” (Information regarding Tsunokai’s study comes from the Portland Oregonian, Nov. 12, 1996, A1, A7.) A Piece of the California Dream (below). (Claudia K. Jurmain and James J. Rawls, California: A Place, A People, A Dream, San Francisco, 1986. 24. Copyright, The Oakland Museum)

Now, speaking about California may not seem to be the most logical way of starting a course on the Pacific Northwest, but I find these recent attitudes toward California and Californians quite revealing. I do not think that we learn much from them about the people and society of California. After all, they are stereotypes that tell us more about the people who hold them than they do about those they are intended to depict. I’d like to use them as a kind of mirror that reflects back to us something about the people who have expressed them. I propose to analyze these images for what they tell us about Pacific Northwesterners.

In doing this, I aim to encourage, and “model,” the historical and conceptual thinking that is a main focus of this course. That is, I want to suggest: that matters that seem simple on the surface are not so simple; that we need to examine both our own assumptions and the conventional wisdom around us, and not accept them uncritically; and that we can arrive at a better understanding of the present by placing it in historical perspective—that is, by seeing it as a continuation or modification of patterns of the past. Let’s look, then, at the recent anti-California attitudes from six different viewpoints.

First, anti-California attitudes contradict our own perceptions of ourselves. People in the Pacific Northwest generally don’t regard themselves as prejudiced. Indeed, the region has a reputation for being polite and friendly. The same Oregonians mentioned in the poll above, the ones who were so suspicious and distrustful of Californians, consider themselves to be “thoroughly decent people: charitable, trustworthy, law-abiding, considerate, cooperative, and neighborly”—their attitudes toward Californians apparently notwithstanding. Moreover, they tend to see people from Washington as basically similar to them. Washingtonians return the favor. When I survey my classes about their attitudes toward Californians, I also ask what they think about Oregonians. My students from western Washington have looked upon Oregon and Oregonians rather favorably. The state of Oregon is reportedly more rural and “laid back” than Washington, and has more “hippies (or, as one respondent said, more “crunchy granola types”). Oregon also allegedly has a duller “lifestyle.” But its people are said to be environmentally aware, and the state is “clean and green.” One student paid Oregonians the highest compliment by calling them “essentially Washingtonians.” In other words, the people of Oregon and western Washington see themselves in fairly positive, similar terms, and see Californians in fairly negative, dissimilar terms. We ought to be suspicious of these kinds of generalizations, where one set of people is imagined to be the fairly exact opposite of another, where “we” appear as good and the other as bad. Yet there is much in the history of the Pacific Northwest—for example, in Indians’ treatment at the hands of non-Indians, or in white attitudes toward immigrants from China and Japan—to suggest that this kind of dualistic and stereotypical thinking is not unique to the 1990s. (See the sixth point.)

Second, we ought to be careful about what we say regarding other people, because we may have the same things being said about us. As part of surveying students in my courses, I have asked those from eastern Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, and Montana to write down the phrases that come to mind when they think of Seattle or Seattleites. In response, about half of the students have offered terms that echo very closely the phrases that students from western Washington employ to describe California and Californians—i.e., “bad drivers,” “crowded and congested,” “fast paced”; “crime”; “individualistic” and “not community-oriented”; “pretentious”; “environmentally destructive” (with sprawling housing developments destroying forests and wetlands); “arrogant”; and “yuppies” (not a word used in any endearing fashion). Two other traits were mentioned frequently—”liberals,” and a variety of things having to do with coffee (e.g. “espresso-slurpers,” “coffee addicts,” “latte land”).

One person from eastern Washington dubbed Seattle “Spokane’s wicked step-sister.” Meant to be humorous, there is a more serious side to the contrast. In the later 1980s a number of western-Washington companies, like Seafirst Bank and Boeing, began putting new offices in Spokane rather than around Seattle. A major reason was that Spokane had less congestion and lower housing costs, and employees there tended to be more stable, more contented, more productive, and more likely not to belong to unions. A Seattle Times article of Oct. 25, 1988 (headlined, with “typical” Seattle arrogance, “Why Spokane?”) quoted one resident as saying that he liked Spokane because it felt more like the 1950s, while another said it resembled Iowa towns with their “farm-boy work ethic.” It was almost as if, in trying to contrast itself with the highly urbanized and fast-paced city of Seattle, Spokane wanted to secede from the Pacific Northwest of the 1980s or 1990s, and align itself with a different time and place. In sum, there were many in the Northwest—including many Portland residents—who felt that Seattle had become too big or its own good, just as people from western Washington thought that California had become too big for its own good. Clearly, perceptions of places and peoples are relative. From Spokane’s perspective, Seattle looked a lot like how Los Angeles appeared to Seattleites.

Third, perceptions of the influence of Californians upon the Pacific Northwest may well have been mistaken. In recent years, one of the widespread ideas about Californians in the Pacific Northwest has been that they have greatly exacerbated many of the social and urban problems of the region. Thus, the influx of Californians is said to have caused an increase in gang activity in urban centers, a rise in crime, increases in traffic congestion and “bad” driving, a drastic jump in the price of housing, and a host of environmental problems. One problem with this sort of explanation is that it overstates the influence of newcomers from the Golden State by overestimating their numbers.

When Seattle became particularly nervous about the impact of Californians in the late 1980s, there existed a widespread perception that Californians were overrunning the place as they tried to escape their own overgrown cities. It is true that some Californians were migrating northward, but they comprised only 12% of all newcomers to Washington between 1980 and 1987. Oregon, by contrast, accounted for 21% of all in-migrants over that span, yet few people in Washington complained about being overrun by Oregonians. (Recalling that Oregon had been first, in the 1970s, actually to campaign against Californians, one might conclude that the state was exporting to Washington not only its people but also its well-developed anti-California sentiments.) Moreover, in the same period, “natural” population growth in Washington accounted for 54% of the state’s net growth, while out-of-state immigrants accounted for 46%. In other words, for every one newcomer from California in 1980-1987, there were roughly ten babies born to Washington parents. The state was, in truth, the greatest source of its own population increase. (In King County, in the period 1990-97, the same pattern held. Residents felt they were being inundated by newcomers, but births actually accounted for 64% of the growth. Of newcomers to the county, furthermore, most were from other countries, not other states. In counties to the north and south of King County, by contrast, migrants outnumbered births. Seattle Times, March 17, 1998, A1, A14.

To gain perspective, one needs look at population flows between Washington and California over longer periods of time. People move toward economic opportunity. During Washington’s recession of the early 1980s, it had a net loss of people to California; during California’s slump in the later 1980s, Washington had a net gain of people from California. The two states have tended to send people back and forth, generally depending upon the health of their respective aerospace and other industry. Between 1970 and 1990, Washington sent seventy (70) fewer people to California than California sent to it! Prior to that, the flow had mostly gone in the other direction. The 1970 U.S. census (at the depth of a steep downturn at Boeing) counted 238,000 people living in California who had been born in Washington, as opposed to 138,000 people living in Washington who had been born in California. In sum, while Californians have certainly been a part of the growth in population in Washington state since 1970, it is easy to overestimate their numbers, and also their influence. It has also been easy to mistake the in-migration of Californians as a quite recent phenomenon. Nonetheless, Californians are seen as an important source of social problems. Let me suggest one speculative reason why.

Fourth, in identifying an influx of people from California as the cause of a variety of problems, people from western Washington (and probably from Oregon, too) have found a scapegoat to blame for problems that they have themselves created. It is easy to assign blame for a wide variety of ills to an outsider, someone who is readily identified as different. But in truth it is usually not the outsider who has caused all the trouble. More than anyone else, Washingtonians are responsible for the conditions attributed to Californians. It is people from this state who are buying most of the new cars and houses, using most of the roads, having most of the babies, and committing most of the crimes. Moreover, if newcomers are arriving, it is in large part because Washington employers such as Microsoft and Boeing and state universities are recruiting them here to join expanding work forces. Most people from the Evergreen State cheer on their homegrown employers, which form the basis for their prosperity. But they seldom pause to ask whether these organizations—not new arrivals from out of state—ought to share more of the responsibility for the urban ills so commonly blamed on Californians.

Fifth, newcomers to the state, including those from California, contribute to Washington in valuable ways, as the case of greater Seattle illustrates.During the late 19th century, the captain of a ship visiting Seattle summed up quite well a distinctive local attitude that persists to this day: “You Seattle pioneers are very peculiar people. You want to have a big city but don’t want anyone to live here but yourselves.” The fact is, of course, a city cannot be “big” if it insulates itself. Boeing, Microsoft and the University of Washington could hardly thrive without luring skilled and educated employees from out of state; the local economy depends upon an influx of talented people, and many of them come from California. Newcomers contribute to not only the economy but also the cultural life that makes Seattle “big” or cosmopolitan. Think about the theater and art and music and movies and restaurants that give Seattle such a rich culture; think about the state’s burgeoning wine industry, which gained so much assistance at the start from California’s Napa Valley. Think about the diversity of peoples—so essential to an urban and urbane existence—that arises as a result of immigration.

Moreover, it may be that the people moving here from elsewhere share our values more than we think they do. Many Californians coming to the Northwest explain their migration by saying they wanted to leave “the California rat race behind.” When I survey the students in my classes who come from outside the Pacific Northwest, I ask them how it is that they ended up in Washington state. Many, of course, had little choice in the matter—the Army sent them here, their spouse got a job here, and so on. But a good number have said that they came because they liked the natural environment of the area and the amenities of urban life on Puget Sound. In other words, they appreciate the very things that we value so highly about our place of residence. Indeed, like converts to a new religion, they may prove to be more devoutly protective of the place than the old-timers, particularly as they worry about it replicating the “rat race” they left behind.

Sixth, and finally, I would argue that the recent anti-Californian sentiments perpetuate an ugly form of bigotry that has long characterized Pacific Northwest history. Since the arrival of American settlers during the 1840s, there has been a constant effort on the part of the dominant population-primarily people of European descent-to define the Pacific Northwest by excluding certain groups of “others” from it or by marginalizing certain groups of “others” within it. Put in different terms, there have been constant attempts to say that some people “belong” in the Pacific Northwest while others—particularly people of color—do not. White Pacific Northwesterners at times formally prohibited as well as informally discouraged African-American migration to the region. They warred against and dispossessed Indian groups. They lobbied the federal government to exclude Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and they forcibly expelled the Chinese from some towns during the 1880s, and outlawed ownership of land by Japanese immigrants in the 1920s. Most Northwsterners supported incarceration of all people of Japanese descent during World War Two, and many lobbied to keep them away from the region after the war.The Ku Klux Klan attained considerable power in the region during the 1920s, and in Oregon almost enacted legislation, aimed at immigrants, designed to outlaw parochial schools. During the 1980s and 1990s, white supremacist groups were attracted to the Pacific Northwest because it had fewer people of color than other parts of the country, and the goal of an exclusively white population seemed more attainable there. There is, in short, a long and unfinished record of people in the Pacific Northwest trying to define the region in exclusive, racial terms. It is not a proud legacy.

One might think that the more recent hostility toward Californians is different. After all, the hypothetical Californians who have attracted so much attention in recent years have tended to be white and relatively affluent. At times in our history, however, even “white” Californians have been castigated in racial terms. In 1924, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce published a booklet called In the Zone of Filtered Sunshine: Why the Pacific Northwest is Destined to Dominate the World. Trying to make a virtue out of necessity, boosters attempted to explain why investors and immigrants should prefer Seattle over California. “The most energetic human types and the highest and most enduring civilizations have evolved in the cloudiest region of the world, Nordic Europe….The entire United States, with the exception of the Pacific Northwest, is not well adapted for the permanent survival of the Nordic races, but is better suited for the darker types.” California would attract the “Mediterranean races,” the pamphlet predicted, so its “civilization” would be of the “inferior” type, susceptible to the negative effects of “intense sunshine” and therefore certain to decay at an early date. Seattle, on the other hand, would attract “Nordic” types, which would ensure a more lasting and successful “empire.”

Perceptions of Californians as the “other” during the 1920s embodied the same kind of bigotry as was expressed by whites against people of color throughout the region’s history. I would argue that perceptions of Californians during the 1980s and 1990s have continued the trend. Stereotypes of people assumed to be different have consistently offered a way to help define the Pacific Northwest as a region and to provide it with a sense of identity, but they have done so at considerable expense. Like any stereotype, they have grossly misunderstood and dehumanized the people they have been meant to portray. Moreover, like any stereotype, these perceptions have generally been based on imperfect information. They have assigned blame for problems mistakenly, and they have helped to perpetuate unrealistic understandings of the causes of those problems. Finally, they have helped to distort the meaning of the region by distorting the knowledge of its own history.

One reason to ask “Who Belongs in the Pacific Northwest?” is to think of all the imperfect answers there are to that question, including the ones that have been offered throughout the region’s history. One reason to study the region’s history is to arrive at better answers, or perhaps better questions.

Unit 1: Lesson 2 – To Whom Does the Pacific Northwest Belong?

“Kwagulth the Salmon,” print by Northwest Native artist Tony Hunt. © 1976 (Hall, Edwin S., Blackman, Margaret B., and Rickard, Vincent. Northwest Coast Indian Graphics. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1981. p. 64.) The previous lesson asks who belongs in the Pacific Northwest, and addresses the question by considering the image of Californians, who have come to serve as a rallying point for people in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. Many residents from these three states, who hardly see eye to eye on every issue, have in recent years tended to agree upon a mutual aversion to Californians. Their stereotypical views of people from the Golden State may not have been accurate, but they have nonetheless contributed to a stronger sense of regional identity. People in the Pacific Northwest seem to know who they are because they have a strong (if largely dubious) sense of who they are not—Californians.

Besides Californians, the other increasingly powerful foil for regional identity in recent years has been salmon. In this case, however, in contrast to Californians, salmon seem to stand for all that is good about the Pacific Northwest (and perhaps all that appears to be endangered by the influx of people from south of the 42nd parallel). The wild runs of Pacific salmon are an indigenous, homegrown species. Unlike recent immigrants, they are native to the Northwest. In fact, they are of nature itself, spawning in freshwater streams. Salmon appear to bind the region together by crossing the lines that divide it. For example, they live on both sides of the Cascade Mountains, and therefore stand as something that the eastern and western halves of the Northwest can claim in common. Moreover, the salmon apparently cross human divides as well as geographic ones. Although Indians and non-Indians have fought one another for years over access to the runs of fish, the iconic salmon is something that the two groups share. One consequence is that artwork portraying the fish by both Indian and non-Indian artists has grown quite popular throughout the region. And much is made of the newfound cooperation between Indians and non-Indians as they cooperate in trying to save the dying runs of wild salmon.

In the world of symbols, the salmon are seen as uniting the Pacific Northwest. Thus the journalist Timothy Egan, in The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (1990), writes that “The Pacific Northwest is simply this: wherever the salmon can get to.” And because they are so important to our regional identity, it is our duty to save them. Will Stelle, head of the Northwest office of the National Marine Fisheries Service, explains: “Salmon are part of the heart and soul of the Pacific Northwest. They have defined its history and its culture and hopefully its future.” The clear implication is that if the wild runs of Pacific salmon are allowed to die, the region as a special place—as a distinctive part of the United States—will die, too.

The symbol of the salmon, like the symbol of the Californian, has a lot of power in the Pacific Northwest. But like the symbolic Californian, the symbolic salmon probably masks or obscures more about the Pacific Northwest than it reveals. Behind the warm and fuzzy notion of Salmon Are Us lies a set of much more divisive issues. Can the wild runs of salmon be saved? Can the region and the nation afford to spend what it will cost to save the threatened species? Who will gain and who will lose from plans to salvage runs of salmon?

Such questions lead to an even bigger concern: Who “owns” the Pacific Northwest, and who therefore has a stake and a voice in how questions about the future of salmon are answered? The previous lesson asked who belongs in the Pacific Northwest. This lesson asks to whom the Pacific Northwest belongs.

One of the major attractions of the salmon as a regional symbol is that it is indigenous; it “belongs” to the region and all its peoples. And, the implication is, all the people of the Northwest belong to it. Because preserving the salmon means preserving ourselves, we tend to assume that it is up to us to save the species of fish, and that what Pacific Northwesterners can manage to do about the salmon should and will be accepted by others. Legal and political and economic realities, however, suggest otherwise. Saving the salmon is a matter much more complicated than having Northwesterners simply agree to preserve the species that they all love. The answer to the question of to whom does the Pacific Northwest belong is equally complex.

As I write these words in spring 1998, numerous runs of Chinook salmon in western Washington have just been nominated for inclusion on the federal government’s list of endangered species. This action has heightened the region’s anxiety about preserving salmon. It confirms, of course, what is already widely known—the wild runs of salmon are disappearing. But it also raises another specter: if Washington cannot develop a credible plan to preserve endangered species of salmon, the federal government will step in and impose its own plan on the state. The fear, of course, is that the federal government will prove insensitive to local needs.

The question of saving the salmon is closely tied to the issue of who controls the region, or “to whom the Pacific Northwest belongs.” Officials in Washington state worry about possible federal efforts to save salmon intruding upon state and local affairs. They suggest that the region belongs to its residents, not federal officials, and those residents ought to be permitted to solve their own problems. But in fact the federal government is intimately involved in all questions of the salmon’s status; it is, after all, a federal law, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, that has raised the current dilemma. Moreover, there is a long tradition of federal involvement in Pacific Northwest salmon. In 1974 a federal judge in Tacoma, George Boldt, handed down a landmark decision that interpreted treaties between Indians and the U.S. government during the 1850s. Boldt determined that, based on the language of the treaties, Indian peoples in western Washington had a right to 50% of the commercial catch of all salmon, even though the native population amounted to no more than 1.5% of the population. In this way, and many others, the federal government has long played a role in determining who gets what natural resources in the Pacific Northwest.

In spring 1997, a court case filed in Oregon revealed the complexity of modern squabbles over salmon. The state of Oregon filed suit against the U.S. government, trying to get it to live up to federal laws requiring protection of threatened species. More specifically, Oregon wanted the federal agencies the manage the flow of the Columbia and Snake Rivers so as to spill more water over dams in order to improve young salmon’s odds of survival. Oregon was supported by representatives from the state of Washington, and by environmental groups, commercial fishing interests, and even some federal agencies sympathetic to more salmon protection (the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service). Unified against the suit were other, more prominent agencies of the U.S. government (the Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, and Bonneville Power Administration or BPA), the states of Idaho and Montana (which benefit more from not spilling more water over the dams), and an assortment of private interests (inland shipping interests, irrigated farmers, and aluminum companies that rely on cheap BPA electricity) who fear they would lose money if the river system is managed differently. Each of the parties to the lawsuit, of course, had a different answer to the question of to whom does the region and its salmon belong. And, as if disagreements within and between the states of the Pacific Northwest were not enough, there have long been even wider disputes underway. The United States and Canada have since the late 19th century been arguing over which country’s fishers have rights to salmon runs passing through one nation’s salt waters on their way to the other’s spawning streams. Even though the Bonneville Dam (below) and others along the Columbia and Snake Rivers have fish ladders, the dams’ size and function has created a serious obstruction to migrating salmon. (University of Washington Special Collections, Neg. #15581.)

Disputes over salmon anticipate a variety of historical questions to be covered in this course. At one time, Indian groups occupied the Pacific Northwest by themselves. They too disagreed among themselves over who controlled what parts of the region. When non-Indian peoples arrived to explore, exploit, and occupy the region, they came representing different European and North American nation states—Spain, Britain, Russia, the United States, and Canada all claimed at least a portion of the Pacific Northwest at some time. They argued extensively over the question of to whom the Pacific Northwest belonged, seeing it as a matter of international rivalry. These nations also set about claiming territory from native peoples—resulting in, among other things, the treaties that reserved for Indians one-half of the commercial salmon catch. Within the American part of the Pacific Northwest, territories and states evolved, each claiming a portion of the region and each establishing a distinctive government and a series of counties and towns. All of these occupations gave a variety of governments a claim to the Pacific Northwest.

One answer to the question, “to whom does the Pacific Northwest belong,” then, is government. Consider that the federal government owns 29.5% of the land in Washington, 52.5% of the land in Oregon, and 63.7% of the land in Idaho. Although Northwesterners may resent federal intervention in the salmon crisis and their other affairs, it is no accident that the U.S. government looms so large in the region. It is the largest landholder, and it is obligated to protect and manage its lands in the interests of all fifty states, not just the Pacific Northwest. In a sense, people from Georgia and New York and South Dakota “own” parts of the Pacific Northwest, because such lands as national parks and national forests are managed in their name and for their benefit. The U.S. government, as another example, determined unilaterally (and secretly) between 1943 and 1987 just how the lands and resources at the Hanford nuclear reservation would be managed, based primarily upon the needs of national security. The powers of the federal government are further enhanced by its special relationship to certain lands. Only the United States, for example, has the power to treat with Indian peoples, and the 2 million acres of Washington state set aside as Indian reservations (as of 1989) are managed by Indians and federal agencies, not by state or local officials. And only the federal government has the power to negotiate treaties with other nations, so when Washingtonians clash with British Columbians about land-use or salmon-rights issues, resolution of the dispute requires federal interaction with the nation of Canada. As another example, federal investment in the Columbia Basin Project and the various dams on the river and its tributaries give the U.S. government an extraordinary role in managing the river system. When it considers the fate of salmon in that system, it must take into account the interests of all fifty states, and not just those of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. In short, through federal ownership, significant parts of the Pacific Northwest quite literally belong to a lot of people who do not live in the region, and they are in many ways managed by people and policies centered in “the other Washington,” the nation’s capital.

The federal government, of course, is hardly the only party to whom the Pacific Northwest belongs. Take a look at the forest lands in Washington state (one of the topics covered in William Dietrich’s The Final Forest). The Evergreen State contains about 44 million acres; roughly half of those can be classified as forest land. Slightly more than half of this forest land (50.6%, or about one-quarter of the entire state) is publicly owned. The U.S. Forest Service owns and manages 28.4% of the publicly owned forest; the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs own another 8.9%; the state Department of Natural Resources owns another 10.3%; and counties and towns own the remainder of the publicly held forest. Private owners possess 49.4% of the forest, and they are divided roughly in half, between big corporate and smaller owners.

Let us think a minute about the forest land owned by big companies. Most of those companies are publicly traded firms, with investors or shareholders located around the world. The companies, and therefore the forest lands of Washington, are thus managed for the benefit not of residents of the Pacific Northwest but rather of those people who owns shares in the companies who own the forest land. In this way, too, much of Washington and the Pacific Northwest quite literally belongs to people who live outside the region. Because owners of forests are affected by the salmon problem (erosion of forest land is one of the big contributors to destruction of salmon-spawning habitat), they have a stake and a voice in problem.

Much of Washington’s land, of course, is privately. Parcels of the Pacific Northwest, in other words, quite literally belong to specific individuals and families. However, as land owners are increasingly finding out, their rights to the property they own are not unfettered. (This is a subject taken up in William Kittredge’s essay “Owning It All.”) In the beginning of the 1990s, to give one example, the state of Washington passed relatively stringent growth management legislation which tried to limit urban sprawl in order to protect farmland, wetlands, and wilderness. (Oregon had had similar laws on the books for more than twenty years.) The new laws limited what private owners could do with their property. If a farmer wants to sell her land to a developer and retire to Arizona on the profits, or a timber company wishes to convert a forest into a housing development, the right to do so is now limited. The state can prevent certain kinds of land developments now in order to prevent damage to wetlands, keep farmland in production, preserve old-growth forest and certain animal species’ habitat, and prevent soil erosion that might destroy salmon-spawning streams. The state has determined, in other words, that it and all its residents have a heightened interest in how land is to be used; to prevent injury to the environment it is prepared to interfere with what owners of land can do with their property, which clearly can reduce the value of that property. In response to this abridgment of property rights, land owners in the eastern portions of King, Snohomish, Skagit, and Whatcom counties are talking about seceding and forming their own counties in order to escape the less permissive land-use regimes associated with big urban areas (and liberal environmental voters). As the meaning of property lines changes, some people want to redraw political lines, too.

Logs on the Humptulips River (above) after the floods of 1909, Grays Harbor County. (University of Washington Special Collections, Neg. #15684.) All of this is to say that the question of to whom does Washington belong is a complicated one. In dealing with the issue of endangered species of wild Pacific salmon, there is a tendency to want to say that these are “our” salmon and that “we” in the region are the ones who will solve the problem. But clearly the salmon (and the forests and the rivers and so much else) do not belong simply to “us,” and the means required to preserve them will involve the other states of the union operating through the federal government, and other nations who participate in the fisheries of the North Pacific. Moreover, even if the salmon issue were left up solely to residents of the Pacific Northwest, those residents are so obviously divided among themselves that they would find it very hard to arrive at a consensus that would do the salmon much good. Intervention by federal officials may prove quite useful—although there are no guarantees of that.

Whether they like it or not, people in the Pacific Northwest ought to be used to the influence of outsiders. For much of its history, the region has struggled to deal with the fact that external entities have exerted significant power over it. Since we have been discussing the matter of regional identity, let me offer two examples relating to the topic. The idea of “the Pacific Northwest” was popularized for the first time not by residents of the region but by big railroad companies, headquartered back East. As transcontinental lines were completed during the 1880s and 1890s, railroads publicists launched campaigns to direct attention to the states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, and in doing so lumped them together as a single place called the “Great Northwest” or the “Great Pacific Northwest.” One set of railroad publicists explicitly meant “to introduce the word ‘Pacific Northwest’ into the popular vocabulary—to make it convey a definite, clean-cut meaning. To make it stand for an idea.” Well before most residents of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho were prepared to see themselves as belonging to the same region, outside investors and landowners were lumping the three states together and selling them to the world.

Another outside power, the federal government, contributed to the sense of region, too. It did this in part by creating a “Pacific Northwest region” as an administrative unit for such bureaucracies as the National Park Service or the Army Corps of Engineers. It also created an agency specifically for the region—the Bonneville Power Administration—when it began marketing the kilowatts generated by federally funded and managed dams on the Columbia River during the 1930s. Like the railroad companies, the federal government had less intrinsic attachment to specific states and localities of the Northwest; it instead saw the region as a single hydroelectric system to be managed, and like the railroads it forced the disparate parts of the Northwest to coordinate with one another more than they ever had. In other words, the whole concept of the Pacific Northwest is to a large extent the invention of outsiders, of people whose offices were in Washington, D.C. or New York City or St. Paul, Minnesota, rather than in the Pacific Northwest itself. The idea of a region has been somewhat imposed on us. The emergence of Californians and salmon as regional icons represents residents’ recent effort to assert their own more homegrown understanding of what the region means—and, implicitly, to whom the region belongs.

Let me conclude by restating that the meanings so popular today make more sense at a symbolic level than they do in actuality. I have suggested already that there are problems with portraying the Pacific Northwest as the antithesis of California. (Washington, of all the states in the American West, most resembles the Golden State—in its urban orientation, its high-tech industry, its reliance on U.S. defense spending, and other traits. I propose, in fact, that Washington is more like California than it is like Oregon.) Let me suggest as well that there are problems with employing salmon as the regional icon. We can say with Egan that the Pacific Northwest is “wherever the salmon can get to.” But wild runs of Pacific salmon get to plenty of places outside the borders of the Pacific Northwest—including streams draining into the Arctic Ocean, rivers in Russia and Korea and Japan, and watersheds in Chile and New Zealand and Australia. They even spawn in California and the Great Lakes! Yet there are some parts of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon where the salmon have never been able to get to, unless they are trucked in, because some watersheds (such as those in southeastern Oregon that are part of the landlocked Great Basin) cannot support anadromous fish. Salmon are thus an imperfect marker of regional identity. Many of the fish, furthermore, are not as “natural” and “native” to the region as we take them to be. A great deal of the salmon consumed in the Northwest today is in some fashion “manmade.” This includes the Atlantic salmon so readily available at grocery stores—which are farm-raised—and the many hatchery-spawned fish, whose numbers and habits actually contribute to the decline of the wild runs of salmon. With these additions to the “natural” stock of salmon, Pacific Northwesterners have been able to have their icon and eat it, too. How much longer they will enjoy such a luxury is open to question. Should Northwest runs of wild Pacific salmon become extinct, we need to ask, will the region’s special identity become extinct, too? Learning to Fish in the Northwest (below) A Northwest child poses with a freshly caught salmon. (University of Washington Special Collections, Fisheries File.)

Unit 2: European Exploration, Imperial Rivalry, and the Maritime Fur Trade, 1741-1806

Lesson 3: European Rivalry for the Pacific Northwest

HMS Discovery, ship of George Vancouver, above. Princessa Real, ship of Manuel Quimper, 1790, (right.) Drawings by Hewitt Jackson. Robert Ballard Whitebrook, Coastal Exploration of Washington (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1959).

In the century between the 1740s and the 1840s, different nations competed with one another, and with native peoples, to take control over the area that is today known as the American Pacific Northwest and the west coast of Canada. In one sense this competition had begun in 1492, when Columbus landed in the New World, claimed it for Spain, and inaugurated a European rivalry for territory. Over the next two years, the Pope responded to the discovery and the threat of competition over it essentially by dividing the western hemisphere into Spanish and Portuguese zones of influence, and assigning the Pacific Northwest to Spain. Yet Europeans would not actually see Alaska and the Pacific Northwest until the 18th century, when their ambitions spurred one another to explore the territory. The contest ended in 1846, when the Americans and British divided most of the region between themselves by drawing a boundary between Canada and the United States at the 49th parallel; another key event occurred when Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. It thus took more than three and a half centuries for peoples of European descent, following up on Columbus’s first voyage, to establish some degree of mutually respected authority over the Pacific Northwest (and for decades longer, even that authority remained contested by native peoples). This long span of time illustrates just how isolated the region once was from European centers of power. The period 1774-1795 marked an especially intense era in this rivalry, for it was when sailors from different nations first visited the lands between Alaska to the north and California to the south, and engaged their countries directly in a contest over who would control the territory. The Spanish arrived first, in exploratory voyages of 1774 and 1775, and performed ritual acts of possession that asserted their claim to the territory.  The British soon followed, with the first ship arriving in 1778 and many more coming thereafter. Other nations also made appearances in this period: the United States, a relatively weak competitor, showed up belatedly; Russia coveted lands south of Alaska but never really established an effective claim to any (except at Fort Ross in California, between 1812 and 1841); and France sent only a single exploratory expedition in this era. But Spain and Great Britain were the main contestants, and the nature and outcome of their rivalry loom large in understanding the European forces increasingly at work on the coast of the Pacific Northwest.

Entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca (above). John Meares, Voyages made in the Years 1778-1812. London, 1790. Atlas, plate 7. Sketch by T. Strothard. Carlos Schwantes, in The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History(p. 42), comments that before 1774 Spain “showed little interest in a region that seemed so pitifully lacking in either economic resources or good harbors,” and had to be roused from “her imperial lethargy” by Russian advances toward Alaska. These comments don’t portray Spanish colonization very fully. Between the time of Columbus and the later 18th century, Spain was the most successful colonial power in the Americas, occupying most of the coasts of Central and South America as well as the Gulf of Mexico, and extracting enormous wealth from such places as Mexico and Peru. When Russian voyages to Alaska in the 1720s and 1740s threatened the North Pacific coastline that Spain claimed, they motivated Spain to send expeditions to the Northwest Coast, as well as to establish missions, forts, and towns along the California coast. But Spanish interest in the lands that would become the west coast of the United States and Canada was not initially focused on its economic potential or prospective harbors. Rather, Spanish officials intended to secure the region–or at least its coastline–as a buffer zone between possible Russian colonies to the north and Spain’s main center of imperial activity (not lethargy) in Mexico.

Consider how Spanish officials in Mexico justified the exploratory voyages of the mid-1770s. First, they used religion to explain their presence along the Northwest Coast. (“Christianity” should be added to the “three C’s of empire” that Schwantes mentions [p. 42].) Rather than let the Russians or English try to convert the Indians, Spain hoped that the natives would be “drawn into the sweet, soft, desirable vassalage of His Majesty” [the King of Spain] and “bathed in the light of the Gospel by means of spiritual Conquest, to separate them from the utter darkness in which they live and show them the road to eternal salvation.” Using the well-rehearsed rhetoric of European colonization, the Spanish basically claimed that Indians would benefit greatly from their arrival. Second, they also claimed that the Indians would do much better as Spanish vassals than as vassals of England or Russia. The Spanish insisted that they were not sailing to the Northwest Coast simply to expand their territory. And in truth, they were having enough trouble as it was trying to populate the northern frontier of Mexico, including California; they had no interest in trying to send settlers to the Pacific Northwest, or in trying to develop its economic resources. They went there, an official explained, “not because the king needs to enlarge his realms, as he has within his known dominions more than it will ever be possible to populate in centuries, but in order to avoid the consequences brought by having any other neighbors [there] than the Indians.”

It is important to understand that the Spanish did not sail north from Mexico seeking economic resources or good harbors. They never sent any traders to the Northwest coast, or even any missionaries to the Indians there. They simply meant to assert a right to the territory, in the hope that reinforcing their claim dating from the 1490s would somehow prevent or discourage other European powers from doing the same thing. The ceremonial nature of this assertion—landing at a few selected points on the coast, erecting a cross, burying a bottle containing official documents at the foot of the cross, and then departing—suggests just how limited their vision of colonizing the territory was. Moreover, the Spanish found it quite difficult, given the limited means of its navy, actually to sail northward along the coast from Mexico. In the end, they could and would not mount a claim to the region in a way that we today, and that other nations at that time, would recognize as assertive. But this does not mean that the Spanish were lethargic colonists; it suggests rather that their attention lay elsewhere, especially in Mexico, from which they had been extracting wealth aggressively for more than two centuries.

Section of chart (above) showing Cook’s 1778 voyage along the North West Coast. Area displayed is from Cape Gregory to Cape Edgcombe. Consider by contrast the British approach to the Northwest. As Schwantes explains (pp. 19-24), the British first arrived in the region as a byproduct of their search for something else—a Northwest Passage through North America that would expedite travel and trade between Europe and Asia. Cook’s crew was initially uninterested in the Pacific Northwest in its own right. But as soon as the British discovered–again, almost by accident–the economic value of sea otter pelts to Chinese markets, they hustled back to the Northwest Coast to do more trading and exploring. The Spanish sent only a handful of expeditions from Mexico to the Pacific Northwest between 1774 and 1795; these vessels came to claim, defend, and explore the territory, but never to do business there. The British, by contrast, sent 25 vessels in the decade 1785-1794; all but a few of them went primarily to participate in the maritime fur trade. In contrast to the Spanish, the British were on the lookout for economic resources and good harbors almost from the beginning of their exposure to the Pacific Northwest, and they approached colonization of the territory more aggressively.

The different designs of the Spanish and British led directly to the Nootka Sound controversy of 1789-1794, a crisis in which Spain and Britain challenged one another’s claim to the Pacific Northwest (see Schwantes, pp. 47-48). The crisis started in 1789 when Spaniards tried to defend their claims to the territory by capturing British trading vessels as they arrived at Nootka Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The British seized upon this incident, and talked about going to war over it, because they saw it as an opportunity to promote a different approach to colonization in the Americas. Spain should not be permitted simply to claim territory and prevent other Europeans from doing the same, the British argued, unless it was actually occupying and making use of the territory. In essence, Britain wanted to change the “rules” of colonization more to their favor. Rather than rely upon the edict of the Pope or some ritual act of possession to assert control over territory, it insisted, relatively unoccupied lands ought to be accessible to any nation that could make productive (i.e., economic) use of them. This concept of colonization was written into the Nootka Sound Convention (signed in 1790, amended in 1794), which resolved the controversy between Britain and Spain.

These new rules, of course, clearly favored Britain over Spain. They were in a sense (and to oversimplify) an attack by the “new” Europe against the “old.”  Spain’s approach to colonization in many ways dated from the 15th and 16th centuries. It depended heavily upon big and rather inflexible institutions—especially the crown, the military, and the Catholic church—and offered little in the way of incentives or opportunities to common individuals. Its mercantilist economic thinking emphasized the accumulation of bullion in Spain. Great Britain, by contrast, had traveled further down the path of modern capitalism. It was much more commercial and industrial in its orientation, and therefore more capable of manufacturing and transporting trade goods to the Americas. Britain was also a somewhat more democratic society, which meant among other things that it offered more opportunity to individuals hoping for economic gain and social mobility, and that certain commercial interests could pressure the government to follow a foreign and military policy more favorable to “free trade” (or at least freer access to non-European resources). For what it is worth, Britain was also a Protestant nation, in contrast to Catholic Spain, and a stronger maritime power. We might view it as more “modern” and less “medieval,” although again this is oversimplifying things. In any case, the two nations’ approaches to the Pacific Northwest illustrated different kinds of European societies. By the late 18th century, Britain’s distinctive traits gave it certain advantages over Spain in the contest for territory on the Pacific Rim, and enabled it to win access to an area that the Spanish had long claimed as theirs.

Mt. Rainier from the south part of Admiralty Inlet (above). Sketch by John Sykes. (University of Washington Special Collections.) Resolution of the Nootka Sound affair provided an opportunity for Captain George Vancouver to visit the Pacific Northwest. After signing the convention in 1790, each nation sent envoys to Vancouver Island to implement locally the terms of the agreement. Spain dispatched Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, who had sailed along the Northwest Coast in 1775. The British sent Vancouver, who had sailed to the Northwest under Cook in 1776-1778. During this voyage, Vancouver and his crew undertook detailed exploration of the Northwest coastline that included a tour approximately 100 miles up the Columbia River as well as the first recorded non-native visit to Puget Sound. That visit to the Sound is the subject of the reading excerpted from Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery and introduced below.

To gain additional background on exploration in this period, one might compare Vancouver’s perceptions to those of others at roughly the same time. Accompanying Vancouver aboard his two ships were a number of individuals, including Peter Puget, who also left accounts of what they saw and thought. At roughly the same time, Spanish explorers were also sizing up the region anew. (Initially, the Spanish reacted to the Nootka Sound convention by establishing a more active presence in the vicinity that included sending more vessels northward from Mexico.) See, for example, Jose Mozino’s Noticias de Nutka: An Account of Nootka Sound in 1792 for a Spanish scientist’s depiction of the region.

GEORGE VANCOUVER

George Vancouver was born June 22, 1757 at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England. At the age of 13 he joined the Royal Navy and served as a midshipman during Captain James Cook’s second and third voyages to the Pacific Coast (1772-75 and 1776-80). He thus accompanied Cook on his visit to the Northwest Coast in 1778. Following nine years of service in the West Indies the British government assigned to him a three-fold mission: to implement the Nootka Sound Convention, to explore the Pacific waters of North America, and to locate a Northwest Passage through British North America. Vancouver commanding the Discovery, and William Broughton on the Chatham, left England on April 1, 1791 and sighted the west coast of North America in April of 1792, close to the time when the American Robert Gray first located the mouth of the Columbia River. Vancouver and his crews meticulously surveyed and documented the Pacific Coast from San Francisco to Vancouver Island, including Puget Sound, so named for crew member Peter Puget. Vancouver’s survey’s proved that an easily navigable Northwest Passage did not exist, but in the process he named innumerable Pacific Northwest landmarks. He also strengthened British claims to the territory and left behind detailed records of the coastline for later navigators. His account suggests that he was constantly aware of his Spanish and American rivals. Vancouver returned to England on October 20, 1794, and died in 1798 at the age of forty. His brother published the account of the voyage, including maps, texts, and illustrations following the explorer’s death. (For more information see Robin Fisher, Vancouver’s Voyage: Charting the Northwest Coast, 1791-1795. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1992.)

Unit 2: Lesson 4 – Americans Enter the Rivalry

Engraving of Astoria (above), the fur trading post established by the Astor Party. From Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1842. Philadelphia, Lea and Blanchard, 1845. Vol. 5, facing p. 113. Sketched by A. T. Agate, engraved by Rawdon, Wright and Hatch. (University of Washington Special Collections)

Map (above) of Astorian groups’ routes to the Northwest: Wilson Hunt (dotted line) Stuart’s Route (solid line) McClellan’s probable route (dashed line) Reproduced from Dorothy O. Johansen and Charles M. Gates, Empire of the Columbia: A History of the Pacific Northwest. New York, 1957, p. 129. Map credited to Cartographic Laboratories, Department of Geography, University of Washington.

Astorian vs. Northwest Company Trade Schemes for Northwest Furs (above). Reproduced from D.W. Meinig, The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968. Map 8, p. 49. John Fonda, Cartographer.

Engraving of a Sea Otter (above). From James Cook, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean. London, 1801. Plate 43. Sketch by John Webber. (University of Washington Special Collections) The United States was, compared to Russia, Spain, and Britain, a latecomer to the Pacific Northwest. When Spain and England were sending the first exploring expeditions to the Northwest Coast, the United States was breaking away from Britain and winning its independence. The new republic was certainly more like Britain than Spain, in terms of its political and economic orientations. But it had substantially fewer resources, than did Great Britain, that it could devote to colonization. For example, it did not have the well-capitalized trading companies that Britain had, and it did not have a powerful navy or a maritime tradition of exploration. Consequently, its approach to the Northwest Coast was initially somewhat hesitant and limited. But when Spain and particularly Britain became preoccupied with the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon in Europe between 1789 and 1815, the United States seized the opening and became more active in the region. It especially pursued the sea otter trade there. Whereas Britain sent twelve trading vessels to the Northwest Coast between 1795 and 1814, the U.S. sent ninety vessels over the same period. After 1814, however, the British reasserted themselves in the region—primarily through the land-based fur trade—and until the 1840s ranked as the prevailing colonial power there.

American activities in the Pacific Northwest between 1788 and 1814, then, represented mostly a temporary phase of colonization. During this phase, the U.S. established claims to the territory, through exploration, trading fur, and occupation of land, and these claims would eventually give the U.S. a stake in the Pacific Northwest that it otherwise would not have had. But these claims did not represent systematic and long-term colonization—in large part because the United States was not yet in a position to undertake such expansion. Rather, U.S. activities in the Pacific Northwest prior to 1814 emerged from two sources within the United States, neither of which was forceful enough to implant long-term American control over the region. One was commerce, and the other was nationalistic exploration.

American ships took the lead in the maritime fur trade off the Northwest Coast in the 1790s. Based and financed out of Boston, for the most part, these vessels brought trade goods to exchange with Indians for sea otter pelts. From the Northwest Coast the ships went to China, where they exchanged the pelts for such goods as tea, silks, and spices. From China the ships returned to Boston, where they sold the Chinese imports at profits that made the entire voyage worthwhile. In these expeditions, American traders were taking advantage of an area of the world where resources seemed accessible. Upon leaving the British empire, the United States was excluded from trading in places where American colonists had traded before. The fur trade of the Northwest Coast represented an opportunity where Americans did not need to contest other entrenched powers. However, these traders were often narrow-minded in their approach to the Pacific Northwest. Claiming territory on behalf of the United States, for instance, was not uppermost in their minds. Consider for example the diary of John Boit, a member of Robert Gray’s crew. Gray “discovered” the Columbia River in 1792 when he entered its mouth looking for Indians with whom he might trade for furs. But Gray was a businessman, not an explorer. And Boit’s diary reflected that fact. It noted that Gray landed in order to “view the country.” Only later, and in a different hand, were the words “and take possession” added. The idea of claiming Northwest lands for the U.S. was but an afterthought to most traders.

A few other Americans, however, had more nationalistic ambitions in mind. One of them was Thomas Jefferson, whose concern about exploration resulted in the U.S. staking a strong claim to the region. Jefferson’s interest in the lands to the West of the United States (the nation’s western border between 1783 and 1803 was the Mississippi River) stemmed in part from his own curiosity in the geography of North America. He had a strong interest in what resources the continent might offer to Americans and others, and he also worried that the young nation needed an ample supply of land to accommodate the agrarian aspirations of himself and others. Moreover, Jefferson worried about the British, Spanish, and French on America’s borders, seeing the presence of these Europeans as destabilizing or threatening to American interests. Long before he became President in 1801, Jefferson worked to get Americans to explore westward and contest the expansionist efforts of its rivals. In 1783, at the close of the Revolution, he asked war hero George Rogers Clark to lead an expedition across the lands between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean. In 1785, while serving as U.S. representative in France, Jefferson schemed to assist another American, John Ledyard (an American who had sailed with Cook to the Northwest Coast in 1778), who wished to establish an American fur-trading enterprise on the Northwest Coast. In 1793, while serving as the nation’s first Secretary of State, Jefferson hatched a plan to hire the French naturalist Andre Michaux to explore the Rocky Mountains and beyond. None of these attempts met with any success, but they demonstrated Jefferson’s abiding interest in staking a stronger American claim to the territory of the Pacific Northwest.

Map of the Louisiana Purchase (above).

Jefferson’s plans reached fruition during the first dozen years of the 19th century, in part because as President from 1801 to 1809 he finally possessed enough power to enact some of his ideas about nationalistic exploration. In 1803 Jefferson secured the Louisiana Purchase, by which the U.S. acquired from France most of the territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains (when Jefferson had proposed exploring this land earlier, he had essentially been asking expeditions to cross territory claimed by other European nations). Also, between 1803 and 1806, Jefferson dispatched the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which traveled from Saint Louis to the mouth of the Columbia and back. Traveling by land across the northern plains, Rockies, and Columbia basin, Lewis and Clark staked an ever stronger American claim to the Pacific Northwest. American fur traders followed Lewis and Clark into and across the Rockies, the most famous of whom were representatives of the Pacific Fur Company of John Jacob Astor, who established a post at Astoria in 1811 and additional posts along the Columbia thereafter. The Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark expedition, and Astorian venture were crucial for establishing an American presence in the Pacific Northwest: the Louisiana Purchase made the Pacific Northwest contiguous with the other territories and states of the union, meaning that it would be increasingly easier for migrants and traders to come by land to the Northwest Coast; Lewis and Clark and the Astorians strengthened American claims to the northern Rockies and the Columbia basin. Moreover, these three events also marked a new are in physical approaches to the region. Rather than arrive by sea, as Perez and Cook and Vancouver had done, Lewis and Clark and some of the Astorians arrived by land. Exploration had now moved on shore, as it were, and away from the salt water. The fur trade, too, was moving on shore, as the Astorians and others increasingly sought beaver and buffalo skins instead of sea otter pelts. (It must be noted that British fur traders operating in Canada had also begun exploring to the coast overland in 1793, when Alexander Mackenzie of the North West Company crossed the Rockies and followed the Bella Coola River to the British Columbia coast. Simon Fraser and David Thompson would continue these inland explorations in the years 1805-1812. Lewis and Clark were merely the first Americans to cross the continent south of Canada and north of Mexico.)

Although U.S. initiatives produced significant results, they did not generate a lasting American presence in the Pacific Northwest. Rather, while the Astorians and the Lewis and Clark expedition staked important claims to the territory for the U.S., they were at best an ephemeral presence in the region. Lewis and Clark came, catalogued the resources of the country, and left. The Astorians set up posts along the Columbia and conducted both trade and exploration, but they were bought out by a British rival, the North West Company, and their post at Astoria was also seized by the British navy during the War of 1812. By 1815, in effect, the British had reasserted dominance among colonizing powers in the region, and the Americans were forced mostly to withdraw and bide their time. British military and financial might help explain this outcome. Its navy was stronger, and its experience and capital in the fur trade were greater. All the U.S. could fall back upon were its claims of prior discovery—established by Gray, Lewis and Clark, and the Astorians—and the rights allotted it by the Convention of 1818, written to resolve territorial disputes following the War of 1812, which permitted the U.S. to occupy the Pacific Northwest jointly with Britain for an indefinite period.

Unit 3: Fur Traders, Indians, and Anglo-American Rivalry for the Northwest, 1806-1846

Lesson Five: Natives and the Maritime Fur Trade

A Native cedar plank home on Nootka Sound, 1770s (above). From James Cook, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean. London, 1801. Sketch by John Webber. (University of Washington Special Collections.)

The maritime fur trade, although often overlooked in textbooks, was a crucial phase in the early history of the Pacific Northwest. For one thing, the opportunity to make money attracted non-Indian peoples to the region much more quickly than they otherwise might have come, so that dozens of ships sailed to the Northwest Coast within two decades of the first explorers’ arrival. It is unlikely, for example, that British interest in the region would have been so keen had not Cook’s crew discovered the profitability of sea otter pelts in Chinese markets. Moreover, early maritime fur traders behaved as explorers because, in seeking more furs (or, more correctly, Indians willing to sell furs more cheaply), they scouted a great deal of the coastline in the region, filling in the many gaps that “real” explorers like Cook and Vancouver had left in their maps. But the most important aspect of the maritime fur trade was that it brought natives and non-natives into immediate and close contact, with profound ramifications for both peoples and for regional history.

Tatoosh and Wife, Neah Bay, 1792 (above).These engravings after early drawings show some of the bold patterning of Northwest Coast native art. Neah Bay is now the site of the Makah reservation. From Alejandro Malaspina, Vaije Politico-Clientifico Albredor del Mundo. Madrid, 1885. Sketch by Jose Cardero. (University of Washington Special Collections)

It is important to keep in mind that direct contact with non-natives was not the only source of change among Indian peoples. Carlos Schwantes’s depiction of the “first” Pacific Northwesterners (28-38) is valuable for understanding the three different, broad cultural groupings of natives in the region, but one should not take away from that description the sense that native societies were static or unchanging until white explorers arrived. Before Europeans migrated to North America, native societies underwent modification as their cultures evolved, as climates changed, and as contact with one another introduced new cultural elements. Once Europeans began colonizing North America after 1492, native societies were affected by a more accelerated pace of change. Even tribes in the Pacific Northwest, quite isolated from sites of European colonization elsewhere, were affected by that colonization. Before Europeans arrived on the Northwest Coast in 1774, the diseases and livestock they had imported elsewhere to North America had already reached local Indian groups (traveling between native peoples rather than directly from Europeans to natives). By the time Lewis and Clark traveled the Columbia Plateau in 1805, for example, native societies there had been reorganizing themselves since about 1730 to incorporate horses as a means of transportation and a measure of wealth, and they had also experienced two smallpox epidemics (capable of killing 10-30% of natives) and were to some extent recovering from them. It would be wrong, then, to imagine Cook or Vancouver or Lewis and Clark encountering “pristine” Indians, i.e. natives unaffected by European colonization. Nonetheless, the onset of the maritime fur trade accelerated the pace of change by heightening the amount of interaction between different peoples.

That Indians and non-Indians structured their initial relations with one another around trade was critical. Although there would be numerous conflicts between the two peoples, and although each party to the trade toiled to coerce (including through violence) or manipulate others in a variety of ways, the maritime fur trade on the Northwest Coast was a realm in which Indians and non-Indians needed one another. European and American traders who sailed from afar needed Indians because Indians were the only ones who could provide the desired pelts. In other words, Indians monopolized the supply of fur by hunting the pelts themselves (something non-Indians never really learned) or by acquiring them by purchase or by theft from other Indians. At the same time, Indians with furs to trade needed the non-native traders, who monopolized a new supply of exchange goods that was coveted for its ability to enrich native society.

Various articles from the Nootka Sound, as sketched by John Webber (above). These artifacts show the skill of natives in using wood, one of their chief resources, and combining it with other materials such as feathers and walrus whiskers. From James Cook, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean. London, 1801. Atlas, Plate 40. Sketch by John Webber. (University of Washington Special Collections)

Within the cultures of Northwest Coast native peoples, trade with European and American ships was welcomed because it added wealth to economies that placed great emphasis upon the accumulation and disposal of wealth. Heads of households, and entire families, attained prestige through their ability to give away wealth, particularly in ceremonies known as potlatches. This drive to attain social status be disposing of property resulted in a pervasive cultural imperative to acquire possessions. When European and American traders arrived, eager themselves to acquire possessions in the form of sea otter pelts, materialistic natives jumped at the chance to acquire the manufactured goods, especially made of metal, that the traders offered in exchange. These goods, to which Indians mostly had not had access before, represented wealth in themselves, as in the cases of pieces of copper that could be made into jewelry or blankets that could be given or traded to other Indians. The goods also included tools which increased Indian households’ ability to produce their own goods. Finally, the European economy also offered the opportunity of earning wealth through the sale of one’s labor (and one’s body, as rates of prostitution apparently increased among natives in response to non-native demand). In other words, natives engaged in the fur trade and related activities because they saw this form of exchange as a way to enrich themselves and their culture. It was not the case that, by incorporating European goods into their lives, natives became “less Indian” than before. Rather, they saw the maritime fur trade as a way to enrich their Indian ways of life. Northwest Coast natives were not simply passive victims of European and American capitalism. Already accustomed to trading before the arrival of non-natives, they saw in European and American maritime traders an opportunity to improve their lives. To a certain extent, furthermore, many Indians were able to shape the trade so that it took place largely on their terms. For example, at Nootka Sound the European traders initially tried to conduct business aboard their ships; over time, however, the natives moved the trade on shore, to their own turf, and drew it out over a few days in keeping with their customs. The Indians also became more sophisticated about the prices they charged, gradually demanding more and better goods in exchange for sea otter pelts. They learned to wait until two or more trading ships arrived, and got European traders to bid against each other, thus driving prices higher. Such tactics demonstrated a people adept at trading and capable of maximizing benefits from it. Some scholars have suggested further that Northwest Coast Indians gained through the trade because their acquisition of metal goods enriched their wood carving and other artwork.

Haida Slate Pipes, (above). These pipes are carved from argylite, a carbonaceous slate found in a single quarry on Queen Charlotte Island. Presently, only members of the Haida tribe are allowed to collect the mineral. From Edward Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World. London, 1843. Vol.1:102. (University of Washington Special Collections) Although it is clear that Indians were not simply victimized by the maritime fur trade, it remains important to point out that it did not simply bring unalloyed benefits. For one thing, some native groups clearly profited more than others. Different groups of Indians tried to monopolize the trade with Europeans for themselves and drive other native competitors away. Most bands that did a lot of trading did not acquire the majority of pelts by themselves, but rather traded with or raided other Indian groups for them. Overall, the maritime fur trade likely increased divisions between different bands or groups of natives. Still another aspect of the trade was that it connected Indians to a global economy over which, ultimately, they had very little influence. Natives did not automatically become pawns of European capitalism, but they did grow more reliant on manufactured goods produced elsewhere (think for a second about the impact of acquiring and using firearms in the trade, and about how destabilizing that commodity could be among Indian groups), and they did change some of their subsistence patterns in order to meet the market demand for sea otter pelts. When those pelts became scarcer and the sea otter increasingly bordered on extinction in certain parts of the Northwest Coast (Nootka Sound had no more sea otter to hunt by 1795, ten years after the opening of the trade), additional adjustments were needed.

“Pira y Sepulcros de la Familia del Cacique An-Kau en el Puerto de Mulgrave,” 1792 (above). These engravings after 1792 drawings show native family burial structures at Mulgrave. From Malaspina, Vaije Politico-Clientifico, 120. (University of Washington Special Collections) Scholars, especially those working on British Columbia, continue to debate over just how destructive the early fur trade was. In 1977, the historian Robin Fisher (in Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890) suggested that natives and Europeans met as relative equals in the fur trade, and that the infusion of new wealth from the commerce produced a high point in Northwest Coast cultures. In other words, the trade was largely beneficial to both parties, prior to the establishment of British colonies in western Canada after 1846. Writing fifteen years after Fisher, James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841(1992), strikes a more balanced tone, inventorying both advantages and disadvantages to Indians. More recently, finally, Cole Harris (in The Resettlement of British Columbia [1997] and elsewhere), taking issue especially with Fisher, has described a native world much more dislocated and disrupted because of the fur trade. Harris emphasizes the conflict between Europeans and Indians, the heightened inequities resulting from the new struggle for wealth, and the great devastation caused by diseases introduced in this era. No doubt the most destructive effect of the maritime fur trade—recognized by both Fisher and Harris—was the heightened incidence of epidemic diseases among native peoples. Natives of the Americas had no immunity to the diseases that Europeans imported from the Old World, which meant that outbreaks of such illnesses as smallpox, measles, and malaria could be tremendously destructive;a rough estimate holds that Old World diseases depopulated native societies by about 90% within the first century of contact. Now, it is surely the case that these kinds of epidemic disease could and would have reached the Pacific Northwest without the advent of the maritime fur trade; after all, scholars estimate that the first epidemic of smallpox broke out around 1780-82, before the trade got started in a systematic way. But the regular contact that followed the opening of the trade—with more than two hundred vessels arriving between 1785 and 1804 to engage in trading—ensured that Northwest Coast Indians would be exposed repeatedly to multiple epidemic diseases against which they had little immunity or resistance. These diseases initiated the sustained demographic decline of native peoples in the Pacific Northwest between the 1770s and the beginning of the 20th century. The actual rates of depopulation are also matters of dispute among scholars; it has proven difficult to measure the effects of disease because the sources of information about them are so flawed and because such things as the possible rates of population recovery are not fully understood. Nonetheless, the anthropologist Robert Boyd suggests that between 1774 and 1874 the population of natives along the Northwest Coast—the area stretching roughly from the 60th parallel (southern Alaska) to the 42nd parallel (the Oregon-California border)—declined by 80%, from roughly 200,000 to about 40,000. The same scholar writes that the native population of the Columbia Plateau declined by 48% in the period 1805-1870. Disease accounted for the vast majority of these declines in population; commerce between natives and non-natives vastly increased the contacts between peoples that accelerated the spread of the disease. As with their relationship to global capitalism, Indians who encountered epidemic diseases found themselves caught inextricably in a web of invisible but nonetheless destructive forces, introduced from outside the region, over which they had little or no control.

Launch of the North West America at Nootka Sound, 1788 (above). The construction of the North West represented the permanence of the British presence at Nootka Sound. Note the Union Jack flying over the building at right. (From Meares, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789. London, 1790. Atlas, Plate 25. Sketch by C. Metz. (University of Washington Special Collections) The maritime fur trade did not end abruptly, although the near-extinction of sea otters by the mid-1820s diminished it substantially. Rather, the maritime trade was absorbed by the land-based fur trade that reached the Pacific Northwest from eastern North America in the second decade of the 19th century. This trade—dominated through the mid-1840s by British companies—focused especially on such land mammals as beavers, but kept up some commerce in sea otter pelts, too. This second phase of the fur trade continued the transformations begun by the maritime trade—spreading epidemic diseases to Indians and transferring such items of European culture as blankets and rifles to native societies—but at the same time it ushered in new forms of utilizing the region. Land-based traders established fixed forts and posts, devised interior routes of travel, explored the inland region, and cultivated direct contacts with plateau and basin, as well as, coastal Indians. They also exploited resources besides fur, such as timber and fish and farmland and pasture, and thus demonstrated how the Pacific Northwest might be developed further by non-native colonizers. This second phase of the fur trade lasted roughly from 1810 until 1846.

Unit 3: Lesson Six – The Continental Fur Trade

A type of steel trap used by an early fur trapper in the St. Paul, Oregon, area (above). (Harvey J. McKay, St. Paul, Oregon, 1830-1890. Portland, Binford and Mort, 1980. p. 2)

Fort Vancouver, (above). Sketched by Captain H. Warre, (1819–1898). The flag visible here is actually the Hudson’s Bay Company flag. From Warre, Henry James, Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory. London, Dickinson & Co., 1848. Plate 12.

Fort Vancouver, (above). (Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to ascertain the most practicable and economic route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, made under the direction of the Secretary of War in 1854-5. Washington, D.C., 1857. Vol. 12, pt. 1. plates 42 and 44. Sketches by J. M. Stanley, 1853.)

Fur traders were not the same as settlers in that they did not come to establish permanent towns and farms or to dispossess Indians from their lands. But the land-based fur trade did lay the foundations for the settlement that ensued in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada after 1840. Like the maritime explorers and traders, land-based traders scouted the coastline and developed relationships with Indians west of the Cascades. They also expanded European and American activities inland. Fur traders explored virtually all corners of the American Northwest and Canadian West; organized systems of trade and travel across these regions; and pursued extensive and intricate relations with a variety of Indians. Moreover, operating out of a headquarters at Fort Vancouver (in what would become Washington state), fur traders explored southward as far as California and eastward as far as Utah. Furs from the entire Far West of North America made their way to Asian and European markets by way of the Columbia River and the Pacific Northwest. Reinforcing the pattern established by the maritime fur trade, the land-based fur trade linked the Pacific Northwest as a resource hinterland to markets across the globe.

Fort Walla Walla (above)

The companies that dominated this trade were British. An American firm, the Pacific Fur Company of John Jacob Astor, attempted to conduct trading at posts along the Columbia River between 1811 and 1813, but it lacked the financial resources and national support required to succeed. Moreover, most of Astor’s employees were Canadians whose experience in the fur trade came from working for British rivals, especially the North West Company of Montreal. Thus it was no difficult thing for the Astorians to sell out to the North West Company in 1813 and go to work for the British competitor. (A good book on the Pacific Fur Company is James P. Ronda, Astoria and Empire [1990]).

The presence of the North West Company beyond the Rockies reflected the intensity of the business competition in the Canadian fur trade during the later 18th and early 19th century. Since early colonial times in British North America, commerce in furs had been instrumental in pushing Europeans westward into the continent, as rivals in the trade competed with one another to get the best and least expensive supply of pelts. Driven by business rivalries, fur traders explored new territory, developed relations with native groups, devised networks of trade and transportation, and claimed land for their respective nations. With the expulsion of France from North America in 1763 after the Seven Years War and the breakaway of the United States from Great Britain after 1776, much of the competition for fur in the North American Far West narrowed to a contest between the Hudson’s Bay Company or HBC (a London-based monopoly with its North American headquarters on Hudson Bay in northern Canada) and the North West Company or NWC (a Montreal-based firm, employing many French Canadians, which emerged out of chaotic competition among smaller firms during the 1770s and 1780s). With a royally granted monopoly on commerce in all watersheds draining into Hudson Bay, the HBC had a tremendous natural advantage over the NWC, which had no such privilege and which had to compete against the HBC’s much lower overhead. In response, the NWC became much the aggressor in pushing westward in search of new, cheaper supplies of fur and a Pacific-coast outlet that would enable it to export its furs to market efficiently. The company’s aggressiveness took a number of forms in the Pacific Northwest, including dispatching Alexander Mackenzie (1793), Simon Fraser (1806-1808), and David Thompson (1807-1812) to explore the far western region and establish trading posts there, and being on hand during the War of 1812 to take over the Pacific Fur Company operations at Astoria and along the Columbia River. Thereafter, the British prevailed among the powers competing for control in the region.

In 1821, the North West Company was absorbed by the Hudson’s Bay Company because the British government forced the two firms to merge in order to bring a halt to their bitter competition. The HBC had never operated beyond the Rocky Mountains, so the merger basically pushed it into a role of substantial influence in a region with which it was unfamiliar. The Company adjusted rather promptly, however, to the opportunity, creating a fur-trading district that became known as the Columbia Department. It established a series of posts, refined means of trading and trapping for the furs, laid out networks of transportation, cultivated relations with Indians, and in general, made the Columbia a profitable branch of the fur business. The HBC went further than this, however. It also initiated the first systematic, non-Indian logging, fishing, farming, and stock-raising in the Pacific Northwest and Canadian West—partly to provide itself with supplies and partly to trade the surplus product to markets in California, Hawaii, Alaska, and around the Pacific Rim. Links between this corner of North America and the rest of the world were once again strengthened, as was the region’s identity as a place from which raw materials were extracted and shipped to the rest of the world.

Under the Hudson’s Bay Company, then, the “fur trade” of the Pacific Northwest became much more than a trade in furs. Such a redevelopment represented the culmination of a series of business decisions made by HBC officials and in particular George Simpson. These decisions represented, in a sense, the adaptation of the fur trade to a new North American environment. When the NWC and HBC moved their operations beyond the Rockies, they entered a region quite unlike what they had known in the East, and they had to change their ways. NWC and HBC officers encouraged several innovations. They increasingly shipped furs to market via the Pacific coast, rather than via Hudson Bay or Montreal, using the Columbia as their main artery of transportation. They replaced their birch-bark canoes with either canoes made of cedar (following the example of Northwest Indians) or pack trains of horses (which were also generally obtained in trade from Northwest Indians, especially the Nez Perce). They substituted salmon (at first reluctantly) for the pemmican (a preserved mixture of bison meat and grease) on which they had relied as a food staple east of the Rockies. And in regions south and east of the Columbia, they took to hunting fur-bearing animals themselves, in annual trapping expeditions, because the natives in those areas were less willing than Indians back east to hunt animals for the fur trade.

A hunting party (above) of Nez Perce Indians meeting with survey members near the Bitter Root River. (Reports of Explorations and Surveys. Washington, D.C., 1857. Vol. 12, pt. 1. plate 33. Sketch by J. M. Stanley, 1853.)

These adaptations occurred under the reign of both the NWC and the HBC, but it was the latter company that truly redefined the fur trade for in the Pacific Northwest. The Hudson’s Bay Company was a remarkably well-organized firm with considerable powers in fur country. As a monopoly company chartered by the King of England, the HBC held some legal and judicial authority over the lands in which it operated, for example. Most importantly, as a monopoly it was capable of keeping British settlers out of and away from the lands from which it was extracting furs. It possessed a strong sense of discipline and order, and it demonstrated the ability to follow a long-term strategy in carrying out its operations. No doubt the individual most responsible for ensuring HBC economic success was George Simpson, who oversaw the operation of the Columbia Department for the London-based company.

Simpson made three tours of the Columbia Department, and with each visit he reorganized the trade in the area. On his first trip of 1824-25 (recorded in a journal, an excerpt of which makes up part of the reading for this unit), Simpson ordered changes that heightened the efficiency of the business, extended the trade so as to extract more fur and deflect American competitors, and insisted that traders in the region become more self-sufficient in order to reduce overhead expenses. On his second visit of 1828-29 Simpson, recognizing that the region’s milder climate and natural resources offered opportunities not available elsewhere in the fur country, called for economic diversification that led to such things as exporting lumber, preserved salmon, and produce to Pacific markets in California, Hawaii, and Alaska. These changes made the Columbia Department one of the most profitable parts of the fur trade. On a third visit during 1841-42, Simpson reorganized the trade a third time, this time moving the majority of HBC operations northward in anticipation of losing the southern part of the Columbia Department to the United States. In this phase, a fort at Victoria replaced Fort Vancouver on the Columbia as the headquarters of the Department.

George Simpson in the 1850s, (above). (In Galbraith, The Little Emperor. Toronto, 1976. Originally a daguerreotype; copy made by Notman in 1872. Photo credited to the Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History.)

One of Simpson’s key concerns throughout these decades was the threat of competition from the United States. He worried that American fur traders, operating in the Rocky Mountains, might move into the Northwest and compete against the HBC (the HBC’s monopoly applied only to other British enterprises), and took many measures to keep these competitors at bay. One such measure was a “scorched-earth” policy, whereby HBC expeditions (in contrast to company policy elsewhere) purposely left no beaver in the watersheds they trapped south and east of the Columbia River, so that there would be nothing to lure American fur trappers to the Northwest. Simpson also worried that American settlers might decide to move to the lands of the Columbia Department, not to trade fur but to establish homes and farms, towns and industries. These concerns of Simpson became apparent in 1829 when he interviewed an American fur trapper, Jedediah Smith, whose party had come to the Oregon Country. Simpson interrogated Smith about whether Americans were interested in the Northwest or might be planning to migrate there. Smith assured Simpson that the Northwest was too remote from the states and too difficult to get to for Americans. Simpson apparently accepted Smith’s answers at face value. At the same time, however, Smith was composing a letter to U.S. Secretary of War—a letter which later became a report to Congress—that spoke of the attractions of the Northwest for settlers and of the ease with which overland migrants could travel to the region via South Pass in the Rocky Mountains.

George Simpson (above). (University of Washington Special Collections, Portrait Files.)

Nisqually FarmView of Nisqually Farm, 1845, (above). (Sketch by Henry Warre. Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Reprinted in James R. Gibson, Farming the Frontier: The Agricultural Opening of the Oregon Country, 1786-1848. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1985. p.100.)

Although he did not say so to Simpson, Smith envisioned American settlers arriving and claiming the Oregon Country—or at least parts of it—for the United States. Simpson was perhaps inclined to accept Smith’s deceitful answers because the focus of his company’s concern was extractive industry, not settlement. Smith, representing Americans with many interests in the Far West besides fur, was interested in all the different kinds of economic opportunities that the Northwest offered. Simpson, by contrast, working for a commercially oriented company, had a harder time grasping why Smith and other Americans might regard the region as a desirable destination. William H. Goetzmann, in Exploration and Empire (1966), explains that the kind of information Smith passed along to Americans back east “inspired migration, and made settlement in the Far West seem possible. It was not the kind of information,” however, “that Simpson and the other Hudson’s Bay leaders received from their own men, nor was it the information they really desired to hear.” Goetzmann concludes that, for all their accomplishments in the Far West, the British fur traders were more agents of commerce than they were agents of empire. Their focus was narrower—on the profits to be made from fur and other extracted commodities—and did not envision the settlement of the Oregon Country or its incorporation into the political mainstream of the nation. Americans, by contrast, had more diverse visions for the region—ones that included not only the fur trade but also many other activities—and by the 1840s, after a period of HBC hegemony, they were increasingly capable of asserting their visions in the region. No doubt their interest was heightened by Smith’s mention of the many commodities besides fur that the HBC produced in the Columbia Department. Without knowing it and without intending to, the HBC was through its program of economic diversification advertising the resources and fertility of the Northwest to future American settlers.

Unit 3: Lesson Seven – The Changing World of Pacific Northwest Indians

Burial canoe at the mouth of the Columbia River (above). (Edward Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World.London, 1843. Vol. 1, p.292.)

In the decades between 1830 and 1860, two fundamental shifts of power occurred in the American Northwest. One took place between non-Indian contestants for the region. British dominance in the area, expressed mainly through the activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company, diminished somewhat, giving the United States a stronger hold on the region and ultimately, in 1846, that portion of it south of the 49th parallel. (This is the focus of the next lesson.) The other major shift occurred between Indians and non-Indians, as native peoples found themselves increasingly on the defensive and subject to the policies and preferences of colonizers from Europe and the United States. For the lands that became the states of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon, these changes meant that by 1860 people from the United States were essentially in control of the territory; at the same time, British and Canadian colonizers were increasingly asserting colonial control over native societies in the land that became British Columbia, too. How native peoples were colonized by American and British “settlement” forms the subject of Unit IV. Here, I want to focus on how changes to the worlds of the region’s Indians, during the period of the land-based fur trade, contributed to the shift in power that eventually led to the dispossession of so many native peoples. I have already pointed out that fur traders differed from settlers in that they did not come to establish permanent towns and farms or to dispossess Indians. Yet the interaction of these fur traders with Indians, combined with the contact of newly arriving missionaries, did facilitate the dispossession that eventually resulted.

As with the era of the maritime fur trade, it was epidemic diseases—which, again, were unknown to Indians prior to contact with Europeans, and therefore illnesses against which natives had no immunities and little resistance—which had the most substantial impact upon native populations in the era before the mid-19th century. Epidemics such as smallpox, measles, and influenza did not strike Indians once; rather they recurred over the decades, meaning that groups of Indians who were recovering from one epidemic would likely be hit by another. Perhaps a band or tribe had experienced smallpox and acquired some immunity to that disease, for example, but the next epidemic to strike might be measles or typhoid. Successive outbreaks of different diseases devastated native peoples. The impact was not spread evenly across the region; groups on the Columbia Plateau, for example, apparently suffered less than those along the coast. But disease reached every group of natives, and not solely the epidemic varieties. Natives were also struck by illnesses that became endemic, including venereal disease and tuberculosis. These afflictions weakened Indian societies just as non-Indian colonizers approached the Pacific Northwest, and thus diminished natives’ ability to resist colonization.

Indian burial place, Willamette Valley, Oregon (above). (Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842. Philadelphia, Lea and Blanchard, 1845. Vol. 5, p. 219. Sketch by A. T. Agate, 1841.)

An outbreak of malaria between 1830 and 1833 offers a powerful illustration of the effect of diseases upon relations between Indians and non-Indians in the Pacific Northwest. Over the course of three years, beginning in 1830, malaria swept through groups of Indians along the lower Columbia and Willamette rivers. The disease was probably brought to the region either by sailing vessels or by traders and trappers who had arrived from the malarial Mississippi River valley. Carried along by the mosquito Anopheles malculipennis, which flourishes in summer and which ranges between coastal areas and the Cascade Mountains, malaria broke out for three straight summer seasons. It hit especially hard in the vicinity around the future site of Portland, the swampy location of which had a special concentration of mosquitoes. From Oregon, the disease spread south to the Central Valley of California, probably carried by one of the HBC trapping expeditions to move in that direction. Before the epidemic struck, in 1830, there are estimated to have been 13,940 Indians in the lower Columbia and Willamette valleys (and this figure, remember, represents an estimate of how many had already survived epidemics of smallpox and other diseases); by 1841 there were only an estimated 1175 natives remaining. In other words, the depopulation over about one decade’s time—largely the result of malaria—was approximately 92%. White observers recounted entire villages destroyed, with nobody left behind to tend to the dead and dying.

Consider for a moment how such a staggering rate of mortality would influence regional history. First, imagine how the culture of Indian peoples would have been affected if nine out of every ten members of a family, band, or tribe died off. Who would be left to procure food and shelter, care for the children, and carry on traditions? What would happen to a group’s spiritual and medicinal practices, given the apparent failure of those practices in the face of epidemic diseases? What traces would be left of groups whose few remaining survivors ran off to join other groups? Second, think about the impact of this disease on relations between Indians and non-Indians. If Indian groups had recently seen their populations reduced by ninety percent, how successfully might we expect them to have resisted the incursion of non-Indians into their territory? Moreover, how would diseases have influenced the perceptions of colonizers in the territory?

An Indian burial canoe, by Captain Henry J. Warre (above). (Henry James Warre, Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory. London, Dickinson & Co., 1848. Plate 13.)

Tshimakain, the American Board’s Spokane Mission, 1843 (above). (James R. Gibson, Farming the Frontier, 156. Sketch by Charles Geyer. Papers of Elkanan and Mary Richardson Walker, 1821-1938. WSU, Pullman.)

When American missionaries and settlers began to arrive during the 1830s and early 1840s, they viewed the Willamette Valley as a relatively unpopulated area, as “free land” upon which they might settle without extensive negotiations with Indians over rights to the land—and because of the effects of malaria their perception was not entirely wrong. The region had been substantially depopulated. It is no accident that the initial influx of settlers to the Northwest flowed so heavily to the Willamette. It possessed great farmland, to be sure, but it also possessed relatively few native occupants who might challenge non-Indian control of the territory. In some respects, disease paved the way for the arrival of settlers. And once settlers had arrived, they seized upon the apparent depopulation of the native Northwest as an excuse or justification for their own occupation of the land. The Indians, they repeated to themselves, were all dying off—so what rights of theirs needed to be respected?

Epidemic diseases affected Indians and non-Indians differently. Some fur traders in the vicinity of Fort Vancouver, for example, were also struck by malaria, but their losses were very small, especially by contrast to native losses. Epidemic disease helped to differentiate between natives and non-natives, then, and also helped to shift the balance of power between them. At the same time, however, the spread of illness from one group to another reminds us that the two groups were in some ways being integrated into a single Northwestern society—not as equals, by any means, but nonetheless sharing much together. The fur trade was responsible for some of this integration, as was the activity of missionaries.

British and American fur trade companies consisted almost entirely of male employees. When employees of the North West or Hudson’s Bay companies initially went to work in the Columbia Department, they were not accompanied by “European” or “white” women. Rather, the only women with whom they came into contact were “full-blood” Indian women, i.e. women entirely of native ancestry. Fur traders formed relationships with these Indian women, and with them had “mixed-blood” or metis children. In essence, although we generally speak about the fur-trade era as one of natives and non-natives, Indians and “whites,” in fact the different groups were starting families together and bringing about something of a mixing of the two peoples.

Willamette Falls, J. Drayton, 1841 (above). (Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842. Philadelphia, Lea and Blanchard, 1845. Vol. 4, p. 345.) University of Washington Special Collections.

It is important to keep in mind that, while personal needs and motives affected these relationships between male fur traders and Indian women, there were also larger social, economic, and political matters at stake. Both the trading companies and the native societies regarded relationships between fur traders and their partners partly in economic terms. Fur traders hoped to develop a closer relationship with influential Indians and to acquire the labor and other skills of wives and their relatives; Indian families similarly hoped that these relationships would result in favoritism toward them in the trade. “Marriage” in the fur country helped to cement ties between trading companies and Indian groups. Of course, they were not purely business transactions; they also addressed personal needs and opportunities. Yet in these regards, the relationships did not follow one pattern. Some seem, in retrospect, to have been quite exploitative, for some fur traders simply abandoned their wives and children upon leaving a territory or going back to England. Other traders, however, developed close ties to their wives and offspring and remained with them for the rest of their lives rather than return to Europe. On both sides, there was a degree of accommodation to the other’s culture. Over time, however, it seems that the pressure on Indians to conform to white ways became greater. One scholar (Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870) has argued that fur traders increasingly preferred “mixed-blood” to “full-blood” women as wives, and in other ways tried to pressure their female partners to abandon Indian ways and adopt British values. One example of this pressure is mentioned by George Simpson—the attempt to persuade Chinook mothers not to flatten their babies’ heads. Another example comes from the realm of religion; many fur traders tried to persuade wives and children to become Christian.

Chemakane Mission, J. M. Stanley, 1853 (above). (Reports of Explorations and Surveys. Washington, D.C., 1857. Vol. 12, pt. 1. plate 34.) University of Washington Special Collections.

Missionaries exerted additional pressure on Indians to convert to European ways, specifically Christianity. As with intermarriage, there were many different shadings of religious interaction between Indians and non-Indians. Some native groups eagerly sought out Christianity, no doubt in part because their own spiritual beliefs had been found wanting in the face of epidemic disease and other aspects of colonization. Natives did not always regard Christianity, however, as a replacement for their own religion. They were often more eclectic than that, and found ways of merging native and European beliefs. Other Indians did not respond so well to the message of Christianity. Schwantes (pp. 83-90) recaps the Cayuse response to the missionary efforts of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. Like other Protestants, the Whitmans had succeeded in recruiting very few natives for Christ after establishing their mission near present day Walla Walla. Over time, as a result, they despaired of converting native peoples and decided to focus their efforts on the growing number of white settlers arriving from the United States. Marcus Whitman explained this change of mission: “It does not concern me so much what is to become of any particular set of Indians, as to give them the offer of salvation through the gospel and the opportunity of civilization….I have no doubt our greatest work is to be to aid the white settlement of this country and help to found its religious institutions.” Whitman went on to explain why natives would not possibly be ably to resist the influx of settlers in comments that combined Christian with biological prophecy: “For the [Biblical] Command is multiply and replenish the Earth, neither of which the Indians obey….How can they stand in the way of others who do both?” How indeed.

St. Paul Catholic Mission, 1847 (above). (Harvey J. McKay, St. Paul, Oregon, 1830-1890. Portland, 1980, 15. Source credited to St. Paul Mission Historical Society.)

(Whitman was citing Genesis 9:7, a more modern version of which states, “As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.” His thought was that Christians would go forth and multiply and replenish the earth—in this case the Pacific Northwest—while Indians seemed to be dying away.)

When the first missionaries arrived in the Pacific Northwest, in 1834, Indians outnumbered non-Indians by a substantial margin. Yet the kind of statement made by Whitman during the early 1840s suggests both just how the demographic balance was changing and just how confident white colonizers were about their eventual success in colonizing the Pacific Northwest. Christianity was one source of that confidence; biology (or, more specifically, an awareness of the impact of epidemic disease) was another. The Bible told Whitman and other Christians of their right and obligation to colonize all corners of the earth; the disappearing population of natives told them of the opportunities of colonizing parts of this specific corner of the earth without great resistance from Indians.

Protestants such as Marcus Whitman and Jason Lee did not have the field to themselves in this period. Catholic missionaries competed with them for Indian souls. Although both Catholics and Protestants sought to convert natives to Christianity, they did not proceed in their endeavors in the same way. Protestants generally proved more rigid in their approach to Indians; more insistent on rapid conversion and on outward signs of conversion such as shortened hair and white clothing; more nationalistic in their focus on American government and values; and more determined to live on fixed plots of land in order to show Indians how to settle down and farm. Francis Paul Prucha writes,

“For the Protestant conversion to take place, a total and external transformation was deemed necessary, and the Anglo-Protestants demanded ultimately the obliteration of Indian culture in its entirety-language, religion, ceremonies, social patterns. The Catholics were more likely to accept the Indians’ nature, to accommodate themselves to the cultures they were seeking to make Christian. They studied Indian languages, appealed to the Indians’ love of ceremonials with the Catholic liturgical splendors, and looked for evidences of an inner faith, not external conformity” (“Two Roads to Conversion: Protestant and Catholic Missionaries in the Pacific Northwest,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 79 [Oct. 1988]: 134).

Catholic missionaries were more likely to be of European origin, and did not share the Protestants’ forceful American nationalism or their attachment to the U.S. government—which Indians of course regarded with suspicion. They proved more willing, too, to travel with and live among Indians. Thus some tribes, such as the Couer d’Alenes in Idaho, became predominantly Catholic and have remained so. And prominent Catholic missionaries such as Father Pierre-Jean de Smet, left behind invaluable accounts of native ways (see in particular Jacqueline Peterson with Laura Peers, Sacred Encounters: Father De Smet and the Indians of the Rocky Mountain West [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993].)

Bishop A. M. A. Blanchet, Archbishop L. N. Blanchet, and Bishop Modeste Demers, the founders of the Catholic Church in the Pacific Northwest (above). (Edwin Vincent O’Hara, Pioneer Catholic History of Oregon. Portland, 1911, 8.)

Unit 3: Lesson Eight – Settlement of the Oregon Boundary Question, 1818-1846

Jason Lee (above) (Dorothy O. Johansen and Charles Gates, Empire of the Columbia. New York, 1957. Plates following p.160. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, University of Oregon Library, Eugene.)

Jason Lee’s “First Oregon Mission” at the edge of French Prairie in the Willamette Valley (above). (Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition. Vol. 4. Philadelphia, 1845, 374. Drawn by A. T. Agate.)

To establish itself as a nation and assert its borders and control over territory, the United States had to accomplish two things. First, it needed to dispossess and displace native peoples, and extinguish their claims to land. The last lesson offers examples of that process beginning to work (albeit under British rather than American influence) among Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Second, it needed to interact with other non-native powers, particularly the nations of Europe, to define and defend American claims to territory. Sometimes this interaction was peaceful, and sometimes it was not. Most American territories came into the nation’s possession via wars or purchases. Thus the Revolutionary War produced most of the territory east of the Mississippi River and the war with Mexico between 1846 and 1848 incorporated the Southwest, while the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 brought most of the lands between the Mississippi and the Rockies into the nation, and a deal with Russia in 1867 procured Alaska.

Oregon City, sketched as the “American Village” by Captain Henry J. Warre (above). (Reproduced in Henry James Warre, Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory. London, 1848. Plate 9.) Courtesy University of Washington Special Collections.

The territory that became the American Northwest was appended to the nation in somewhat unusual fashion, by comparison. First, it passed through a phase during which the main two non-native claimants, Britain and the U.S., agreed to share it for an indefinite time—the so-called joint occupation. Second, national ownership of the area was resolved not by war or purchase but by treaty, as the two sides negotiated a boundary dispute. The dispute on the Pacific coast, settled in 1846, was complemented by one on the Atlantic coast, resolved in 1842, between Maine and Canada. Both sets of negotiations were part of the process whereby Britain and the United States reached a more substantial accommodation with one another, after the conflicts of the American Revolution and War of 1812.

The Pacific coast area in dispute, called the Oregon country, stretched from the crest of the Rockies in the east to the ocean in the west, and from the 42nd parallel in the south (today’s California-Oregon border) to the parallel of 54 degrees, 40 minutes in the north (today’s Alaska-British Columbia border). This territory was claimed by the various explorers who arrived first by sea and then by land. At different times, then, Spain and Russia were among those contesting the region, but between 1818 and 1824 the Spanish and Russians relinquished their claims to the territory south of Alaska and north of California. Thereafter, only Great Britain and the United States, among the developed nations, competed for the Oregon Country.

It should be noted that while Great Britain and the United States both had claims to the entire Oregon country, the two sides mostly expected to divide the territory between themselves; neither could realistically expect to acquire the entire Oregon Country. East of the continental divide, the U.S. and Britain had agreed upon a border running west from the Great Lakes at the 49th parallel. Virtually from the start of discussions over Oregon, the British expected this border to continue west to the Columbia River, and then to follow that river to the ocean. They were willing, in other words, to concede everything south of the 49th parallel, and then south and east of the Columbia River, to the United States. But they wanted to maintain access to the river itself, which after all was the key artery of travel within HBC holdings, and they wanted control over Puget Sound, which they rightly regarded as a superior harbor. At the same time, the Americans generally did not expect to gain anything north of the 49th parallel, but they coveted Puget Sound and access to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Keep in mind that during the 1820s and 1830s the United States had no good harbor on the Pacific coast. San Diego and San Francisco were first Spanish and then Mexican ports. The shoreline of Oregon offered no great harbor for ships, and the bar at the mouth of the Columbia was notorious for interfering with transportation between ocean and river. Until the conclusion of war with Mexico, 1846-48, the U.S. regarded Puget Sound as the best place for it to acquire a protected, deep-water harbor on the Pacific coast.

Michael T. Simmons, one of the first settlers of Oregon Territory north of the Columbia River (above). (University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, Portrait Files.)

Basically, then, the boundary dispute between Britain and the U.S. revolved around which side would get the Puget Sound country and the remainder of Washington state west and north of the Columbia River. In this competition, the British initially had by far the strongest hand. The Englishman George Vancouver, after all, had been the first non-native to discover and explore Puget Sound. And British fur traders, particularly in the employ of the HBC, had in the course of organizing the entire region into an economy of extractive resources, set up permanent bases in western Washington. By the 1830s the HBC had established posts at Fort Vancouver and Fort Nisqually and along the Cowlitz Rover, and they had also developed cordial relations with Indians. Many of George Simpson’s designs for the Columbia Department between 1824 and 1840 had been based on the assumption that the British would retain western Washington and lose eastern Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Thus Simpson had, for example, encouraged American missionaries to set up operations south and east of the Columbia; accepted settlement by American citizens in the Willamette Valley; and tried to extinguish fur supplies in the lands he expected the British would not retain. He believed until the early 1840s that the British would hold on to western Washington, which he regarded as integral to HBC operations on the west coast, and thus did not expect to have to modify activities there in response to an American takeover. Simpson’s decision to relocate the Department’s headquarters in 1842 from Fort Vancouver to Victoria, however, signaled a change in his thinking. By that time, the balance of power between the British and Americans in regard to the boundary dispute was shifting.

When the U.S. initially agreed to the idea of joint occupation in 1818, it did not really have the resources to make a strong imprint on the Pacific Northwest. It had neither a navy as powerful as Britain’s nor a colonizing agent as well-organized and focused as the Hudson’s Bay Company. The great majority of its population resided far to the east of the Mississippi River. Its fur traders and trappers had not, until the 1820s, penetrated the Rockies successfully or found ways through the mountains to the west coast. Some Americans nurtured the idea of a Pacific-coast harbor, but most did not envision the United States expanding its holdings beyond the continental divide.

Champoeg in 1851, (above) looking south. This situation began to change during the 1830s and 1840s. Mountain men and missionaries began to link the Pacific Northwest to the eastern states through their travels to, working in, and descriptions of the region. Moreover, a few parties of settlers began to make their way into the area. Then, during the 1840s, the United States became keenly interested in westward expansion—so interested that national politicians took up the West as a key campaign issue and the U.S. annexed Texas and went to war with Mexico for the remainder of its northern holdings (what became the American Southwest). Simultaneously, thousands more Americans decided to migrate overland toward the coast, including especially the Willamette Valley. American interest in the Pacific Northwest, after about two decades of stagnation, suddenly climbed dramatically, taking the form of both settlers arriving to reside in the region and politicians and statesmen willing to confront the British in order to resolve the boundary dispute in the Americans’ favor. By contrast, British interest in the Northwest remained limited, largely because the HBC monopoly in the area had precluded much attention by others from Great Britain. American citizens were taking a keen interest in the far corner of the continent, while British subjects most likely knew little about it, or else resented the fact that the HBC was a monopoly.

The arrival of American settlers cast into bold relief the different approaches adopted by the British and Americans for colonizing the region. British colonization proceeded through the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose corporate operations focused on extraction of natural resources. The HBC generally discouraged settlement in the lands it expected to retain, and discouraged private ownership of lands; it aimed to minimize any disruption to the fur trade and any dislocation of its Indian trading partners. It also worked to control non-native society in the area so that the company, and not individuals, dominated the local economy and governed the region. Americans, by contrast, expected to bring to the Northwest the more individualistic and democratic attitudes of their society. They insisted upon acquiring privately owned parcels of land and having a voice in government. And they did not wish to be subordinate to such a powerful firm as the HBC. One HBC official summarized the differences nicely: farms in the Willamette Valley, he explained, could flourish “only through the protection of equal laws [the antithesis of monopoly], the influence of free trade [again, the antithesis of monopoly], the accession of respectable inhabitants [meaning the arrival of families of settlers, as opposed to unattached, male fur traders]…while the fur trade much suffer by each innovation.”

Map of International Rivalries (above).

The arriving American settlers were aware of these differences. Although they did a good deal of business with the HBC, and actually benefited from HBC assistance and trade, they also resented the power of the Company. One way to assert their own interests, and try to limit the influence of the company in the region, was for them to organize their own government—an action that reiterated their faith in American values of self-government and republicanism. Borrowing from the Iowa Territory code of laws, Oregon settlers formed the Provisional Government between 1843 and 1845. The first laws provided for the acquisition and secure ownership of land, the holding of elections, and the formation of a militia. Later legislation provided for an executive and judicial branch of government and divided the territory into counties for local administration. Importantly, the Provisional Government outlawed the migration and residence of African Americans—both free and enslaved—to Oregon.

In short order, between about 1838 and 1845, the American presence had gone from being minimal to being substantial. This change was an important factor in strengthening the American claim to the territory.At the national level, too, there existed a desire to stake a stronger claim to the Pacific Northwest. Britain and the U.S. had remained in communication about the Northwest boundary, with both sides generally unyielding in their desire to control Puget Sound. Some Americans grew impatient with the dispute, so much so that James K. Polk, when running for president in 1844, declared that he wanted the U.S. to acquire “all” of Oregon, i.e., the entire region between California and Alaska, including present-day British Columbia. Another campaign slogan to the same effect, “Fifty-four Forty or Fight” (which meant that if the British did not yield the entire Oregon Country, up to the parallel at 54 degrees, 40 minutes, the Americans would go to war for it), summarized the aggressiveness of some Americans in this era of “Manifest Destiny.” This belligerence came exactly as Britain was growing more inclined to concede western Washington to the U.S., and it actually may have stalled resolution of the dispute. By 1846, nonetheless, the two nations came to an agreement and signed the Oregon Treaty. The United States, patient since 1818, finally secured the Pacific port they had coveted for so long, a port to which they surely had less claim than the British. The British lost western Washington, but retained the interior coastline of the Strait of Georgia and Vancouver Island. The HBC retained the right of navigation on the Columbia and its substantial holdings in what was now American territory. Yet the transfer to U.S. control did not bode well for further operations south of the 49th parallel, and the HBC would eventually sell its interests in the American Northwest and retrench to British Columbia.

Few Americans today pay much attention to the Oregon Treaty of 1846.The nation’s acquisitions by war have seemed more dramatic, and even its acquisitions by purchase have seemed more memorable. The diplomatic negotiations that produced the treaty perhaps appear dull, as if the two sides finally just arrived at a fair compromise. Maybe there is a sense, too, that the U.S. did not take the far corner of the Pacific Northwest so much from another nation or people as it did from a company, the HBC, whose own operations were inhibiting American-style “development” of the region. It would be best, however, to keep in mind that in Canada, across the border that the Oregon Treaty extended in 1849, feelings are different. There, the Oregon Treaty is often remembered vividly as a loss, and one of many examples of American disrespect for Canadian borders and national integrity. Thus James R. Gibson, a Canadian geographer, writes in Farming the Frontier: The Agricultural Opening of the Oregon Country 1786-1846 (1985):

Map of the San Juan Islands International Boundary Dispute, (above). The Oregon Treaty was not a fair compromise; there was no division of the ‘Oregon triangle’ [the disputed lands in Washington state], all of which went to the United States….Canadians have valid reasons for regretting and even resenting the Oregon settlement, since the British claim to the territory north of the Columbia-Snake-Clearwater river system was at least as good as, if not better than, that of the United States on the grounds of discovery, exploration, and settlement, and since the future Canadian Dominion was deprived of any harbour on Puget Sound….Canadians should not forget that they were dispossessed of part of their rightful Columbia heritage, a heritage whose economic potential in general and agricultural possibilities in particular were initially and successfully demonstrated by the Hudson’s Bay Company. They should also remember that whenever it is tritely declared that Canada and the United States share the longest undefended border in the world, it is so mainly because the stronger American republic won its northern boundary disputes at the expense of its weaker neighbour, just as it southern boundary was gained at the expense of a weaker Mexico.

Gibson’s interpretation reflects a longstanding and pervasive Canadian concern about the sheer power of the United States as well as an accurate memory of the many threats that Americans have posed to the integrity of Canadian borders and Canadian national identity. I would, however, add one caveat to Gibson’s formulation. When the Oregon Treaty was signed, the Confederation of Canada did not exist; America’s northern neighbor was not a nation, but rather several British colonies. When the U.S. negotiated the Oregon Treaty, it did so with Great Britain, not Canada, so it is logical to keep Britain’s participation in the treaty in mind (there was as of yet no official Canadian participation in diplomacy). Canadian views of this British participation hint at different kinds of weakness in the face of American strength. Gibson, for example, refers to a British mood of “appeasement” in yielding western Washington to the U.S., while another Canadian scholar (John Saywell, Canada: Pathways to the Present [1994]), recalls not only American aggression but also British carelessness in giving “what is now Washington and Oregon to the United States.” American interpretations, by contrast, do not portray Britain as weak, and thus do not tend to see the Oregon Treaty as a deal struck with a “weaker neighbour.” Quite the contrary, in fact. In explaining President Polk’s decision to accept the 49th parallel as the boundary, Robert H. Ferrell, in American Diplomacy: A History (1975), writes that Polk “had given in to Great Britain [rather than standing up for more territory]. It was one thing to press territorial claims against a nation such as Mexico, and quite another to stand up to the most powerful nation in the world, as Britain was during the nineteenth century.”

Canadians and Americans tend to recall the Oregon Treaty in distinctly different ways. In this case and in virtually every other, how one interprets the past depends in large part upon where one is viewing it from.

Unit 4: Settlers, Indians, and the Americanization of the Pacific Northwest, 1834-1900

Lesson Nine: Settlers and Societies in California and Oregon

In the early 1990s a joke began making the rounds in the Pacific Northwest, and it went something like this. Three men were sitting around a campfire drinking. One was from Texas, one was from California, and one was from Oregon (or, in some versions, Washington). The Texan took a few swigs of whiskey, threw the bottle up into the air, and shot at it with his pistol while exclaiming, “We have plenty more whiskey where I come from.” The Californian thought a minute, sipped a bit of Napa Valley wine, grabbed the Texan’s pistol, threw the wine bottle up into the air, and shot at it while exclaiming, “We have lots more wine where I come from.” The Oregonian (or Washingtonian) guzzled a whole bottle of Northwest microbrew, grabbed the Texan’s pistol, threw the empty into the air but then caught the bottle in one hand and shot the Californian dead with the other, and explained, “We have too many Californians where I come from, but I need to recycle this beer bottle.”

One could no doubt argue that this joke is tasteless and that it trivializes violence. It is mentioned not to endorse it but to provide evidence of what seem to me to be fairly widespread attitudes toward Californians on the part of people in the Pacific Northwest. I wish to note as well that these attitudes—and humorous expressions of them—have been of long standing. Perhaps the first anti-California joke in the Pacific Northwest appeared in the 1850s, and it went something like this: Migrants on the overland trail encountered a number of forks in the road. “At Pacific Springs, one of the crossroads of the western trail, a pile of gold-bearing quartz marked the road to California; the other road had a sign bearing the words ‘To Oregon.’ Those who could read took the trail to Oregon.” (Cited by Dorothy O. Johansen, “A Working Hypothesis for the Study of Migrations,” Pacific Historical Review 36 [Feb. 1967]:8.)

Jokes such as these have lasting currency in the Pacific Northwest because they confirm the region’s belief and desire that it remains distinctive from California. Ostensibly offered as criticisms of the Golden State, these jokes are really told to point out what we regard as our own virtues. They tell us about who we are or, more accurately, about who we think we are. There is some truth to the idea conveyed in this humor that the Northwest and California have long been two different kinds of places and societies. At the same time, however, it seems to me that Northwesterners have tended to overemphasize these differences while underplaying the similarities and linkages between their region and California.

Placer Miner, Helena, Montana (above). While this view shows a placer miner near Helena, it also illustrates the work of California gold-seakers. (University of Washington Special Collections, Mining Files, UW Negative #278).

P. L. Edwards, Sketch of the Oregon Territory, or Emigrant Guide (above). Liberty, Missouri, Herald, 1842. (Special Collections, University of Washington).

Historians have written especially on settlers and societies in California and Oregon during the 1840s and 1850s, trying to detect differences during the critical early years of these two American states. They have found ample grounds for confirming the founding of two distinct societies. At bottom, they agree, early American Oregon was shaped profoundly by the fact that immigrants were attracted primarily by the ample, fertile farmland in the Willamette Valley, while early American California was shaped profoundly by the fact that immigrants were attracted primarily by the presence of gold. Prior to the discovery of gold in California in 1848, Oregon was the favored destination of overland migrants to the West Coast. Between 1840 and 1848, 11,512 migrants headed for Oregon (or 81% of the total population in motion) while 2,735 headed for California. Once news of the gold strike reached across the continent, these percentages were reversed while the figures grew enormously. Between 1849 and 1860, 200,335 overland migrants headed for California (79% of the total population on the trails) while 53,062 headed for Oregon. (Figures from John D. Unruh, The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1860 [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979], 84-85.)

The discovery of gold, then, dramatically rearranged the quantity of migrants heading west and the quantity of migrants going to specific places in the West. It also introduced more qualitative differences into the stream of people moving overland. Those traveling overland to Oregon and California in the mid-1840s, their minds for the most part on starting farms in the Far West, included many more women and children. About half of all migrants in this period traveled the trail as members of family groups, and adult women comprised 15-20% of all emigrants. During the 1850s, by contrast, only 20-30% of all emigrants traveled the trail as members of family groups; and women and children amounted to no more than five percent of all emigrants bound for Gold Rush California during that decade.

In sum, then, families and farms tended to define society in Oregon, while males and miners tended to define society in California. Other differences accrued. Migrants to Oregon appeared to be more careful in how they got information about western destinations and how they moved across country. That is, they relied more than Argonauts on information obtained first-hand from personal acquaintances, and their families traveled across the trail more commonly with others from their extended families, towns, churches, or other group of acquaintances. By contrast, migrants to California made the decision to move with less care and caution, coming much more frequently as individuals and depending more upon less reliable printed materials for their information about the coast. Once they arrived at the end of the trail, moreover, California-bound emigrants proved much more mobile, moving around from place to place seeking opportunity, and also leaving the state more readily to return home or head for some other supposed strike. California seems to have been more restless, Oregon more steady.

Historians of early American Oregon and California have detected important differences in economic, political, and environmental attitudes that mirror these demographic differences. Oregon’s early settlers had to some extent intentionally left behind the nation’s growing market system and its increasing commercial orientation. They participated in commerce, to be sure; indeed, their farms prospered in the late 1840s and early 1850s, in large part because they could sell so much produce to miners in more grasping California. But Oregon’s farmers did not embrace market capitalism wholeheartedly. The historian Robert Bunting explains:

Settlers approached markets cautiously, for although farmers wanted outlets for their surpluses, few were unlimited marketers merely awaiting the structures that would make profit maximization possible. Settlers farmed according to the “Oregon fashion,” which sought to take advantage of market exchange while minimizing market risk. They accomplished their goal through raising a variety of crops and animals designed to meet household needs first and marketing only the surpluses….

Emigrants entering [Oregon] from the 1840s to the 1880s…were families in search of health and abundant land upon which they could establish permanent homes. Oregonians clearly recognized these goals as an important feature of their society and a significant element in framing a distinctive self-identity. L. F. Grover, in an 1853 Fourth of July speech, contrasted Oregon’s steady progress with California’s fluctuating periods of rapid growth and declines. For Grover, Oregon’s superiority clearly rested with its “permanent population, characterized by intelligence, industry and wealth.” Or, as Oregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs Anson Dart proudly noted, Oregon proved a poor country for “doctors, lawyers, clerks, speculators and gamblers.” The Pacific Raincoast: Environment and Culture in an American Eden, 1778-1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 92.

The farm of S. Timmons (above), Walla Walla County, n.d. (Special Collections, UW, Agricultural Files. Photo by F. Fortin, Walla Walla, UW negative #8310.)

Camp Ground, Aug. 23, 1849 (above). Raymond W. Settle, ed., The March of the Mounted Riflemen, First United States Military Expedition…to Fort Vancouver,…1849. As recorded in the journals of Major Osborne Cross and George Gibbs and the official report of Colonel Loring. (Glendale, 1940)

Settlers in Oregon placed somewhat more emphasis on community than did most other Americans of the time, and less emphasis on individual gain. “Landownership and a familial competence, more than the profits of personal self-seeking, provided the critical incentive to the settling of the land,” writes David Alan Johnson in Founding the Far West: California, Oregon and Nevada, 1840-1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 139. Johnson goes on to point out how this economic orientation played out in a more “republican” politics in Oregon, as manifest in that state’s constitution upon admission to the Union in 1859. He also contends that Oregonians resisted the modernizing changes of the later 19th century:

Except in a small way, Oregon lacked the mineral wealth that, transformed into capital, shaped California long after the mines played out. Pacific Northwesterners remained wedded to farming, and as farmers their embrace of market agriculture was subdued even after the isolation of the early decades ended. Although commercial farming increased in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s—most importantly east of the Cascade mountain range—the older mixture of subsistence and market family farming in the Willamette Valley continued long after the 1850s. This was the case to no small degree because of the persistence of the early comers to the state. With the exception of those who briefly sojourned in Oregon during its mining rushes in the 1860s, life there was marked, if not dominated numerically, by those who stayed behind. (Johnson, 270)

Throughout Johnson’s and Bunting’s comments, the contrast between Oregon and California looms large. The two places attracted different kinds of settlers who decided about and traveled to these destinations in different fashion and then developed political institutions and social attitudes that reinforced their differing world views. Many Oregonians would argue that these early distinctions have persisted to the present, that the fork in the overland trail (now a junction of the interstate highway) continues to symbolize a powerful division.

There is a good deal of truth to the idea that California and Oregon (and, by implication, the Pacific Northwest) traveled along different paths toward the present. However, I would not want to stress the point too much. There is a case to be made, too, for similarities between the two subregions of the West. Consider for example the fact that many observers reported that farms throughout the Willamette Valley seemed deserted in 1849-1850 because so many people—especially the men—had left to seek their fortunes in the Gold Rush. James Douglas, an officer in the Hudson’s Bay Company, estimated in 1849 that two-thirds of Oregon’s settlers had abandoned their farms in search of California gold. Benjamin Cory, a doctor and miner based in San Francisco, commented similarly that “News of the gold has extended like wildfire. Every ship from the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii], Oregon, and the Southern Coast is loaded with passengers—Oregon is dead….” If settlers in the Willamette Valley were so virtuous, so impervious to the lure of gold, then why did they mimic the behavior of Californians?

Above: Allegedly the first sawmill on Puget Sound; built by William Shelton, an Indian on the Tulalip Reservation. (Special Collections, UW, Logging Files. Photo by Norman Edson, Burton, Washington.)

Other complicating factors deserve our attention as well. First, just as Oregon’s settlers did not remain in Oregon, so the gold rush did not stay confined to California. It spread northward into southern Oregon during the early 1850s, bringing many “Californian” habits and attitudes with it. Thereafter miners lit out from California for additional strikes (or rumored strikes) in eastern Washington, southern British Columbia, central Idaho, and western Montana between 1855 and 1864. In other words, the Pacific Northwest played host to mineral rushes, too, and in some cases profited quite handsomely from them. Second, the gold rush made California into such a powerful force that it utterly dominated the economies of the surrounding area, including those in the Pacific Northwest, regardless of how residents of the region felt about it. Farming in Oregon and logging in Washington and British Columbia—the region’s two leading industries—prospered primarily because of the markets for produce and lumber that existed in California. Moreover, investment in, and control over, the economies of the region came primarily from, or by way, of San Francisco. As economic theorist Henry George explained in 1868, “Not a settler in all the Pacific States and Territories but must pay San Francisco tribute; not an ounce of gold is dug, a pound of ore smelted, a field gleaned, or a tree felled in all their thousands of square miles, but must…add to her wealth.” Third, although family farming in the Willamette Valley no doubt set the pace for the Northwest during the 1840s and early 1850s, extractive industries became much more the norm thereafter. Fishing, mining, logging, and corporate agriculture all made the Pacific Northwest more like California and less like the Willamette Valley as the decades passed during the late 19th century.

The Willamette Valley society of the 1840s remained influential, but over time it also seemed more and more exceptional and ephemeral. Urban and industrial society in Portland and Seattle and Vancouver and Spokane, for example—more similar to California in its higher proportion of men and singles in the society, its greater focus on resource industries, its more diverse population—marked the new direction of the Pacific Northwest. Ironically, though, this newer Northwest remained as devoted as the older Northwest to anti-California jokes and to the underlying sentiment that people to the north of the 42nd parallel—the northern boundary of California—remained different from, and no doubt better than, those to the south.

Descending the Grande Ronde, Foot of the Blue Mountains (above). Raymond W. Settle, ed. The March of the Mounted Riflemen. As recorded in the journals of Major Osborne Cross and George Gibbs and the official report of Colonel Loring. (Glendale, 1940), facing p. 226.

The migration of people is neither a random nor a chaotic process. Those who moved to the Pacific Northwest by no means comprised a cross-section of the societies back east that provided the majority of the emigrants. Rather, migration was a selective process. Some people, such as those with some resources with which to pay for a journey, were able to go while others were not. Similarly, some people chose to go while others with the same amount of resources did not. There were reasons for the choices that were made, reasons that fell into patterns that can be explained through historical analysis. (One should add here that, as we are speaking about the mid-19th century, it is important to note that male heads of household had far more power in shaping decisions about migration than did women or children. For supporting evidence, see John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979] and J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981].) Moreover, the destinations at the end of the overland trail attracted some migrants but not others. Farm land in the Willamette Valley appealed particularly to some kinds of migrants, while the presence of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada appealed particularly to other kinds. And so different types of societies emerged in the Far West of the mid-19th century. Yet the two kinds of societies would clearly overlap and interact. Californians and Northwesterners would regularly cross the borders that supposedly set them apart. People would also change their minds, for a variety of reasons, and become more or less devoted to mining, or to farming, or to some other activity or place.

More importantly, while migration allowed the choices of some individuals to create differences in the kinds of settler societies that took root in the Far West, there were other quite powerful forces at work that profoundly shaped all colonization in the region. Some were national and some were international. For example, Californians and Oregonians both sought to improve their condition and that of their families within a generally shared framework of modern, global, market capitalism that encouraged the movement of individuals and families across increasingly vast distances. For example, Californians and Oregonians brought to the Far West a common political ideology of the republic of the United States, along with the mutual expectation that American laws and courts, and American policies regarding natural resources, would provide the framework for economic and legal development in newly colonized country. (This ideology, after all, had been at the root of American settlers’ complaints about the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Pacific Northwest.) For example, Californians and Oregonians brought with them a shared complex of beliefs—religious, scientific, legalistic, economic—that defined in their minds quite clear racial and cultural distinctions between themselves and such groups of “others” as Indians and Mexicans and Chinese. Indeed, when American settlers in the Pacific Northwest began drawing “lines”—i.e. borders between themselves and Canadians, boundaries marking off Indian reservations, grids that gave coordinates to specific tracts of property—they provided evidence of the great number of common features that set them apart as American colonizers of the West. The importance of these lines forms the subject of the next lesson.

Lesson Ten: Lines on the Land

When the first American fur traders and settlers saw the Willamette Valley, they wrote glowingly about its natural beauty and its suitability for farming. It seemed to them as if nature had made the valley for the explicit purpose of planting crops, grazing livestock, and pleasing the eye of overland migrants from the east. Much less obvious to pioneers was the fact that Indians had very consciously shaped this environment through fire. Annual, low-intensity, controlled burns, set in the late summer, had minimized the valley’s underbrush, reduced the number of trees, facilitated native hunting and gathering, and created the prairie-like appearance that settlers so appreciated. The Willamette Valley was in substantial part the artifice of Indians and of fires set by Indians.

Once American settlers set up homes in the area, however, their first impulse was to suppress the fires that Indians set. From the viewpoint of the farmer, rancher, and homeowner, fires—whether caused by Indians or not—were a wild force of nature that threatened the crops, livestock, and buildings that settlers had brought with them to Oregon. Or, more to the point, they threatened to destroy the value of the property that settlers had brought to and created on the land. Thus Jesse A. Applegate, a very early settler, recalled the frightening effect of such a fire:

We did not yet know that the Indians were wont to baptise the whole country with fire at the close of every summer; but very soon we were to learn our first lesson. This season [1844] the fire was started somewhere on the south Yamhill [River], and came sweeping up through the Salt Creek gap. The sea breeze being quite strong that evening, the flames leaped over the creek and came down upon us like an army with banners. All our skill and perseverance were required to save our camp. The flames swept by on both sides of the grove; then quickly closing ranks, made a clean sweep of all the country south and east of us….The Indians continued to burn the grass every season, until the country was somewhat settled up and the whites prevented them.

(Joseph Schafer, ed., A Day with the Cow Column in 1843. By Jesse Applegate. Recollections of My Boyhood. By Jesse A. Applegate [Chicago: Caxton Club, 1934], 137-38. Applegate is cited in the discussion of fire by Robert Bunting, The Pacific Rain coast: Environment and Culture in an American Eden, 1778-1900 [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997], 12-15, 80-85.

Although most settlers did not realize it, fire had been one of the things that made the Willamette Valley an appealing destination for them. However, as soon as they established homes and farms and ranches and businesses in the area, settlers prevented Indians from setting their annual fires. For Indians, fire was a tool that enriched their habitat in numerous ways. For non-Indians—who fixed themselves upon the land with fields and fences and farmhouses, rather than moving across it seasonally—fire represented a threat that needed to be extinguished. That is, in the Indians’ hands, fires threatened because they seemed to be “wild” and out of control. These different attitudes toward fire, then, mirrored different attitudes toward the land and its uses, as well as different conceptions about “wild” and about property.

That Indians used fire to modify nature reminds us that the land was not “pristine” or free from human influence before settlers arrived. Nonetheless, settlers immediately sought to transform the land by manipulating it so that it resembled the landscapes they had known back east. It is true that settlers were changed at least somewhat by the western lands to which they migrated; but it is even more important to see that those settlers were bent upon changing the lands they encountered in order to make them conform more closely to the places from which they had come. Westering migrants did not so much create new societies and institutions in the West as to transplant societies and institutions from the East to the West. The Willamette Valley and Puget Sound countries attracted their eye, but both areas needed to be reshaped in the eastern image before they could be deemed comfortable and productive places to live. In short, in colonizing the land and other natural resources, newcomers began to modify them in much more intrusive and heavy-handed ways than Indians had. And, the colonizers also began to deplete the Northwest’s resources in ways the Indians had never really been capable of.

Above: An example of southern Oregon meadows created by Native American Burning. Henry Abbot, of the U.S. Railroad Survey “credits Indians with excavating water holes and firing the landscape to foster the growth of grass for their horses,” as shown here along the Klamath River and Upper Klamath Lake in Southern Oregon. Reports of Explorations and Surveys, Washington, D.C., 1857. Plate IV, Vol. 6, facing p.69. Caption citation: William G. Robbins, “Landscape and Environment: Ecological Change in the Intermontane Northwest,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 84:4, p.145.

Successful colonization of the Pacific Northwest required that its lands be integrated into the political, economic, and cultural systems of societies headquartered back east. This integration in turn entailed a virtually endless process of drawing lines on the land. Explorers had begun this process by mapping and charting and claiming territory in the region, and devising routes to it. The “noble science of discovery,” to use George Vancouver’s words, integrated the Northwest into Europeans’ and Americans’ conceptual worlds by describing and naming the country so that it seemed familiar, and placing it into an accepted framework of latitude and longitude. The Northwest had to be colonized intellectually before it could be colonized in other ways. Fur traders, including the Hudson’s Bay Company, continued the process of integration by linking the Pacific Northwest to global markets in commodities and global routes of transportation and by strengthening national claims to the territory. With each linkage or line drawn, the country came into clearer relief.

: An example of southern Oregon meadows created by Native American Burning. Henry Abbot, of the U.S. Railroad Survey “credits Indians with excavating water holes and firing the landscape to foster the growth of grass for their horses,” as shown here along the Klamath River and Upper Klamath Lake in Southern Oregon. Reports of Explorations and Surveys, Washington, D.C., 1857. Plate IV, Vol. 6, facing p.69. Caption citation: William G. Robbins, “Landscape and Environment: Ecological Change in the Intermontane Northwest,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 84:4, p.145.

Successful colonization of the Pacific Northwest required that its lands be integrated into the political, economic, and cultural systems of societies headquartered back east. This integration in turn entailed a virtually endless process of drawing lines on the land. Explorers had begun this process by mapping and charting and claiming territory in the region, and devising routes to it. The “noble science of discovery,” to use George Vancouver’s words, integrated the Northwest into Europeans’ and Americans’ conceptual worlds by describing and naming the country so that it seemed familiar, and placing it into an accepted framework of latitude and longitude. The Northwest had to be colonized intellectually before it could be colonized in other ways. Fur traders, including the Hudson’s Bay Company, continued the process of integration by linking the Pacific Northwest to global markets in commodities and global routes of transportation and by strengthening national claims to the territory. With each linkage or line drawn, the country came into clearer relief.

Standard Section Divisions–how every section in the West is divided, above. Both towns and farms conformed to the federal survey grid. In some instances, even rivers and streams were reshaped to fit the lines on the land. Reproduced in Everett Dick, The Lure of the Land: A Social History of the Public Lands from the Articles of Confederation to the New Deal (Lincoln, 1970), following p.178.

Grays Harbor, above. George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean (London, 1801,) chart #11.

The international boundary settlement of 1846 drew still another line on the land—the border between British North America (later, Canada) and the United States. (This line on the land was a complete anomaly to the Indians whose homelands straddled the 49th parallel, of course.) By finalizing the division of territory between Britain and the U.S., the international boundary facilitated the drawing of additional lines. On the American side of the border, settlers in the early 1840s had organized a “provisional government” in order to create a familiar, secure, predictable American framework for settling Oregon. Now that the region was officially part of the United States, they anticipated the drawing of lines that would indicate the presence of a not-so-provisional government. For example, following a well-established American system, the federal government drew and redrew a series of lines to create the territories of Oregon (1848), Washington (1853), and Idaho (1863), and the state of Oregon (1859). (For a map of these shifting lines, see Schwantes, p. 254.) These lines represented the integration of the Pacific Northwest into the U.S. political system. Integration did not come immediately, but residents were assured that for purposes of government and law that they now fell within the orbit of American (rather than British or native) ways, which included some measure of self-government. Territories and states, of course, quickly set about drawing additional lines in order to create counties, capitals and other towns, and additional governmental and political units. In other words, they subdivided themselves in the American way.)

The integration of Oregon and Washington into the United States after 1846 ensured that settlers’ claims would be recognized and incorporated into the American economic system, one in which the federal government, by drawing additional lines upon the land, fulfilled its responsibility for creating land title in western territories. In 1850 Congress passed the Donation Land Claim Act, which not only legitimized most of the claims of pioneers who had settled in Oregon prior to 1846, but also offered new arrivals the chance to acquire their own parcels of land (see Schwantes, p. 121). And at a time when the government was selling land to settlers elsewhere, this act authorized the government to give land away, or donate it, to settlers in the Pacific Northwest. Federal officials were further charged with the responsibility for surveying the lands of the Northwest and making them available to claimants and buyers. By platting the territory the standard grid pattern and arranging for the transfer of this public property into private hands, the government exerted a profound influence on the economy of the region. (Most of the land surveyed by the U.S. was not claimed by private citizens, and thus remained in the hands of the federal government. By the 20th century, this sizable unclaimed territory had become a welter of national parks and national forests, military bases and nuclear sites, interstate highways, Bureau of Land Management acreage, dam sites, wild and scenic rivers, and Indian reservations, among other things—as well as a constant source of tension between the states and the U.S. government. The states also acquired title to their own share of the public lands, and so did some local governments.)

Plat of Township 27 North, Range 8 East W. M., Snohomish County (above) (Special Collections, University of Washington.)

By drawing lines upon the land, federal officials created parcels of property that could be bought and sold and taxed and leased and bequeathed to heirs. In other words, government legitimated the landed basis for the regional economy. Private owners and state and local governments then drew additional lines on the lands that they controlled. Towns built roads that carved communities up into grids, for example, while property owners subdivided their parcels by drawing new lines, and often reinforced those lines by building fences, planting hedges, or erecting buildings. All of these modifications, of course, represented drastic departures from how native peoples had treated the same territory. Indeed, they symbolized a dramatically different way of looking at and relating to the lands of the region—a way shaped by both American and international versions of such forces as market capitalism and Christianity.

The transformation of Northwest lands at the hands of American colonizers entailed two other powerful sets of changes as well. One was biological. We have already considered how Europeans introduced epidemic diseases to natives of the Northwest. (In the Willamette Valley, one effect of these diseases, especially the malaria epidemic of 1830-33, was the virtual depopulation of the valley. Another attraction of the area was the relative absence of natives to resist settler designs on the area.) In addition to introducing deadly diseases to Indians, the newcomers also brought with them a host of plants and animals that had never been part of the regional ecosystem before. Cattle and horses and wheat and potatoes were all part of the familiar eastern worlds that westering migrants wanted to transplant to the Pacific coast. But these exotic species could not simply coexist easily with indigenous species. The spread of settlers’ crops and livestock, along with a host of other environmental changes—the arrival of new kinds of weeds; the outbreak of disease; the suppression of Indian fires—drastically altered native ecosystems.

One example of these changes occurred on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. The island’s ecology had already begun to change before settlers showed up to claim land during the 1850s. Indians there had acquired such things as blankets, guns, and potatoes from fur traders, which had changed subsistence patterns: they relied less on hair from domesticated dogs to produce blankets; their new ability to hunt with guns depleted game more rapidly; and potatoes partially replaced camas roots in their diet. But the settlers who arrived to farm and raise livestock transformed the ecology even more forcefully. They divided the land into parcels of private property, and marked off roads for transportation (unintentionally clearing a pathway by which exotic species of weeds spread rapidly to their fields). They introduced wheat, oats, and other crops, while trying to discourage the growth of the bracken plants on which Indians had relied. They plowed land for the first time (which soon reduced the fertility of the soil). They also introduced hogs and cattle, and at the same time exterminated wolves from the island to protect their stock. Within a short time, the ecosystem was utterly different from what it had been. One farmer eloquently explained that the goal behind these changes was “to get the land subdued and the wild nature out of it. When that is accomplished we can increase our crops to a very large amount and the high prices of everything that is raised here will make the cultivation of the soil a very profitable business” (cited in Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980]).

Settlers thus remodeled the landscape—in this case, and most others by remaking it not only for economic use but also for the purpose of creating a place that seemed familiar rather than “wilde” and strange. They inscribed a new set of lines on the land that linked it directly to the larger society of 19th-century America, one defined in substantial part by market capitalism and the individual pursuit of gain. Another powerful set of lines drawn by settlers upon the land of the Northwest were social boundaries that prescribed where groups of people could or could not reside. The people who moved to the Pacific Northwest brought to the region all the diversity of the American population, so that European immigrants and African Americans and Latinos and natives from east of the Rocky Mountains, for example, were all part of the newly arrived populace. Yet they also brought the prejudices and racism of the eastern states to the region. In the same way that the newcomers strove to replicate the natural environs they had left behind, so they tried to reproduce their social environs and, if possible, “improve” upon those they had left behind. Their efforts ensured that groups of people who were marginalized back east would remain marginalized in the Northwest.

George Washington Bush (above), who became Washington’s first African American settler when he came to the Tumwater area in 1845. Even so, it required a special act of Congress to allow him to obtain the deed to his homestead. (Drawing by Samuel Patrick for the Los Angeles Times, courtesy of the Henderson House Museum, Tumwater, Washington.)

Treatment of African Americans in Oregon exemplified what could happen. In 1844 the provisional government prohibited African Americans, both free and slave, from entering and living in Oregon. This effort was not unusual at the time; most new states and territories were populated by migrants who hated blacks as well as slavery and wanted to eliminate one or both of them from their new places of residence. White settlers in early Oregon in 1844 acted to outlaw blacks after two episodes led them to think that African Americans were likely to provoke or even encourage Indians to attack the new settlements. (See Thomas C. McClintock, “James Saules, Peter Burnett, and the Oregon Black Exclusion Law of June 1844,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 86 [Summer 1995]: 121-30.) In 1849 the legislature of Oregon Territory continued the exclusion of African Americans; when Oregonians voted on a new constitution, prior to becoming a state in 1859, they voted by eight-to-one to prolong the exclusion. Although not rigidly enforced, the exclusion law remained on the books until the 1920s. Of course, the most lasting lines meant to divide peoples within the region were those intended to segregate native peoples on reservations. These lines, and their consequences, are the topic of the next lessons.

To colonize the Pacific Northwest, arriving settlers drew all kinds of lines on the land—lines to link the region to life back east; lines to subdivide the region; lines to include and exclude groups of people. These lines brought the region into the social, political, economic, and biological framework of the eastern United States, and thereby made it a much more thoroughly American region than it had ever been before.

In drawing new lines on the land, arriving settlers were very consciously trying to remake the Northwest into a place that either resembled or improved upon the places they had left behind. They were purposefully reshaping the region in order to make it more familiar and malleable to their designs. Yet their reshaping had many unintended consequences, for settlers could fully control neither the tools they brought to this remodeling project nor the nature that they hoped to tame. Their management of fire exemplifies the problem. Settlers used fire intentionally to clear land, fell trees, heat their homes, and accomplish other tasks. By suppressing the Indians’ annual burns in the Willamette Valley, however, settlers unintentionally reduced the amount of prairie-like land, increased the amount of forest land, and probably heightened their vulnerability to invasions of grasshoppers. Their mastery of nature in the Northwest was always quite limited.

Over the course of the 20th century, farmers in the valley reintroduced the practice of setting fires at the end of every summer. Growers of grass-seed crops—approximately 300,000 acres’ worth by the 1960s—burned their fields after every harvest in order to kill fungus and clear the way for the next year’s crop. These fires sometimes got out of control, so much so that nearby residents protested and tried in vain to prohibit them. In August of 1988 one such fire spread beyond the fields for which it was intended. The smoke engulfed the nearby freeway and caused one of the worst automobile accidents in the state’s history. Twenty-three cars were involved, seven people died, and thirty-seven more were injured. (Peter G. Boag, “The World Fire Created: Field Burning in the Willamette Valley,” Columbia 5 [Summer 1991]: 5-11.)

An eastern Washington farm landscape (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Agricultural Files. Photo by Fred Milkie, Seattle, Washington, UW negative #438.)

Unit 4: Lesson Eleven – Overview of American Indian Policies, Treaties, and Reservations in the Northwest

Native Americans fishing for salmon (above). (“Salmon Fishing at Chenook” by James G. Swan, published in his The Northwest Coast; Or, Three Years’ Residence in Washington Territory, New York, 1857)

1849

Oregon governor Joseph Lane became the region’s first U.S. superintendent of Indian affairs—a full three years after the acquisition of the area by the U.S. Indian land title was guaranteed; however, the Donation Land Act of 1850 simultaneously offered 320 acres to every settler in the country—thus stimulating a land rush that dispossessed many Indians. Settlers filed for 2.5 million acres in western Oregon alone.

1850–1855

Indian agents signed more than 20 treaties with Oregon Indians, none of which was ratified in the Senate. Oregon’s territorial delegates to Congress opposed them.

1853–1856

Miners from California flocked to a gold strike on the Rogue River in southern Oregon, and proceeded to mistreat Indians and undermine native subsistence. When the Indians fought back, in what became the Rogue River War of 1855-56, they were defeated by the miners and U.S. Army and removed to distant reservations.

1853–1855

Seven treaties in western Oregon, signed in 1853-55 and ratified in 1854-59, extinguished Indian land title in the Willamette Valley and moved unwilling natives on to two reservations outside the valley. The Siletz and Grande Ronde reservations, however, were created not by treaty but by executive order, and were thus vulnerable to reduction.

1854–1855

Governor Stevens signed treaties with Indians around Puget Sound, on the northern ocean coast, and in south-central and southeastern Washington, some of which were not ratified until 1858. The treaties, among other things, helped to provoke sporadic warfare throughout the territory between 1855 and 1858.

1872–1873

The Modoc War was fought in northeastern California, largely as a result of some Modocs’ dissatisfaction with their forced removal to and mistreatment on the Klamath reserve. The Indians were defeated, captured, and sent to Oklahoma permanently.

1877

The non-treaty Nez Perce, after having been granted a homeland in the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon by executive order, had that reserve taken away and were forced to move to Lapwai. The process of removal provoked crimes between young Nez Perce men and white settlers, which escalated into the so-called Nez Perce War during which the non-treaty Nez Perce attempted to flee to Canada. They were defeated, captured, and sent to Oklahoma, too, although most eventually returned to the Northwest. The Dawes Allotment Act created procedures for dividing reservations lands into 160—acre parcels and allotting (or assigning) them to individuals and families. The remaining lands could be sold off to non-Indians. This process, intended to accelerate the conversion of Indians to non-Indian ways, resulted in severe losses of land at many reservations, including Colville, Grand Ronde, and Siletz.

The colonization of Indians by non-Indian society exemplified just how lines got drawn on the land in the Pacific Northwest. It was not a clear-cut or precise process, and it was not a process that was seen the same way by all the parties involved. Policy toward Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest was an extension of the Indian policy developed at the national level by the U.S. government. In other words, the rules and regulations for dealing with Indians were established and administered by various federal officials based in Washington, D.C.—by superintendents of Indian affairs and Army officers, by Senators and Congressmen, by members of presidential administrations and Supreme Court justices. Yet western settlers—the residents of states, territories, and localities—attempted with some success to modify national Indian policy to suit their own ends. Moreover, the natives who were the objects of these policies also attempted to modify and resist them, again with a limited degree of success.

Joseph Lane (above). (Reproduced in Johansen and Gates, Empire of the Columbia, New York, 1957. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, University of Oregon Library.)To explain the development of relations between Indians and non-Indians in the Pacific Northwest, then, one needs to keep in mind that there were federal points of view, settler points of view, and native points of view. The plural—”points of view”—is deliberate. It is also crucial to keep in mind that there was no unified perspective among any of the parties involved. Neither the officials of federal government, nor the settlers of the Northwest, nor the Indians of the region were unanimous in their thinking about and responses to American Indian policy as it was applied in the Pacific Northwest. (Indians from the same band or tribe sometimes ended up fighting one another; some women proved more sympathetic to Indians than men did; the U.S. Army was often much more restrained in dealing with natives than settler militias were.) This lack of agreement was surely one of the things that complicated, and to some extent worsened, relations between Indians and non-Indians. It makes generalizations about those relations tenuous.

Portrait of Isaac I. Stevens (above). The federal Office of Indian Affairs assigned to Stevens the task of carrying out the new reservation policy in Washington Territory. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Portrait files.) Although it is risky, then, I want to offer the generalization that 19th-century America was an achieving, acquisitive, non-pluralistic, and ethnocentric society. It had tremendous confidence in its way of life, and particularly its political and economic systems, and it aspired to disseminate its ways to those who seemed in need of them or able to benefit from them—including Indians (and Mexicans and, at times, Canadians). The nation was tremendously expansive, in terms of both territory and economy. Its assorted political and economic blessings (at least for free, white, adult males) seemed both to justify and feed this expansionism. Thus expansion was viewed as both self-serving (it added to the material wealth of the country) and altruistic (it spread American democracy and capitalism to those without them). The nation’s self-interest was thus perceived to coincide with its sense of mission and idealism.

American Indian policy bespoke this mixture of idealism and self-interest. White Americans proposed to dispossess natives and transform their cultures, and the vast majority of them remained confident throughout the century that these changes would be best for all concerned. Anglo-American society would take from Indians the land and other natural resources that would permit it to thrive, while Indians would, in theory, absorb the superior ways of white culture, including Christianity, capitalism, and republican government. For the first half of the 19th century, federal officials pursued this exchange largely with an Indian policy dominated by the idea of removal. Removal policy aimed to relocate tribes from east of the Mississippi River on lands to the west, assuming that over time the natives would be acculturated to white ways. There were numerous problems with this policy, of course. For our purposes, one of the key problems was that removal policy regarded lands west of the Mississippi as “permanent Indian country.” By the 1840s, numerous non-Indians were moving both on to and across those lands, ending any chance that they would truly remain “Indian country.” By midcentury, the Office of Indian Affairs had begun devising another policy based on the idea of reservations. This institution, new at the federal level, has had a central role in relations between Northwest Indians and non-Indians since 1850.

Reservations were designed to isolate, concentrate, and “civilize” Indians in a more intensive fashion that removal had done. Natives would be confined to a more restricted and rigidly defined space, supervised by white military and civilian officials, and taught the English language, farming and industry, and Christianity. The policy assumed that Indians would be “de-tribalized,” i.e. they would give up their collective identity as part of a native group and adopt the more individualistic orientation of Anglo-America. Some whites doubted that reservations would succeed, and some saw them only as a place where natives might be able to die off in peace. But official policy remained optimistic that reserves would convert natives into Christian farmers who believed in private property, and participated in the market economy and democratic politics. Of course, official policy was made in Washington, D.C., where government employees were quite removed from the native groups whose lives they hoped to change. Moreover, in the mid-19th century, the U.S. government was not nearly as powerful as it is today. Its ability to convey official policy all the way across the continent, to impose its wishes on settlers and natives—who had their own ideas about what was appropriate—was quite limited. Corruption in the Indian service further reduced the government’s ability to secure its objectives, and so did constant changes in the design, administration, and funding of policy.

Isaac I. Stevens treaty council in the Bitterroot Valley, July 1855 (above). (Drawing by Gustav Sohon. Courtesy of Washington State Historical Society. Reproduced in David L. Nicandri, Northwest Chiefs: Gustav Sohon’s View of the 1855 Stevens Treaty Councils. Tacoma, 1986.)

Through the 1850s and 1860s, reservations in the Pacific Northwest were usually created by treaties signed between the United States and specific Indian groups. On the one hand, the treaties symbolized a significant amount of respect for natives. Apart from war, the government assumed that it needed to negotiate with Indian peoples, because it regarded bands or tribes as somewhat autonomous nations with clear rights to land and resources that non-Indians wanted. In theory, settlers were not supposed to be able to occupy land until the federal government had extinguished Indian title to it, either by treaty or by war (or, in the case of California, by taking the land over from another nation which, the U.S. assumed, had already extinguished Indian land titles). Treaties, then, were agreements or contracts between two political entities, each of which possessed a certain standing in the realm of diplomacy. That the U.S. government felt compelled to sign treaties suggests that, officially, it meant to treat Indian peoples with a measure of respect.

For many practical purposes, however, the treaty system proved cumbersome and unreliable. For example, it could take years before agreements reached between government agents and Indian groups were ratified; some treaties, indeed, were rejected by the Senate. So parties who signed treaties often did not know for long periods of time whether they would become the law of the land; yet, in Washington Territory, Indians who signed treaties were immediately directed to begin living as if they were in force. Moreover, neither the U.S. government nor the Indian groups consistently behaved according to the terms of the treaties that they signed and ratified. In the later 20th century, Indians have had remarkable success in the courts at getting the states and nation to live up to the terms of treaties that were signed in the 19th century. Their legal victories remind us that the treaties helped to preserve crucial rights for native groups. As Alexandra Harmon suggests in the accompanying article “Lines in Sand,” furthermore, the treaties represented something like founding documents for many Indian groups, who previously had not regarded themselves as the kind of political entities—”tribes”—that the treaties assumed existed very clearly. That the benefits of this new status were realized only belatedly, often after much 20th-century litigation, suggests the difficulties that Indians faced in getting non-Indian society to honor the often contested terms of the agreements.

Even before Isaac Stevens began his treaty negotiations, the United States Army—anticipating conflicts between white settlers and Native Americans — established a military presence throughout Washington Territory. Fort Steilacoom, shown here in an 1880s photograph (above), was established in 1849. Pierce County settlers fled to the protection of this fort when hostilities broke out in 1855. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Fort Steilacoom file. Photo by Thomas H. Rutter.)

Although native peoples benefited in some ways from treaties over the long term, the treaty system proved quite disruptive, confusing, and destructive when imposed on Indians in the Pacific Northwest during the 1850s and 1860s. Native peoples had little or no experience with the legal ideas behind the treaties that they were signing; it is not clear how well they grasped the significance of the documents before them. Treaty negotiations, furthermore, were conducted primarily in the Chinook jargon, a trade patois of some 300 words and phrases which was not well suited for conveying the concepts needed for a clear understanding of the contractual documents being negotiated. There is also serious doubt whether most Indians believed that they had been suitably represented in treaty negotiations. Whites tended to assume that the “chiefs” who signed treaties spoke for entire tribes; yet white leaders also tried to recruit to the negotiations individual Indians who were regarded as more sympathetic to U.S. aims, and made fewer provisions for Indians who dissented. Government officials had one idea of how the politics of treaties worked, in other words, but it is not clear that Indians shared that idea. In short, the signing of treaties left a great deal of room for confusion and discontent. It is no wonder that the treaties of 1854-1855 in Washington Territory did not prevent the hostilities of 1855-58; indeed, in some regards they clearly helped to precipitate those hostilities.

The Puyallup Indians, along with the Makah and Yakima tribes, were assigned lands close to their native villages and fishing places. Show here is Yelm Jim’s house (above) and fish trap located on the Puyallup River, c. 1885. (Special Collections, University of Washington. Photo by Mitchell, WA, UW neg NA695)

No doubt for Indians the most disturbing aspect of treaties was the fact that they ended up being assigned to reservations. Reservations implied a variety of unwanted changes for native peoples. The most important change was that they were frequently being asked, or forced, to move away from their homes on to lands with which they were not familiar, giving up forever the majority of their territory to non-Indians. Some groups, such as the Makah and the Yakama tribes, were able to sign treaties that guaranteed them continued access to substantial portions of their homelands. These groups still lost ground, literally and figuratively, but perhaps their dislocation was not as severe. Also, treaties generally permitted natives to leave reservations for the purpose of finding food and work elsewhere. In many places, then, Indians became a critical part of the labor force in the Pacific Northwest after 1850, and many natives seized upon opportunities provided by the non-Indian economy to promote their own economic and cultural agendas. Nonetheless, the treaties and reservations implied drastic changes that were created on non-Indians’ terms; natives found themselves now having to react and respond to the initiatives of outsiders who generally viewed Indians as inferior, child-like, and needing to be “civilized.”

Posed in American dress and the proper tools, these Quiliute men (above) were described by their photographer as “promising young men.” The view was taken by 1920, just before Indian policy began to change to allow Native Americans the opportunity to preserve their traditional culture. (Special Collections, University of Washington. Photo by Sarah E. Ober, UW negative #NA650.)

Relocation to reserves took Indians away from sacred sites and burial places. It also removed them from the natural environments that they had exploited for subsistence, and made them increasingly dependent on the government for food and other supplies. It frequently required Indians to live next door to other groups, including natives who had been their enemies, and in some cases Indian groups made life more miserable by mistreating one another on reservations. One reason that some of the Modoc Indians of northern California left the reservation and went to war in 1872-73 to remain on their homeland, for example, was that they were abused on the Klamath reservation in southern Oregon by another tribe. Finally, of course, the biggest changes expected of Indians on reservations were those insisted upon by the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs, which aimed to replace native cultures with Anglo-American ways by converting Indians into English-speaking, Christian, capitalist, farm families. Natives were asked to yield the majority of their lands as well as virtually all of their cultures. The pressures thus exerted against them by the U.S. government, especially when combined with the continuing ravages of disease and the mistreatment by settlers, proved enormous. The wonder is not, then, that some wars and a considerable amount of crime broke out between Indians and non-Indians in the Pacific Northwest between 1850 and 1880, but rather that more conflict did not occur.

Let me sum up how U.S. Indian policy was ideally meant to work in the later 19th century. First, the U.S. government would arrive in a new country and extinguish Indian title to land, preferably by treaties which represented lasting and binding contracts clearly understood by both parties. The government would then survey the land and make it available to non-Indian settlers, who would only then arrive to take up the land that Indians had yielded. The natives, having moved on to reservations, would proceed to be acculturated to Anglo-American ways; some officials even envisioned the full assimilation of Indians, which would make reservations unnecessary and result in their being disbanded. All of this would ultimately succeed, it was assumed, because Indians would ultimately see the wisdom of official policy and accede to it, and because the U.S. government possessed the power to make it work.

Of course, reality intruded upon this ideal scenario at many points and belied the assumptions that underlay it. The federal government did not arrive in the new country first, extinguish Indian title, and survey the land; settlers preceded them to the Northwest, so that U.S. officials were generally imposing their policies on places where Indians and whites had been mingling for decades. The federal government did not possess the power to enforce Indian policy as it was ideally constituted, live up to the treaties that it signed, or prevent settlers from upsetting relations with natives. Reservations did not become a satisfactory new home for Indians and did not convert the majority of them to Anglo-American ways. And Indians themselves did not come to see the general wisdom and propriety of government policies and goals.

The Surrender of Chief Joseph, 1877 (above).

The system did not work smoothly at all and, as it failed to achieve its goals, government tried to reform it and heighten pressure on Indians. By the 1870s, for example, it abandoned the treaty system, so that reservations would no longer be guaranteed by a binding contract. Thus the Colville Reservation in northeastern Washington, established by executive order in 1872, was reduced in size by about 50% during the 1890s by an act of Congress and an agreement with some of the chiefs on the reserve. In 1887, for another example, Congress passed the Dawes Act, which proposed to dismantle reservations by giving Indian residents individual allotments of land; the acculturation of natives would supposedly accelerate if they were forced to become individual owners of property and to abandon tribal affiliations on “collective” reserves. As a third and final example, after the Civil War and especially after 1880, the government relied increasingly upon boarding schools to accelerate the transformation of Indian culture. These institutions, which took native children away from their parents and homes and required that they speak English and dress like white people, epitomized the heightened pressure that the government placed on Indians, as well as the sense that solutions devised in the 1850s and 1860s had proven inadequate. Not until the 1920s and 1930s was the overall goal of transforming Indians into non-Indians reconsidered.

James G. Swan and his Haida interpreter, Johnny Kit Elswa (above). This picture was taken on a cruise to the Queen Charlotte Islands for the Smithsonian Institution, 1883. (Special Collections, University of Washington, portrait files)

To the north, in the territory that became British Columbia, non-Indians brought many of the same goals and methods to bear upon natives, and the experiences of conquest and dispossession were ultimately rather similar. However, there was a time in the 1850s when the approach of British agents offered a slightly different—and maybe slightly more sensitive—alternative. Indeed, within the American Northwest there existed a sense among some Indians that Canada provided a safer refuge. Consequently, the Yakama leader Kamiakin and the non-treaty Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph, in the 1850s and 1870s respectively, tried to escape north of the border during times of conflict with settler society.

Why was British Columbia different? Indian policy there during the 1850s rested in the hands of former Hudson’s Bay Company employees, who had accumulated years of experience in dealing with Indians, rather than in the hands of distant federal officials. James Douglas, B.C. colonial governor through 1864, did things differently from how Isaac Stevens, governor of Washington Territory, did them. Whereas Stevens had to follow a national policy with often little regard for local needs and issues, Douglas was able to make local changes in policy and control some details himself. Douglas had the power, for instance, to write treaties and make them effective immediately, while Stevens had to wait for Senate ratification. In contrast to Stevens, who was urged to combine different Indian groups on the same reservations, Douglas tended to create more numerous and scattered reserves. This kept a larger number of native peoples on lands they considered their homes, and so reduced one key complaint that prevailed in Washington. B.C. natives also enjoyed more opportunity to purchase or homestead land. Finally, Douglas showed more restraint in dealing with native violence. He treated crimes as crimes by Indian individuals, as was less likely than Stevens to respond with military (as opposed to judicial) force.

A key difference between Washington Territory and early British Columbia helps to explain the divergent Indian policies — in American society the political leaders had to be more responsive to the anti-Indian attitudes of settlers. There were many fewer settlers in B.C. prior to the 1860s, which meant that there was less pressure on Douglas to accommodate their interests at the expense of Indians. (And once more Canadian settlers arrived, Indian policy turned harsher.)

Moreover, Douglas presided over a system where settlers’ concerns were not as influential as those in the United States. Stevens worked in a political system that paid attention to the demands of citizens, especially the white male settlers who could vote and perhaps even advance the governor’s political career. Douglas did not have similar pressures, in part because a more democratic system of government was not yet in place in British Columbia, so he could better afford to go against the popular preferences of settlers—something his former employer, the Hudson’s Bay Company, had been doing for decades already.

Lesson Twelve: Indian Reservations, Resistance, and Changing Indian Policy since 1850

This view (above) shows Indian Agent Captain Thomas Priestly with Chief White Swan taken in front of the Agency House at Fort Simcoe in 1888 or 1889. Even though many Native Americans lived away from the reservations, many maintained their links to them, and to the military forts which were also a component of reservation policy. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Fort Simcoe files.)

c. 1850
The Wanapum prophet Smohalla experienced his first visionary dream that encouraged all Indians to live according to their old customs and ways. This and other visions became the basis for a prophetic religion among natives on Northwest reservations during the late 19th century, a religion that constituted one form of resistance.

1887
Decision in Washington Indians’ first suit to defend treaty fishing rights, launching a legal form of resistance that would endure more than a century.

1934
Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act, which marked the federal government’s partial reversal of the policy of assimilation. Prodded by John Collier and others, the government now decided that it did not have to destroy Indian cultures, and also offered tribes more chances for self-government (although these chances were carefully defined by Anglo-American criteria). In other words, Indian cultural autonomy and political sovereignty would be given greater respect.

1953
Congress officially adopted a policy known as “termination,” by which it aspired “to make the Indians…subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens…, to end their status as wards of the United States and to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.” This policy would be reversed by the 1960s, leading to more self-determination by Indians, and only 3% of all Indians would be terminated, but among these were the Klamath Indians of southern Oregon and 61 tribes and bands of western Oregon.

1974
The Boldt decision, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1979, marked the culmination of decades of litigation and Indian activism in support of treaty rights. The Boldt decision determined that treaty tribes in western Washington (who represented no more than 2% of the population) would be apportioned 50% of the annual commercial salmon harvest, based on the wording of the treaties of the 1850s. The U.S. government entered the case in support of the Indians, and helped to overcome the state of Washington’s resistance to such Indian participation in the fisheries. The decision symbolized a more widespread recognition of Indian rights, which by the 1990s had expanded to include federally sanctioned operation of gaming casinos on Indian reservations.

The U.S. government made reservations the centerpiece of Indian policy around 1850, and thereafter reserves became a major bone of contention between natives and non-natives in the Pacific Northwest. However, they did not define the lives of all Indians. Many natives lived off of reservations, for example. One estimate for 1900 is that more than half of all Puget Sound Indians lived away from reservations. Many of these natives were part of families that included non-Indians and children of mixed parentage, and most worked as laborers in the non-Indian economy. They were joined by Indians who migrated seasonally away from reservations, and also from as far away as British Columbia. As Alexandra Harmon’s article “Lines in Sand” makes clear, the boundaries between “Indian” and “non-Indian,” and between different native groups, were fluid and difficult to fix. Reservations could not bound all Northwest Indians any more than others kinds of borders and lines could.

An Indian family working as hops pickers (above). (Courtesy Special Collections Division, University of Washington. UW Negative #na6633.) Nonetheless, reservations were places where Indians remained concentrated and where the federal government continued to exert its most concerted effort to transform natives into people who more resembled Anglo-Americans. Indian agents pressured natives on reservations to abandon the remnants of their cultures. Reservation doctors at Colville, for example, were instructed to discredit Indians’ faith in traditional Indian medicine, including sweat houses. Indian agents outlawed certain types of dances as well as plural marriages. One means of converting natives was to supply subsidies that undermined traditional means of subsistence. Indians who became dependent on the government’s provisions could be coerced by threats to withhold supplies. When the Nez Perce leader Joseph at the Colville reserve protested the sending of Indian children to boarding schools in 1901, for instance, he was denied his ration of beef. The boarding schools, of course, represented another point to pressure Indians to conform to white ways. Agents expected them to work efficiently because they had taken children away from the cultural influence of their parents. The schools compelled students to dress like non-Indians and speak English, and punished those who did not conform. Students who returned from boarding schools had generally not been fully assimilated, yet they often felt estranged from their tribe or band when they went home. In sum, there was considerable pressure placed on natives to adopt Anglo-American ways.

Skokomish Indian School, 1892 (above). Yet Indians found numerous ways to resist complete assimilation and retain elements of their traditional cultures (although these cultures were themselves changing in myriad ways). One method was the practice of religion. In 1850 the Wanapum prophet Smohalla experienced his first visionary dream that encouraged all Indians to live according to their old customs and ways. This and other visions became the basis, during the later 19th century, for a prophetic religion among natives of the Northwest. Smohalla and his many followers believed that if natives adhered to old ways and resisted white ways, they could hasten the arrival of some sort of cataclysm that would remove non-Indians from the land and restore to the world the harmony supposed to exist before whites arrived. This vision, which resembled those of other Indians in North America, was the key to the new “dreamer” religion among many native peoples of the Northwest during the later 19th century, which took root on the Colville reservation and among other Indian groups. Instructed by their faith to follow traditional ways, the so-called Dreamers resisted pressures on them to acculturate to white ways.

In this Suquamish settlement near Eagle Harbor (above) photographed at the turn of the twentieth century, western-style dress and housing are combined with the traditional method of drying fish. (Special Collections, University of Washington. Photo by Webster and Stevens, UW negative #NA700.)

Some Indian groups found other means to preserve aspects of their cultures. The Makah experience, in the far northwestern corner of Washington, illustrates another experience. The Makah reservation was created out of the tribe’s traditional territory and offered access not only to land-based supplies but also to the salt-water resources that the Makahs had long exploited. Government-sponsored attempts to get the Makah to farm generally fizzled. Between the founding of the reservation in 1855 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, the Makah Indians continued the whaling, sealing, and fishing that had sustained them for centuries. These activities were not the same as they had been before; the Makah incorporated new technologies to succeed, participated in the emergent market economy, and learned how to speak English and otherwise get along with non-Indians in the worlds of labor and commerce. But while learning to adapt to non-Indian society, these Indians refused to assimilate. They kept traditional occupations alive, and also maintained a measure of prosperity—something most other Washington tribes could not claim. [See also “Subsistence and Survival: The Makah Indian Reservation, 1855-1933,” Cary C. Collins, Pacific Northwest Quarterly] Many native peoples combined their traditional cultural practices with those introduced by Euro-Americans.

Another form of Indian resistance was litigation. Natives pressured the United States to live up to the terms of the treaties it had signed in the mid-19th century. Yakama Indians launched the first cases to uphold Indian fishing rights on the Columbia River in 1887 and 1905. These lawsuits, which were partially successful, were the first of a series spanning more than a century by which native groups protected their access to the fisheries of Washington and Oregon. However, federal courts allowed Oregon and Washington to regulate Indian fisheries, and both states placed substantial limitations on Indian fishing. Native groups kept the issues alive in the courts over the decades of the 20th century until the U.S. government finally decided to throw its weight behind the Indian position during the late 1960s and the 1970s. The Boldt decision of 1974, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1979 and further expanded with regard to shellfish during the 1990s, cemented the rights to fish that Indians had claimed based on treaties signed in the 19th century. Specifically, the Boldt decision guaranteed Indians the right to catch one-half of the commercial salmon harvest every year (even though Indians in western Washington amounted to no more than 2% of the total population). With the precipitous decline of runs of salmon, this decision put pressure on Indians and non-Indians to co-operate with one another to protect the remaining salmon fisheries of western Washington. By the time of the Boldt decision, U.S. Indian policy had undergone some crucial changes. The general effort to have Indians assimilate into non-Indian society remained in force until the 1920s and 1930s.

Yakima Reservation Boundary (above). The Yakima Indians were another tribe, along with the Colvilles, who protected their boundaries and rights, as this 1950s photograph shows. The original caption reads: “Barriers prevent all except Indians from much of the reservation and passes are required to enter.” (Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries. Photo by J. W. Thompson, UW negative #NA761.)

At that time, reformers led by John Collier determined that this policy was wrong. One reason that whites changed their minds about what was good for the Indians is that whites began to doubt the virtues of their own society. The growth of industry, inequality, and other social concerns prompted some whites both to criticize their own culture and to look at other cultures more favorably. Collier believed that whites had much to learn from Indians, and he dedicated himself to making federal policy less coercive and assimilationist. Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Collier as superintendent of Indian affairs during the New Deal, and together FDR and Collier pushed the Indian Reorganization Act through Congress in 1934. This law was meant to encourage Indian tribes and bands across the country to preserve their traditional cultures. It also granted Indians greater say in the administration of reservations and tribal affairs. On the Colville reservation, the many different tribes took advantage of this opportunity to form a confederated government to assume greater control of reservation life. The decision led to a greater sense of commonality among the once diverse groups of Indians. However, as on other reservations, there remained many differences and disagreements between Indians.

Events after the 1930s affected reserves in many ways. Completion of Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, for example, eliminated upstream runs of salmon on the Columbia, and destroyed the fishery at Kettle Falls. The Colville reserve received some of the first electricity generated by the Grand Coulee hydro plants, but this hardly made up for the loss of the salmon. The nation’s mobilization for World War Two and the Cold War recruited many Indians away from reservations and into either the armed services or the numerous defense-related jobs in urban areas such as Seattle, Portland, and Spokane. Many Indians did not return once the war was over. Finally, in the midst of the Cold War and its pressure for social and cultural conformity, there was a temporary turning away from the ideas of John Collier and a return to assimilationist thinking. Congress in 1953 officially adopted a policy known as “termination,” by which it aspired “to make the Indians…subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens…, to end their status as wards of the United States and to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.” Across the United States, only 3% of all Indians would be terminated, but among these were the Klamath Indians of southern Oregon and the 61 tribes and bands of western Oregon. (One faction of the Colville also filed for termination, but their effort was not completed.) These groups expected that termination would provide an overall economic benefit, as tribal resources would be sold and the proceeds distributed to members of the tribe, and as federal controls over community resources would be abandoned. The Klamath, for example, anticipating receiving $43,700 apiece, succeeded in being “terminated” in 1961. This produced a temporary bonanza, but over time the Klamaths went from prosperity to relative poverty. Western Oregon groups similarly experienced adversity from termination, and by the 1970s and 1980s were taking steps to reverse the process and restore their relationship with the federal government.

Reef net fishing (above), as shown in this 1930s view, is well-suited for the Lummi Tribe. Their reservation is situated along deep water north of the San Juan Islands, where migrating salmon move northward to the Fraser River in British Columbia. Federal Judge George Boldt, in the 1974 U.S. v. State of Washington court case, specifically mandated the protection and preservation of the Lummi reef net fisheries. (Special Collections, UW. Photo by Eugene Fields, UW negative #NA1813.)

By the 1960s and 1970s, with the advent of the Civil Rights movement and the failures of termination, Indian policy changed again. The federal government generally aspired to uphold its commitments to Indians, including siding more with the tribes and bands in court in disputes over treaty matters. Of course, many Indians and non-Indians remained dissatisfied with its efforts, and the matter of Indians’ dependency on the government and its social and welfare services remained contentious. Nonetheless, there emerged a general consensus that Indians, with federal support, ought to have greater powers of political and economic self-determination. The restoration of fishing rights in the 1970s, and the legalization of Indian casinos in the 1980s and 1990s (both of which were contested by non-Indians as well as some Indians) offered some opportunity for tribal economic development. But the benefits that accrued from these opportunities were remarkable uneven. Some tribes, such as the Lummis on northern Puget Sound, had the resources to participate in a resurgent fishing economy while others did not; at the same time, the Lummis as a whole tended to do better in the new fishing regime than did most other tribes on Puget Sound. In the matter of gambling, some tribes were able to finance and open casinos, while others were not. And of the tribes that operated casinos, those which did so in urban areas or along well-traveled highways certainly prospered much more than those whose casinos were located in more rural or isolated locales. Finally, the matter of dependency continued to loom large. Northwest Indians aspired to self-determination, but many of their efforts remained wedded to federal recognition and federal benefits. Non-Indians continued to challenge those benefits, and the Indians themselves wondered how they could achieve satisfactory autonomy while remaining reliant on the U.S. government and its ever-changing policies.

Unit 5: Cities, Hinterlands, and Extractive Industry

Lesson Thirteen: Cities and Hinterlands: The Modern Northwest

Oregon dominated the early American Northwest because most of the newcomers to the region went there. By far the majority of them were attracted by the farmland, particularly in the Willamette Valley. They migrated to the country while relying on family and community networks of communication and support, and once in Oregon they tended to settle in clusters that kept family and community together. As discussed in Lesson 9, most of these rural households operated at some remove from the national market system. They wanted to sell their surplus crops to buyers, but tended to concern themselves with their own subsistence first. They also developed a distinctive politics that saw virtue in family men who owned a limited amount of landed property—”small freeholders”—rather than in the wealthy, mercantile, or working classes. These initial American settlers long remained influential in Oregon. Indeed, they helped to create a culture and a society that many believe helps to explain Oregon distinctiveness to this day.

At the same time, however, another type of economic and social development was emerging in the town of Portland and around Puget Sound. Portland quickly became the leading city of the Pacific Northwest.

Situated at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, and used as a port by ocean-going vessels, its location and enterprise made it the leading commercial center north of San Francisco. Farm products from the Willamette Valley, minerals from Idaho, and wheat from around Walla Walla all flowed to market by way of Portland. While Portland grew, San Francisco capitalists discovered the forests on Puget Sound. California mines, cities, and ships required prodigious amounts of lumber, and the deep waters and forested shorelines of Puget Sound offered the most convenient place to get that commodity. At Seattle and Port Gamble and Port Ludlow and a host of other sites around the Sound, docks and sawmills appeared to deliver wood products to the ships that sailed away to San Francisco and other Pacific ports. Around Puget Sound and in Portland during the 1850s and after, one can detect the emergence of an urban and industrial economy that would eventually surpass and engulf the farm economy started in the Willamette Valley. The rural economy and society were more traditional and, being so strongly associated with pioneers, became the focus of much attention Over the long term, however, the urban and industrial economy and society were much more influential in the Pacific Northwest, forming the basis for the modern region. These will be our focus for the remainder of the course.

Map of wheat export route, c.1880 (above). (D. W. Meinig, Great Columbia Plain. Seattle, 1968. 252.) Columbia River sternwheelers (below) were one means of transporting the wheat from the Walla Walla Valley to Portland. This view shows one passing through the Cascade Locks prior to the construction of the Bonneville Dam at this location. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Postcard Files. Photo by Cross and Dimmitt.)

Here I want to describe the spatial organization of the urban and industrial Northwest during the 19th century, and in particular I wish to develop the idea of metropolis and hinterland. As part of the North American West generally, the Pacific Northwest was divided into a series of subregions or hinterlands, each of which produced extractive commodities that moved to market by way of a hierarchical series of towns and cities. For example, the Walla Walla Valley of southeastern Washington became known as farming country during the 1850s and 1860s. Grain grown there was gathered in towns like Walla Walla, which served as points of export and import for the surrounding farms. From Walla Walla, the grain was shipped to the Columbia and then downstream to Portland on river-going vessels. The Walla Walla Valley, and indeed virtually all of western Idaho, eastern Oregon and Washington, and the Willamette Valley, were hinterlands for Portland—the metropolis or leading city. That is, the goods they produced made their way to market by way of Portland; goods they imported from around the world made their way to these hinterlands by way of Portland; and Portland also served as the chief financial and retail center for these regions as well. At Portland, furthermore, goods moving up and down the Columbia River system were transferred to different sorts of vessels for the next stage of their trip. Walla Walla wheat, for example, was there put aboard ocean-going vessels for shipment to other ports, most likely San Francisco. San Francisco was the leading city of the entire Far West, and the Pacific Northwest—including Alaska as well as British Columbia through the 1880s—was its hinterland. Within the Northwest, Portland played the role that San Francisco played for the entire North American West. That role was largely economic—based on its command over commerce—but it was also cultural, as Portland initially hosted the region’s leading cultural institutions, e.g. churches and newspapers.

Spokane in 1909. Stevens Street looking south from Main Avenue (above). (Special Collections, UW. Dennison Photo taken for the Spokane Chronicle. UW negative #5344.)

Put another way, the region came to be organized around a host of towns and cities such as Portland, Victoria, Tacoma, Seattle, Spokane, and Boise. The power of each city was commensurate with the extent and wealth of its hinterland. Each town prospered as the interior region that it served, and that relied upon it, prospered. And these interiors were creations of systems of transportation. While many of the pioneer settlers of the Willamette Valley did not so much mind isolation, the majority of Euro-Americans in the region wanted to be linked up to the global market economy.So long as river travel remained the cheapest method of transportation, the city that dominated that traffic would dominate the Northwest. Thus the city of Portland, commanding the Columbia River watershed through its location at the junction of the main stem of the Columbia and the Willamette, remained the premier city of the region into the 20th century.

Beginning in the 1880s, however, the arrival of railroads in the region began to undermine Portland’s predominance. Portland depended upon the natural transport system of rivers to bring produce and profits to it. Railroads, on the other hand, were a man-made transport system that provided an alternative to river travel. Once railway lines were completed to and through the Pacific Northwest, other cities capitalized on them to carve out their own hinterlands separate from Portland’s control. Thus in the 1880s and 1890s the cities of Tacoma, Vancouver, B.C., and Seattle began to chip away at Portland’s leadership on the Pacific coast, while Spokane emerged as the metropolis for what was called the “Inland Empire.” As the following charts show, the arrival of the railroads also stimulated an enormous population boom, both in cities and throughout the region, beginning in the 1880s.

Tacoma (above), the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad, in 1878. (Lithograph after a drawing by E.S. Grover. Stokes Collection, New York Public Library.)

Camp of Northern Pacific Railroad engineers (above) in the Cascade Mountains in 1886 during the construction of the Stampede Tunnel, below left. Up until this time the Northern Pacific transcontinental line, completed in 1883, ran through Portland. With the completion of the Cascade line into Tacoma–and later Seattle–trains could by-pass Portland and wheat, as well as other freight, was shipped directly to Puget Sound ports. (Special Collections, University of Washington. UW negative #5815.)

William S. Ladd (above) was one of the many leaders of Portland during the city’s early years. He was one individual, however, who did not restrict his investments to the Oregon city. At the time of his death in the 1890s he owned considerable property, in addition to controlling interest in transportation and industrial companies, throughout Washington State. (Special Collections, University of Washington. UW negative #17579.)

Portland’s success was not due entirely to its fortunate location. It also benefited from astute leaders who secured the city’s future in a host of ways. The city had a number of rival towns nearby, but it surpassed them when prominent businessmen established an efficient steamship service to and from San Francisco; launched the successful Oregonian newspaper to promote the town; and built a road to the west to serve the productive wheat farms there. On such foundations, Portland became the headquarters for trade and transportation throughout the Willamette River Valley, the most densely populated part of the region. When the Gold Rush in California generated a tremendous demand for foodstuffs, lumber, and other products, Portland stood ready to service that demand by shipping goods from its hinterlands, and throughout the 1850s it began to prosper. Throughout this era, Portland’s conservative business leadership became well known. One west coast judge commented on the city’s staid and sensible nature in 1868: “Portland will never be the centre of fashion, speculation, or thought. Do what it will, it will be a comparatively provincial place…but it will be worth more dollars per head than either London or New York, and its good citizens will sleep sounder and live longer than the San Franciscans.” Once again, contrasting Oregon to California seemed to come naturally.

Frisco Mill and Mine (above) located between Wallace and Burke, Idaho in the Coeur d’Alene mining region. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Postcard Files. Inland Printing Company, Spokane.)

As extractive industries in the interior of the Pacific Northwest developed, Portland strengthened its leadership as the financial, commercial, and transportation center. For example, in the early 1860s prospectors struck gold and silver in Idaho, creating a rush to such places as the Clearwater and Boise river valleys. Portland serviced these mines, sending them supplies as well as more people and exporting the minerals from them. By 1861, Idaho mines exported $400,000 worth of minerals per month via of Portland— virtually all by way of the same shipping company. Beginning in 1860, Portland’s power as a metropolis increased with the formation of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company (OSNC). This firm secured Portland’s control over the Columbia River watershed by establishing a monopoly on cargo traffic up and down the Columbia River. It did so by buying and controlling the key river portages at The Dalles and Cascades—places where goods had to be shipped overland to get around river rapids. Towns along Puget Sound in Washington Territory tried to destroy the monopoly, which they regarded as their main impediment to receiving more cargo traffic and overland migrants themselves, but the OSNC easily turned that challenge away. Indeed it endured until the 1880s, when it became the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, merging its river transport network to the growing transcontinental railroads in an effort to maintain its monopoly and Portland’s leadership position.

Aerial view of Seattle in 1904 (above).

As the leading city in the Northwest, Portland was certain to be linked up to transcontinental lines once they arrived in the 1880s. However, these lines ultimately undermined the city’s leadership position. Its primacy had stemmed from its location near the mouths of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, where it could command the flow of almost all the products and passengers moving into and out of the region. But railroads offered an alternative to river travel that challenged Portland’s “natural” advantage. They enabled cargoes and passengers to bypass the city. Moreover, they enabled cargoes and passengers to bypass one of the main disadvantages of river travel—the dangerous bar where the Columbia meets the Pacific Ocean. Between 1883 and 1893, cities to the north of Portland, on the safer, deep-water harbors of Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia, acquired their own connections to transcontinental railroads—and by railroads to interior regions of the Northwest as well as to eastern North America. Railways served as man-made rivers, directing traffic to Tacoma, Seattle, Everett, and Vancouver, B.C. in the same way that the Columbia had funneled traffic through Portland. Cities on the Straits and Sound expanded their own hinterlands; exported some extractive products (such as coal, timber, and fish) more readily than Portland could; and hustled by a variety of methods to steal away some of Portland’s (and San Francisco’s) business. The most successful rival was Seattle, which captured Alaska and the Yukon as a hinterland after 1893, and then surpassed Portland in size by 1910.

Boise, Idaho (above). Main Street looking east from 10th, c. 1913. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Postcard Files. Photo by G. Ed. Russell.)

As the leading city in the Northwest, Portland was certain to be linked up to transcontinental lines once they arrived in the 1880s. However, these lines ultimately undermined the city’s leadership position. Its primacy had stemmed from its location near the mouths of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, where it could command the flow of almost all the products and passengers moving into and out of the region. But railroads offered an alternative to river travel that challenged Portland’s “natural” advantage. They enabled cargoes and passengers to bypass the city. Moreover, they enabled cargoes and passengers to bypass one of the main disadvantages of river travel—the dangerous bar where the Columbia meets the Pacific Ocean. Between 1883 and 1893, cities to the north of Portland, on the safer, deep-water harbors of Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia, acquired their own connections to transcontinental railroads—and by railroads to interior regions of the Northwest as well as to eastern North America. Railways served as man-made rivers, directing traffic to Tacoma, Seattle, Everett, and Vancouver, B.C. in the same way that the Columbia had funneled traffic through Portland. Cities on the Straits and Sound expanded their own hinterlands; exported some extractive products (such as coal, timber, and fish) more readily than Portland could; and hustled by a variety of methods to steal away some of Portland’s (and San Francisco’s) business. The most successful rival was Seattle, which captured Alaska and the Yukon as a hinterland after 1893, and then surpassed Portland in size by 1910.

A residential neighborhood in Portland (above), on Seventh and Columbia Streets. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Postcard Files. Published by M. Rieder, Los Angeles.)Although Portland would no longer be the biggest city of the region, it long remained the most refined. From the start, founders of the city had aspired to imitate eastern cities; indeed, the city’s name had been determined by a coin flip between a Massachusetts man (who wanted “Boston”) and a Maine native (who won). There was an impulse to create in Portland another version of the New England town, and the city soon acquired an ample number of churches, schools, fine homes, and business blocks. It had a more reputable newspaper, livelier theatrical and musical scenes, and an urbane quality that many easterners noted with admiration. One of them—Samuel Bowles—remarked in 1869: “Oregonians have builded what they have got more slowly and more wisely than the Californians; they have less…to unlearn; and they seem sure, not of organizing the first state on the Pacific coast, indeed, but of a steadily prosperous, healthy, and more one—they are in the way to be the New England of the Pacific Coast.” Nobody, it must be noted, gave similar praise to Seattle in this period.

River Front, Portland in 1899 (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, Postcard Files. Photo by H. A. Hale.) Perhaps Portland’s only drawback was the weather, which one visitor noted in 1865: Rain is an exceedingly pleasant and gratifying institution in its way, and in moderation; it causes the grass to grow, the blossoms to flourish, and it is a positive necessity to the umbrella-maker; but when you get to a country where it rains incessantly twenty-six hours a day, for seventeen months in the year, you cannot resist having the conviction forced upon your mind that the thing is slightly overdone. That’s the case in Oregon; it commenced raining pretty heavily on the third of last November, and continued up to the fifteenth of May, when it set in for a long storm, which isn’t fairly over yet. There’s moisture for you.

The consequences of this awful climate are just what might be supposed. The immense quantity of the protoxide squirted about here causes trees, buildings, streets, everything, to present a diluted and wishy-washy appearance. The women lose their color, the men their hair (washed off, sir), and the animals, by constant exposure, acquire scales and fins, like the natives of the great deep. In fact, all the inhabitants of this territory have a generally scaly appearance, and rejoice in a peculiar smell, a combination, I should say, of a fishball and a fresh mud-sucker….

The visitor allowed that Oregon presented travelers with many amusing things, yet he also found it difficult to laugh about them while in the state: “Such a thing as ‘dry’ humor in Oregon is, of course, a physical impossibility.”

Unit 5: Lesson Fourteen – Industrialization, Technology, and Environment in Washington

This classic view commemorates the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad (above) transcontinental line in 1883 as it ran from St. Paul, Minnesota to Tacoma by way of Portland. (Special Collections, University of Washington, negative #594.) The arrival of transcontinental railroads in the Pacific Northwest during the 1880s marked one of the key turning points in the region’s history. The Northwest had been integrated into global trading networks since the 1780s, when British vessels began carrying away sea otter pelts to China; and the Northwest had been integrated into far western trading networks since the time of the Gold Rush, when California’s demand for produce and lumber had sent ships to regional shores. Yet as late as 1880 the Pacific Northwest remained largely isolated from both the main currents of the global economy and the bulk of the population in the United States. From the writings of people like James Swan, Americans knew that the Northwest possessed resources to be exploited. Yet other parts of the country generally provided plenty of the kinds of resources that the Northwest had to offer, and the place remained too inaccessible for most people. Consider, for example, the extent to which people homesteaded in the region. Between 1862 and 1880, only 9,800 people in Oregon and 9,500 in Washington filed homestead claims; by contrast, 62,000 and 59,000 filed claims, respectively, in Minnesota and Nebraska—states located closer to, and served better by railroads from, eastern centers of population.

Logging railroad (above) (Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. #12093). The population of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington in 1880 amounted to no more than 283,000. After the arrival of transcontinental lines during the 1880s, the number of people grew quickly. By 1910 the three states contained more than 2 million residents. The substantial increase resulted in large part from the arrival of railroads, which brought more people to settle in the region, more investments in the extractive economy, more awareness of opportunities, and more of a means to increase exports to the rest of the world. No longer so remote, the Northwest became even more integrated into the networks of the global economy and the commerce of the United States. Boosters exuded confidence that the railroads would elevate the regional economy, and perhaps even put the Northwest on a par with other parts of the country. They were gratified to get the attention of big capitalists from the East and Europe, to be the focus of advertising campaigns, to become the destination for thousands of new migrants. They embraced the new cities and new commerce that railroads helped to create. However, many booster’s hopes were misplaced. Railroads may have liberated the Northwest from its isolation and accelerated its pace of settlement, but they brought with them their own constraints and limitations. In some ways they heightened the sense that the Northwest was the colony, the hinterland, of other places.

If the railroads exported the Northwest (or at least its products) to the East, they also imported the East to the Northwest. By that I mean two things. First, railroads transported to the remote region the social and cultural and economic and political traits that characterized Gilded Age America. By conquering distances between different corners of the country, railroads helped to disseminate the modernizing ways of the late 19th century. The Northwest received as a result an intense dose of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration—and it came at a formative time when social institutions were beginning to jell. Outside of the Willamette Valley, industrialism found few entrenched institutions within Anglo-American society that were capable of resisting or buffering its ways. Second, railroads came with strings attached, and these strings took the form of conditions determined by people back East. No western town, territory, or state had the resources to build a transcontinental line itself. As a result, they relied upon cooperation between the federal government and finance capitalists to obtain rail connections, and they had to live with the terms that those eastern “benefactors” laid down. They had to accept, for example, the bargain struck between Congress and the Northern Pacific Railroad which granted the company immense tracts of western lands as an incentive for building the line. Most of all, they had to learn to live with the enormous influence that railroad companies exerted on their societies.

Follow this link for more Logging Scenes.  Railroad companies immediately became the most powerful economic actors in the Pacific Northwest, and they toiled to shape its economic development to their benefit. They built or expanded towns, for example, where it best suited (or profited) them, often leaving bypassed sites to wither. They became the largest private landowners in the region, and wielded enormous influence over the distribution and utilization of land. Moreover, they became the biggest boosters of the Pacific Northwest. They distributed millions of flyers and pamphlets and broadsides to advertise the area, not just in the eastern states but also in Europe, and they hired agents to encourage emigration to the Northwest. Railroads profited in multiple ways from the population influx that they encouraged. For example, they charged fares to passengers migrating to the region; they sold land to many of the newcomers; and they shipped back east the produce or natural resources that the newly enlarged population generated. They also formed companies to develop the region’s land and resources on a much larger scale. The amount of economic activity increased dramatically because of their arrival; yet the powerful railway companies naturally directed much of that activity, making it hard for Northwesterners to feel that they had been “liberated,” in economic terms.

One sphere in which railroads expedited growth was the logging industry. The first explorers and fur traders had noticed the abundant timber and made some economic use of it, and the California Gold Rush created a demand for Northwest wood products that really launched the lumber industry. Between 1860 and 1880, eight out of every ten dollars invested in manufacturing in Washington Territory went to the timber industry. Yet these remained slack years with wildly inconsistent levels of production, and many sawmills struggled to stay in business. As late as 1880, Washington ranked 31st among all states and territories in timber production. Over the next decade, however, its output multiplied eight times, and by 1890 it had risen to fifth in the United States; by 1905 it ranked first, and it continued to lead the nation for every year but one until the 1930s. The arrival of railroads had suddenly accelerated timber production. (Another key factor was that in this era the forests around the Great Lakes began to give out, after having been harvested for decades, and timber companies such as Weyerhaeuser moved to the Pacific Northwest to get new supplies of wood.)

Railroads stepped up timber production in myriad ways. First, they were enormous consumers of wood products themselves, using 20-25 percent of the annual timber production between the 1870s and 1900 for railroad ties, bridges, stations, fences, and fuel. Second, railways enabled loggers to penetrate deeper into the forests by providing access to many more trees than before. Third, as owners of enormous amounts of land, railroad companies treated forests as private property and worked both to develop and to conserve timber resources. Fourth, they imported to the Pacific Northwest more machinery and more people than ever before, and put them to work in the timber industry. Fifth, they lowered the cost of transporting logs out of the forests to mills, and from mills to the eastern states. In short, railroads were machines that revolutionized the timber industry.

Just as railroads “mechanized” and accelerated production throughout the economy of the Pacific Northwest, the “steam donkey” further mechanized and accelerated production in the timber industry. Steam donkeys were introduced during the 1880s to replace the ox and horse teams that hauled fallen logs out of the forest. By 1900, Washington had three times the number of steam donkeys of Oregon and California combined. Not coincidentally, its production of lumber skyrocketed.

This kind of productive growth was hardly limited to timber. The industrialization or mechanization symbolized by railroads and steam donkeys revolutionized every extractive industry. The fishing industry underwent its own considerable changes, as the story of three technological innovations illustrates. The development of internal combustion engines during the early 20th century enabled fishing boats to travel further in pursuit of fish and made it much easier for crews to handle large nets and catches. The invention of the so-called “iron chink” during the first decade of the century expanded the productive capacity of canneries by mechanizing the process of salmon butchering. (“Chink” was, of course, a derogatory word for Chinese. The “iron chink” was named and marketed as a machine that both replaced and improved upon the highly skilled Chinese salmon butchers who had occupied such an important position in the canneries.) Finally, as Northwesterners began to worry, as early as the 1870s and 1880s, about the depletion of runs of salmon in the region’s streams, the development of hatcheries offered the hope that the reproduction of fish, too—like the production of sawmills and canneries—could be mechanized and thus increased. The increasing output of canned salmon seemingly confirmed the benefits of technology as applied to regional fisheries.

Above: Every Pacific Northwest city had its own way of boosting its growth. In Tacoma, businessmen asked everyone to “Watch Tacoma Grow” and publicized their campaign in the local newspapers. (Tacoma Daily News, June 10, 1907)

Follow this link for more Fishing Scenes.

Mechanization—of transportation, resource extraction, and manufacturing—brought immense changes to the Pacific Northwest, then, and cemented the role of extractive industry as the dominant activity in the region. For example, on the eve of the First World War in 1914, and a spurt of war-related manufacturing, timber payrolls accounted for 55 percent of all salaries and wages in the Pacific Northwest. Logging and milling would remain the region’s premier industry until another, bigger spurt of war-related manufacturing occurred during World War Two. The identity of the region, even more than before, became that of a place from which raw materials flowed to other locales, and one which needed to import more costly, manufactured goods from distant places with more developed economies.

If the Northwest as an entire region became known as a resource hinterland, it should nonetheless be noted that the influence of extractive industries was not the same across the region. The three states of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon were all profoundly defined by such enterprises as mining and fishing and logging. However, Oregon remained slightly different. It’s founding by farmers during the 1840s and 1850s, located particularly in the Willamette Valley, gave it a distinctive economic and political orientation (as David Alan Johnson has argued in Founding the Far West: California, Oregon and Nevada, 1840-1890[1992]) that its neighbors did not share. Idaho and Washington, by contrast, took shape under the largely undiluted influence of extractive industries. Not coincidentally, Washington and Idaho became better known than Oregon for the roles that big business and big labor played in them. The Seattle writer Ivan Doig has characterized the differences (in Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America [1980]):

“What I have been calling the Pacific Northwest is multiple. A basic division begins at the Columbia River; south of it, in Oregon, they have been the sounder citizens, we in Washington the sharper strivers. Transport fifty from each state as a colony on Mars and by nightfall the Oregonians will put up a school and a city hall, the Washingtonians will establish a bank and a union.”

Edmund S. Meany (above) (Special Collections, University of Washington, negative #17818)

What did people make of the rising industrial production of the later 19th century? While railroads and industrialism both had troublesome aspects to them, they also fulfilled the region’s longstanding desires for growth. Boosters looked at the figures of increasing population and increasing output, and concluded that the Pacific Northwest had begun to realize the great potential they had long touted. Moreover, they took advantage of the recent growth to promote the region to still more investors and immigrants and industry. Consider the comments of Edmond S. Meany, the first historian of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Washington. Before he became a university professor in 1895, Meany worked as publicist and booster for Washington at the state’s exhibition at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. His message at the Chicago world’s fair was simple: “The natural resources of the State are vast and inexhaustible.” Other promoters of the state also spoke as if its resources and opportunities were infinite. One resident from the Puget Sound area expounded in 1914 or so upon the unlimited things that Washington offered:

“Why should I not love Seattle? It took me from the slums of the Atlantic coast, a poor Swedish boy with hardly fifteen dollars in my pocket. It gave me a home by the bountiful sea; it spread before my eyes a vision of snow-capped peaks and smiling fields; it brought abundance and a new life to me and my children and I love it, I love it! If I were a multimillionaire I would charter freight cars and carry away from the crowded tenements and noisome alleys of the eastern cities and the Old World the toiling masses, and let them loose in our vast forests and ore-laden mountains to learn what life really is.”

In the Northwest it was common, in the years before World War One, to regard Washington’s resources as virtually unlimited, and capable of absorbing an enormous increase of population. Observers from outside the region, by contrast, were more skeptical—no doubt because they were less personally engaged in the regional economic growth. At the same world’s fair where Meany promoted the Evergreen State as a place of “inexhaustible” natural resources, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner talked about the closing of the American frontier. His remarks, based upon the Census Bureau’s 1890 comment that the amount of “free land” available to homesteaders was now in rather short supply, suggested a new sense of limits to the nation. The centuries-long migration from east to west had finally run up against the Pacific Ocean—as well as against the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains and Great Basin—and for this reason and others, Americans began to recognize barriers to their economic and territorial aspirations that they had not understood before. The development of federal programs to conserve natural resources—e.g. by creating Forest Reserves (later called National Forests) during the 1890s, or National Parks such as Mt. Rainier in 1899 and Crater Lake in 1902—illustrated how this new sense of limits began to operate on the Pacific Northwest.

Helen Hunt Jackson (above) (Ruth Odell, Helen Hunt Jackson. Photo courtesy of Ruth Davenport. Facing p. 170.) The article “Puget Sound,” by Helen Hunt Jackson, published on the eve of the transcontinental railroad’s arrival in 1883, provided another outsider’s recognition that the region’s natural resources were indeed finite.

Helen Maria Fiske was born in Amherst, Connecticut on October 15, 1830. She married twice, first to Major Edward Bissell Hunt (who died in 1863), and then to Colorado financier William Sharpless Jackson. She began her writing career following the death of her first husband using the nom de plume “H. H.” for many of her poems, essays, travel pieces (of which her visit to Puget Sound was one), and novels. She became a zealous convert to Indian reform in 1879 after hearing a lecture on the condition of the Poncas, a midwestern tribe forced to resettle in Indian Territory. She spent the next two years compiling evidence to document the effects of federal Indian policy on Native Americans in the West. The result of this work, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United State’s Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes, was published in 1881. Helen Hunt Jackson’s attention was then drawn to the Mission Indians of California where, in 1883, she was appointed to investigate their conditions and suggest legislation (which was not passed by Congress) to correct injustices. This work lead to her last novel, Ramona, published in 1884, one year before her death. Jackson’s concern about the treatment of Indians made her into a reformer, and she brought this perspective to her observations of conditions around Puget Sound. Note that her article appeared in the same year as the transcontinental railroad to the Northwest was finished. Jackson meant to give eastern audiences a glimpse of the newly accessible region. (For more information see Ruth Odell, Helen Hunt Jackson. New York, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1939.)

Unit Five: Lesson Fifteen – Industrialization, Class, and Race; Chinese and the Anti-Chinese Movement in the Late 19th-Century Northwest

Chinese vegetable vendor, Victoria, B.C., (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, Social Issues Files Cb, UW negative #514). Railroads and industrialism changed the Pacific Northwest economy not only by accelerating and mechanizing the extraction of natural resources but also by accentuating divisions between classes and races. Business interests, led by railroad and timber barons, formed elites that dominated industries, towns, and politics; workers organized to protect and assert the interests of labor. The result, particularly in Washington and Idaho, was a considerably polarized society that featured an unusually high degree of labor radicalism between 1880 and 1920. (In his textbook and other works, Carlos Schwantes has written a good deal about this aspect of regional history.) But conflict did not occur solely between classes. Within the working classes there emerged additional divisions defined by race.

Chin Fook Hing (above) was a Chinese importer in Seattle. This 1909 photograph shows him in his shop, located at 114 Second Avenue. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Cb, neg. 420). The economy of the American West was characterized by a dual labor system. Whites occupied the majority of the white-collar and skilled blue-collar positions. They also occupied semi-skilled and unskilled positions, but enjoyed higher rates of mobility out of those kinds of jobs. People of color, on the other hand, occupied in disproportionate numbers the semi-skilled and unskilled positions at the bottom of the economic ladder. These workers—Indians, blacks, and people of Mexican and Asian descent—had fewer chances to escape the lower rungs (although in some cases members of minority groups owned and operated their own businesses). When white workingmen formed into unions in the American West, they often were organizing not only against capital but also against the non-white worker who, in a variety of ways, was perceived as a threat to whites’ economic security. In the Pacific Northwest of the 1880s—the very decade when railroads increased the pace of industrialization in the region—these patterns of labor organization and conflict played out against Chinese communities.

Chinese migrants (above) lived throughout Washington, as this Walla Walla portrait of a Chinese youth documents. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Cb.)

Streams of emigrants began leaving China, mainly for other parts of Asia, during the late 18th century. The great majority regarded themselves as sojourners, i.e. people who intended to return to China rather than settle permanently in the places to which they had moved. During the 1840s, as the Chinese empire collapsed under pressures imposed by other nations, rapid population increase, declining standards of living, and problems in government, Chinese sojourners began moving to the New World, and particularly to California where the gold rush had attracted the attention of migrants from around the globe. Between 1849 and 1882, approximately 300,000 Chinese entered the United States. Many entered more than once, taking return trips to China; others left and never returned. As a result, the 1880 census counted only about 100,000 Chinese in the U.S. The ratio of men to women among these immigrants was about 20 to 1. As late as 1920, women still amounted to less than fifteen percent of all people of Chinese descent in the U.S.

Chinese immigrants worked primarily as laborers and lived largely in the states and territories of the American West. Most toiled at mining and constructing railroad lines across the region, and they also worked in agriculture. Some worked at providing services to other Chinese people, particularly those concentrated in Chinatown districts in western cities. Opportunities were limited by racism and segregation. Because American jobs generally paid better than the employment that cold be had in China, Chinese sojourners generally earned enough money to make immigration worthwhile (although many never acquired enough savings to be able to afford to return to China). However, with the exception of a few businessmen operating in Chinatowns, none had good access to paths of upward mobility within the American economy. The Chinese were paid lower wages than white workers, and they suffered other forms of economic and civil discrimination which were based in part on racism against Asians and in part on fear of the Chinese as economic competitors. Yet the demand for labor in the American West during the later 19th and early 20th centuries was generally high, and for this reason Chinese (as well as Japanese and Mexicans and Filipinos) were routinely recruited and employed.

Chinese laborers (above) working on the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks along the Columbia River gorge. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Cb, neg. 522.)

Beginning in the early 1850s in California, and then continuing in other times and places in the West, white workingmen protested that the Chinese drove down wages. White labor criticized the Chinese for accepting lower rates of pay, and criticized employers who hired the Chinese instead of whites. The animus against the Chinese and their employers grew strongest in times of economic downturns, such as during the mid-1870s and mid-1880s, when many Chinese workers involved in railroad construction were laid off. In California during the later 1860s and the 1870s, white workingmen took the lead in organizing an anti-Chinese movement in politics and within unions. The state and its cities passed a number of laws to discourage more Chinese from coming and to drive out those who were already there. Through mobs, lynchings, and other forms of violence, Chinese workers were also terrorized. Both the violence and the organizing spread across the West and to the entire country. During the later 1870s, both the Democratic and Republican party platforms contained anti-Chinese clauses. By 1882, the pressure against the Chinese resulted in passage of legislation outlawing the immigration of most Chinese into the United States. The act was designed primarily to exclude laborers; merchants, diplomats, students, teachers, and travelers were permitted to enter the country. But the drop-off in immigration was sizable. In 1881, 12,000 Chinese had entered the U.S.; in 1887, 10 Chinese did. (Over time, immigrants figured out how to use loopholes in the law to gain admission, so between 1882 and 1917 another 92,000 Chinese actually arrived.)

The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major piece of legislation restricting immigration to America. It is noteworthy that Asians were the initial group to be singled out for discriminatory treatment in immigration policy, as well as the only peoples to be entirely excluded from immigration to the U.S. On top of this, until the early 1950s, Asians were the only immigrants who could not be naturalized as American citizens. Such draconian restrictions were entirely out of proportion to the relatively low numbers of Asians in the American population.

Contrasting advertisements, (above): According to Murray Morgan in Skid Road, “Wa Chong & Co. began manufacturing `Havana Cigars’ in Seattle on February 1, 1883. Theirs was the first cigar factory on the Sound…. During the anti-Chinese agitation, a white label on the cigar meant only Caucasian workers were employed….” (Seattle, 1982 ed., p.120. Reproduction from City of Seattle Directory. Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Cb, neg. 539)

Passage of the 1882 Exclusion Act skewed the population of Chinese in the United States. It inhibited the predominantly male population from bringing wives from China, and thus greatly limited the immigrants’ ability to reproduce themselves in the U.S. or to live with their families. Most immigrants’ family members stayed in China. The Chinese community in the U.S. remained heavily male, and over time it aged markedly and declined in size. These demographic traits further marked off a population that was already quite distinctive, that already tended to cluster in homogeneous enclaves around the West, and that was discouraged by white discrimination as well as by a sojourners’ orientation from undergoing substantial acculturation. In stark contrast to most immigrants groups in the U.S., the Chinese population declined sharply, from roughly 105,000 in 1882 to 62,000 in 1920. One can track this decline in the three states of the Pacific Northwest.

Chinese Population in the Pacific Northwest (below)

Class and racial tensions erupted during the mid-1880s in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, as the Northern Pacific Railroad reached completion and laid off its construction workers-both white and Chinese. The Pacific Northwest entered a steep recession, and laborers streamed into cities looking for jobs, which proved quite elusive. In these conditions, the Chinese quickly became scapegoats for the economic distress of whites, who believed that the immigrants were taking away jobs that the whites rightfully deserved, and were also accepting lower wages which undercut non-Chinese workers. The anti-Chinese movement in the Northwest was spearheaded by members of the Knights of Labor, a fairly radical union whose leaders had already gained experience in the anti-Chinese movement in California during the 1870s. The Knights and other workers protested what they regarded as lax enforcement of the 1882 Exclusion Act. If the law was truly being upheld, they believed, there would not be so many Chinese available to take work. Moreover, workers complained about big regional employers, such as railroads, which had recruited, paid, and then laid off the Chinese in the first place. Big corporations were regarded as an important part of the economic problems, and not solely because of their relationship to the Chinese. Throughout the Northwest, the Knights tried to get workers to redirect anti-Chinese sentiments against the “capitalists, bankers, [and] railroad monopolists” who, the union charged, prevented less wealthy people from achieving upward mobility in the region.

Tacoma’s “Committee of Fifteen,” (above) who were in charge of organizing the expulsion of the Chinese in 1885, included among its members some of the city’s most prominent businessmen. One of them, James Wickersham, went on to become a federal judge. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues File Cb, neg. 1679.)

The anti-Chinese fervor crested between September 1885 and February 1886 in a series of violent attacks on immigrants. White miners, led by the Knights of Labor, killed 28 Chinese and wounded at least 15 others in Wyoming, in September, after a dispute over whether whites or Chinese would be assigned to an especially promising section of a coal mine owned by the Union Pacific Railroad. The “Rock Springs Massacre,” as the event was named, touched off additional outbreaks of anti-Chinese violence. Near present-day Issaquah, Washington, a band of whites and Indians killed three Chinese hop-pickers the same month by setting their sleeping barracks afire, and another mob burned down the sleeping barracks of 36 coal miners near Newcastle, Washington. Sensing an opportunity to expand their organization, the Knights of Labor stepped up criticisms of the Chinese and their employers, and focused new attention on Tacoma.

White Tacomans had expressed concern over the Chinese population prior to the fall of 1885. Newspaper accounts had for months attacked the Chinese as sub-human and blamed them for virtually all the city’s problems. One newspaperman wrote:

“Why permit an army of leprous, prosperity-sucking, progress-blasting Asiatics befoul our thoroughfares, degrade the city, repel immigration, drive out our people, break up our homes, take employment from our countrymen, corrupt the morals of our youth, establish opium joints, buy or steal the babe of poverty or slave, and taint with their brothels the lives of our young men?…If no other method of keeping them at a distance from our people can be found, let the citizens furnish them with lots on the waterfront, three fathoms below low tide.”

Terence Powderly Leader of the Knights of Labor (above). In the 1880s, Powderly (1849-1924), became the most influential labor leader in the United States when he organized the Knights of Labor as an industrial union with open membership and created a “job conscious” approach to trade union problems. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Dc/i.) These sentiments, echoed in some Seattle newspapers, were accompanied by attempted boycotts against the Chinese. Some businesses hoped to attract more customers by advertising that they employed no Chinese. Some opponents of the Chinese set up a laundry run by white women, so that customers would not have to take their cleaning to immigrants shops (the white women’s operation failed). Occasionally, anti-Chinese protesters targeted big corporations as well; one critic denounced railroad companies as “ironclad monopolies” and “the thieves who stole our timber and coal lands”—a reference to railroad’s control over so much land in Washington. But in truth the Chinese—who were not, and could not become, citizens—made the far easier target.

In October, the protest leaders announced that all Chinese would have to leave Tacoma by the start of November. Many Chinese departed, but some did not, so early in November a mob of whites, led by Tacoma’s mayor and supported by the city police, invaded Tacoma’s Chinatown and ordered its residents out of the city. The Chinese were marched to a railroad depot and put aboard a train to Portland. Few whites were willing to resist the mob. Most disapproved of the Chinese, and perhaps the only qualm they had was that the eviction by the mob seemed likely to stain Tacoma’s reputation among prospective investors and immigrants back East.

Seattle’s anti-Chinese riot of February 8, 1886 (above), in front of the New England Hotel on Main & 1st Ave. Reproduction of a drawing in Harpers Weekly. Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Cb, neg. 527). In Seattle, a similar scenario unfolded early in 1886. Labor leaders had told the Chinese that they would have to leave the town. Some Chinese complied with the “order,” but as many as 500 did not, and they remained behind. On the morning of February 7, a mob led by workingmen went to Chinatown, rounded up the remaining immigrants, marched them to the docks, and tried to put them aboard a waiting steamer. This time, however, the anti-Chinese forces encountered opposition from other whites, who protested this extra-legal action. Some businessmen in Seattle had spoken against the anti-Chinese movement among workers, seeing it in part as an issue of whether capital had the right to employ whoever it wanted to hire. Other businessmen objected to the show of strength by radical labor, and also opposed the extra-legal means adopted to evict the Chinese. They worried about Seattle’s reputation. Few who resisted the anti-Chinese forces spoke up to defend the rights of the Chinese; their main focus seemed to be to find a way to remove the Chinese from the city legally. In any case, a misunderstanding developed between the more working-class people trying to remove the Chinese immediately, and the more middle-class people supporting “law and order” and opposing the unlawful expulsion of the immigrants. The middling sorts had organized into a militia called the “Home Guards,” and in the midst of a confused confrontation over the fate of Seattle’s Chinese these troops fired upon the working-class mob, killing one and wounding four. By March, the entire Chinese population of Seattle had been expelled. (The Chinese, nonetheless, reappeared in time to help the city rebuild after the 1889 fire.)

Smuggling Chinese into the United States as viewed by a West Shore weekly magazine artist (above). Not all entered the United States by water, however. Many came across the border into eastern Washington. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Cb, neg. 11309)The anti-Chinese movement affected Oregon, too. Once more, mobs led by workers drove Chinese laborers out of small towns and selected workplaces, and in general terrorized the immigrants from Asia over a period of several months between the winter and summer of 1886. Most of the displaced Chinese went to Portland’s Chinatown where, in part because of the city’s close commercial and shipping ties to China, they were not expelled. Oregon added another twist to workers’ sentiments against the Chinese. In addition to white men complaining of the competition they faced from Chinese workers, a number of white working women also took up the anti-Chinese cause. Women laborers often competed directly against Chinese men for jobs in domestic service, tailoring, laundries, and mills, and they joined in the white men’s refrain that Asian immigrants were undermining their opportunities. With the decline of mining and the completion of railroad construction, the Chinese increasingly took jobs that had been regarded as within the “sphere” of women. One newspaper thus blamed the Chinese competition for driving white women out of respectable jobs and into careers of “depravity,” i.e. prostitution. It was not just men, then, who perceived the Chinese as a threat. [See Margaret K. Holden, “Gender and Protest Ideology: Sue Ross Keenan and the Oregon Anti-Chinese Movement,” Western Legal History 7 (Summer/Fall 1994):223-43.]

Anti-Chinese sentiment did not die with the violence of 1886. In 1887 a gang of at least four white men robbed, murdered, and mutilated thirty-one Chinese miners in the Hell’s Canyon region of the Snake River in Oregon. Three of the criminals were brought to trial, but none was convicted. A white rancher from the area commented on their acquittal: “I guess if they had killed 31 white men something would have been done about it, but none of the jury knew the Chinamen or knew much about it, so they turned the men loose.” One nearby ranch house reportedly used a Chinese skull from the massacre as a sugar bowl on its kitchen table for many years afterwards. [David H. Stratton, “The Snake River Massacre of Chinese Miners, 1887,” in Duane A. Smith, ed., A Taste of the West: Essays in Honor of Robert G. Athearn (Boulder, Colo., 1983), 109-29.]

Chinese on a wharf in Port Townsend (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Cb, neg. 5074). Interestingly, not all white communities in the Pacific Northwest reacted so violently against the Chinese. The anti-Chinese movement certainly touched Port Townsend, Washington, on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but it had a different outcome there. The community decided at one point in early 1886 to attempt to remove its Chinese population, particularly as many were arriving from towns on Puget Sound from which they had been expelled. But whites tried to proceed against the Chinese in a more lawful fashion, by boycotting their businesses and firing them from jobs in white-owned businesses. These methods did not work, however, in part because white employers and consumers came to realize how much they depended on Chinese labor for the smooth running of the town economy. Moreover, contrary to the perception that Chinese sojourners sent all their earnings home, white leaders in Port Townsend came to understand that the Chinese had invested a considerable amount of money in the town itself. To expel the Chinese, then, was to create significant economic problems for the community. Port Townsend never went about integrating the Chinese socially into the community, and over time the population of Asian immigrants there dwindled as a result. (The town was also the site of considerable smuggling of Chinese into the United States from Canada after the 1882 exclusion.) But at least some white people in Port Townsend recognized the economic contributions that the Chinese made, and this recognition likely prevented in Port Townsend an expression of the kind of unrestrained hostility that had been unleashed elsewhere. [Daniel Liestman, ‘The Various Celestials among Our Town’: Euro-American Response to Port Townsend’s Chinese Colony, Pacific Northwest Quarterly 85 (July 1994):93-104.]

Unit 5: Lesson Sixteen – Mastering Nature: The Rise of Seattle, 1851-1930

Seattle from the waterfront, 1878 (above). (Special Collections Division, University of Washington, neg. 23270; copy by Asahel Curtis. Orig. neg., Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma.)

The cities of the Pacific Northwest competed energetically with one another to gain dominance in the region. As discussed earlier (Lesson 13), Portland enjoyed advantages, related largely to its ability to command the largest hinterland, that gave it an early and enduring lead over prospective rivals. Seattle, by contrast, had to play catch-up. In 1880, its population was about 3500 people fewer than Walla Walla possessed and about one-fifth the size of Portland. Many predicted that Tacoma, assured of becoming the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad, would shortly surpass Seattle and live up to its (Tacoma’s) slogan, The City of Destiny. Yet by 1920, in spite of its apparent handicaps, Seattle had passed its rivals to become the dominant city of the Pacific Northwest. Its population had leapt to 315,312 by 1920, while Portland’s stood at 258,288 and Tacoma’s at 96,965.

Nature Literally Harnessed: Postcard advertising the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition held in Seattle in 1909 (above). (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry, Seattle.)

One key to Seattle’s success was the ability of its residents and promoters to master nature. Railroads permitted this mastery in one sense. They linked Seattle to the coal mines east and south of Lake Washington and to farms in eastern Washington. Railroads also ensured that when gold was found in the Yukon and Alaska during the 1890s and 1900s, Seattle would become the metropolis for those hinterlands—although its connections to the north were made by sea rather than by land. At the same time that Seattle rose to greater prominence by mastering nature at some distance, it undertook concerted efforts to master nature more locally. In order to grow and flourish as a city, it developed a network of streetcars that dispersed residents; acquired a water supply and an electric system by harnessing the Cedar and Skagit Rivers; leveled the hills surrounding downtown in order to facilitate real-estate development; straightened the channel of the Duwamish River and created a man-made harbor; built a new ship canal and locks that tied Lake Washington more directly to Puget Sound; and laid out a large-scale urban park system. In sum, the city flourished by harnessing to its own ends the many forms of nature that surrounded it.

This treatment of nature began early on in the town’s history. The city was begun in 1851 at Alki Point, in what now is West Seattle. Some if the founding party, after one winter there, decided that Alki Point’s windy and cold weather, coupled with a relatively poor harbor, made it an unpromising place to lay out a town. The next year some of the settlers moved to a more sheltered site, on the eastern shore of Elliott Bay, where the modern city of Seattle was begun. This site was not perfect, either; the steep hills rising from the water would complicate the process of building a city. But it was more sheltered from the wind and had deeper water for a harbor; and loggers could cut the trees on the hillside and easily slide them down to mills on the waterfront.

The town had its start, but it was hardly a respectable one. One observer in the 1850s summarized Seattle:

“Cut out a clearing from a dense forest on a side hill, one mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, put about fifty houses in this clearing; divide the settlement into two streets filled with sawdust; give the place three hotels, five boarding houses, and seventeen grog shops, and you have a clear idea of Seattle.”

As the proportion of grog shops suggests, life was crude and heavily male. Men outnumbered women by a ratio of 5 or 10 to one. Indeed, this gender imbalance lasted a long time; as late as 1920, Seattle’s ratio of men to women was 1.14 (while Portland’s was 1.05 and Spokane’s 1.00). In contrast to early Portland and Walla Walla, early Seattle was not much affected by the presence of missionaries.

Mayor Hiram C. Gill sanctioned and approved the construction of the “largest house of prostitution in the world” on 10th Ave. S. in Seattle (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Ha, neg. 8235)

Seattle business leaders had thought that their city might wither if it did not become the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Yet when the transcontinental line was finally completed to Tacoma, Seattle benefited along with its rival to the south. The population grew from 3,500 in 1880 to 42,800 in 1890, and by the early 1890s the city was substantial enough to attract its own transcontinental railroad, the Great Northern, which was finished in 1893. This railroad gave the city a tool with which to reach out and secure more of a hinterland for itself. But the biggest windfall came because the railroad enabled Seattle to claim a new hinterland to the north—Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. Prior to the 1890s, the city of San Francisco had controlled American trade with and industry in Alaska, but in the early 1890s Seattle began taking this hinterland away from San Francisco. It was cheaper and quicker to ship goods from Alaska to Seattle than to San Francisco, and after 1893 the Great Northern line permitted Seattle to ship those goods as easily to the East as San Francisco had been shipping them. One San Francisco firm moved its Alaska operations north to Seattle, while other new companies, including the Alaska Steamship Company, organized locally to take advantage of the new opportunities. For decades Seattle had been a hinterland of San Francisco, shipping lumber and coal to the City by the Bay. Now Seattle gained a sort of independence by “colonizing” Alaska as its own hinterland. In other words, Seattle did to Alaska what San Francisco had done to Seattle—mastering nature in such a way that it could direct its hinterland’s natural wealth (in Alaska’s case, fish and minerals) through its port and commercial houses.

Yukon Outfitters (above). One of the many businesses in Seattle that outfitted the miners for the Yukon. (Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, Photo by Asahel Curtis, negative #345A.)

The stage was thus set for the city’s greatest strokes of fortune, the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 and the Alaska Gold Rush of 1900 (See also, The Klondike Gold Rush). In the summer of 1896 prospectors found a substantial amount of gold along the Yukon River in Canada; four years later another substantial find was located in Nome, Alaska. These strikes precipitated the last great mineral rushes of the 19th century, and thousands of Americans left quickly for the goldfields. Although the initial strike occurred on Canadian soil, the Canadian cities of Vancouver and Victoria were not well prepared to service it. American cities, on the other hand, began competing earnestly to attract miners on their way to the strikes—most of whom were themselves American and therefore predisposed to depart for the North from an American entrepôt. Now, one may wonder why any city wanted hundreds of mostly young, desperate men passing through it; the big payoff for towns that served as jumping-off points for the Yukon was that miners had to transport all their supplies with them from the lower forty-eight. Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, and San Francisco each wanted to sell those supplies to the miners, and also wanted to be the ports to which miners returned from the north.

The first plat of Seattle laid out by Arthur Denny (above).  Sketch made by Lieutenant W. S. Phelps of the “Decatur” in c. 1855-56. (Arthur A. Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound. Seattle, 1908. Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. 10049)

Seattle won the struggle to become the most popular jumping-off point to the Klondike, partly because of its proximity to Alaska and its railroad terminus, but also through a massive publicity campaign sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. A committee led by Erastus Brainerd flooded the nation with advertising that conveyed a simple message: “Seattle is the gateway to Alaska and the Yukon.” In Illinois alone, for example, 488 weekly newspapers carried Seattle’s promotional message. On October 13, 1897, the Chamber of Commerce sent 212,000 copies of a special 8-page, Klondike edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to post offices and periodicals around the nation. Seattle generated five times as much advertising as any other city on the West Coast, and the advertising paid off. The city received the bulk of the American traffic to the Yukon, and later to other mineral strikes in Alaska, and thus cemented its economic hold over its northern hinterland.

A town was laid out with the help of Arthur Denny, formerly a surveyor in Illinois. He chose the gridiron plan that was the simplest and most familiar format and the one best suited to the buying and selling of property. Nobody cared in the 1850s or 1860s about laying out streets that allowed residences to take advantage of the views from Seattle’s hillsides. Rather, people cared about attracting immigrants and investors, and selling land. By 1876 the lands along the 4-mile path from Lake Union to the Duwamish Valley had been platted, ready for sale. However, people resided only within one half-mile of the city center. The town’s corps of land speculators had to await the arrival of buyers. Meanwhile, like most other towns on Puget Sound, Seattle got along by cutting and milling lumber and shipping it to markets around the Pacific Rim. Townspeople blamed the “Indian war” of 1855-56 for a slump in growth, but the collapse of the Californian economy—to which Seattle had sent most of its wood—may have been more problematic. In any case, Seattle’s growth was too slow to satisfy its boosters.

Regrading Seattle, (above): The leveling of the hills to make Seattle. (Special Collections, University of Washington, 1910 photo by Asahel Curtis, neg. 4812)

Seattle had some advantages to help it along. People found coal deposits on the eastern and southern sides of Lake Washington, and by 1871 the city was shipping about 100 tons of coal daily to San Francisco. This gave Seattle a second staple to go along with timber. Still, the city had no more substantial hinterland that it could tap, as Portland was tapping the Willamette Valley and the Columbia and Snake River watersheds. Without access to a “natural” hinterland (i.e. one connected to it by river travel), Seattle hoped for a railroad to connect it to other places. Thus, during the early 1870s when the Northern Pacific Railroad was shopping for a terminus site on Puget Sound (choosing between Mukilteo, Seattle, and Tacoma), Seattleites regarded the matter as urgent and critical. “If we win [the terminus] our property will be quadrupled in value,” one newspaper editor explained. “If we lose, it will be depreciated one half to two-thirds. Our destiny must now be settled for years to come.” Notice that nobody spoke about developing a satisfactory sense of community, or valuing the natural scenery, or managing growth, or building fine schools, or protecting the neighborhoods, or having just the right kind of coffee merchant on the street corner. The founders thought of Seattle as a gold mine of sorts—not a place to make a life but rather one to make a living, preferably through an increase in property values. This mentality, emphasizing growth at virtually any cost, prevailed in the city well into the 20th century. Seattle was a real estate venture, first and foremost, for its founders. The keys to its success were developing some form of control over the natural wealth of the hinterlands (railroads), and asserting greater control over the landed wealth within the city limits (through efforts to increase property values, commerce, and industry). The city devoted itself to attracting new residents and investors who, it was sure, would help it realize its dreams of greatness.

Ship Canal Locks, (above): The Government Locks looking east toward Lake Union. (Special Collections Division, University of Washington, negative 4234)

At the same time, the market created by miners and others headed north stimulated additional enterprises closer to Seattle. Throughout western Washington, farmers and ranchers produced more crops, livestock, and dairy products to sell to the miners and to the ballooning population of Seattle. In other words, Seattle captured not only the rather distant hinterlands of Alaska and the Yukon but also the closer rural hinterlands within its own state. Through the technology of transportation and the workings of the market, it harnessed nature’s wealth far more successfully than ever before. The growth that accompanied the Klondike and Alaska gold rushes increased Seattle’s population and affluence to new heights.

As the city matured, it sought to make further refinements to itself, thus launching a campaign of civic improvement devoted to mastering nature locally as well. One set of improvements revolved around leveling the steep hills that encircled the downtown. Between 1900 and 1930 the city re-engineered its natural setting by regrading the slopes around the central business district. The hills were seen as an impediment to real estate development; city officials assumed that by lowering the hills they would facilitate the outward growth of the central business district and accelerate the rise in property values. As workmen washed and shoveled and hauled the hills away, they also straightened the lower Duwamish River in order to facilitate shipping on that stream; created Harbor Island, which added to the city’s waterfront; and filled in some of the tideflats in the area just south of Pioneer Square (the spot occupied by the Kingdome between 1976 and 1999).

Furthermore, in 1916 the city, assisted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, completed the Seattle Ship Canal which, with the help of a system of locks, permitted ships to travel from Puget Sound through Lake Union into Lake Washington. One goal of the canal was to permit the industrialization of Lake Washington by making it more accessible to ocean-going vessels. It should be noted that each of these projects had enormous environmental consequences, few of which were given much thought at the time. For example, water and anadromous fish used to drain out of Lake Washington at its southern end, into the Black and then the Cedar and then the Duwamish rivers on their way to Elliott Bay. After 1916 the lake was lowered by about ten feet, and it now drained out to the Sound primarily via the ship canal. Salmon had to struggle to and from the sea through the locks and the accompanying fish ladder. We have only recently grasped the great consequences of such ecological changes.

Map of the Olmsted Brothers’ park and boulevard system for Seattle, (above). (“Parks, Boulevards and Playgrounds of Seattle,” Issued by the Board of Parks Commissioners. Special Collections, University of Washington, F899/S4/S235)

Most of the harnessing of nature that Seattle undertook during the early 20th century was meant to increase its economy and expand its population. The ethos of growth, implanted by the founders, still governed the city. At the same time, there emerged a new interest in aesthetic refinements. The rising population and expanding streetcar system encouraged the population to build new residential districts that took advantage of the city’s natural amenities. Homeowners began to value and appreciate the many views of water and mountains that the city possessed. As people moved away from the city center, it should be noted, they also created a more segregated city, for classes and races that had mixed together before were now increasingly separated. Another urban “improvement” was the development of the city’s park system. In 1903 Seattle hired the Olmsted Brothers, of Brookline, Massachusetts, to lay out a park system for the city. John C. Olmsted, the landscape architect who planned for new parks and parkways, was struck by the natural vistas that Seattle offered. The city would never need a huge green space like New York City’s Central Park, he concluded, because its residents would always have access to views of forests and mountains, of lakes and Puget Sound. People expressed a growing appreciation for the mixture of urban and natural amenities that Seattle promised. It was around this time, too, that residents of Seattle and Tacoma began making the newly established Mount Rainier National Park part of their collective backyards. Parks of all kinds were another way of mastering nature while at the same time appreciating it.

The “authorized birds eye view of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition” compiled by William Caughey in 1909 (above). (Seattle, 1909. Special Collections, University of Washington)

In 1909 the city of Seattle celebrated its prodigious growth and recent civic refinements by hosting a world’s fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. The fair meant many things to the city. It announced Seattle’s maturity, the passing of its “frontier” stage and its arrival as a major American city capable of hosting an international exposition. (The fact that Seattle’s key rival, Portland, had hosted its own world’s fair in 1905 naturally spurred the people of Seattle to do what they could to match and then surpass that event.) It suggested that Seattle had become refined enough to bring together in one place civilization’s finest products of science, art, and industry. The fair, promoters claimed, was “wisdom personified.” That it took place on the campus of the University of Washington doubtless gave this claim added credibility. (What the University got from the fair, of course, was more concrete—many new buildings and a new campus plan, laid out by John C. Olmsted and coordinated—at least briefly, in Olmsted’s thinking, with the park system.)

Map of University of Washington campus (above). (Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Washington). But the fair had a more materialistic rationale as well. Seattle leaders meant not only to celebrate recent growth but also to promote additional growth, to advertise the city and attract new immigrants and investors. The A-Y-P aimed—like Klondike-era publicity had before it—to convince Americans that Seattle was the nation’s doorway to trading around the Pacific Rim. One booster explained, “Seattle has assumed the task of introducing the half of the world which is developed almost to the ultimate [the U.S.], to that other half [Alaska and East Asia] which to all intents and purposes of trade, is developed not at all.” Note the name of this fair in particular, which commemorated not the host city but rather the city’s economic hinterlands—Alaska, the Yukon, and trading partners in Asia. In almost every respect, the exposition stressed the accomplishments and refinements of Seattle, and juxtaposed them to the natural wealth of the city’s less refined hinterlands. The official seal (below, far right) illustrated Seattle’s aspirations. The figure on the right represented the forested American Northwest, ready to serve commerce via rail connections; the figure on the left represented Japan and Asia, linked across the ocean by steamship; the figure in the center, beneath the northern lights, represented Alaska and her untapped wealth. Alaska stood as a meeting ground for East and West, and would “supply the wealth for both.” A little more harnessing of nature—by rail or by sea, or by one of the many mechanical inventions featured at the world’s fair—seemed to be all that would be required.

Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition Insignia

Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition seal, (above). Official design. (Special Collections Division, University of Washington Libraries, Photo by F. H. Nowell, official photographer of the AYP. Nowell negative #236; UW negative #236.)

Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition seal, (above). Official design in staff. (Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, Photo by F. H. Nowell, official photographer of the AYP, 1909. Nowell negative #90.)

Unit 6: The Northwest as a Political and Economic Colony, 1880-1940

Lesson Seventeen – Reform and the Pacific Northwest, 1880-1920

Labor families protest (above). Protest and reform were events that involved the entire family, including young girls who, besides their parents, were part of the labor force. We do not know the date of this photograph, but these children by asking us to not be a “scab” could be making this appeal on behalf themselves, their mother or their father. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Dc/iii. Neg.335)

In the decades between 1880 and 1920 the United States produced a variety of social and political movements devoted to the improvement of all areas of life. These movements responded in many respects to the conditions being created by the new urban and industrial order. Many Americans were uncomfortable with the rapid and disruptive changes that were occurring, and they participated in movements that sought to soften the impact of those changes. Others aspired to create a more efficient world, hoping to make adjustments to the prevailing system so that it ran more smoothly. Still others proposed to overturn the prevailing system in some fashion, and replace it with another that would be more humane or equitable. In textbook accounts of U.S. history, these social and political movements, many of which overlapped, are often summarized as Populism, Progressivism, the Rise of Organized Labor, and Radicalism.

The various reform and radical movements that emerged across the country took especially powerful hold in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps because so many parts of regional society were still in their “formative” phases during the decades surrounding 1900, these movements exerted a more forceful and lasting impact in the region than they did elsewhere. The history of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon was profoundly shaped by the various protests, reforms, and radical proposals that emerged across the country between 1880 and 1920. The impact of populist and progressive reforms on the region offers good case studies.

Farmers’ cooperatives (above) in Washington go back to 1890. By 1920, there were close to 100 groups organized to promote and market agricultural produce from eggs to the cut flowers sold by the Spokane Flower Growers Association. (M.C. Puhr. Spokane, 1940. p.16.)

Populism was many things, but at bottom it might be seen as a movement by farmers to enlist government to help them meet the challenges presented by the new industrial order. Farmers felt tremendous pressure from: the growing and threatening concentration of economic power in the hands of railroads, banks, farm-equipment manufacturers, and other corporations; the booms and busts in the economy of the late 19th century; the growing problem of overproduction, which drove down prices for the things they produced; and deflation. Organizing into social groups, economic cooperatives, and political parties, farmers pressed for government regulation of railroads and other powerful financial interests, a new currency system to end deflation and reduce the power of banks, a more equitable means of distributing the public domain so that big owners (specifically, railroad companies) would not get more than their share of lands, and other economic and political reforms designed, in the words of one group, to “secure the toilers a proper share of the wealth they create.” The states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho developed Granges and Farmers Alliances, and contributed to the rise of populist third parties during the later 19th century. As the accompanying reading by Marilyn Watkins (“Contesting the Terms of Prosperity and Patriotism”) shows, the influence of populist ideas persisted well into the 1920s.

Two kinds of evidence may serve to illustrate the relatively strong presence of populism in the Pacific Northwest. One is electoral returns. During the 1890s, the People’s Party enjoyed comparative success at the polls in the Northwest, particularly when one considers just how hard it has been in the United States for a third party to take votes away from the Democrats and Republicans. In its first year on the ballot, in 1892, the People’s Party won 30% of the votes cast for President in the three states of the Pacific Northwest. In Idaho (where the leading role of silver mining made the populist stand against the gold standard quite popular), the Populist candidate for President, General James B, Weaver, won 54% of the popular vote. Voters in Washington and Oregon gave Weaver 22% and 16% of the vote, respectively, and also elected a handful of Populist legislators to state houses. In the 1894 elections, Populists replaced Democrats as the second party of Washington; in 1896 Populists and Democrats “fused” in the Evergreen State to elect as Governor the Populist John R. Rogers of Puyallup, and also took control of the state legislature. Populists’ accomplishments in Olympia were few and their prevalence was short lived, yet their success in the state and around the region exceeded that of most Populists elsewhere.

Governor John R. Rogers’s (above) home town of Puyallup was a major center of Populist sentiment. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Portrait Files. neg. #6347.)

The constitution for the state of Washington, written in 1889, stands as another instance of lasting populist influence. The document reflects very clearly the concerns of farmers (and others) who felt strongly about regulating railroads and other monopolies, reducing the influence of big business on government officials, and guaranteeing the rights of individuals. One provision of the constitution “banned gifts or loans of public money and credit to the private sector. These prohibitions were aimed primarily at the railroad companies, which often refused to build lines to communities unless the public helped pay for the railroad stations and other improvements.” The constitution contained other clauses based on a suspicion of big business; one provision gave the state control over the disposition of most tidelands, largely in an effort to prevent them from being sold to railroads or other private interests. Other sections of the constitution attempted to reduce the influence of big business on government. For example, compared to people in other states Washingtonians vote on more executive offices—e.g. commissioner of public lands and superintendent of public instruction—because those writing the constitution wanted to limit the appointive powers of elected officials (who seemed too susceptible to lobbying by corporate interests) and permit voters to select for themselves a wide range of officials. Finally, populists pushed to safeguard the rights of individuals in Washington. In many respects—such as the right to privacy, limitations on police searches, guarantees to a trial by jury, the right to own guns, and equal protection for women—the state constitution protects individual rights more zealously than does the federal constitution. (This information, including the quotation, comes from articles by Hugh Spitzer on the Washington state constitution, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Nov. 16, 18, 19, 20, 1997.) Many populist ideas remain in force in the Washington state constitution.

“Women Should Vote” (above). Women worked in a variety of ways to publicize their efforts to gain the right to vote.If Washington became known for the influence of populism, Oregon became quite closely identified with the multifaceted movement known as progressivism in the years between 1890 and 1920. When the great progressive Woodrow Wilson visited the state in 1911 (as governor of New Jersey, one year before he won election to the U.S. Presidency), he was struck by how much the reform movement had captured Oregon: “In the East I am counted intensely progressive,” he said. “In Oregon I am not so sure.” Wilson was observing the accumulation of a variety of new laws and procedures since 1890. Wary about the ability of average people to enact the laws they wanted, reformers in Oregon (including populists as well as progressives) focused on opening up the political process to citizens while reducing the power of “the lawmaking monopoly,” which was correctly identified with leading corporate interests, including the railroad.

Thus Oregon became associated with that current of progressive reform that focused on making government more responsive to people’s wishes. It passed laws to: adopt the Australian ballot (1891) to enable secret balloting; permit the people to create legislation through initiatives and to review acts of the legislature through referenda (1898-1902); create direct primaries so that the voters, and not elected officials, could choose U.S. Senators (in two stages, 1904 and 1908); regulate campaign expenditures (1908); permit voters to recall elected officials (1908); create a presidential preference primary (1910); establish a public utilities commission (1911); and extend the suffrage to women (1912). Using their power to pass laws without going through the legislature (as well as their new abilities to press legislatures to pass laws before the citizens beat them to it, and to approve or veto laws passed by the legislature), Oregonians also enacted a host of other progressive reforms in areas outside the political process: a ten-hour day for women workers (1903); local-option prohibition (1904); railroad rate regulation (1912); workmen’s compensation (1913); statewide prohibition (1914); and abolition of capital punishment (1914; reversed in 1920, abolished again in 1964, and restored anew in 1984). Oregon was not always the first state in the Union to enact specific reforms, but it was consistently one of the earliest to enact progressive political reforms, and it adopted more reforms more quickly than virtually every other state. Thus it became known as “The Laboratory for Political Democracy.” Washington and Idaho also adopted numerous reforms, but Oregon remained most closely identified with the progressive political tradition—a factor that may help to explain its distinctive 20th-century politics and its early and thorough conversion to environmental regulations during the 1960s and 1970s.

National Forests: Denny Peak and The Tooth, near Snoqualmie Lodge, August, 1947 (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, from the library of Winona Baily.) Progressivism affected more than the political process. The reform movement encouraged such practices as municipal ownership of utilities and the development of urban planning. Seattle built a publicly owned water system during the 1890s, and by 1902 had added a municipal power system. Portland, Tacoma, Spokane, and Seattle also launched more rigorous city-planning programs in this era, which led to the development of elaborate park and street systems. Progressivism is also associated with the rise of conservation. The federal government led the way in this reform in the Pacific Northwest, establishing some of the nation’s first forest reserves (later known as national forests) in the region during the 1890s—often in the face of complaints from state and private interests—and creating Mount Rainier National Park in 1899 and Crater Lake National Park in 1902. [See Also: The Campaign to Establish Mount Rainier National Park, 1893-1899, By Theodore Catton.] The reading by Abigail Scott Duniway, documenting the campaign for women’s suffrage, documents another aspect of progressive reform. The Pacific Northwest, and indeed the Far West in general, extended the suffrage to women before other parts of the country did. This was another example of a reform movement having a relatively stronger effect in the region.

Given the pronounced impact of populism and progressivism (and utopianism and labor radicalism) on the Pacific Northwest, how does one explain the region’s receptivity to reform movements? One socialist claimed during the 1890s that Washington seemed to be home to “more ‘isms’ and ‘osophies’ than any other state.” Why was that?

A number of answers come to mind, although they are more suggestive than definitive. I speculate that reform movements enjoyed more success in the Pacific Northwest in large part simply because people believed they would have a better chance of succeeding there. The Pacific Northwest struck Americans as a relatively new place. Although Oregon had been a state since 1859, its greatest population growth occurred after the arrival of transcontinental railroads during the 1880s. It seemed new to many Americans who were just beginning to discover it, thanks in large part to promotional materials distributed by railroads. The populations of Washington and Idaho similarly consisted primarily of recent arrivals. Moreover, those two states were themselves brand new, having been admitted to the Union in 1889 and 1890, respectively. As the case of the Washington state constitution illustrated, reformers could have a clear influence on how the new governments for the two states were organized.

Utopian Communities (above). Home (located in Pierce County, Washington) was one of several utopian colonies created in Washington State. It was a planned development of sorts, with each family receiving an acre plot for both a house and land to grow food. If you moved there you were free to speak your mind, but you could not force anyone else to your views. (Special Collections Division, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Ac. neg. #11264.)

In a word, the Pacific Northwest seemed malleable. And this condition actually helped to attract reformers and radicals of various stripes to the region. In the mid-19th century, American newcomers in the region had demonstrated a strong impulse to imitate that which they had left behind in the eastern states. Now, the West and Northwest became identified as places where one could innovate more readily. Populists, progressives, and radicals believed that they could enact in the Northwest their proposals for change that had met so much resistance elsewhere. This conviction helps to explain, for example, why so many utopian communities were created around Puget Sound in the years between 1885 and 1915—visionaries were certain they had a better chance to succeed in the Northwest, compared to elsewhere. And once model communities had proven themselves in the remote Northwest, utopians supposed, they would have a good chance of being adopted across the country. (See Charles P. LeWarne, Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885-1915 [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975].)

Abigail Scott Duniway (above) arrived in Oregon Territory in the 1850s. Her brother, Harvey Scott, was an early editor of the Portland Oregonian, and did not necessarily support Abigail Scott’s campaign for women’s suffrage. (Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Oregon. David Duniway collection.)

Residents—perhaps especially newcomers—increasingly seemed to hold that society and government in the Pacific Northwest were new enough to be plastic and accommodating. They need not be satisfied with how people back east had done things; rather, they could try out new ways, and actually improve upon established practices elsewhere. In claiming that the Pacific Northwest was fertile ground for woman suffrage, consequently, Abigail Scott Duniway explained that “All great uprisings of the race, looking to the establishment of a larger liberty for all the people, have first been generated in new countries, where plastic conditions adapt themselves to larger growths.” The men of the Pacific Northwest, because of where they lived, cherished liberty, according to Duniway, and were thus more disposed than eastern men to extend its blessings to women. Furthermore, she claimed, the West had given women more opportunities to prove themselves worthy of the vote, and in laboring next to their husbands to tame the country, women had earned suffrage at work that was unavailable to eastern women (Duniway, Path Breaking, 139, 142-43, 165, 172).

By the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, similar claims were made on behalf of the region’s cultural institutions. When ground was broken in Seattle for the present site of the University of Washington campus in 1894, Adell M. Parker, president of the alumni association, urged the citizens of her state to aspire to new, improved, and regional standards of culture:

“That the West should unfalteringly follow the East in fashions and ideals would be as false and fatal as that America should obey the standards of Europe. Let the West, daring and unprejudiced, discover its own ideals and follow them. The American standard in literature and philosophy has long been fixed by the remote East. Something wild and free, something robust and full will come out of the West and be recognized in the final American type. Under the shadow of those great mountains a distinct personality shall arise, it shall adopt other fashions, create new ideals, and generations shall justify them.”

Those who sought to improve or reform the world felt that the relatively new and flexible society of the Pacific Northwest, in the period between 1880 and 1920, offered them better chances for success—or at least more distance from the older ways they were bent on rejecting.

In early view of the University of Washington campus showing Parrington Hall in the foreground (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, photo collections. Neg. 4035). There are other ways of looking at the Pacific Northwest, however, that focus less on the opportunity to reform and more on the need. The historian Earl Pomeroy writes, “If abuse provokes political reform, the Far West became ripe for change as early as any part of the country” (The Pacific Slope [1965], p. 191). We need to keep in mind that many parts of the Pacific Northwest remained quite “unrefined.” The populations of urban centers, for example, were still heavily male, and most cities tolerated vice districts that catered to men without families. These districts presented moral problems for emerging, progressive-minded, middle classes, and also represented great opportunities for corruption and graft. Such conditions remind us of how the region’s development since the mid-19th century had been dominated by the quest for economic growth. Residents had generally postponed making social or cultural improvements, focusing upon making a living rather than making a nice place to live. Cities like Spokane, for example, had tolerated prostitution as an economic staple—perhaps even a public-health service—rather than moralizing against it. Now, during the progressive period, they turned to making the improvements that would create a more satisfying and respectable home.

Working conditions–such as those shown in this photograph of both women and young girls canning fish by hand (above)–were part of the reason why reform movements were popular in the Pacific Northwest. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Ga.)

Reformers in the Pacific Northwest were also reacting to the harsh realities of the regional economy. As discussed in Lesson 15 and the Schwantes textbook, industrialization polarized society between different classes and economic groups. That the economy focused so much on extractive industry for export to outside markets, that working conditions in mines and forests could be so dangerous and depressing, and that so much production was dominated by big, absentee, corporate owners only exacerbated the tensions inherent in industrialization. Northwesterners who had welcomed the railroad to the region (seeing it, not entirely incorrectly, as an economic savior) now, in the era of reforms, began to appreciate the extensive power that transportation companies exerted over the economy and society, and strove to regulate them more. Populists and progressives also proposed a variety of steps to ameliorate the sharp class tensions that had emerged. Populists hoped to recruit workers to their producer-oriented ideology and reforms, while progressives hoped to modify and fine-tune the economic system so as to ameliorate the gaping social divisions that had appeared.

Ideal Family Life (above). Families dreamed for an ideal life in the Pacific Northwest. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Eo.)

The roots of the Pacific Northwest’s receptivity to reform and radicalism, then, are complex. On the one hand, there was a great deal of optimism about the region. People believed that life could be better there. Thus a group of families from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, decided to move to the Northwest because they expected to improve their condition by going there. “Cannot we make a living here [in Pittsburgh]?” they replied to a reporter’s question during the early 1880s. “Well, yes, sort of a living. But every year it is becoming more difficult, as the different trades and avocations become more and more crowded by foreign immigrants, giving employers an opportunity to reduce wages….We hear the most encouraging reports from Washington Territory, and believe it is just the place for poor men to go.” This kind of optimism encouraged the idea that the Pacific Northwest would be a better place to live. On the other hand, migrants like these could also easily become bitter when the improvements they anticipated were not attainable, when they discovered that oppressive employers and economic busts treated Washington at least as harshly as they treated the eastern states. It is likely, furthermore, that the disappointment of newcomers only added to the calls for social and political change, and even contributed to the radicalization of those advocating change. As responsive as the Pacific Northwest was to populism and progressivism, it was equally receptive to labor radicalism and utopianism—the focus of the next lesson.

Unit 6: Lesson Eighteen – The Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) in Washington

The Equality Colony, located in Skagit County, was founded in 1897 (above). The “B.C.C.” seen in this group photograph stood for the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth, which planned to convert Washington to socialism by creating a system of colonies throughout the state. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Aa. neg. #2274 or #11282) Arthur A. Denny (below). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Portrait Files, neg. #6881.)

In the later 1880’s Arthur A. Denny, one of the founders of Seattle, set down some impressions of what he called “pioneer days on Puget Sound.” Ostensibly presenting a “factual” account of early settlement, Denny took numerous opportunities to contrast the ethos of “pioneers” like himself to the attitudes of modern workers who, Denny explained more than once, did not hold pioneers in very high regard. Consider the following example:

…we were all capitalists in those days. Each one expected to help himself, and as a rule all went to work with energy to open up the country and make homes for themselves….I will presume to say that if the people now possessed more of the spirit that then actuated the “old moss backs,” as some reproachfully style the old settlers, we would hear less about a conflict between labor and capital, which in truth is largely a conflict between labor and laziness. We had no eight hour, nor even ten hour days then, and I never heard of any one striking, not even an Indian…. [From Denny, Pioneer Days On Puget Sound (Seattle: C. B. Bagley, Printer, 1888), 27. Keep in mind that Denny wrote this shortly after the anti-Chinese movement, spearheaded by organized labor, had crested in Seattle. Denny and others from Seattle’s elite had opposed labor’s actions.]

When Denny wrote, he looked back upon conditions that no longer existed for most newcomers to the Northwest. For example, the idea that a household could attain for free, as Denny had, a donation land claim of 160 acres (320 if one were married), in areas quite valuable for agriculture, commerce, or land speculation, was foreign to newcomers in the 1880s. There was no longer room for new arrivals on the ground floor of the city; there was little chance that all people could be “capitalists” any longer. Most recent migrants worried about having to accept a lifetime of working for wages, often for employers who showed little sensitivity to the welfare of labor. New conditions helped to create new attitudes toward capital and labor, ones that challenged sharply those held out by Arthur Denny.

“Pyramid of Capitalist System,” issued by Nedeljkovich, Brashich, and Kuharich in 1911 (above). During the Depression and New Deal, labor unions demonstrated their solidarity by marching in Labor Day parades. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Dc/vi. neg. #1535. Cleveland: International Publishing Co., 1911)

The Industrial Workers of the World, or I.W.W., epitomized the new outlook in its more radical guise. Founded in 1905, more than a decade before the Communist Party emerged as a factor in American radical life, the I.W.W. took Marxism and made it accessible to relatively uneducated workers. The union appealed especially to the highly mobile laborers who worked in such industries as logging, milling, mining, fishing, railroading, and farming. In a way, these workers stood as a kind of antithesis to the “stable,” landowning, town-founding “pioneers” that Denny lionized. And Wobbly ideology was diametrically opposed to the laissez-faire views of Denny and other members of the economic elite. “It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism,” the Wobblies argued. “By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” Another I.W.W. maxim held that “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” Whereas Denny had assumed that labor in the industrial age needed only to show the same work ethic and make the same sacrifices as the pioneers had displayed, Wobblies disputed the ideology of capitalism and proposed to overturn the entire system on which it rested. They never explained very clearly how that transformation was to occur, but they were convinced it was coming. And, along with other radicals and reformers, they acted as if the Pacific Northwest might be one of the first places to usher in the big change.

This 1937 view shows the District Council of Carpenters (above).(Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Dd/iv. neg. #016)

The rise and fall of the Wobblies in Washington state during the early 20th century can serve as a measure of how the urban and industrial Northwest differed from Denny’s pioneer Northwest. The story of the I.W.W. also illuminates the fate of radicalism in the region. Socialism and unions appealed to many within the rapidly expanding population of the Pacific Northwest. To numerous laborers they seemed to be sensible responses to the nature of the new industrial order. Thus organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World grew to have a substantial amount of influence in the region. Such organizations also caused a great deal of alarm among businessmen and the more conservative elements in society. One response to the challenge presented by radicalism was reform; progressives in particular sought ways to make industrial capitalism work more smoothly by removing the rough edges in the system that so antagonized workers. Another response, attempted simultaneously, was repression; by 1920 business and political leaders had succeeded in crippling the I.W.W. and other radical groups. Thus one can see in the years between 1885 and 1920 a cycle of emergent radicalism, and then severe reaction to radicalism, leading to the quite conservative politics of the 1920s. In the period 1930-1960 this pattern was repeated: radicalism emerged anew during the Great Depression (while reformers tried to address radicals’ grievances in a more limited way), another Red Scare ensued in the late 1940s, and then a generally conservative political mood prevailed during the 1950s. These two cycles affected the entire Pacific Northwest to some degree, but the extremes of radicalism and reaction were particularly dramatic in the state of Washington. (See also: The Cold War and Red Scare in Washington State.)

The Industrial Workers of the World was created in 1905 at a famous meeting in Chicago. The organization attracted some of the best and most energetic radical minds of the day, and they tried to provide a theoretical foundation for the union. But the radical thinkers quickly divided into factions, and there was little stability in Wobbly ideology. The I.W.W. attracted more than radical thinkers, however. It also appealed to a wide variety of laborers who had few or no other union voices eager to speak for them. The “guiding principle” of the I.W.W., explains Doug Honig, was “‘industrial unionism,’ the notion that all workers in a given industry [lumber or mining, for instance] should be organized in the same union. These groupings would some day join together in One Big Union of all workers, skilled and unskilled, men and women, black and white. The One Big Union would run society as a Cooperative Commonwealth, thereby ending the reign of greedy capitalists.” [Doug Honig, “One Big Union,” Landmarks: Magazine of Northwest history and preservation, IV:1-2, p. 69.] The Wobblies thus reached out to all workers, and attempted to organize groups who had largely been neglected by more established unions—unskilled workers, immigrants, women, and people of color. They especially recruited the largely male, family-less, migratory and seasonal workers—loggers, farm laborers, miners, and railroad workers—who had proven too difficult for more conventional unions to organize. Migratory and seasonal laborers provided the bulk of the I.W.W. membership in the Pacific Northwest and accounted for its considerable regional appeal and influence. They were also, however, notoriously difficult to discipline and coordinate, and this constituted one of the inherent weaknesses of the I.W.W.

This I.W.W. hall might be Seattle’s headquarters on 2d Ave (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Dc/i. neg. #1537). The Industrial Workers of the World served three purposes for Northwest labor. First, it functioned as a union, seeking better pay and working conditions through strikes and other actions. Second, it functioned as a “revolutionary cadre working to overthrow capitalism,” as Honig explains. Third, the I.W.W. functioned as a meeting place and social experience. Its union halls, located in towns across the region, served as places where workers (most of whom had no family ties) could congregate with others, seek amusement and contact, and learn about job opportunities. These multiple purposes broadened the organization’s appeal; they also probably brought together people who did not always have the same agendas. Partly by design and partly by circumstance, the I.W.W. was a diverse and rather unwieldy organization. As a result, its methods were often as unorthodox as its politics.

The Wobblies “free-speech fight” in Spokane during 1909 illustrated the organization’s unusual approach. The struggle began in response to the existence of corrupt employment agencies, many of which were located along Stevens Street in Spokane. These agencies recruited workers for jobs in logging, milling, mining, farming, and construction throughout the Inland Empire. They generally charged a dollar for their services. Too often, however, workers would find that the job they had been promised did not exist, or else they might be fired after one day of work and have to go back to Spokane and pay another dollar to learn about another job. Late in 1908 the I.W.W. decided to protest these conditions; Wobblies began demonstrating along Stevens Street to complain about the agencies, encourage a boycott of them, and spread the One Big Union’s message. The city of Spokane reacted by passing a law prohibiting street meetings and public rallies. The Wobblies obeyed this ordinance until it was amended in summer 1909 to permit the Salvation Army to preach and hold meetings in the street. Because Wobblies regarded the Salvation Army as their fiercest rival for the souls of down-and-out workers, they responded by openly violating the city ordinance. It was crucial to Wobblies that they uphold their right to organize and recruit workers in the streets; the organization could not rely on conventional means of recruitment, and also wanted to disseminate its ideas as widely as possible. Defending their right to “free speech,” the Wobblies decided to break the city law and, by getting themselves arrested and imprisoned, become a financial and public-relations burden on Spokane’s municipal government. I.W.W. newspapers successfully summoned other Wobblies from around the region to join the fight, using headlines like, “Wanted—Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane.”

Remarkably, the free speech fight worked. Spokane, of course, did not welcome the I.W.W. Many of the arrested Wobblies were mistreated in jail, where three died, but this brought only more condemnation of the city by liberal and moderate citizens, and more exposes in local newspapers. Having spent $250,000 to convict and jail Wobblies, and facing another $100,000 in legal claims from Wobbly plaintiffs, the city finally gave in to the union after five months. It released Wobbly prisoners from jail, permitted limited public speaking in the streets, and along with the state legislature began to regulate more carefully the practices of employment agencies. The business licenses of 19 employment agents were revoked. Most importantly for the union, the I.W.W. attained considerable acclaim for its unusual and successful action.

Felix Baran Funeral, 1916 (above). I.W.W. members staged elaborate funerals for the victims of the Everett Massacre. This photograph shows the funeral of Felix Baran in November 1916. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Dc/i. neg. #11504.)

Over time the enemies of the One Big Union became more effective in opposing it, partly because repressive policies often worked and partly because conditions changed so that the I.W.W. received less support than before. The events of 1916-1920 brought about the organization’s downfall in Washington. In 1916 Wobblies from Seattle attempted to organize another free-speech fight in Everett, where they hoped to come to the assistance of striking shingle weavers. (Shingle weavers worked in sawmills that manufactured shingles for roofs. Their job included steering blocks of wood through saws that shaped the lumber into shingles. It was often said that shingle weavers recognized one another by the digits missing on their hands.) Capitalists and managers in Everett, already defeating the shingle weavers, were determined not to let the I.W.W. revive the strike or radicalize further the Everett citizenry. They deployed the local police to beat and torture the Wobblies who came to Everett. The Wobblies refused to back down, however, and on November 5, 1916 a boatload of armed Wobblies steamed from Seattle to Everett. They were met by an armed delegation of deputies and hired guns at the Everett dock. Shots rang out—who fired first was earnestly disputed—and after the shooting was over there were casualties all around: perhaps a dozen Wobblies killed and another thirty wounded, as opposed to two Everett deputies killed and as many as twenty wounded. Seventy-four passengers from the boat were arrested on charges of murder upon their to Seattle; after one man was acquitted the others were released. None of the Everett gunmen were arrested or tried.

Everett’s civic and business leaders proved more conservative and repressive than most. [See Norman H. Clark, Mill Town: A Social History of Everett, Washington… (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970).] But their harsh treatment of the I.W.W. foreshadowed the events of 1917-1920. The entry of the United States into World War One, and the nationwide alarm that greeted the Bolshevik success in Russia, made Americans even less tolerant of Wobblies. That the I.W.W. opposed the war and American involvement in it only made matters worse, for Wobblies came to be seen as unpatriotic and worse. The organization helped to spearhead a large-scale strike in the lumber industry during the spring and summer of 1917; one of their goals was an 8-hour day. (Working conditions in the forests were so bad that more moderate unions had also decided to strike.) Timber companies resisted the idea of an 8-hour day, but they disliked even more the thought of giving in to I.W.W. pressure. The Wobblies called off the strike and went back to work, but they “transferred the strike to the job,” in Honig’s words. That is, they undermined production by wasting time and slowing down their work in myriad ways. All this came, of course, at a time when the demand for timber had reached new heights, and when timber was regarded as an essential resource for the war and particularly for building military planes. The Wobblies’ striking and shirking on the job, then, was all too easily perceived as injuring the U.S. war effort and endangering American soldiers.

In the end, the War Department intervened in Pacific Northwest forests to end labor tensions and ensure increases in production. It put soldiers to work at logging; created a company union for all timber workers (the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, or 4-L) that supplanted the I.W.W.; and imposed improvements on the industry, such as an 8-hour day and better living conditions in lumber camps, that addressed workers’ sorest complaints. Workers no longer needed the I.W.W., even though the industry adopted many of the changes it had supported. Moreover, the union’s wartime actions were now seized upon to discredit the organization, both around the Northwest and nationally. The federal government began deporting recent immigrants who were Wobbly members, and the Washington state legislature passed “criminal syndicalism” legislation that outlawed “the mere advocacy of political change through intimidation or sabotage,” as Honig explains. By 1919, the U.S. government had launched a full-fledged and largely successful campaign to destroy the I.W.W. and other radical organizations.

Back in Washington, the townspeople of Centralia struck a severe blow against the Wobblies in 1919. During an Armistice Day parade, American Legionnaires rushed the I.W.W. union hall to attack the hated Wobblies inside and run them out of town. Partly because Wobblies had been similarly attacked two years before, they stood armed and ready this time, inside the hall as well as at points across the street, opened fire on the Legionnaires, and killed six. The Wobblies were then arrested. That night, one of them was abducted from the city jail, hanged from a nearby bridge, and mutilated. Centralia’s vigilantes were never caught or tried; the surviving Wobblies who had shot at the Legionnaires, on the other hand, were tried, convicted, and imprisoned, much to the approval of public opinion, which complained only that their punishments were not harsh enough. [On the so-called “Centralia Massacre,” see John McClelland, Jr., Wobbly War: The Centralia Story (Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 1987).]

The same year as the Centralia Massacre, Seattle experienced a general strike. On Feb. 15, 1919, following its failure, The Town Crier reported on “The Late Lamented Strike,” (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Dc/iii. neg. #11499). Roland Hartley, governor of Washington, 1925–1933, (below). (Reproduced in Louis A. Magrine, Meet the Governors of the State of Washington. Seattle and Tacoma, 1946. p.55.)

The end result of the violence in Centralia did not by itself seal the fate of the I.W.W. in Washington, but it came at a time when the Wobblies were already in retreat. Union radicalism had been rejected by the vast majority of Americans, especially during and after World War One. Indeed, the war brought an end to most of the reform activity that had characterized the progressive era, and it reduced people’s tolerance for radicalism. The I.W.W. and other socialist and reform groups did not disappear overnight; many lingered on until the desperately hard times of the 1930s gave them new life—albeit often under different names. (Between the 1930s and the 1950s in Washington, the Communist Party would play something like the role that the I.W.W. played between 1905 and 1920.) But the decade after 1919 was characterized by conservatism, nor progressivism or radicalism or populism. It was typical of the time that Roland Hartley, one of the quite conservative industrialists who had ruled Everett at the time of the 1916 shingle weavers’ strike, became governor of the state from 1925 to 1933. As Norman Clark explains:

There was little about progress and nothing about the Progressive Age which [Hartley] could not hold up to wrath and condemnation. He detested prohibitionists, social workers, suffragettes, direct primaries, and direct legislation. He hated radicals, agitators, internationalists, pacifists, unions, taxes, and progressive education. He was proud that as a legislator he had introduced laws against picketing and against the teaching of social science. He had voted against an eight-hour law for women (Mill Town, p. 164).

Governor for a post-reform and post-radical age, Roland Hartley was the kind of leader with whom Arthur A. Denny might have felt comfortable.

Unit 6: Lesson Nineteen – Economic and Political Change between the Wars, 1919-1939

The Doughboys (above). The text surrounding this photograph of three young servicemen (an image found in the University of Washington’s IWW materials) reads: “The one in the middle is Mr. Frederick. He is at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with the Signal Corps.” (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Dc/i)

An influenza pandemic (above) greeted servicemen in the United States following the Armistice ending the “Great War.” This explains why the men off-loading the injured were wearing surgical masks. This view may have been taken at Fort Lewis in Pierce County, Washington. The base was one of the many Army facilities established during this war. (Special Collections, University of Washington)

World War One marked an important turning point in both regional and national history. An political era of reform and radicalism came to an end. The outcome of the war brought disillusionment to the United States; people felt less confident of the progress about which reformers had been so confident, and they increasingly tolerated repression of those who had advocated more extensive political and social changes. Disillusionment can be a healthy thing if it strips away illusions about the world, and skepticism about progress can similarly make peoples less complacent. In the 1920s, in fact, Americans were more prepared to criticize mainstream values, and more inclined than before to find virtues in the cultures of peoples of colors—cultures that, in the case of Native Americans, they had before wanted to destroy or disparage. [On the resulting changes in Indian policy, see Lesson 12 and consult Sherry L. Smith, “Reimagining the Indian: Charles Erskine Scott Wood and Frank Linderman,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 87 (Summer 1996): 149-58, for a regional study of the new attitudes.] But while the 1920s was in some senses a more tolerant decade, it was a more conservative decade in many other regards—as events in the Pacific Northwest demonstrated.

The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon (above). (Reproduced in George Estes, The Old Cedar School. Troutdale, Oregon, 1922.)

Republicans dominated elections in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho during the 1920s. In Washington, they cut government expenditures dramatically. Governor Hartley made it a special point of his administration to fire Henry Suzzallo, the liberal president of the University of Washington, and create an agency to rein in the excesses and independence of higher education in general: “Call [the agency] what you wish, so long as it is given authority to say to the five institutions what they shall teach, what monies they shall expend, and what accounting they shall make.” The University lost autonomy, had its budget cut, and entered a period of demoralization. In both Washington and Oregon, conservatism also appeared in the guise of nativism. The Ku Klux Klan and other proponents of “true Americanism” moved to defend institutions that they believed to be under attack by “outsiders,” who included immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. In 1922 Oregonians passed an initiative, supported by the Klan, that required parents to send children to public schools; it was meant to abolish parochial schools and reduce the influence of the Roman Catholic church. (A similar initiative was defeated in Washington, which had a more diverse population.) The Oregon bill was declared unconstitutional and never implemented, but it did typify the power of nativist sentiment at the time. So did Washington’s and Oregon’s laws, passed in 1921 and 1923 respectively, forbidding Japanese immigrants from owning land. Moreover, Northwesterners lent support to the national efforts, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1917, the First Quota Act of 1921, and the Second Quota Act of 1924, to close the door on immigration, particularly from Asia.

The Hooverville in Seattle, (above) shown here in 1937, was one of many such communities for the homeless created by unemployed workers during the Depression. (Special Collections, University of Washington)

While racism and ethnocentrism lay behind anti-immigrant sentiment, perceptions of immigrants as economic competitors made feelings stronger. And those worries were heightened by the economic malaise of the years after World War One. Indeed, key parts of the Northwest economy slumped, starting with the cutbacks in government contracts at the war’s end and continuing throughout the 1920s. Mining and farming were hit especially hard by the downturn, and did not truly recover until the Second World War. The economic doldrums of the 1920s dramatized the enduring complaint of the region’s boosters: the Pacific Northwest was too underdeveloped, especially in manufacturing, and thus it remained too much a colony of more developed regions of the country. One explanation for such economic conditions was the lack of population. In 1930 the four states of Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and Montana possessed 13% of the nation’s land area but only 2.8% of its population. Related to underdevelopment and underpopulation were two other conditions—the region’s lack of political power in Congress, and its relatively provincial culture. In economic, political, and cultural terms, the Pacific Northwest continued to play catch-up to the rest of the nation.

Beginning in 1929, the region’s relationship to the rest of the nation began to change. A sequence of national crises—the Great Depression, World War Two, and the Cold War—transformed the Pacific Northwest in dramatic ways over the next six decades. By the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, the region was playing a much more integral and less dependent role in the nation’s economy, had attained significantly more political clout, and had begun to shed its reputation as a cultural backwater. One key to these changes was the growth of the role of the federal government in regional affairs. Beginning during the Great Depression and then continuing during World War Two and the Cold War, the United States played a powerful role in underwriting economic change in the region. It could be said that Washington, D.C., had replaced Wall Street as the economic “master” of the region. And in many localities, the heavy hand of federal agencies provoked resentment and suspicion. However, the federal government generally proved to be a more benevolent master, in part because the ability of the entire region (if not each locality) to influence the U.S. government increased during the same period. Northwesterners were increasingly able to enlist Uncle Sam as an ally in support of economic development. Thus the other states of the union helped to underwrite the expansion of the regional economy.

In historical perspective it is easy to say that the national crises of 1929-1989 helped to pull the Northwest out of its economic doldrums and accelerate its social and cultural development. However, it is important to keep in mind that the Great Depression, Second World War, and Cold War were crises during which Americans and Northwesterners experienced considerable hardship. Even in hindsight it makes no sense to call the Great Depression a blessing. The Northwest suffered more than most parts of the country from economic collapse. As the following chart illustrates, it lagged behind the rest of the nation in recovering from the drop in employment.

Two things about this chart deserve mention. First, note the uneven nature of recovery. Levels of employment bottomed out in 1933, rose through 1937, and then declined again. The economy was not emerging from depression on the eve of the Second World War. Second, Idaho was hit hardest of all, in large part because of its heavy reliance on the single extractive industry of mining. If the Pacific Northwest remained under-developed by comparison to the rest of the country, Idaho possessed the least developed economy among the three states.

Conditions portrayed in this view were many of the reasons why farming families living in other parts of the country moved to the Pacific Northwest during the Depression years. This “dust bowl scene” was photographed in Kansas in 1935 (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington. Courtesy, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, KS)

A few more figures can illustrate further the depths of depression in the region. By 1933, lumber exports stood at about half what they had been in 1929. Many agricultural products brought prices so low that they were not worth shipping to market; some apple and prune growers uprooted their trees and burned them for fuel. Mining output in Idaho dropped from $32 million in 1929 to $9 million in 1933. By 1933 income levels across the three states had declined to about 55% of what they had been four years earlier. Rates of tax delinquency and business failure, of course, had climbed greatly. The surest sign of an interruption in the normal course of things was that, for the first time since the 1840s, mainstream society was united in trying to discourage migration to the region from back east—for fear that newcomers would only add to already overburdened welfare rolls. In fact, the population of the area did not stop growing during the 1930s; it actually increased by about 10%, largely because so many people from the Midwest moved to the region seeking work. (For a fictionalized account of one North Dakota family’s move to the Northwest, see the assigned short story by Lois Phillips Hudson, “Children of the Harvest,” which is drawn from Hudson’s personal experiences.)

The Pacific Northwest did not have nearly enough work to accommodate all the recent arrivals in the region. However, it did gain some new jobs (and a reputation for having abundant work) from the launching of the Columbia Basin Project, a massive, federally funded and directed effort to “tame” the Columbia and Snake rivers by building big dams that would generate hydroelectricity, facilitate irrigation of farms, and permit inland navigation by ocean-going vessels, among other things. This program represented one effort of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help bring relief, recovery, and reform to the regional economy, and it was welcomed warmly in the region. (The assigned text by Wesley Arden Dick, “When Dams Weren’t Damned,” summarizes 1930s attitudes toward the Columbia Basin Project, which differ from our own.) The federally supported building of dams on the Columbia system marked a sea change in the political relationship between the Pacific Northwest and Washington, D.C. It also mirrored the transformation of party politics within the region.

The Engineers’ camp on the site of Grand Coulee Dam before construction began. (Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. #62594)

Prior to the Great Depression the Pacific Northwest had been heavily Republican. In 1928, only one county in the three states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington had given a plurality of its votes to the Democratic candidate for president, Al Smith. The crash of 1929 changed all that. In 1932, only two counties in the three-state region remained loyal to the Republican President Herbert Hoover. All the others supported Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrat. FDR actively courted the region during his campaign of 1932 by supporting the building of dams on the Columbia and its tributaries. He spoke directly to the question of a colonial Northwest economy by suggesting that further development of the Columbia River system would not only create jobs but also produce cheap electricity, which in turn would attract manufacturing jobs and provide power for farms and homes. In other words, he proposed investing in a new infrastructure that would not only put thousands of unemployed men to work but also permit the region to overcome its dependence on such extractive industries as mining and logging. (Little effective attention was paid to the dams’ impact on another extractive resource—salmon.)

The Columbia Basin Project became the centerpiece of the assorted New Deal programs applied by the Roosevelt administration to the Pacific Northwest. There were other notable efforts—Civilian Conservation Corps programs in parks and forests; wildlife protection; public housing; irrigation projects; and creation of Olympic National Park in 1938 (over the objections of Washington state officials and the timber industry). But the Columbia Basin Project loomed the largest. It brought about the most change, and it also represented the greatest opportunity for the federal government to influence the Pacific Northwest. Yet this outcome dashed the hopes of some in the Northwest who had expected that economic development would remain under the control of local and regional residents rather than federal officials.

For years different groups within Washington state had lobbied and schemed to build a large dam on the Columbia River system. Interests centered in Spokane had advocated a dam on the Pend Oreille River, near the Idaho border. They “lost out” to interests from north central Washington, around the towns of Wenatchee and Ephrata, who advocated a dam in the Big Bend country, closer to them, at the Grand Coulee. The Grand Coulee site won out in large part because the larger dam required at that locale would be able to create income, and help offset the cost of irrigation works, by generating hydroelectricity. When it was selected, boosters in north central Washington were convinced that their communities would reap the maximum benefit from the construction and operation of the dam. They assumed that proximity counted for everything, that the local individuals who had so boosted the dam would exert some control over it in the end, and thus be assured of receiving their rightful share of benefits. (See also: “Rufus Woods, Wenatchee, and the Columbia Basin Reclamation Vision,” by Robert E. Ficken, Pacific Northwest Quarterly). Their assumptions were proven wrong.

Large dams on the Columbia River—like transcontinental railroads—were deemed essential to the development of the Pacific Northwest, but the towns and states and businesses of the region lacked the resources to build them for themselves. They had to turn to outsiders to get the job done. In the case of the railroads, that had meant letting big corporations with headquarters back East have a disproportionate say in the economy and politics of the region. In the case of the dams, that meant letting the federal agencies that had provided the money run the Columbia Basin Project and make the crucial decisions about operation of the dams. Those decisions often contradicted the wishes of local interests, yet they ensured that the region as a whole would benefit enormously from the dams. For example, electricity would be provided as cheaply to industries and cities across the entire region as it would be to the farmers and townspeople living nearer the dam. Consequently, by the outbreak of World War Two the Pacific Northwest possessed a new infrastructure that permitted it to mobilize for war to an extent that would have proven impossible ten years before. Aluminum factories in Spokane and the Portland area, plutonium plants at Hanford, and aircraft manufacturing at Seattle all drew upon power from the Columbia Basin during World War Two. The economy of the Pacific Northwest reached new heights, and the region enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity. Wenatchee and Ephrata benefited some from this economic upswing, but they saw most of the industrial growth of the region pass them by. Power and wealth remained centered elsewhere—in Portland and Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Senator Warren Magnuson’s political savvy was a major factor in the development of the Columbia basin water projects. Since the 1850s the Pacific Northwest had slowly been urbanizing and industrializing. In other words, it had steadily become more integrated into national systems of communication, production, transportation, and cities. By the time the Columbia Basin Project got under way, it was no longer so remote, and at the same time it could no longer aspire to be so autonomous. The linkages to distant places that facilitated regional growth—railroad lines, massive dams—came with strings attached. Federal funding for and control over the Columbia Basin Project ensured that the U.S. government would play an enlarged role in the development of the region. Uncle Sam could hardly ignore the wishes of people who resided in the region, but he always had a variety of constituencies to please—some within the Northwest and some without. And this characteristic of regional history would only become more pronounced as the 20th century moved on. World War Two, the Cold War, and a series of social and environmental issues (e.g. questions of civil rights for minorities, and concerns over protection for wilderness and endangered species) would merely serve to elevate further the role played by the federal government in the Pacific Northwest.

Grand Coulee Power Station (above). At its completion, Grand Coulee Dam was publicized by the Bureau of Reclamation as “The World’s Largest Power Plant.” Almost half of the hydro-electric power of the Pacific Northwest was generated and distributed here through a massive system of substations. To advertise the benefits of public- versus private-power distribution, the federal government hired Woody Guthrie to write and perform folk songs advocating the blessings of public power. “Roll On Columbia” was one of his most well-known songs. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Portrait Files, neg. #2396)

There was a pronounced difference, however, between how the U.S. government and a private corporation would conduct affairs in the region. The corporation had to answer to stockholders, while the government had to answer to voters. Many of those voters resided in the Pacific Northwest, and over the course of the 20th century they became quite effective at exerting influence upon Uncle Sam. In the period after 1930, in fact, voters in the state of Washington proved particularly effective at lobbying the federal government on behalf of regional and state and local interests. Their elected officials, and particularly the Democratic congressmen and senators Henry M. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, became particularly well-known for directing federal expenditures to their home state. [Walter Mondale of Minnesota, who served in the Senate alongside “Maggie,” once described Magnuson’s formula “for evenly dividing the federal budget among the states: ‘Fifty percent for Washington state, and fifty percent for the rest of the country” (quoted in Magnuson’s obituary, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 21, 1989).] With well-placed politicians such as Magnuson and Jackson—both of whom attained considerable seniority in the U.S. Senate—the Northwest enjoyed some ability to get the federal government to do its bidding.

One set of reasons for why the Evergreen State attained so much clout in the nation’s capital also had its roots in the decade of the 1930s. Washington and Oregon had agreed for years on the need for dams to generate hydroelectric power; both agreed on the need for federal money to subsidize dam-building; both agreed that dams should produce cheap power. But they diverged on the question of who ought to benefit most directly from the kilowatts produced by the new dams. “Public power” interests (farmers, labor, and reformers) urged that the cheaper hydroelectricity be delivered as directly as possible to consumers, while their opponents (private utility companies, urban businessmen, and manufacturing interests) favored the power being used primarily for industrial purposes. In the state of Washington, the Democratic Party used the issue of “public power” to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the Depression and the Columbia Basin Project, and redeveloped itself into the more forceful party in the state. Democrats in Oregon, by contrast, were much less effective at using the issues of the 1930s to revitalize their party, and Oregon—like many western states—reverted fairly quickly to the predominantly Republican politics of the pre-1929 era. [See Paul Kleppner, “Politics Without Parties:The Western States, 1900-1984,” in The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Interpretations, ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 317-24. Let me add that Oregon’s Republican politicians in the 20th century seldom fit the national Republican mold. But the key point is that, because of differences in party alignment between the two states during and after the 1930s, Oregon lacked the clout in the nation’s capital that Washington possessed.]

The way that the Democratic Party in Washington seized upon the issue of “public power” in the 1930s helps to explain how Democrats like Jackson and Magnuson (and Tom Foley and Norm Dicks) kept getting elected. These individuals attained seniority in the party that dominated Congress between 1932 and 1994. As a result, they stood in a very strong position to see that the interests of Washington would be well served by the U.S. government in the middle and later decades of the 20th century. The Evergreen State was by no means the complete master of its own destiny; a wide variety of forces continued to impinge upon the state’s autonomy, so that not even Magnuson or Jackson could insulate it from the rest of the world. But Washington arguably had less reason to fear Uncle Sam that did many other states. Its relationship to the federal government had been changed dramatically by the events of the 1930s. And the region, too, had begun to change in profound ways. Then the Second World War accelerated those changes.

Bremerton Naval Shipyard (above): World War II in the Puget Sound region began in 1940, when President Roosevelt issued an order to place in readiness all military bases in the country. The Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, shown here in 1932, was one of the first to benefit from the order. Following the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941, the damaged Pacific fleet destroyers were returned to this Bremerton facility for repair and modernization. (Special Collections, University of Washington. Photo by Ware, copyright 1932.)

Unit 7: World War Two and 20th-Century Diversity in the Pacific Northwest

Lesson Twenty: Modern Society in the Pacific Northwest; The Second World War as Turning Point

Women and Work (above): World War II was a special turning point for women, as these Texaco attendants shown in a 1941 photograph document. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Ga. neg. #11475)

The previous lesson argues that a series of national crises between 1929 and 1989—in particular the Great Depression, Second World War, and Cold War—wrought thorough transformations that ushered in the modern Pacific Northwest. The crises interacted with one another to generate some of the same effects, e.g. an increased presence of Uncle Sam in the region, the restructuring of the economy so that it ultimately depended less than before on extractive industry, and heightened migration to Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. It is useful to stand back and conceive of these three crises working together to change the Pacific Northwest, to consider the six decades from 1929 to 1989 as something of a discrete era.

While lumping the crises of 1929-1989 together, however, two things should be kept in mind. First, it is important to realize that not all places within the region were affected in the same way by these events. Recall, for instance, that Oregon’s and Washington’s politics diverged during the 1930s, and that Wenatchee and Portland gained differently from dams on the Columbia River. The years since 1929 were generally prosperous ones for the urban Northwest, moreover, but rural parts of the region seldom benefited as much. Second, it is important to keep in mind that each national crisis had its own character and impact. The Great Depression was a time of economic hardship and doubt. It introduced more federal spending in the region, but the presence of the U.S. government was less substantial than it would be during the Second World War and Cold War. New Deal reformers envisioned large-scale changes in the region, but government lacked the resources to implement their plans fully until the post-war era. Finally, the Great Depression was perceived and dealt with largely as a domestic crisis; it seemed to have fewer international ramifications. The Cold War, by contrast, was a more protracted crisis that occurred in a time of greater economic abundance and that involved America and the Northwest in new ways with other peoples around the globe. The Cold War reshaped both the Pacific Northwest’s economy (it secured an immense future for Boeing and Hanford in Washington, for example) and its politics (again, the McCarthyism of the period was especially pronounced in Washington state). In recent years people have agreed that the Cold War is “over,” but its many effects linger on in the region.

A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress over Mt. Rainier (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Postcard Files. Photo by Pacific Aerial Surveys.) Of the three crises between 1929 and 1989, the Second World War exerted the greatest impact in the shortest span of time. I don’t think it is appropriate to set the war years (1939-45) off by themselves, because they continued some trends already under way during the 1930s (the growth of a federal presence, migration of population from other states) and because the mobilization that they entailed was essentially perpetuated for more than four decades by the Cold War. Yet, World War Two is the single factor that I would point to if asked to account for how the Pacific Northwest became “modernized” during the 20th century. century. The war, more than any other event, deserves to be called a turning point in the regional history of the 20th century. As Carlos Schwantes explains quite nicely in The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History (chapter. 19), the Second World War resulted in profound transformations to the economy, society, and politics of the region. [Schwantes has also edited a nice anthology, The Pacific Northwest in World War II (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1986) on the region’s wartime history.]

The New Deal brought many projects to Puget Sound that had long-term impacts on the future growth and development of the area. The Lake Washington Floating Bridge, (above) shown here during its dedication, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and McChord Field (now McChord Air Force Base), located north of Fort Lewis in Pierce County, were all dedicated the last week of June/July in 1940. This photograph was taken on July 2, 1940. (Asahel Curtis, negative 65146; copy negative. Special Collections, University of Washington. Original, Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma)

This lesson and the two to follow will explore the ways that the Second World War represented a turning point for Pacific Northwest society. That is, they focus on how the many different groups in the Pacific Northwest, particularly women and people of color, were affected by the war and the numerous events related to the war, and how the war years of 1939-1945 initiated a series of changes with long-term implications for the development of the region through the remainder of the 20th century. To understand these changes, particularly in regard to people of color, one needs to consider the Northwest experience prior to war. Lesson 21 and 22 will focus on African Americans and Asian Americans, respectively, in the 20th-century region; for both groups, the Second World War marked a crucial turning point. The remainder of this lesson will consider more generally how the war years initiated changes in the Pacific Northwest, and survey selected groups’ experiences.

One way to appreciate the impact of World War Two on the Pacific Northwest is to look at basic census data. In the period between 1940 and 1990, both the total population and the numbers of minorities in the population increased substantially. (The main exception to this pattern, of course, was the reduced population of people of Japanese descent during the 1940s, due to the effects of wartime internment and relocation.) The war itself jump-started the demographic changes, as is evident in the changes between 1940 and 1950, and other events kept them going. As the following table shows, Washington consistently possessed a larger and more diverse population than Oregon or Idaho.

It is useful to consider these regional data against national figures. The 1990 population of the Northwestern states was not as “diverse” as that of the rest of the country, largely because they had fewer Latinos and African Americans. But states in the region tended to have a relatively large proportions of Asian Americans and Native peoples in their populations.

These two tables show that the demographic mix of the Pacific Northwest became more complex during and after the Second World War. Because of the migration of people stimulated by the war and other events, the society of the Pacific Northwest became considerably less homogeneous in racial terms, and began to look more like the society of the rest of the United States. Like railroads and the New Deal, the Second World War helped to incorporate Oregon, Washington, and Idaho more closely into the United States. However, the location of the region remained important in keeping it from approximating the national average more closely. The Northwest remained relatively distant from main sources of African-American and Latino migration around and to the United States, for instance, so it had fewer black and Hispanic-origin residents than most states. The region was closer, too, to centers of Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American populations, and Washington actually led most other states in those parts of its demographic makeup. The Pacific Northwest remained distinctive demographically, even as it resembled more than before the other states of the union.

While the Second World War was not the only event contributing to a new demographic mixture in the Northwest between 1940 and 1990, it launched fundamental changes reshaping the regional population. These changes began to lower the geographic hurdles that had for so long inhibited migration to the region. In mobilizing for war, the United States needed to recruit people to serve in the armed forces and work in war-related industries. Moreover, because a large part of the war took place around the Pacific Rim, the government especially needed to mobilize the Pacific Coast. The western states became places from which troops and supplies would be shipped to the Pacific Theater of operations. The number of military bases and personnel there climbed dramatically. Many families followed servicemen out to the coast, as they prepared to leave for the Pacific front, and those families added to the region’s wartime population. Simultaneously, the western states developed more industry to support the war effort, producing such things as warships and planes. The fact that Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams had recently been completed on the Columbia River gave the Pacific Northwest extra appeal for manufacturing, because their surplus hydroelectricity was available to supply wartime industries. These businesses, too, demanded workers, who had to be recruited from all parts of the country. Additionally, the armed services and war-related manufacturing drew labor from other sectors of the economy; farms throughout the Northwest, for example, experienced shortages of workers, especially during harvests. Replacements needed to be recruited there, too.

The Aluminum Industry. The Second World War reversed the economic conditions that had prevailed just a few years before. A depressed economy became a booming one; a surplus of labor turned into a shortage. By itself, the Northwest did not contain enough people to work in the burgeoning industries. Consequently, the federal government and private sector both undertook large-scale efforts to recruit workers to Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. This effort laid the foundation for the diversification of the regional population that occurred between 1940 and 1990. African Americans came to the Northwest during the war to work in shipyards and airplane factories in Portland and Seattle; Latinos came to work on farms and ranches; Indians left reservations in substantial numbers to work in cities and enlist in the armed services. Moreover, many people of all colors moved to or through the Northwest, including in particular people from Midwest and the western fringes of the South—Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. Not all migrants stayed in the Northwest for the duration of the war; most went “home” once the war ended. But many stayed and made a life in the region, and others who had passed through the area during the war liked what they saw and returned months or years later to live in the Northwest. In these ways the Second World War precipitated broad demographic changes. The population of the region expanded as well as became more diverse.

Above: The Kaiser Company’s shipyard in Portland, Oregon was one of the many wartime industries that drew people into the Pacific Northwest. This symbol was originally reproduced in “The Yard” section of The Bo’s’n’s Whistle, a publication put out by the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation, the Kaiser subsidiary in Oregon. (Courtesy of the Kaiser Corporation. Reproduced in Manley Maben, Vanport. Portland, 1987. Title page.)

Among the many industries drawn to the Pacific Northwest by the abundance of hydroelectricity was the production of aluminum. This view shows the pouring of molten aluminum around a steel slab in the carbon anodes used in the smelting of aluminum at a plant near Wenatchee. Other World War II Pacific Northwest Plants were located at Longview and Tacoma in Washington State, and near Salem in Oregon. (Special Collections Division, University of Washington Libraries, neg. #16866. Photograph courtesy Aluminum Company of America, Wenatchee.)

Richland, Washington, looking west (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, Nell Lewis MacGregor papers, box 1. Photograph by Robley L. Johnson.)

The construction of the Hanford Engineer Works, which manufactured plutonium for atomic bombs, illustrated the demographic patterns. The population in and around the towns of Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland hovered around 7,000 or so in 1940. But the construction of the Hanford plant required a work force that reached 45,000 at its peak, and many of these workers brought family members with them. After construction ended, more than 15,000 additional newcomers remained behind in Richland to operate the plant, while the towns of Kennewick and Pasco underwent dramatic population increases during wartime, too. The Army and the Du Pont company recruited workers from every state of the union to work at Hanford—and because the living conditions seemed so harsh, recruiters had to work overtime to make up for the high rate of employee turnover on the job. Non-whites comprised 16.5% of the construction workforce at Hanford, where they were housed and fed in segregated facilities. African-Americans made up the largest non-white group on the site; Mexican-Americans were recruited later, and housed at a separate, distant site on the edge of Pasco. Many longer-term, white residents of Washington reacted to Hanford’s employment patterns with suspicion or resentment. The plant siphoned off laborers from nearby farms, and it raised questions as to the fate of the newcomers once the war ended. Washington Governor Arthur Langlie urged the ranking officer at Hanford to arrange, once work was completed, “to return most of the construction workmen back to their original centers of activity, particularly the negroes.” Most workers and their families did leave when the plant was finished, but Hanford remained open for business and by 1950 it supported an urban area, the Tri-Cities, with a diverse population of more than 42,000, about six times as many people as had resided in the vicinity ten years before. Unlike the temporary work force, the plant and the nearby towns (not to mention radioactive wastes) remained behind after the war and grew into an important part of modern Washington.

Above: A bracero sugar beet worker in the fields of Idaho during World War II. (Reproduced in Erasmo Gamboa, Mexican Labor and World War II. Austin, 1990. p.47. Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Labor). Population growth and diversification resulted from other factors, too. The Second World War marked a turning point nationally in terms of American immigration policy. The nation slowly began modifying the restrictions it had placed on the entry of foreigners to the country between 1882 and 1924. The main reforms would occur long after the war itself, particularly with the immigration act of 1965, but the steps taken during the war were notable and had an immediate impact upon the Pacific Northwest. In 1943 the United States eased its restriction on Chinese immigration, largely because it was allied with China in the war against Japan. And in 1942 the nation signed a treaty with Mexico providing for the importation of seasonal farm workers, known as braceros. The first such laborers arrived in Washington in October 1942, and more came in following years. Over the course of the war, Washington received 6% of all braceros in the U.S., Idaho got 5%, and Oregon 4% (many more headed to Texas and California). The braceroprogram lasted, with interruptions, until 1964. Farmers also actively recruited Chicanos (people of Mexican descent who already resided in the U.S.) to the Northwest as well during the war. These influxes increased the region’s Latino population considerably. They were particularly welcomed in the Yakima Valley of Washington, where growers had faced such labor shortages during the hop harvest in 1941 that they had actually succeeded in closing public schools for a week to ensure that the harvest got in. At the end of the 1943 harvest, the Yakima Chamber of Commerce sent a letter of thanks for the braceros to the President of Mexico. Braceros were meant to be seasonal workers, but the enlarged presence of people of Mexican descent, especially in Yakima, Benton, Franklin, Grant, Chelan, and Walla Walla counties, was permanent. [A good introduction to the bracero program is Erasmo Gamboa, Mexican Labor and World War II: Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942-1947 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).]

A female wartime worker (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, Social Issues Files Ga, neg. #2331.)

Still another group experienced considerable change to its status, beginning during the war. The shortage of male workers during wartime led to the large-scale recruitment of women into the workforce. At its peak the construction, the Hanford Camp contained about 4,350 women (and still more worked on the project who resided elsewhere). The Boeing Airplane Company employed about 55,000 people at peak production during the war, and almost half were women. Throughout the Puget Sound region, women comprised one-fourth of the industrial workforce, even though as late as 1939 they had been deemed incapable of handling many of the tasks to which they were now assigned. Most men and women regarded this work as temporary, and women customarily were both paid less than men for performing substantially the same kind of work and denied a chance to accrue seniority in the workplace. They also received little support for such domestic duties as daycare and shopping, which meant that women workers contributed more than their share to the high rates of absenteeism and job turnover during the war. Nonetheless, their wartime experience made a lasting imprint. After the numbers of women in the workplace shrunk through 1946 and into 1947 around the country, they began to rise again, and have kept rising ever since. In this respect, too, the Second World War initiated profound changes in the Pacific Northwest. [On women workers in the Northwest during the war, see Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), and Amy Kesselman, Fleeting Opportunities: Women Shipyard Workers in Portland and Vancouver during World War II and Reconversion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).]

Unit 7: Lesson Twenty-One – African Americans in the Modern Northwest

A detachment of Troop C, 9th Cavalry (above), from Fort Lawton in Seattle, posed before their departure to China during the Boxer Rebellion, August 10, 1900. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Ca, neg. #1530. Photo by Peiser, Seattle)

People of color have generally moved to the American West for the same reason that other groups came—in search of opportunities that, they believed, would be greater in the region than elsewhere. In 1925 James Weldon Johnson, national secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said during a speech in Denver: “Your West is giving the Negro a better deal than any other section of the country. I cannot attempt to analyze the reasons for this, but the fact remains that there is more opportunity for my race, and less prejudice against it in this section of the country than anywhere else in the United States.”

Johnson’s sentiments, while expressed in remarkably generalized form, resonated in such western cities as Los Angeles and Seattle. And studies of the African-American experience in the 20th-century urban West have tended to bear them out. Blacks have fared somewhat better in the West, compared to the other sections of the country, in the realms of political representation, economic gains, social status, and education. Such opportunities have played a role in attracting African-American migrants to the region.

Portrait of Horace Cayton, Sr. (above) (Special Collections, University of Washington, Portrait Files. neg. #2380.) If the West and Northwest offered some improvement over opportunities in the South, Northeast, and Midwest, however, they have never permitted African Americans to achieve parity with the Anglo-American majority. Thus, blacks in the West simultaneously urged other blacks to join them in the region and pressured western whites to lower the discriminatory barriers that continued to limit their opportunities. If the region truly improved upon the rest of the country, it was a matter of limited improvement and not dramatic difference. The West and Pacific Northwest participated in the nation’s racist thinking toward African Americans so that, for example, when Jim Crow laws heightened discrimination against blacks in the eastern and southern states between 1877 and 1930, they heightened discrimination in the West at the same time. African Americans in Seattle, such as the newspaperman Horace Cayton, observed, commented upon, and protested the hardening of racial lines between 1890 and 1920, even as they continued to suggest that more blacks consider moving to the Northwest. [See Horace R. Cayton, Long Old Road: An Autobiography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970), esp. ch. 1 (the book is by the newspaperman’s son).]

African American families stayed in Roslyn after their importation as strike- breakers (above). (Reproduced in Mildred Tanner Andrews, Washington Women As Path Breakers. Dubuque, IA: 1989, 27. Copyright, Junior League of Tacoma. Courtesy of Ellensburg Public Library.)

The emergence of Seattle’s black community over the course of the 20th century illuminates the paradoxical fate of African Americans in the West and Northwest. [Throughout this lesson I rely heavily upon Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community (Seattle: University of Washington, 1994)]. Washington’s first African-American settler, George Washington Bush, arrived during the 1840s, and by 1880 the census counted 180 in the state. Many came as homesteaders, seeking land to farm, but some went to urban areas where they encountered limited opportunities. The citizens in Seattle hardly rolled out the welcome mat, however. An ed do better if their population remained low. “There is room for only a limited number of colored people here. Overstep that liitorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1879, which often reflected businessmen’s views, warned that local blacks wouldmit and there comes a clash in which the colored man must suffer. The experience of the Chinese on this coast indicates that beyond question….The few [blacks] that are here now do vastly better than they would do if their numbers were increased a hundred fold.” The P-I seemed to concede that blacks would be treated more poorly in the South, but it followed the pseudo-scientific racism of the day by stating, “The South is essentially the home of the colored man. In it he can live easier, and in a manner more in accordance with his nature and desires. Until he is stronger and better able to protect himself, it will be wiser for him to give way” (i.e., southern blacks should avoid politics and other confrontations with whites). Comparing blacks to Chinese was prescient. During the 1880s some African Americans were recruited to the state—specifically to the Northern Pacific Railroad’s coal mines near Roslyn, just east of Snoqualmie Pass—by employers seeking to break strikes. Very few unions were already willing to accept blacks as members, but now white workingmen came to regard African Americans even more than before as a threat to their economic standing and labor organizations. The number of blacks in Washington kept rising, topping 1,000 in 1890, and discriminatory conditions in the state were perhaps not as bad as those elsewhere. But white hostility toward African Americans was nonetheless clear and forceful.

Burke Family Chauffeur (above). Among the many living in Seattle who hired African Americans was Thomas Burke. Here his chauffeur (whose name we do not know) is shown posed with Caroline McGilvra Burke in the late 1880s. (Special Collections, University of Washington. Thomas Burke Collection #486, Box K0178, File 486/1/7. neg. #9428).

By 1900 the blacks in Washington were increasingly dwelling in cities. More than before they arrived in association with urban-based employment, working aboard ships and trains or serving in the military, and their numbers grew. The African-American population in Seattle climbed from 400 in 1900 to 2,300 in 1910, 2,900 in 1920, 3,300 in 1930, and 3,800 in 1940. The black community was not very large, compared to those in other American cities, and it was not especially prosperous. Union regulations, employment discrimination, and other factors kept the great majority of African Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder in menial and service occupations throughout the first four decades of the century. In 1910 45% of black male employees were servants, janitors, and waiters, and 84% of black female employees were domestic or personal servants; in 1940 the figures were 52% and 83%, respectively. Economic opportunities were hardly improving. Moreover, residential discrimination actually worsened during these years. In 1900 blacks lived in all fourteen of the city’s wards, but in the ensuing decades discrimination by whites confined them to two primary neighborhoods—along Jackson Street near what became the International District, and along East Madison on Capitol Hill-that merged to form the Central District. African Americans found it impossible to rent or buy housing outside of these areas, and in many parts of the city they were not allowed in theaters, nightclubs, and restaurants.

Seattle’s Central District at 23rd Avenue, looking south, possibly near East Union, June 12, 1920 (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries.)

Seattle was no paradise for African Americans, but it did offer opportunities not found in most other parts of the country. The black community, anchored by good schools, strong family networks, and influential churches, proved relatively cohesive, and it did not come to resemble the more troubled black ghettoes in eastern cities, at least until after the 1950s. The Central District of the early 20th century was not exclusively black; whites and people of Asian descent lived there, too. Moreover, rates of home ownership among Seattle’s African Americans generally ranked among the highest in the nation. In 1910, 27% of blacks owned their own homes; in 1930, the figure was 39%, and in 1940 the figure was 29%. Only Los Angeles, among American cities, had consistently higher figures. Finally, parents were generally pleased with the city school system. Few blacks finished high school (in 1940 the average black student spent 8.4 years at school), and even fewer finished college (2.7% of blacks in 1940 were college graduates, compared to 8.3% for the entire city), because additional years of education seldom led to more economic opportunity. Yet African-American parents appreciated that the city schools offered their children chances that southern states had never provided.

Seattle’s Jackson Street after hours provided entertainment for soldiers out for a night on the town (above). (Reproduced in Paul De Barros, Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle. Seattle, Sasquatch Books, 1993. p. 90. Photo by Al Smith.)  With the onset of the Second World War, life in Seattle’s black community underwent considerable change. The 1940 census counted 7,000 African Americans in Washington, most of them living in Seattle. Thereafter wartime migrations brought thousands of black newcomers to the state to work in shipyards and airplane factories, to build the Hanford Engineer Works, to serve in the armed forces, and to work for government agencies. Some African Americans left after the war, yet in 1950 the state contained about 30,000 blacks, more than four times the figure from ten years before (the overall state population increased by “only” 37% over the same decade). Seattle’s black population had jumped from 3,800 in 1940 to 15,700 in 1950, while Portland’s grew from 1,900 to 9,500. Additionally, new or enlarged clusters of African Americans could be found in Tacoma, Bremerton, Spokane, Pasco, and other towns. In 1950 blacks comprised the largest minority group in the urban Northwest.

The recent arrivals and the so-called old settlers in black communities did not always see eye to eye. The newcomers had less education and fewer skills, and old settlers worried that they might upset the racial accommodation reached between blacks and whites in pre-war Seattle. For their part, the recent arrivals saw the old timers as snobbish and too accommodating. Urban overcrowding tended to exacerbate tensions, for patterns of racial segregation were not suspended during the war. In 1944 the Central District contained 5,000 people in housing that had served 3,700 residents in 1940. Yet as the largest black community in the Northwest it was also home to newcomer and old settler, and a refuge where visiting black soldiers could feel comfortable. Moreover, despite their differences both old settlers and new arrivals found common cause in resisting prejudice and common interests in the African-American culture that flourished in their community. [On this subject, see Paul De Barros, Jackson Street After Hours: The Roots of Jazz in Seattle (Seattle, Sasquatch Books, 1993).]

African American Workers at Boeing during WWII (above). Boeing publicity photographs during World War II showed African Americans as a part of the construction crews. (Reproduced in Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community. Seattle, 1994. Plates following p. 178. Photo courtesy of Boeing Company Archives.)The war opened employment opportunities for blacks in Seattle that had not existed before. Some came at the expense of people of Japanese descent, who had been evacuated. [Quintard Taylor explores the pre-war relationship between African Americans and people of Japanese descent in “Blacks and Asians in a White City: Japanese Americans and African Americans in Seattle, 1890-1940,” Western Historical Quarterly 22 (Nov. 1991): 401-29. Post-war racial tensions between blacks and Nikkei are documented in John Okada’s fine novel No-No Boy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979).] More opportunities came because of the city’s mobilization for defense production. The shipyards in particular hired African Americans, in large part because one union in the yards was relatively receptive to black members. About 6.8% of Seattle’s 60,000 shipyard workers in 1945 were African American (and the Kaiser shipyards in greater Portland likely employed even more blacks). The second largest employer of African Americans was the federal government 0.4% of Seattle’s 18,900 federal employees were black. The Boeing Airplane Company, on the other hand, hired proportionally fewer African Americans, in part because the International Association of Machinists resisted the idea until pressured into accepting it by federal officials. “We resent that the war situation has been used to alter an old established custom” in regard to prohibiting employment of blacks, one union official explained, “and do not feel it will be helpful to war production.” Once employed at Boeing, African Americans encountered segregated lunchrooms and bathrooms, and second-class status in unions. They could pay dues but not vote or accrue meaningful seniority.

The end of the war brought substantial adjustments for African Americans. Some defense-industry employment dried up, but the economy of the city rebounded after 1946. Wage rates in Seattle after the war remained relatively high for African Americans at 53% above the national average in 1948. And compared to before the war blacks found better jobs available to them, in industry and government. They also engaged more successfully in civil-rights activism after 1945, partly because they felt that their sacrifices during the war had proven that they were first-class citizens. Blacks and white supporters of civil rights lobbied during the late 1940s for a state fair employment practices law to reduce discrimination in the workplace. The Washington Federation of Labor, continuing organized labor’s animosity toward African Americans, opposed the legislation for five years and successfully diluted it, yet the bill passed in 1949. In 1950 the Central District elected Seattle’s first black representative to the state legislature. These successes contributed to the city’s civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Above: An integrated classroom. By 1950 in Seattle there were African American women teaching in integrated classrooms. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle Urban League Records. Reproduced in Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community. Seattle, 1994. Plates following p. 178.)

Although Portland’s African-American population had also grown during the 1940s, that city was regarded as less having fewer opportunities than Seattle. The wartime shipbuilding industry there had attracted many African Americans; Portland may have had as many as 21,000 blacks in 1945. But two years later the total had dropped to 12,000, and by 1950 is was down to 9,500. Portland was reputed to be a less tolerant city for African Americans; it also possessed a smaller nucleus for the black community. Perhaps more importantly, Portland did not retain as many defense-related jobs in the Cold-War period as Seattle did. Of the 4,500 African Americans in the Portland labor force in 1947, only one-third were employed. It is no wonder that the city’s black population actually shrunk in the immediate post-war period. [See Quintard Taylor, “The Great Migration: The Afro-American Communities of Seattle and Portland during the 1940s,” Arizona and the West 23 (Summer 1981): 109-126.]

Seattle may have seemed somewhat more attractive than Portland, yet it was hardly perfect. Blacks had made some gains during wartime, but discrimination and poverty persisted. It remained very difficult, for example, for qualified black buyers to purchase housing outside of the Central District. In 1948 one local realtor was expelled from a national organization for violating their “code of ethics.” He had sold a home in a white neighborhood to black buyers, and therefore violated the rule stating that “A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy which will clearly be detrimental to property values.” Seattle’s black community arguably faced somewhat fewer problems and somewhat less discrimination than its counterparts in other American cities, but the city and its inhabitants had no cause for complacency regarding race relations. The protests, tensions, and anxieties of the 1950s-1990s—concerning such matters as school desegregation and busing, economic and social inequality, housing, police harassment, and political representation—demonstrated that Seattle basically faced the same racial problems as the rest of the nation.

The following figures from 1989-1990 attest to the effects of persistent racial inequities. In Seattle, 30% of whites and Asian Americans had college degrees, but only 11.5% of blacks did. Fifteen percent of Seattle’s blacks possessed only an elementary-school education. Blacks accounted for 22.5% of the 53,000 Seattleites living below the poverty line, even though they amounted to less than 10% of the city’s population; by contrast, only 9.1% of whites fell below the poverty line. Blacks made up 7.9% of Seattle’s adult population but 14.5% of its unemployed. And across the state, black inmates accounted for 20.6% of the prison population but only 3% of Washington residents. These figures do not deny the existence of a sizeable and growing black “middle class,” but they do suggest that for all its “opportunities” the Pacific Northwest has not come close to “solving” on a regional level the racial inequities that have characterized the 20th-century United States.

Rainier Vista, March 1942 (above). African American residency in public housing was as problematic as home ownership. Jesse Epstein, director of the Seattle Housing Authority insisted, successfully, on integrated housing in West Seattle, Sand Point, Holly Park, and Rainier Vista. In the words of Quintard Taylor in The Forging of a Black Community (Seattle, 1994), “those residents, already apprehensive over public housing for the white poor, including a disproportionate number of southern-born war workers, now feared an influx of Southern black migrants, into their neighborhoods.” (Special Collections, University of Washington.)

Unit 7: Lesson Twenty-two – Asian Americans and the Modern Pacific Northwest

I have argued (in Lesson 20) that World War II served as a critical turning point for the 20th-century Pacific Northwest. The experiences of people of East Asian descent in the region certainly bear out the claim. The war and its aftermath were pivotal in their lives, particularly regarding their status as immigrants to and citizens of the United States. The clearest impact, of course, was the wartime internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans, by which more than one hundred thousand people—most of whom were American citizens—were imprisoned on the basis of race (as well as geography, since only those people of Japanese descent on the west coast were incarcerated). But other crucial changes occurred as well. The war initiated reforms to U.S. immigration and naturalization policies, and the Cold War and civil-rights movement that followed accelerated the transformations. The attitudes of white Americans toward peoples of Asian descent also changed substantially, so that by the 1960s and 1970s some Asian Americans came to be viewed as a “model minority.” Moreover, the numbers and varieties of Asians coming to and residing in the United States changed with and after the war. America’s military involvement in Korea and southeast Asia resulted in more peoples from those areas joining the peoples of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino descent who had already established substantial communities in the United States.(A History Bursting With Telling: Asian Americans in Washington State.)

Clearly, to appreciate the experiences of people of Asian descent in the Pacific Northwest, we need to look closely at laws, policies, and relationships that were national and international in scope, rather than regional or local. The states of the Pacific Northwest did not create immigration regulations or determine foreign policy. Federal officials did respond to the lobbying and opinions of white Westerners—including people from Oregon, Washington, and Idaho—when deciding what to do about the Chinese in 1882 or how to handle the Issei and Nisei in 1942. But immigration and naturalization policies were creatures of the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court, and Presidency. They represented still another powerful federal influence on regional life. By and large, U.S. immigration and naturalization policies have been remarkably liberal or tolerant, compared to those of other nations around the world. But those policies did not always live up to American egalitarian ideals because they were racist, toward Asians in particular.

At the same time that United States policy curtailed future Japanese immigration, these young women from the Shig Osawa Sewing School (above) in Seattle posed for a graduation photograph, August 10, 1924 (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Cc, neg. 11532). To understand the importance of World War Two, the Cold War, and the civil rights movement to peoples of Asian descent, one must appreciate how the law treated them before 1940. As pointed out in Lesson 15, Asians became the first population of foreigners to be restricted from free immigration to the United States. Congress outlawed most Chinese immigration in 1882, and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907-1908 severely curtailed Japanese immigration. Both efforts focused especially on preventing laborers from emigrating while allowing immigration by special or exempt classes of people; neither entirely halted the flow of immigrants from either country. Then, between 1917 and 1924, the United States restricted immigration further. “The Immigration Act of 1917 expanded the principle of exclusion based on national origins begun by Congress in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,” writes Reed Ueda [in Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History(Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 20]. “It established an Asiatic Barred Zone from which no laborers could come, covering all of India, Afghanistan, and Arabia as well as parts of East Asia and the Pacific.” Seven years later, with the Second Quota Act of 1924, virtually allimmigration from Asia was prohibited. Filipinos continued to come with few restrictions until 1934, when Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, establishing a quota of 50 for the Philippines. Virtually all people of Asian and Pacific-Island descent were thus prevented from immigrating to the United States. No other “race”—or, more precisely, virtually the entire population of no other continent—has been similarly singled out for exclusion. (Interestingly, Ueda points out [p. 22], “all Asian nations received small token quotas to ensure that whites born there would have the chance to immigrate.”)

When the Second Quota Act of 1924 outlawed further immigration from Asia, it did so by referring to another special condition applied solely to people of Asian descent: “No alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the United States,” it said, offering only a few exceptions for direct relatives of immigrants already admitted to the country. In other words, besides being the only groups singled out for complete exclusion from immigration, peoples from Asia (and at some points from the Philippines, too) were also prevented from becoming naturalized citizens of the United States. This prohibition dated to the original U.S. naturalization law of 1790, which specified that only “free whites” could apply for citizenship. Americans did not pay much attention to whether Asians were “white” or could become naturalized, however, until 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act declared that the Chinese were no eligible to become citizens. Yet the 1910 census reported that 1,368 Chinese and 420 Japanese had, in fact, been naturalized. After that point, the courts began denying opportunities for naturalization to all immigrants from Asia, including Burmese, Malaysian, Filipino, Thai, Indian, and Korean applicants. In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Ozawa vs. United States, confirmed that Japanese immigrants fell within the ranks of the non-whites and were thus ineligible for citizenship.

A Japanese farm in the Black River Valley (above) south of Lake Washington. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Cc. Photo by Nowell and Rognon, Seattle.)

At roughly the same time, the states of Washington (1921) and Oregon (1923) passed laws, modeled on California’s 1914 legislation, that prevented aliens ineligible to become citizens (they were really targeting successful Japanese growers) from owning farmland. The Issei generally found ways to circumvent the intent of these laws; one method was by putting property in their children’s names. They could do this because, paradoxically, the American-born children of Asian immigrants were considered citizens, under the remarkable terms of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) to the U.S. Constitution, which states that “All persons born…in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States….” This provision, of course, was tested by groups in the United States that hoped to deprive the children of Asian immigrants of the full benefits of citizenship, but the Supreme Court, in U.S. vs. Wong Kim Ark (1898), upheld the rights of the second generation. At birth the second generation automatically received those citizenship rights that the first generation would never be able to obtain; the former became citizens based upon where they were born, regardless of race, while the latter could never become citizens because of their race. (The differentiation between the land-owning rights of first- and second-generation immigrants from Japan plays a small role in David Guterson’s fine historical novel Snow Falling on Cedars [1995], set around Puget Sound in the early 1940s and early 1950s.)

This photograph of a family of Japanese migrants (above) was captured at the U.S. Customs and Immigration center by photographer Elmer Ogawa shortly after World War II. Between 1945 and 1967, Ogawa was the northwest correspondent and photographer for the Los Angeles-based Pacific Citizen, the newspaper for the Japanese-American Citizen’s League. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Elmer Ogawa Papers and Photographs, 1923-1971. Box 13 [10 of 14].) On the eve of World War Two, then, Asian- and Pacific-Island-origin peoples faced the severest restrictions of any immigrants to America. By law they could not migrate to the United States. Moreover, they could not become naturalized citizens, and were permanently unequal to other residents. The wartime treatment of people of Japanese descent in the United States, documented in the readings by Monica Sone and Roger Daniels, hardly offered a great deal of promise for improved race relations after 1940. Yet, for a variety of reasons World War Two did mark a dramatic turning point in U.S. immigration and naturalization policy. The conflict, writes Ueda (p. 42), “marked the end of American isolationism and the beginning of a new international leadership role for the nation. Henceforth, lawmakers saw immigration and naturalization policy as a tool for shaping foreign relations to further American self-interest.” They also grew more sensitive to international criticism of racist policies, particularly during the Cold War. Over time peoples from Asia—facing the greatest restrictions—would be the ones who benefited most from the resulting changes. Wartime partnerships prompted the initial alterations. “To cement the alliance between China and the United States…, Congress in 1943 repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,” provided a small annual quota for Chinese immigrants, and enabled them to become naturalized citizens. “Furthermore, in 1946, Congress established naturalization rights for Filipinos and admitted aliens from India who had been excluded since the act of 1917 created the Asiatic Barred Zone.”

A Filipino artist in his studio (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Victorio A. Velasco Collection, Acc.#1435, 1948. Box 15 of 18.) Velasco was editor of the Filipino Forum, a newspaper for the increasing number of Filipinos residing in the Seattle area following World War II. U.S. acceptance of Asians began with the end of WWII.Reforms continued in 1952 with the McCarran-Walter Act. This legislation reaffirmed many exclusionary aspects of American immigration policy, but for Asians and Pacific Islanders it advanced some critical reforms. By putting forth the principle that admission of immigrants should not be based on race, it started dismantling the barriers that had been erected against Asian newcomers. Japan received an annual quota of 185 immigrants, and China a quota of 105. Moreover, the act abolished racial qualifications for citizenship. Immigrants from Asia could now be naturalized; they need not remain a permanent underclass, with fewer civil rights and civic responsibilities than their children.

These Nisei WACs (above) posed for their graduation from the language school at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, prior to their departure to occupied Japan in late 1945. (Daniels, Asian America, 174. Courtesy of U.S. Army)

Reform of U.S. immigration policy crested in 1965, concurrent with the blossoming of the civil rights movement, when Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act. This law abolished the old, discriminatory, national-origins quotas, and established in their place a more egalitarian system. Each country in the eastern hemisphere received a quota of 20,000 visas, up to a maximum of 170,000 for the hemisphere. The western hemisphere got the same system in 1976; then in 1978 the hemispheric maximums were abandoned, and a worldwide ceiling of 290,000 annual immigrants was established. Additional reforms followed, in particular the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and another liberalization of 1990 which expanded the worldwide cap on annual immigrants to the U.S. to 700,000 for 1992. On top of these more general laws, Asian immigrants benefited from legislation addressing special situations. The Second World War and Cold War engaged Americans in wars around the Pacific Rim. During and after these wars, for a host of reasons, the U.S. made provisions to admit immigrants who came as the spouses of U.S. military and civilian personnel (War Brides Act of 1945) and who had been displaced by wars or who suffered persecution or the threat of persecution by mutual enemies (Displaced Persons Act of 1948, Refugee Relief Act of 1953, Indochinese Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975, and Refugee Act of 1980).

American legislative reforms exerted a dramatic impact on Asian immigrants. Their numbers jumped immensely after 1965. During the 1970s, Asia provided more newcomers than any other continent—about 1.5 million to Europe’s 840,000. And the fastest growing Asian immigrant groups were not those from Japan, China, or the Philippines, all of which had fairly well-established communities in the United States. South Koreans, South Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Thais, Indonesians, and many more national groups came to the United States in much larger numbers than before. In the three states of the Pacific Northwest, the numbers of people of Filipino descent surpassed those of Japanese or Chinese descent, and the numbers from other parts of East Asia also climbed quickly. In 1990, the U.S. Census counted the following Asian and Pacific-Island groups in the region.

As people in and around Seattle grew more concerned about rapid population growth in the years after 1985, they gradually realized the large role played by Asian immigrants in that growth. In King County between 1990 and 1996, “natural increase” accounted for 63% of the population growth, migration from other states for 5%, and immigration for 31%. Most of immigrants came from around the Pacific Rim. Between 1985 and 1995, more than two-thirds of all immigrants to King, Snohomish, and Pierce County arrived from Asia and the Pacific Islands; Europe accounted for only 19.5%. Despite the increased complexity of the Asian-origin population of the Northwest, little history has yet been written concerning groups other than those of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino descent. Articles from big-city newspapers offer valuable information, and Seattle’s Wing Luke Asian Museum is another important resource.

Immigrants who arrived from Asia during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s differed in several key ways from those who had come to the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. First, the earlier arrivals had been predominantly laborers, but the more recent immigrants had a wider range of skills and training. In the late 1980s, Ueda tells us (p. 65), “immigrants from India, the Philippines, China, and Korea ranked in the ten nationalities with the largest representation of professional and managerial workers.” (Many of those Asians who arrived as refugees from war were less well-educated and had a more difficult time entering the U.S. economy.) Second, the recent arrivals came more regularly as families, and they much more frequently intended to settle permanently in the United States. The age of the Asian “sojourner” had mainly passed, Ueda explains (p. 67): “Asian immigrants were quick to take out citizenship papers and composed a disproportionate share of the newly naturalized in the 1970s and 1980s. They began a spiral of chain migration: the numerous spouses, children, and parents who entered in the unlimited class of ‘immediate relative’ in turn sponsored their ‘immediate relatives,’ and so on. Consequently, annual admissions from each Asian country greatly exceeded the visa allotment of 20,000. These factors caused total immigration from Asia to skyrocket.”

School Diversity (above): The ethnic diversity and family orientation of post-World War II migration is seen in Elmer Ogawa’s photograph of this football team, above. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Elmer Ogawa Papers and Photographs, 1923-1971. Box 9 [6 of 14].)

Another factor that affected the experiences of the recent Asian immigrants was the change in attitude among the “host” population. Recently arrived Asians met with less resistance and hostility from white Americans than before. They were hardly uniformly welcomed; vestiges of racism surely remained. But public animosity toward people of Asian descent had subsided considerably in the Pacific Northwest. Evidence for the changed attitudes comes from election returns around the state of Washington. The city of Seattle elected to the city council in 1960 Wing Luke, the first person of Chinese ancestry to win political office on the West Coast. King County elected Ruby Chow to the county council in 1974, the first Chinese American to sit on that body. And in 1996 the state of Washington elected as governor Gary Locke, the first Asian American outside of Hawaii to hold such office. More broadly, evidence for the changed attitudes can be found in the willingness of the people of the United States to admit the severity of the errors of internment of people of Japanese descent during World War Two, and establish a program of redress in 1988. More broadly still, evidence of the changed attitudes can be found in the idea that Asian Americans constituted “model minorities.” [Roger Daniels surveys both the campaign for redress and the “model minority” idea in Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), ch. 8.]

The idea of a “model minority” was troublesome from a number of angles. For one thing, it encouraged the idea that discrimination against people of Asian descent had been completely replaced by admiration for them, and such was not the case. Some groups of Asian Americans had by 1970 attained on average more years of schooling than whites, for example, but that achievement did not translate into better or equal positions or pay in the working world. Nonetheless, the idea of a “model minority” did suggest a more favorable view of Asian Americans than had existed before World War Two. And what was particularly striking was that this idea was first coined in reference to Japanese Americans. Attitudes toward a group that was so vilified and mistreated during the Second World War had changed substantially.

Internment (above). Japanese individuals boarding a train at the Union Station in Tacoma on their way to Camp Harmony located on the grounds of the Western Washington Fair in Puyallup. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Social Issues Files Cc/ii. Photo by Howard Clifford.)

The harsh experiences of Issei and Nisei in the Pacific Northwest (and especially Seattle) before and during World War Two are the subject of the readings by Monica Sone and Roger Daniels that accompany this unit. (For another account focusing on Seattle Issei, turn to Louis Fiset,Imprisoned Apart: The World War II Correspondence of an Issei Couple [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997].) The Daniels article traces the steps by which the U.S. government dealt with the “threat” presented by the Japanese and Japanese Americans, and samples the public opinion of whites before and during internment. (See Also: University of Washington Library virtual exhibit on Camp Harmony.) In this period, the protections that citizenship afforded the American-born children of Japanese immigrants were temporarily but profoundly overridden in a climate of fear, racism, and anger.

A similar process affected people of Japanese descent in Canada, where 21,000 Issei and Nisei were removed from coastal British Columbia to the interior. In contrast to the United States, however, where (as Daniels points out) the Supreme Court undermined the decision to intern loyal citizens in late 1944, the coerced displacement of Japanese Canadians—who did not have citizenship status and for the most part could not enlist in the Canadian army—persisted until 1949. (Only in that year did Canada grant all Japanese Canadians the right to vote and finally extend full citizenship rights to them). The lengthy forced relocation had lasting effects. In the United States, about two-thirds of the internees of Japanese descent returned to the west coast; in Canada, only about one-third did. By the time they were allowed to go back in 1949, seven years after being relocated, many had made new lives away from the coast. (For comparative discussion of people of Japanese descent in Canada and the U.S., see Roger Daniels, “The Japanese Experience in North America: An Essay in Comparative Racism,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 9 [1977]: 91-100, and Daniels, “Chinese and Japanese in North America: The Canadian and American Experiences Compared,” Canadian Review of American Studies 17 [1986]: 173-86.)

On February 19, 1976, President Gerald Ford signed Proclamation #4417 (above), which repealed Executive Order #9066 authorizing the internment of the Japanese during World War II. (In Daniels, Asian America. Seattle, 1988, p. 174. Photo from the Gerald R. Ford presidential library.)

In 1988, the same year that the U.S. Congress approved a program of redress for those interned during World War Two, the Canadian government established its own redress program, offering an official apology and monetary compensation to those it had relocated in 1942. Both countries, then, were trying to make amends for the racist policies and practices toward Asian immigrants and their children that had characterized long stretches of their history. State and local bodies in Washington adopted similar paths of redress. The legislature and governor in 1983 passed a redress bill for the 38 Nisei state employees who had lost their jobs in 1942; the Seattle City Council in 1984 provided redress for five city employees who had lost their jobs; and in 1986 the Seattle School District adopted redress legislation for the 27 public school employees who had been terminated in 1942. [See Louis Fiset, “Redress for Nisei Public Employees in Washington State after World War II,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 88:1 (Winter 1996/97): 21-32.]

Unit 8: Lesson Twenty-three – The Impact of the Cold War on Washington, an Overview

Boeing stratojet XB-47 on its maiden test flight (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington. Photo courtesy of Boeing.)

It is a commonplace among historians of the Pacific Northwest that the Second World War marks the most important turning point in the region during the 20th century. It is less widely appreciated that the four-plus decades of mobilization for the Cold War, from roughly 1946 to 1990, perpetuated the influence of war and federal intervention on regional society, and in many cases accelerated or broadened those changes initiated between 1940 and 1945. In effect, the United States remained mobilized for war, and engaged at an entirely new level of international relations, not for four or five years—the time between Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki—but for roughly fifty years, from the onset of World War Two in 1939 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the state of Washington alone, one need only think about the rise of Boeing as the leading private employer and backbone of the Puget Sound economy; the continued expansion, production, and pollution occurring at Hanford; the kinds of international-relations activities reshaping the University of Washington into a major, public, research university; or the skyrocketing numbers of immigrants from around the Pacific Rim, to appreciate fully the importance of the Cold War to the Pacific Northwest. The following two lessons focus on a couple of examples of Cold-War influence on the Evergreen State—the developments surrounding Hanford, which produced plutonium for America’s nuclear arsenal, and the Seattle world’s fair of 1962, which gave urban expression to the Cold-War themes of space and science. This lesson offers an overview of the influence of the Cold War on Washington.

An MSTS troop ship in Seattle Harbor (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Ellis Postcard Collection, Photo #992. Photo by Joseph Scoylea.)

In emphasizing the experiences of Washington, we are considering the northwestern state where the Cold War had its greatest impact. Idaho and Oregon were also affected, of course, but a variety of factors combined to ensure that Washington would become substantially more mobilized than the other two states. One was the power of Washington’s Congressional delegation in the nation’s capital. Because the Evergreen State has had a larger population than either the Gem State or the Beaver State, its 20th-century Congressional delegation has been bigger, giving it more clout. Moreover, as pointed out in Lesson 19, Washington’s U.S. Representatives and Senators after 1932 were usually aligned with the prevailing Democratic Party in Congress, and they also gained a surprising amount of seniority. Both relative advantages heightened Washington’s ability to lobby successfully for Cold-War-related federal spending. There was also the matter of geographical good fortune. Contrasted to the other states, Washington had more physical features to attract defense-related activity. Puget Sound was a better harbor for such things as nuclear submarines and naval ships than anything Oregon could provide, and the fact that the Columbia flowed more through Washington than through Oregon gave the Evergreen State an “advantage” (if one can call it that now) when it came to placing nuclear reactors at Hanford.

Boeing engineering (above): Cold War military contracts also impacted the employment of civilians, as this room full of Boeing engineers documents (Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. #10704. Photo courtesy of Boeing.)

Luck came in other forms, too. William Boeing, founder of the aerospace company, happened to be a Washington rather than an Idaho or Oregon timber baron. Finally, Washingtonians “made” their own luck through incessant boosting, lobbying, and promoting at the city and state level. Recognizing the value of defense-related spending to their communities, they ensured that Uncle Sam spent inordinate sums on air force bases, bombing and gunnery ranges, naval facilities, forts, and military-related industry in their state. [This hustling began long before World War Two. Tacoma, for example, lobbied and donated land in order to have Fort Lewis established next door in 1916-1917. See Jane T. Merritt, “Fort Lewis: Evolution of a Landscape,” Columbia, the Magazine of Northwest History 5 (Winter 1991/2): 27-32.

Taken together, the various factors resulted in Washington becoming substantially more mobilized than its neighbors, including British Columbia. Compared to Oregon, Washington received about three times more military contracts from the federal government during one stretch of the Cold War; Oregon also ranked 48th of the 50 states in number of people employed in defense-related industry. Idaho’s and Oregon’s economies remained much more dependent on extractive industry, while Washington’s became more dependent on manufacturing and services and was no longer so tied to lumber or other extractive industry. In this respect (and consequently in many others), Washington came to resemble California more than it did the states that bordered it. Its economy was generally more diversified, more reliant on federal spending, and more technologically oriented because of the importance of science, space, and engineering to Cold-War mobilization; its employees also received higher wages, on average. Such differences were not due entirely to the effects of the Cold War on the state, but the Cold War contributed to them significantly. The state experienced some sharp downturns in the post-war period, but in general the era brought considerable prosperity.

The economic upswing of the years after 1945 surprised many. During World War Two, Washingtonians were leery of the number of newcomers because they worried that the Depression would return at the end of the war and that there would not be enough jobs or public-assistance funds to go around. Thus, as mentioned in Lesson 20, Governor Langlie urged the Army to send the construction workers at Hanford, and “particularly the negroes,” back home when the plant was built; thus, as mentioned in “The Exile and Return of Seattle’s Japanese” by Roger Daniels, some labor organizations and farmers opposed the return of interned Issei and Nisei to the Puget Sound area in 1945. When the federal government began cutting back on war-related contracts, the hard times seemed imminent. At the peak of production, shipyards in the Portland-Vancouver area had employed 100,000 people; on August 1, 1945, that number had already dropped to 65,000. Portland’s payroll had topped $44 million in 1943; by 1947 it had fallen to $18 million. Some predicted that Boeing’s post-war employment would be no more than 10-15% of its wartime figure. People recalled the confusion, labor unrest, and recession after World War One, and worried that they would have to endure the same conditions in the mid-1940s.

One result of pent-up demand for new housing was the increased suburbanization of Puget Sound cities. The completion of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge (above) across Lake Washington is one symbol of this trend for Seattle. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Ellis Postcard Coll., Photo #C-684. Photo by Clifford B. Ellis.)

The economic transition was not, however, as traumatic as people had feared. There was significant unemployment in 1946, but it diminished substantially. Federal measures, such as the G. I. Bill which provided money for tuition and guarantees for housing mortgages, kept conditions from becoming worse. Many servicemen went straight from the military to college; the University of Washington doubled its enrollment from 7,000 in September, 1945 to 14,000 in September, 1946, and then expanded further to 16,650 by the next autumn quarter. Moreover, the pent-up demand for new housing—and consumer goods in general—was unprecedented, and wartime savings as well as veterans’ benefits enabled that demand to be filled. As construction boomed in the region and across the country, the lumber industry began depleting the Northwest timber supply. The Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southwestern Washington offers a good example. In the decades leading up to World War Two, loggers had taken, on average, about 8 million board feet of timber annually from the forest. Then, turning increasingly to trees on publicly owned land, the lumber industry geared up to meet the vastly expanded demand for wood products that arose during and especially after the war. By 1947 the Gifford Pinchot National Forest was producing 100 million board feet annually; by 1959 its production reached the clearly unsustainable rate of 436 million board feet. Such figures promised long-term economic and environmental consequences, but in the short term they helped to underwrite economic expansion.

The assembly plant for the Boeing B-50 (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. #346. Photo courtesy of Boeing.) A major reason why economic demobilization after World War Two went so smoothly was that it was less a transition from wartime to peacetime than a transition from one wartime economy to another—that of the Cold War. After a downturn in military spending in later 1945 and in 1946, the United States consistently enlarged its investment in national security beginning in 1947, with bursts of dramatic increase, such as during the Korean War, that mobilized the economy for defense purposes at a very high level. The state of Washington was on the receiving end of a great deal of this spending. It either acquired or expanded its defense establishment so that from the 1950s to the 1990s it possessed the Hanford complex; air force bases in Spokane and Tacoma; naval facilities on Whidbey Island and at Bremerton, Everett, and other locales; Army posts at Fort Lewis and elsewhere; plus a host of shipyards, other industrial concerns, and university facilities enlisted in Cold-War-related work.

The emergence of Boeing as the state’s largest private employer epitomized the influence of the Cold War on Washington’s economy. In 1962, one economist summarized the relationship between the company and the region: “As goes Boeing, so goes the Puget Sound region.” This does not strike us as remarkable today, for most of us have grown up with the knowledge of Boeing’s crucial role in Washington. But it is a remarkable statement when one notes that as late as 1939 there was no optimism that aircraft manufacture would become a major part of the regional economy. World War Two changed things, but could not by itself make Boeing into a mainstay. Work at the airplane manufacturer contracted sharply in 1946 and 1947, with its workforce falling from around 50,000 during the war to 9,000 afterwards. Local politicians and businessmen lobbied to have the federal government reinstate the aircraft orders that it had canceled, but to no avail. So Boeing, and the economy of greater Seattle, stagnated during 1946.

Boeing Stratocruiser (above). “Stewardesses ‘model’ their new stratocruiser,” claimed a Boeing press release for this photograph. The view illustrates that employment opportunities were not just limited to men. Other photographs of this series also show women working on the construction line. (Special Collections, University of Washington. Photo courtesy of Boeing.)

Events in 1947 and after precipitated the global polarization between the United States and Soviet Union that became the Cold War. And over time the United States made substantial commitments to air power and nuclear weapons as staples for its military in the post-1945 era. But it was not automatic that the government would decide to procure hundreds of bombers; once the decision was made to buy bombers, it was not automatic that the government would buy the bombers from Boeing; and once the decision had been made to buy bombers from Boeing, it was not automatic that the new planes would be built in the Seattle area (Boeing also had plants in Wichita, Kansas). The health of Seattle’s post-war economy depended at least in some part on each of these decisions; for that reason, Washington politicians and Puget-Sound-area businessmen organized and campaigned on behalf of air power, Boeing, and Boeing’s Seattle plants. Their lobbying helped Boeing become a major supplier to the U.S. Department of Defense during the Cold War. It also signified that the people and politicians of Seattle and Washington increasingly identified their economy and future with Boeing, with aircraft (and later aerospace) production, and with federal expenditures. The fact that they could rely upon well-placed and powerful politicians, such as Warren G. Magnuson and Henry M. Jackson in Congress, helped them enormously. [These developments are summarized by Richard S. Kirkendall, “The Boeing Company and the Military-Metropolitan-Industrial Complex, 1945-1953,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 85:4 (Oct. 1994): 137-149.]

The success of Boeing, of course, depended upon more than government contracts and political connections. Using the profits generated by supplying the U.S. Air Force with planes, the company skillfully diversified its output during the 1950s and 1960s so that it produced for commercial as well as military customers. By 1965, about half its sales were to civilian markets. The backbone of Boeing’s commercial production was its series of jets, beginning with the 707, introduced during the 1950s, and the 727, 737, and 747 introduced during the 1960s. The manufacture of these airliners helped sustain the growth of the Puget Sound economy through the 1950s and 1960s. In 1947, Boeing employed one-fifth of the manufacturing workers in King County; in 1957, it employed one-half. In 1960, 13% of all workers in the county were employed by Boeing, and each Boeing job was estimated to “sustain” another two-to-three non-Boeing jobs. While the Boeing company had certainly diversified its production, it now seemed that Seattle was not diversified enough, for its economy depended rather heavily upon production cycles in aerospace. Boeing’s workforce in Washington expanded and contracted substantially, and the fortunes of the state economy expanded and contracted concurrently. Boeing employed roughly 72,000 in 1958 and 58,000 in 1960, roughly 70,000 in 1962 and 50,000 in 1964. It reached a peak of 101,000 in 1967, but then contracted to 38,000 in 1971 with cutbacks in the space program, reduced military and commercial orders, and the cancellation of federal support for the Supersonic Transport (SST). The severe contraction between 1967 and 1971 created a painful local depression. One Seattle billboard tried to make light of the economic devastation by asking the last person leaving Seattle to please turn out the lights. More seriously, local politicians and businessmen vowed to diversify the local economy so that it did not rely so much on Boeing. Perhaps they enjoyed some success, but a 1990 report concluded that Seattle remained as reliant upon Boeing as it had been in 1960, and reported that 15% of Washington state’s jobs “are dependent on Boeing in one way or another” (Seattle Times, Feb. 16, 1990).

Harry P. Cain (above). During World War II, Cain (as mayor of Tacoma) received notoriety for refusing to support the internment of the Japanese. By the 1950s, however, as a U.S. Senator from Washington, he was one of the last to openly support Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cain’s reactionism cost him his Senate seat, one immediately filled by Henry M. Jackson. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Portrait Files, neg. #3321.)

Economic changes during the Cold War were accompanied, almost of necessity, by political changes. A state so enmeshed in production for national security, so much a part of the country’s mobilization against communism, could hardly afford to practice the left-leaning and radical-friendly politics that had characterized Washington during the 1930s. However, the state did not simply drift away from the left. Instead, during the late 1940s and early 1950s it actively tried to purge radicals and suspected radicals, former radicals and suspected former radicals, from positions of influence. Washington did not just join the other Americans’ anticommunist crusade during the early Cold War; in some respects it helped to lead the events across the country that became known as the Second Red Scare. By the time that Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin lent his name to the national movement in 1950, Washington had already gone through one set of statewide anticommunist convulsions.

The Second Red Scare resulted in large part from fears of communist subversion as the United States mobilized for a lengthy confrontation with the Soviet Union. These fears—in some respects a consequence of Americans finding themselves in an entirely unprecedented global and domestic situation—were given credence by those rare instances when the U.S. government caught spies working on behalf of the enemy. The anticommunist crusade also resulted from the efforts of Republican and Democratic politicians to accuse the other party of being “soft” on communism and to demonstrate their own firmness in the face of subversive threats. Michael Reese explains (in The Cold War and Red Scare in Washington: Historical Context):

Washington Republicans made anti-communism the central theme of their 1946 campaign, charging that Democrats had “sold their soul to the Communist Party” [CP]. They concentrated their fire on Hugh DeLacy, a US Representative from Seattle who advocated friendly relations with the Soviets. Republicans asserted (quite accurately) that DeLacy was secretly a member of the CP. The accusations that Democrats aided communism, combined with a mild post-war recession, led Republicans to sweep the elections, regaining controlled of the Washington state legislature for the first time in 16 years.

Albert Canwell was one of the many Republicans whisked into the state house in the 1946 landslide. Canwell, who later described himself as a “one-man FBI,” had previously worked undercover to monitor CP activities for Boeing, Washington Water Power, and the Spokane Police Department. During the 1947 legislature, he introduced a resolution to create a committee with broad powers to investigate “organizations whose membership includes communists.”

[Virtually every student of the Canwell Committee now agrees that it represented an excessive and unfortunate reaction to the threat of communism, yet its chair—still alive in 1998—remains unrepentant. See Albert F. Canwell: An Oral History, interviewed by Timothy Frederick (Olympia: Washington State Oral History Program, 1997).]

Portrait of Melvin Rader (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Portrait Files. Photo by James O. Sneddon, Office of Information Services.)

The bill created the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, which became known as the Canwell Committee because Albert Canwell chaired it. The Committee was authorized to conduct investigations throughout the state of Washington in order to expose “subversives,” communists, and other threats to national security. One reason that it claimed such attention, of course, was that during the 1930s many in Washington had flirted with or joined the Communist Party and other radical organizations—as had numerous individuals across the country who were convinced that the Great Depression meant the capitalist system was collapsing. The committee had many targets, then, although the risk those targets actually presented to the people of Washington and the national security of the United States seems quite minuscule in retrospect. Investigations focused particularly on the seeming bastions of liberalism in the state, such as the Washington Pension Union, the Seattle Repertory Playhouse, and the University of Washington. [See Vern Countryman, Un-American Activities in the State of Washington: The Work of the Canwell Committee (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951 for one account.]

Many of the targets of the Canwell Committee’s freewheeling “fact-finding” were damaged severely. The University, for example, fired three professors for their political affiliations, put three more on probation, and generally compromised principles of academic freedom. In firing professors, it became the first university in the United States to assert that membership in the Communist Party, in and of itself, made someone unfit to serve as a professor. [The effect of the anticommunist crusade on the U.W. is explored by Jane Sanders, Cold War on the Campus: Academic Freedom at the University of Washington, 1949-1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979).] The Canwell committee’s methods were quite haphazard. A professor of philosophy, Melvin Rader, was accused of having been a Communist during the 1930s. The accusation was false, and the committee in all likelihood had evidence that would have cleared Rader of these charges, but it did nothing with it and left Rader dangling under a cloud of suspicion until he and a newspaper reporter could clear his name. [See Melvin Rader, False Witness (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969; reprint, 1998) and Lorraine McConaghy, “The Seattle Times‘s Cold War Pulitzer Prize,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 89:1 (Winter 1997/98): 21-32.] The anticommunist crusade extended to the schools as well. A counselor for Tacoma Public Schools, Jean Schuddakopf, was fired for refusing to answer questions about her past political associations. [See Ronald E. Magden, “The Schuddakopf Case, 1954-1958: Tacoma Public Schools and Anticommunism,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 89:1 (Winter 1997/98): 4-11.] The anticommunist crusade was notably less virulent in Oregon—perhaps because Oregon had less of an economic stake in the Cold War, and perhaps because Oregon politicians and media were less mobilized about the issue. Yet in 1954 a philosophy professor at Portland’s Reed College, an avowed Marxist named Stanley Moore, was fired for refusing to answer questions about his political affiliations. [See Michael Munk, “Oregon Tests Academic Freedom in (Cold) Wartime: The Reed College Trustees versus Stanley Moore,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 97 (1996): 262-354; Floyd J. McKay, “After Cool Deliberation: Reed College, Oregon Editors, and the Red Scare of 1954, ” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 89 (Winter 1997/98): 12-20.]

Henry M. Jackson (above). “Senator Jackson receives a trophy from a Boeing Company representative.” (Jackson Papers, Manuscripts and University Archives Division, University of Washington Libraries. Photo and caption reproduced in Richard S. Kirkendall, “Two Senators and the Boeing Company,” Columbia, the Magazine of Northwest History 11 [Winter 1997-98], 39)

In the same way that the Cold War wrought long-term changes in the Washington economy, so it wrought long-term changes in the state’s politics. The Second Red Scare succeeded in destroying the left in the Pacific Northwest. The Democratic Party certainly survived and remained powerful, but it was no mere coincidence that one of its two major leaders during the postwar period, Senator Henry M. Jackson, was a staunch Cold Warrior. It was no mere coincidence, in light of the growing importance of the Boeing company to the state, that the anti-corporate rhetoric that had characterized Democratic politics in the 1930s had virtually disappeared in the 1950s. Finally, it was no mere coincidence that Washington state developed increasingly strong and effective ties to Washington, D.C. in this period. The political culture of Washington—scorned by many during the 1930s as excessively leftist—had undergone substantial change. Richard S. Kirkendall, [in “Two Senators and the Boeing Company,”Columbia, the Magazine of Northwest History 11 (Winter 1997-98): 38-43] describes the transformation as one from 1930s progressivism to 1950s liberalism The effects of political and economic transition remain quite evident in today’s Washington. Among the important artifacts of the Cold War are the long-lived radioactive waste at Hanford, and Seattle’s signature building, the Space Needle—topics to be addressed in the next two lessons.

Unit 8: Lesson Twenty-four – The Impact of the Cold War on Washington; Hanford, 1942-1992

Poster for 1948 Atomic Frontier Days (above). Richland High School Bombers logo (below). (Logo courtesy Richland High School).

Cold War symbols pervade the state of Washington. The Space Needle and Pacific Science Center attest to the future-minded, high-tech, aerospace-oriented thinking around Puget Sound. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seattle learned to call itself “jet city,” among other “aerospacey” things, as Boeing’s increasing production defined the local economy. During the annual Seafair festival (which commemorated not space but Seattle’s maritime heritage), the city hosted the Navy’s squadron of Blue Angel performing jets as well as a variety of naval vessels.

As devoted as Seattle was to Cold-War symbols, however, it could not match Richland, Washington, bedroom town for Hanford, in its identification with the Cold War. In Richland the atom, in an assortment of guises, became a very prominent icon. Residents could live on Proton Lane, bowl at the Atomic Lanes, and dine at Fission Chips. Townspeople referred to their community as Atomic City, A-City, or the Atomic City of the West (Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was the Atomic City of the East), and the city logo contained an image of the atom. During the 1950s Richland’s annual summer festival—the equivalent of Seattle’s Seafair—was called Atomic Frontier Days. When Richland teamed up with Pasco and Kennewick to form a chamber of commerce in the early 1960s, it was called the Tri-City Nuclear Industrial Council and it focused on attracting more atomic and space work in particular. Most notoriously of all, the Richland High Bombers , after 1970 or so, adopted an atomic-blast mushroom cloud as the school logo (above). Townspeople defended the much-criticized symbol as an accurate icon for their history. Much more than Seattle, Richland and Hanford, products of the atom, were creatures of World War Two and the Cold War. [On Richland’s past see John M. Findlay, “Atomic Frontier Days: Richland, Washington, and the Modern American West,” Journal of the West 34 (July 1995): 32-41.]

Richland city seal in 1958 (above). New Richland city seal (below). (Seals courtesy City of Richland)

By the late 1990s, of course, the atom seemed less appealing than before. Hanford had ended its plutonium-producing career in 1987, the Tri-City Nuclear Industrial Council had renamed itself the Tri-City Industrial Development Council in 1985, and in 1990 Richland adopted a new city logo that did not include the atom. Communities after 1980 were less willing to be identified with the atom, in large part because nuclear power was now viewed as a quite problematic—perhaps even obsolete—technology that had presented serious public health and environmental risks and created enormous amounts of toxic and radioactive waste. When the Tri-Cities of the 1990s spoke about the technology of the future, they focused not on the atom but on the development of new methods for managing the wastes created during World War Two and the Cold War in the course of plutonium production. They generally did not regard nuclear wastes as a desirable icon for local towns (although they did see “remediation” of those wastes as an economic opportunity). Yet for many observers more distant from Hanford, the wastes were an all too enduring symbol of the history of Hanford and the Tri-Cities in the half-century after 1942.

Manhattan Project Medal (above) (Courtesy U.S. Department of Energy).

The nuclear facilities at Hanford were built up in separate phases between 1942 and 1982. The federal government took the lead in developing the site for the purpose of producing plutonium to use in nuclear weapons during and after World War II. Late in 1942 the Army selected the area to become part of the Manhattan Project, the crash campaign to build atomic bombs. In 1943 and 1944 the Army and its lead contractor, the DuPont company, built three production reactors and two processing buildings in which plutonium was purified. In later 1944 the first reactor started producing plutonium, and in 1945 Hanford began shipping its product to Los Alamos, New Mexico, whence the material was deployed as the fuel for the world’s first atomic detonation (the Trinity test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945) and the second atomic bomb dropped on Japan (at Nagasaki) on August 9, 1945. (The bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 was fueled by uranium produced at Oak Ridge.) Until bombs were dropped on Japan, virtually nobody knew what Hanford was for, and many Washingtonians grew quite suspicious of the secret site. After Hiroshima, however, the Army broke the news about the Manhattan Project in a carefully orchestrated public-relations effort. Thereafter, Washingtonians took pride in Hanford as one of their state’s signal contributions to victory in World War II. [One introduction to wartime Hanford is S. L. Sanger, Hanford and the Bomb: An Oral History of World War II (Seattle:Living History Press, 1989). On wartime decisions about radioactive wastes, see Daniel Grossman, “Hanford and Its Early Radioactive Atmospheric Releases,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 85:1 (Jan. 1994): 6-14. The overall Hanford story is also contained in a rather triumphalist account by Michele Gerber, Legend and Legacy: Fifty Years of Defense Production at the Hanford Site (Richland, WA: U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Restoration and Waste Management, 1992)]

Hanford construction camp (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, Nell Lewis MacGregor papers, box 1. Photo by Robley L. Johnson.)

The creation of a plutonium factory left an enormous footprint on south-central Washington. The workers building the plant, coming from all around the country, numbered as many as 45,000. Most departed by August of 1945, yet the population in the vicinity was substantially higher than it had been before the war. While building Hanford the Army and DuPont had also laid out the town of Richland to house the families of Hanford’s operations employees during and after the war; the planned community had a population of around 15,000 at war’s end. Other nearby towns, including Pasco and Kennewick, had also expanded considerably beyond their 1940 size. Yet in late 1945 and 1946 the outlook for Hanford remained uncertain as the United States debated the future of atomic weapons and its own role in world affairs. Residents of the Tri-Cities were not really certain that they could depend upon Hanford until 1947, when the federal government (now working through the newly created, civilian Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC) announced plans to expand Hanford by building more reactors there and accelerating the pace of production. In this second burst of growth, which lasted through 1955 or so, the site acquired five new plutonium-producing reactors and a host of new processing facilities. Hanford was the nation’s main supplier of fissionable material for bombs as the Cold War began and the United States decided to rely heavily on its nuclear arsenal. The plant generated an ever-increasing amount of plutonium— as well as high levels of radioactive and chemical wastes, some of which were “stored” on the Hanford site and some of which were released to the atmosphere, the Columbia River, and surrounding lands. [One study of Hanford’s environmental impact is Michele Stenehjem Gerber, On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).]

The Cold-War buildup at Hanford also increased the size of the growing metropolitan area known as the Tri-Cities. The development of a “local” population added an important ingredient to the politics of Hanford. Through the 1940s and 1950s, decisions by the federal government, made primarily in Washington, D.C., determined the fate of Hanford. And the federal government retained the predominant voice in the site’s future through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. If Uncle Sam wanted to build another reactor at Hanford or release more radioactivity into the surrounding environs, it generally saw no reason to consult the nearby population. One reason was the need for secrecy, for the AEC meant to avoid giving the Soviet Union any unnecessary chance to learn more about Hanford operations. However, in the 1950s the people residing in the vicinity of Hanford began pushing to have their voices heard, too. They worried in particular about the local economy, not the health risks presented by Hanford wastes. According to one estimate from the early 1960s, 80% of the 28,500 jobs in the Tri-Cities were “indirectly or directly dependent on Hanford activities.” And Hanford, in contrast to Boeing, had not diversified its product line. It produced only for military and not civilian purposes.

Hanford Real Estate (above). Washington’s “Hottest Market” in 1958. (Courtesy Tri-Cities Herald)

Worried that technological obsolescence or improved international relations could destroy their one-dimensional economy, residents of the Tri-Cities began pressing the AEC and Congress to diversify Hanford. Confident that nuclear power plants were the wave of the future, they lobbied the federal government to authorize construction of a ninth reactor at Hanford, one that could produce both plutonium for nuclear weapons and kilowatts for the BPA power grid. Senator Henry M. Jackson (D, WA) introduced a bill to this effect in 1956, and ten years later the dual-purpose N Reactor was completed at Hanford. While Washington, D.C., still called the truly important shots at Hanford, the people of Washington state began to feel that their voice could be heard, too, in planning Hanford’s future. This became particularly important between 1964 and 1971, when the AEC shut down the first eight reactors built and operated at Hanford. The people in surrounding towns relied upon their new connections in Washington, D.C., especially Senators Jackson and Magnuson, to ensure that federal funds continued to flow toward Hanford, despite the shutdown of eight production reactors. The Tri-City economy managed to keep afloat until the 1970s, when construction of three nuclear power plants, under the auspices of the Washington Public Power Supply System (or WPPSS), got under way at Hanford (two others were started in western Washington). It seemed as if the region’s economic future was assured. Indeed, Tri-City optimists glowingly envisioned the building of a “nuclear industrial park” with up to fifty different reactors producing plutonium and kilowatts as well as serving the cause of scientific research. Perhaps the Cold War would endure at Hanford in the form of productive reactors.

In April 1963, R. W. Beck and Asc. submitted to the Washington Public Power Supply System an engineering report covering the Hanford Electric Generating Project. This photograph (above) is the artist’s conception of what it would look like. (Reproduced in “Engineering Report: Hanford Electric Generating Project.” Seattle, 1963, following title page. Photo credited to Burns & Roe)

These heady days were numbered. Always expecting to be on the cutting edge of nuclear technology, Tri-City residents were consistently disappointed by the twists and turns that the atomic age took. Construction of the three WPPSS reactors continued during the 1970s, fueling the local economy, but by 1982 it had become clear that nuclear power plants would not be an anchor for the future. Americans turned against nuclear power during the later 1970s and early 1980s. Moreover, the WPPSS reactors not only ran into enormous cost overruns but also were deemed increasingly unnecessary as forecasts for future demand for electricity were revised downward. Only one of the Hanford power reactors was actually finished—way behind schedule and over budget—and the Washington Public Power Supply System went broke. Hanford’s economy kept going during the mid-1980s, spurred by President Reagan’s defense build-up and by proposals to make storage of nuclear wastes from other sites an important part of the future. But these opportunities had closed by 1987, by which time plutonium production had ceased and decisions had been made not to import nuclear wastes from out of state. The economic future once more appeared bleak, with problems compounded by the fact that Senator Magnuson had failed to win re-election in 1980 and Senator Jackson died in 1983. The Tri-Cities had to face Hanford’s future, and the end of the Cold War, without the cushion provided by Washington’s powerful Democratic politicians.

Reactor B at Hanford, 1943-44 (above). (Reproduced in Daniel Grossman, “Hanford and Its Early Radioactive Atmospheric Releases.” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 1 [January 1994], p.13. Photo courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library.)

Since the mid-1960s, Hanford had been seeking a mission that would replace plutonium production as its reason for existence. It had failed to become a major center for nuclear power plants, nuclear research, or the importation of nuclear wastes. Being primarily an industrial plant throughout its career, it had never amassed the resources to become a major center for scientific innovation. And throughout the 1980s it had generally resisted suggestions that it make clean-up of its own wastes a high priority. “You can’t overstate the demoralizing aspect of taking away high technology activities and asking us to become paper-pushers and janitors,” one engineer explained. Yet despite the failure over twenty-five years to develop a new and compelling mission at Hanford, something always seemed to come along at the right time. In the late 1980s the Department of Energy (or DOE), which had emerged in 1977 as successor to the AEC, decided to make a huge commitment to cleaning up the wastes at its nuclear sites. (At roughly the same time, it began releasing previously classified documents that detailed the great extent of pollution in earlier years.) In 1989 the DOE, in a deal struck with the Washington state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, promised to invest a whopping $57 billion over the next thirty years in cleaning up and managing Hanford’s waste—which represented about two-thirds of all wastes created by America’s nuclear-weapons program since World War Two. By 1992 employment at the Hanford reservation reached an all-time high. The money and manpower applied to the waste problem at Hanford did not initially produce encouraging results, and there were charges of gross inefficiency, excess spending, and inadequate technology. Yet the economy of Hanford and the Tri-Cities (if not the environmental quality) again seemed secure, fifty years after the atomic age, and forty-five years after the Cold War, had arrived in Washington.

Map of the Hanford Engineer Works, 1943-1945 (above). (Reproduced in Grossman,”Hanford,” PNQ 85:1, p.8. Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy.)As the Tri-Cities looked to the future, they gave new attention to the Columbia River. The construction of Hanford during the 1940s and 1950s had impinged upon plans for the nearby lands and river which, in New-Deal plans for the Columbia Basin Project, had been earmarked for development through irrigation and hydroelectricity. Engineers and scientists designed the plutonium-producing reactors so that they were cooled by water pumped from and returned to the Columbia; thus the river carried radioactive wastes to the ocean, and needed to run free. Moreover, placement of Hanford along the mid-Columbia had prevented construction of Ben Franklin Dam (named for Benton and Franklin counties), proposed for a site just upstream from Richland. So long as nuclear wastes were stored in tanks and soils beneath the Hanford reservation, the dam could not be built because it would disturb the water table and the underground wastes, and flood sensitive portions of the Hanford reserve.

The paradoxical result was that the presence of the plutonium plant—which dispensed a considerable amount of radioactivity to the cold, clear water— prevented the damming of more than 50 miles of the river. The Hanford Reach thus became the last “free-flowing” stretch of the Columbia in Washington state upstream from Bonneville Dam. (By the 1990s, the idea of “free-flowing” had to be relative. Operation of the Priest Rapids Dam, just upstream from Hanford, causes the river to rise or fall as much as 10 feet over a fairly short time.) Contamination from Hanford may at times have created the most radioactive stream in North America, but the Hanford Reach also became one of the last great spawning beds for salmon in the United States. In 1989, according to one journalist, “as many as 90 percent of the approximately 530,000 fall chinook salmon harvested from the Columbia had been spawned in the Hanford Reach. More than 40,000 adults returned there to spawn [in 1993]—making it the healthiest spawning area on the Columbia.” According to another journalist, “there are more chinook spawning per mile in the 51 miles of the [Hanford Reach] than anywhere else in the lower 48” (Portland Oregonian, Sept. 28, 1994; Tri-City Herald, Oct. 9, 1994).

Ice Harbor Dam (above). (Reproduced in Keith C. Petersen,”Battle for Ice Harbor Dam: Fish, Navigation, and the Lower Snake River, 1948-1962.” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 86:4 [Fall 1995], p.178. Photo courtesy of Walla Walla District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.)

The end of plutonium production at Hanford prompted new debate over what to do with the river. Some hoped to return to the vision, laid out most fully during the 1930s and early 1940s, of a stream harnessed to serve the economic needs of the region and the national-security needs of the nation. This vision had remained compelling in the mid-Columbia region after 1945, even though the construction and operation of the Hanford site compromised parts of it. The residents of Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland generally supported construction of dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers. [A good summary of the politics behind the construction of dams on the lower Snake is Keith C. Petersen, “Battle for Ice Harbor: Fish, Navigation, and the Lower Snake River, 1948-1962,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 86 (Fall 1995): 178-88. Petersen also wrote River of Life, Channel of Death: Fish and Dams on the Lower Snake (Lewiston, ID: Confluence Press, 1995).] No doubt encouraged by the presence of Hanford, Tri-City interests argued for dams on the grounds of military preparedness. Additional development of the river, of hydroelectric power, and of regional farm resources was essential if the Northwest was to contribute as much as it should to American mobilization for the Cold War. The nation needed “to develop every natural resource at its command,” the Columbia Basin News opined. “The West is the last economic frontier. Its industrial and agricultural settlement is imperative” (Dec. 14, 1950). Advocates of dams expressed little concern for the ecological consequences. The Columbia Basin News(Feb. 28, 1951), in advocating construction of Ice Harbor Dam along the lower Snake, conceded that salmon runs would be injured but considered that a small price to pay:

“If the state is to be maintained as a glorified national park, then the desert will remain desert, and the productive potential must be discarded and forgotten. If full-scale industrial development is desired, it must be realized that civilization and the primitive are not compatible and some sacrifice of natural resources must be expected.”

In some circles, this attitude toward use of rivers persisted into the 1980s. Indeed, with the shutdown of all but one Hanford reactor, the economic potential of the river loomed larger than before, and proposals for harnessing the Columbia further were resurrected. Some Tri-City boosters, along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, urged that the Hanford Reach be dredged in order to permit barge traffic all the way upstream to Wenatchee, and promoted the building of Ben Franklin Dam in order to facilitate more irrigation, more generation of hydroelectricity, and more slack-water recreation. One Army Corps spokesperson explained, “We are in the business of building projects. And that’s the last major dam site left on the river. However, we are having a little trouble selling that dam.”

A view of Benton County (above) near the mouth of the Yakima River. (Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. #16045)

The Corps had trouble “selling that dam” because by the later 1980s and the 1990s American civilization, including most people in the Pacific Northwest, no longer had the same attitudes toward technology and the environment that they had held during World War Two and the height of the Cold War. Indeed, the troubles associated with the development of nuclear power had helped to spur the rethinking of those attitudes in the years after 1970. Nuclear weapons had helped the U.S. bring an end to World War Two and stand firm against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but they had also exacted a very high environmental cost with which Americans became more preoccupied. In light of the harm done by dams to fisheries along the Columbia, or by radioactive releases from Hanford to nearby ecosystems, there emerged among people in the Pacific Northwest a sense that efforts to industrialize and militarize the Columbia had been somewhat shortsighted, even a little arrogant, in their confidence in the blessings that science and industry could wring from nature. Thus during the 1980s and 1990s there appeared a forceful opposition to proposals for dredging or damming more of the Columbia. Most residents of the region (and maybe even of the Tri-Cities) likely supported the 1992 recommendations of the National Park Service that the Hanford Reach be designated a “federal wild-and-scenic river,” to be managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and that an 86,000-acre national wildlife refuge be created abutting the northern and eastern banks of the Hanford Reach.

After more than five decades of harnessing the river by building dams and dredging its bottom, of using it to cool atomic reactors and carry away radioactive wastes, it increasingly seemed like a good idea to try to leave the Columbia alone. The atomic age had yielded, perhaps, to the environmental era in the Pacific Northwest. Yet the effects of the Cold War on the region lingered on, both in the mind and on the land and waters.

Unit 8: Lesson Twenty-five: The Impact of the Cold War on Washington, The 1962 Seattle World’s Fair

An artist’s conception of the Century 21 Seattle Space Needle (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. #10114. Drawing by Earle Duff. Copy by Yang Color Photography, Seattle.)

In 1909 the city of Seattle had hosted the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, a world’s fair whose name called attention to the city’s economic orientation, especially its command over (or designs on) hinterlands to the north and trade across the ocean. In 1955, the civic leaders of Seattle proposed another world’s fair for 1959, to mark the 50th anniversary of the A-Y-P Exposition. Initially, proponents of the fair were not sure what theme to use. Moreover, events beyond their control delayed the fair three years beyond the original suggested date. But when Seattle’s second international exposition opened in 1962, the first major American fair since before World War II, it reflected the city’s economic orientation as fully as the 1909 fair had. The themes were space, science, and the future, as reflected in the signature building (the Space Needle), the largest attraction (the U.S. Science Exhibit, which later became the Pacific Science Center), and the name of the fair (the Century 21 Exposition, implying a look at what life in America would be like in the year 2000 and beyond). These themes mirrored the city’s economic participation in American mobilization for the Cold War. By building jets and missiles and spacecraft, The Boeing Company had put Seattle on the map in new ways and given it an identification with scientific and technological innovation. The city was in many ways an ideal place to hold what became known as “America’s Space Age World’s Fair.” [An introduction to the fair is John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), ch. 5.]

Typical of the themes of the fair was the 600-foot Space Needle, the structure that became as synonymous with Seattle as the Eiffel Tower was with Paris. Conceived and built by private interests, the Space Needle adhered to the themes of science and space in virtually all details. High speed elevators, designed to resemble “space capsules with large vision ports,” carried guests up to the observation deck and a revolving restaurant that was said to resemble a flying saucer and was lighted at night so as to seem to be hovering in the sky. Dining hostesses wore “skin-tight gold coveralls” meant to resemble space suits. And the color scheme of the building exterior was, literally, out of this world: “astronaut white, galaxy gold, re-entry red and orbital olive.” The Space Needle summarized the orientations of Century 21.

A view of the Century 21 Seattle Space Needle looking towards the downtown (above) area whose interests the fair was to promote. (Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. #15543.)

The Seattle Monorail, c.1980 (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. #13107.)

The 1962 world’s fair was in large part a monument to Boeing and its influence on the urban area. It is therefore paradoxical that the businessmen, politicians, and journalists who initially conceived, promoted, and planned the exposition during the mid-1950s were actually quite concerned that Boeing was having too much influence on the city. The leaders behind the Century 21 Exposition came primarily from downtown Seattle. They were men (for the most part) who felt that Boeing was too dominant in the local economy; that the city needed to diversify by advertising itself nationally and attracting new businesses and more tourists to town; that the expansion of Boeing, by accelerating the suburbanization of Seattle, was helping to drain economic vitality from downtown; and that Seattle’s central business district (or CBD) could be revitalized by adding cultural facilities, better transportation access, and improvements to the main shopping areas. For these civic leaders, the world’s fair was in large part a tool to help shape urban change so that downtown Seattle could hold its own in the face of sprawling suburbs, burgeoning shopping centers, and the thriving Boeing company. [On the urban agendas behind Century 21, see John M. Findlay, “The Off-Center Seattle Center: Downtown Seattle and the 1962 World’s Fair,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 80 (Jan. 1989): 2-11.] The fair was also expected to call more national and international attention to Seattle. Like the boosters of the A-Y-P Exposition in 1909, the boosters of the 1950s felt that the world did not sufficiently appreciate Seattle or its postwar expansion and new maturity. Century 21, like the A-Y-P, was expected both to advertise recent growth and spur even more growth.

Seattle’s downtown boosters attained some but not all of their goals. The city did become better known and attracted some new business during the early 1960s, for which the fair deserves some credit. Promoters of the exposition were able to locate the fairgrounds rather close to the CBD, and after 1962 the site became the Seattle Center, an important gathering place and cultural focus for the metropolitan area. The Center was able to add something to the nearby downtown. However, because the Center was located about a mile away from the retail core of the CBD, it never provided as much of a boost as planners had desired. For example, it had been proposed that the Center would become home to the growing convention trade in Seattle, but it proved too distant from downtown hotels, restaurants, and stores. So in the early 1980s, when the city and state decided to erect a new convention facility, they rejected a Seattle Center site and instead put the Washington State Convention Center downtown, over the freeway. A new symphony hall and A Contemporary Theater similarly rejected Seattle Center sites in the 1990s and headed for downtown. Another example of the failure of the downtown vision for the fair is the Monorail. When constructed in 1961-62 between the fairgrounds and the CBD, the Monorail was supposed to be the beginning of a new transit system focused on downtown and capable of bringing workers and shoppers to the CBD more easily. But the Monorail was not expanded beyond the original one-mile stretch. Today it strikes one more as a quaint relic from an earlier time than as the basis for tomorrow’s mass-transit system.

Perhaps the most noteworthy “failure” of Seattle’s fair planners, however, was their inability to keep Boeing (and what Boeing stood for) from dominating the themes of the fair. In this respect, Seattle was no more immune from Cold-War influences than any other part of the Pacific Northwest. When civic leaders first conceived of a second world’s fair for Seattle, they had talked about its prospective benefits for downtown and imagined sponsoring a “Festival of the West.” But they were not really sure what kind of theme would prevail at the exposition. Then in October 1957 the matter was decided for them when, in one of the crucial moments of the Cold War, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite. The United States and Soviet Union had for years been developing missile systems to deliver weapons through space; Sputnik raised the stakes, and made the competition much more public. The race into space was under way, and Americans were desperate to respond to Sputnik in ways that reassured the nation and the world that the United States was not really “behind” the Soviet Union in the realms of science and space.

That science was perceived as a “universal language” is shown in this view of astronaut John Glenn’s Friendship 7 (above), which was part of the fair’s NASA exhibit. (Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. #13108)

In 1958 American statesmen, scientists, and politicians thus seized upon Seattle’s proposed world’s fair as one vehicle for responding to the challenges presented by Sputnik. The federal government decided to invest heavily in the exposition. Through the efforts of Senator Warren Magnuson, it spent about $10 million on an elaborate facility called the U.S. Science Exhibit. This exhibit displayed American advances in science and space. One portion of the federal building was a simulated ride to outer space, sponsored by The Boeing Company. The prominent participation of Boeing, a major supplier to the U.S. Department of Defense, was assured. Because 1962 was a busy year for the aerospace firm, the very first page of the Official Guide Book to the fair was an advertisement inviting visiting engineers and scientists to stop by Boeing’s employment information center on the fairgrounds. The space race came to Seattle in tangible fashion in August of 1962 when astronaut John Glenn’s Mercury space capsule, the Friendship 7, went on display at the fairgrounds. The Friendship 7, the first manned American spacecraft to orbit the earth, was warmly received.

At the IBM exhibit (above), the engineer William Dersch demonstrates “shoebox,” an experimental voice recognition device. (Special Collections, University of Washington)

Along with the themes of science and space, the idea of the future also came to permeate the exposition. The state of Washington hosted an exhibit called the World of Tomorrow. Devoted to predicting life in the year 2000, this exhibit meant to display how science and technology would change and improve living conditions. In short, a fair originally conceived as a “Festival of the West” had become America’s Space Age World’s Fair. By 1962, many national needs concerning the Cold War and space race had overridden the initial objectives of downtown leaders. But few complained, because the nation’s and the world’s attention to the new set of themes and ideas gave the Century 21 Exposition more popularity and a higher profile than it otherwise would have had. Moreover, most residents of the metropolitan area, quite conscious of the local economy’s orientation to science and space, no doubt felt quite comfortable with the way the fair evolved. It just made sense to celebrate science and the space age in Boeing’s hometown, and to portray Seattle as a headquarters of sorts for the Space Age.

The comments of scientists and legislators illuminate how the Seattle fair was reshaped to serve national needs during the Cold War. In hearings on U.S. participation in the exposition, congressmen, boosters, and technical experts explained that America’s “very survival during the next century depends upon how well we develop our scientific resources.” A federally sponsored exhibit on science at the fair would help by encouraging young people to take up careers in science. It would also reassure adults by serving as “a giant showcase where the American taxpayer can see graphically and at first hand where his money is going and why it is being spent.” Moreover, fair messages would be targeted as well at other nations, especially the “undecided people” of the world, who presumably had to choose between the Soviet Union and the United States and would look to the fair for cues.

The Cold War was fought at least partially in the realm of public relations, and a world’s fair proved to be an ideal opportunity to promote assorted American interests. To some extent, the messages presented were firm and even harsh. The legislation authorizing federal spending on a science exhibit specified that “no Communist de facto government holding any people of the Pacific Rim in subjugation” would be invited. The act barred North Korea, North Vietnam, and the People’s Republic of China from participating (although the Soviet Union and Communist countries in eastern Europe were invited). In a similar vein, George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, attacked the Soviet Union in a Labor Day speech by contrasting Seattle’s new Space Needle, “a towering monument to the aspirations of humanity for a better life,” to the Berlin Wall separating East and West Germans, which stood for “the basic cruelty of the Communist conspiracy and its utter disregard for human life and human values.”

The U.S. Science Exhibit (above), entitled “Illusions.” (Special Collections, University of Washington. Photo by Dudley, Hardin and Yang, Seattle.)

In the end these sharper notes were muted by the kind of optimism more commonly associated with world fairs. Scientists is particular hoped to avoid replicating in their displays the more negative aspects of competition between the superpowers. They spoke about science as a “universal language” drawing diverse peoples together and revealing new findings that would benefit all. The American biologist Jonas Salk found in the fair’s scientific theme evidence that “the world is one culture.” Moreover, there was widespread confidence that science would bring about improvements that would ultimately minimize world tensions. Science, it was said, would contribute to peace by helping to create the abundance that would make wars unnecessary. It could achieve this goal because it heightened people’s mastery over nature and the universe. Scientific knowledge, the Official Guide Book explained, “enables man to harness nature’s forces, to ease the burdens of living and lengthen the span of life. As it increases, man’s ability to act, to mold and control his environment, will increase.”

In a state and region where dams “tamed” the Columbia and Snake rivers, nuclear reactors “harnessed” the power of the atom, and Boeing produced jets and rockets that “mastered” the earth’s atmosphere and outer space, the idea of science and technology providing tools to control nature and shape the environment doubtless went over very well. Visitors to the fair surely appreciated the different images of life and travel in outer space, but they may well have been even more captivated by suggestions about what scientific and technological advancement would mean to them on a daily basis on earth. The Century 21 Exposition had no shortage of suggestions for how “average” Americans could expect to benefit from the advances of the space age. Agribusiness and timber companies touted the maximization of harvests in the 21st century through the use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and more elaborate technology. Communication companies predicted advances in computers and electronics. Transportation companies conjured up visions of automated highways and high-speed cars. Three different exhibitors erected versions of the “home of tomorrow,” complete with push-button conveniences and prefabricated, easy-to-add modular rooms. At bottom, the planners and designers of Century 21 assumed that a beneficent capitalism (as opposed to an unworkable communism) would ensure that scientific and technological advances reached eager consumers the world over. “The folks in Puyallup, Punjab and Peru are hungry for what we produce as living standards go up everywhere.”

Bell Systems Exhibit (above). In its press release for this Century 21 photograph, officials from the Bell System laboratories wrote the following: A full- sized model of the United State’s first satellite, Vanguard I, is a part of the Bell System exhibit…. Hostess, Linda Colwell explains how two Bell laboratories inventions — solar batteries and transistors — contributed to Vanguard I’s success. The satellite’s dependable voice — still operating more than 4 years after it was placed in orbit — is expected to continue through its estimated lifetime of some 200 years. (Special Collections, University of Washington. A Pacific Northwest Bell photo.)

In its optimism and its assumptions about growing affluence and consumerism, the Century 21 Exposition differed little from most world’s fairs, which always have tended to look at the present and future in positive ways. But Seattle’s 1962 fair reflected not just the customary tenor of international expositions but also the thinking of the decade in which it was conceived and planned, the 1950s. Those who planned exhibits for Century 21 envisioned a life that would be more affluent and fast-paced and automated than their own, but not fundamentally different. They did not foresee imminent social and cultural and political changes and as a result their forecasts of the future frequently proved outdated. One shortcoming was the fair’s inattention to, and assumptions about, women. Exhibits at Century 21 foresaw no changes in relations between the sexes—women still did the majority of domestic tasks in all the houses of the future, and appeared to be charged with making their home a haven from the changing technologies on the outside. Many publicists for the fair, furthermore, worried that the emphasis on science and space would not appeal to women. So, they emphasized that their would be fashion shows and other attractions “for the ladies,” while men visited the science exhibits and toured the space age. Century 21 was conceived and designed in the days before its sexist ideas were challenged by the rise of feminism. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), the book that would help launch the women’s movement, would not be published until the year following the fair. The exposition’s optimism about world peace was abruptly shattered, too. President John F. Kennedy had agreed to visit Seattle for closing ceremonies in mid-October of 1962, but he cut short his cross-country trip and returned to the White House, where he set about managing the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Below: General Motors Exhibit. “The space-age motif which guided design everywhere at Century 21 led to the suggestions that the cars of tomorrow, including the General Motors Firebird III would be shaped like rockets. What mattered most in 1962 was how fast and how stylishly one traveled–not how much fuel was consumed or how much pollution was produced.” (Findlay, Magic Lands, Berkeley, 1992, p. 247. Special Collections, University of Washington, neg. #1540)

In some ways the Seattle World’s Fair was obsolete almost as soon as it was over. What we might call the 1950s—a decade of confidence about economic abundance, American power, and the potential of science and technology—gave way to another era that we might call the 1960s, a period of rising political and social tensions, when it became clear that both American power overseas and the ability of science to solve problems had definite limits. This was nowhere more plain than in the nation’s increasing concern about the environment. The Seattle World’s Fair was predicated on the idea of mastering nature, even nature in the form of outer space. It celebrated such advances as synthetic fertilizers and virulent pesticides, faster cars and jet planes, without questioning their impact upon the world’s ecosystems. This attitude, like the attitude toward women’s place in society, would be challenged during the 1960s. Indeed, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 (too late for fair planners to take heed of) suggested that the tide was beginning to turn. By the time the city of Spokane hosted its own world’s fair a dozen years later, the theme would be protecting—not mastering—the environment (see Lesson 26).

As for Seattle, is was changed by the fair in a variety of ways. Those who had promoted an international exposition as a way to reshape the urban core got some of the benefits they had sought, especially national attention, increased tourism, a much better nucleus of facilities for the arts, and a substantially enriched cultural scene. The Space Needle survived, and became Seattle’s best-known landmark. The Washington State Coliseum, built to house the state’s exhibit for the fair, was left behind and became home to the city’s first big-league sports franchise in 1967, the SuperSonics of the National Basketball Association (like the Space Needle, the team name is another relic of the Space Age celebrated at Century 21). Seattle had attained “major-league” status, both literally and figuratively. The Century 21 Exposition had helped gain for it more national attention, so that it stood more as an equal to the nation’s other big cities. [On how Seattle’s rise in this period set it apart from (and “above”) Portland, see Carl Abbott’s fine article “Regional City and Network City: Portland and Seattle in the Twentieth Century,” Western Historical Quarterly23 (Aug. 1992): 293-322.] But the world’s fair hardly solved all the problems of downtown Seattle, or reversed the flow of people, jobs, and shops to the suburbs. Moreover, most of the problems it had been meant to address were soon overshadowed by new and more compelling ones, including the matter of civil rights and the question of environmental quality. The world’s fair emerged at a time when economic growth and demographic growth were assumed to be good things in and of themselves, as they had been for more than a century in the American Northwest. These premises increasingly came into question after 1962, as issues that turned around quality of life rather than quantity of growth commanded more attention.

Unit 8: Lesson Twenty-six – Spokane’s Expo ’74; A World’s Fair for the Environment

Logo for Spokane’s Expo ’74 (above)

One way to measure changing attitudes toward growth and natural resources in the Pacific Northwest during the 1960s and 1970s is to contrast the international expositions in Spokane in 1974 and Seattle in 1962. When the people of Seattle hosted a world’s fair, they meant for it both to celebrate their recent economic and demographic expansion and to perpetuate that expansion (with the one caveat that the outward sprawl of population should not detract too much from the financial position of the central business district). They demonstrated little concern about the environmental problems caused by the growth that they coveted. Perhaps typical of the ecological sentiment of the Century 21 Exposition were the remarks of William Merry, editor of the Washington Motorist, who admitted that, while growth had its costs, it was an inevitable sort of improvement: “Seattle does want new pathways to progress, though it may well be true that a heavy influx of people will threaten the very things that bring them here—the great untouched, undefiled, unspoiled outdoors. Seattle knows in its heart that things cannot always remain the same.” In this formulation, growth was seen as an unquestioned good, an end in itself.

Growth in the Pacific Northwest had been regarded in this fashion for more than a century, since American settlers arrived in the 1830s and 1840s and set about trying to impose their own agendas, their own economic designs, on territory claimed by Great Britain and the Hudson’s Bay Company. For the next twelve or thirteen decades—with the brief exception of times of economic downturn such as in the mid-1880s and the 1930s—the overriding impulse of the great majority of Americans in the region had been to accelerate the rate of growth, mainly by developing closer ties to sources of capital and immigrants and closer ties to markets around the world, and by exploiting natural resources. Growth had long been viewed as the main solution to many of the problems of the Pacific Northwest, particularly the matter of its hinterland or colonial status in relation to the eastern states and California. Growth became a central aspect of Americans’ identity in the Pacific Northwest. It motivated efforts to recruit more settlers in order to offset British influence during the 1840s; loomed as the key benefit to be gained from a variety of federal programs (such as the Donation Land Act, the movement of native peoples off their homelands and on to reservations, the subsidy for building the Northern Pacific Railroad, and the underwriting of the costs of building dams in the Columbia Basin); and stood as the main thing being celebrated by the first world’s fairs in the Northwest, at Portland in 1905 and Seattle in 1909. Growth slowed in the years after World War One, but the national crises after 1929—the Great Depression, World War Two, and the Cold War—created a framework for sustained additional growth. This mid-20th-century burst of expansion contributed to the confidence that permeated the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.

Tacoma’s ASARCO Smelter (above), while in operation, was a symbol of both economic growth and environmental pollution. (Special Collections, University of Washington. Photo by Howard Clifford.) The American Northwest long identified its future and its character with growth which, in the economic sphere, revolved largely around the exploitation of natural resources until developments after 1929 encouraged the rise of new kinds of industry. The region was widely seen as a kind of “promised land.” Only a few people defined the region’s promise in terms other than those involving growth; some utopians and socialists, for example, had between 1885 and 1917 imagined the Northwest as the American place most amenable to their radical visions for remaking U.S. society. But the majority of Americans, and particularly the male-dominated, economic and political elites who governed Northwest society, generally measured the fulfillment of the region’s promise in such quantitative terms as the amount of wealth generated, the amount of resources extracted, and the amount of population increase. When these amounts expanded, when growth occurred, the Pacific Northwest was seen as living up to its promise. This formula for determining success or failure in the region generally prevailed through the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, it encountered a challenge from a different way of thinking. This way of thinking was not entirely new, but its increasing influence was something different.

The Cascade Range (above). A view on the southern edge of the North Cascades National Wilderness. (Special Collections, University of Washington.)

During the 1880s and 1890s, at the same time that socialists and utopians had imagined a different kind of Pacific Northwest, a new measure of fulfillment began to emerge slowly in the region and around the country, one focused more on qualitative rather than quantitative criteria and one that paid greater attention than before to the environment. Helen Hunt Jackson, writing about Puget Sound in 1883, had foreshadowed this new calculus. By the same token, in the 1890s the conservation and preservation movements emerged in the Pacific Northwest, spearheaded by the federal government which created forest reserves and national parks in the Cascade Mountains. Succeeding generations of progressive and New-Deal reformers, operating at the municipal and state levels as well as at the federal level, elaborated on earlier efforts by devising programs to conserve and preserve natural resources (such as creating state and city park systems, setting aside federal wilderness areas, and encouraging replanting of cut-over forests).

Then, in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the environmental movement began to crest. Nationally, some of the landmarks of the movement were the successful fight to prevent construction of the Echo Park Dam on the Green River, along the Utah-Colorado border, in the mid-1950s; passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973; creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1969; and celebration of the first Earth Day in 1970. In Washington state, some of the landmarks of the movement were the creation of Metro in Seattle and King County in 1958 to clean up Lake Washington; the creation of the North Cascades National Park complex in 1968 and the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area in 1986; and cancellation of federal support, based in part on environmental concerns, for Boeing’s Supersonic Transport project in 1971. [A fascinating look at the debates over preservation vs. use of western lands and rivers, with a long section on North Cascades, is John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971). The “archdruid” is wilderness advocate David Brower.] In Oregon, the movement crested with the election of Tom McCall as governor in 1967 and the campaign to prevent in-migration of Californians to the state during the 1970s. McCall gave voice to the new way of looking at the Northwest in 1973 by suggesting that quantitative and qualitative measurements of “success” in the Northwest might, in some circumstances, be mutually exclusive: “Unlimited and unregulated growth leads inexorably to a lowered quality of life.” Most Northwesterners were not yet prepared, of course, to renounce growth altogether, so they spoke instead about “regulating” or “managing” or “limiting” it. But as an ethos for regional society, growth was questioned more sharply than ever before.

Falls on the Spokane River (above). (Special Collections, University of Washington). Just as new concerns about the environment were calling into question old assumptions about growth, the city of Spokane decided to sponsor a world’s fair. Expo ’74, as the event was called, reflected the rising attention being paid to ecological matters. The motto of the fair was “Celebrating Tomorrow’s Fresh New Environment,” and the exhibits staged during the fair’s six-month run gave expression to the environmental issues under discussion during the early 1970s. On the day the fair opened, May 7, 1974, the city released 1974 trout into the Spokane River in order to demonstrate the fact that it had been cleaned up enough to support fish life. Symposia at the fair pondered environmental issues, and many of the 5.2 million visitors came away with new thoughts about the state of the earth. [The most thorough work on Spokane’s fair is J. William T. Youngs, The Fair and the Falls: Spokane’s Expo ’74, Transforming an American Environment (Cheney: Eastern Washington University Press, 1996).] But Expo ’74 proved in many ways an ambivalent statement about the environment, for at least two major reasons—because the region and nation remained uncertain about how to strike a balance between pursuing growth and attaining environmental quality, and because the host city was reluctant to embrace the environmental message.

Spokane was a curious place to hold an environmental world’s fair. The basis for the city’s fortunes had long been the extractive industries of the Inland Empire—mining, logging, farming, and hydropower—and this kind of economy does not immediately lend itself to the kind of environmental questioning that took place at Expo ’74. Over the years Spokane’s civic leaders acquired a fairly conservative reputation, which again would suggest less than eager support for the environmental movement afoot during the late 1960s and early 1970s. So how did the environment get chosen as the fair’s main message? Outside consultants advised the planners of Expo ’74 that a fair “themed on the world’s environmental problems and highlighting the history and ecology of Spokane and the northwest region” would be popular with visitors. In other words, the environmental theme would sell; it would attract people and attention to a fairly remote place. Moreover, Spokane’s civic leaders could link the environmental theme to their more narrow urban objective, redevelopment of lands near the downtown core, which they portrayed as an ecological restoration project. Of course, their redevelopment plans stemmed more from wanting to protect downtown property values than from wanting to protect nature, but the fair nonetheless produced a new city park, a cleaned-up river, and a spruced-up downtown.

The Spokane River and downtown Spokane, 1953 (above). In hosting a fair as a downtown renewal project, the civic leaders of Spokane followed the example of Seattle. And because Spokane’s fairgrounds were actually adjacent to the downtown core, rather than one mile distant, they enjoyed considerably more success in getting the fair to influence downtown. But success was a long time in coming. Concerns about downtown dated back to the early 1950s, even before Seattle came up with the idea for a fair. Expo ’74 occupied 100 acres. Half of these consisted of the Spokane River and Falls; the other half was land bordering the river and downtown. The 100 acres stood where three different rail lines had been built through the city, and where industry, rail yards, and low-rent residential housing had grown up around the tracks. The congestion of trestles, bridges, stations, warehouses, and transient quarters was so bad, according to local legend, that some residents of Spokane did not even know that a river ran through the center of the city.

After World War II this riverfront area deteriorated, and so did the neighboring Central Business District (CBD). Property values fell, vacancy rates increased, and buildings became dilapidated. Downtown retail and traffic volumes declined as new malls in outlying parts of the city lured away customers and businesses with their plentiful free parking, proximity to new housing subdivisions, and newer stores and offices. When Sears, Roebuck decided to move from downtown to the North Town Shopping Center in 1958, downtown property owners and city government organized into a group called Spokane Unlimited to redevelop the CBD. After about a decade of trying, Spokane Unlimited decided in the late 1960s to stage an event of such proportions that it would mobilize the entire community in support of their downtown plans, and attract investment from the outside. Thus was born Expo ’74. It was perhaps audacious of Spokane, a relatively remote and small city of 180,000, to host a world’s fair, but the exposition did attract outside interest and money (from the state and federal government and from private firms), cleaned up the riverfront, and rejuvenated downtown.

Fair Site, 1960 (above). The future Expo `74 site in the 1960s was a complex of railroad yards, industry, and parking areas.

In succeeding at urban renewal, Expo ’74 lived up to the environmental theme at the local level. However, at a larger scale fair officials did not always take the theme of ecology seriously. They tried to stress upbeat rather than gloomy or complicated messages about ecology-largely because they did not want to discourage visitors-and as planning progressed they increasingly emphasized entertainment at the expense of education and controversy. Most environmental groups were discouraged from full-scale participation, but big companies and state and foreign governments, who were better prepared to invest money in the fair and thus in Spokane, were well-represented. Thus the Soviet Union participated, despite its own abysmal record of pollution, and expressed a Marxist-Leninist message about the environment that favored the manipulation rather than the protection of nature, confident that humans could manage nature better than nature itself could. The “surest way to safeguard the biosphere,” one spokesperson explained, “lies not through passive ‘protection,’ but through the intelligent and scientifically-substantiated use of natural resources.” (The Soviets did take opportunities to criticize the U.S. environmental record. A Russian journalist commented on the B-52 bombers continually flying in and out of nearby Fairchild Air Force Base: “It is a great irony. An environment fair down here and the thing that destroyed the environment of Vietnam up there.”)

The 1974 Fair: Expo `74 (above) covered 100 acres of land directly adjacent to downtown Spokane.

Many other participants took equal liberties with the environmental theme. The Mormon Church addressed “moral pollution” more than environmental pollution. President Nixon opened the fair with remarks that stressed foreign policy (“a new environment of peace for all nations”) and prosperity (an “environment” of high employment and ample energy). Nixon’s critics, concerned about the growing Watergate scandal, protested his appearance with a sign that read, “Clean Up Our Environment—Impeach Nixon.” Corporate exhibitors, of course, took the most liberties. The Energy Pavilion at Expo ’74 was sponsored by oil, coal, electric, and nuclear power companies, not a group eager to address matters of conservation. Similarly, the Agriculture Pavilion was hosted by agribusiness, chemical, petroleum, and food-processing firms, hardly the entities most concerned about the effects of modern agriculture on ecosystems and public health. The Ford Motor Company epitomized the corporate response to the environmental movement at Expo ’74: it featured recreational vehicles which permitted consumers to come into closer (not to mention more destructive) contact with nature. Moreover, Ford very explicitly stated that environmental protection must not come at the expense of Americans’ standard of living. “We in industry know the average American is truly interested in a clean environment, but…not…to the exclusion of his job or an adequate supply of gasoline…or heating oil for his house or concern over the rising cost of living.” (The remarks reflected American concerns in the early 1970s about an energy shortage.) In other words, concern about the environment was fine, so long as it did not compromise American affluence, comfort, and economic growth. Ford’s views mirrored fairly well the view of the Spokane officials responsible for Expo ’74. Once the fair was over, downtown boosters deemed it an economic and redevelopment success, and emphasized its contributions to growth by making downtown Spokane “a better place in which to do business.”

This abstract forest was part of the Soviet Pavilion (above). According to the commemorative booklet for the fair, the display was used to explain biological relation ships. (In Dawn Bowers, Expo `74 World’s Fair Spokane. Spokane, 1974. p.64.)

Naturally, this approach to environmental issues sparked controversy. Local environmental groups had early on questioned the idea of a world’s fair. First, they worried about its impact on the local environment. Maybe, they said, Spokane did not need the added traffic and pollution that the exposition would attract. The local chapter of Zero Population Growth predicted that the exposition would diminish the city’s quality of life, and passed out bumper stickers that read “Expollution ’74.” One wag even suggested that “the ideal world’s fair in honor of the environment would be no world’s fair at all.” Second, environmental activists charged that Expo ’74 presented primarily commercial and “Disneyfied” messages about the environment. The business leadership behind the fair, they complained, cared only about Spokane’s economic growth and downtown property values, and did not really want serious discussion about environmental issues—particularly if that discussion suggested that Americans might need to alter their lifestyle or reduce their consumption in order to safeguard nature. Third, environmental groups felt that Expo ’74 had made their active participation prohibitively expensive, so many boycotted or protested the fair. On July 4, fifteen demonstrators burned an Expo ’74 flag, which they had marked with a dollar sign ($). While being arrested they declared that “This is the Environmental World’s Farce” and chanted “Exploit ’74.” It was clear that the downtown leadership behind Expo ’74 did not represent the entire city when it came to environmental issues.

The theme and controversy at Spokane’s world’s fair made it clear that there was a growing awareness of environmental problems in the United States and around the world. Naturally, however, there was in 1974—still an early time in the “greening of America”—no widespread agreement about the size of or solutions to those problems. Even today, environmental issues seldom generate consensus. This may be particularly true in the Pacific Northwest, a region that had for so long identified itself with economic and demographic growth-rooted especially in extraction of natural resources-that it would be very difficult to reject the old ethos quickly and adopt a new one. Expo ’74 suggested that the region had not moved very far down the road to ecological enlightenment. Yet, the environmental theme of the Spokane world’s fair and the controversy it generated in fact represented a considerable departure from Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition, a dozen years before.

After the Fair (above): Riverfront Park, a cleaner Spokane River, and a renewed downtown were some of the legacies of Expo `74.

Unit 8: Lesson Twenty-seven – Extinction in Ecotopia
Environment and Identity in the Late-20th-Century Pacific Northwest

Cover of Ecotopia (above). (Courtesy of Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia, Berkeley: 1975). In 1975 a Berkeley writer named Ernest Callenbach published the novel Ecotopia. Set twenty-four years into the future, in 1999, the book portrayed how a part of the United States—northern California, Oregon, and Washington—had seceded from the rest of the country in 1980 and established the new country of “Ecotopia,” an ecological utopia. The fictional new nation outlawed the internal combustion engine, did away with most cars, replaced many city streets with streams, and planted flowers in potholes. It prided itself on a “steady-state” (or no-growth) economy that recycled virtually all wastes, ran on solar power, and reduced the work week to 20 hours. The standard of living declined, but most Ecotopians did not seem to mind. They lowered their material expectations, found ways to enjoy their newfound leisure time, and derived more happiness from living harmoniously with nature. They became better-rounded people; men in particular got more in touch with their “feminine” sides. Indeed, women’s influence was critical in redirecting and running the society.

The green land and falling water of “Cascadia” (above). Marymere Falls in the Olympic National Park near Lake Crescent. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Postcard Collection Photo by W. Ray Scott. Published by National Parks Concessions, Inc., Olympic National Park)

Ecotopia is not great fiction. For one thing, it tends to read as a male fantasy about the benefits of feminism. For another, there is at least one glaring contradiction in the approach of Ecotopians that needs better explanation: in order to attain their independence, the radical environmentalists used nuclear blackmail by threatening to detonate atomic bombs in major American cities if they were not granted their autonomy. Many observers concurred that, as a work of fiction, Ecotopia left something to be desired. Twenty-five publishers rejected the manuscript before it was issued by a Berkeley collective, Banyan Tree Books. Yet the novel began to attract adherents and sold amazingly well, so well that it was brought out as a Bantam paperback and sold thousands and thousands of copies. Readers perhaps regarded the novel not as good fiction but as a kind of wishful nonfiction, a forecast of how the future could or should evolve. (Bantam now markets the novel as one in a series of “Bantam New Age Books: A Search for Meaning, Growth and Change.”)

Ecotopia was especially popular among readers in the Pacific Northwest. As late as 1979, when the novel was still selling at a rate of 1,000 copies every month, Callenbach estimated that at least half of the sales took place in the Pacific Northwest. The plot possessed a certain resonance for people in Oregon and Washington. The idea that the American Northwest was some kind of ecological utopia gained popularity outside the region as well. In 1979 the British magazine New Scientist labeled the Pacific Northwest “ecotopia.” Then in 1981 the journalist Joel Garreau published a trendy book called The Nine Nations of North America. Garreau asked readers to put aside old political boundaries and recognize the new geographical and cultural realities remaking North America into different states. These included Mexamerica (Mexico and the American Southwest), Quebec (separated from the rest of Canada), the Foundry (the industrial Northeast), the Empty Quarter (most of western Canada and the American Great Basin and Rocky Mountains), and Ecotopia (the coastal strip running from Monterey, California to Anchorage, Alaska, including the western half of the Pacific Northwest). Garreau argued that, in some measure, Callenbach’s Ecotopia was coming into existence in northwestern California, coastal Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and southeastern Alaska.

By the 1990s, the notion of cross-border, ecotopian region, distinct from the rest of North America and shaped in large part by a special relationship to nature, persisted in the form of “Cascadia,” a territory conceived as running roughly from Eugene, Oregon to Vancouver, B.C. Boosters of Cascadia included mainstream businessmen, academics, and politicians as well as more countercultural environmentalists and visionaries. Agendas for Cascadia varied widely, from free-trade across the 49th parallel to environmental protections of the highest order, so its promoters seldom saw eye to eye. But they tended to agree that the far American Northwest and far Canadian Southwest shared some fundamental cultural traits, including a Pacific-Rim outlook as well as key environmentalist attitudes, and the same verdant and well-watered environs. In 1992 Paul Schell (a King County developer, academic, and politician who was elected mayor of Seattle in 1997) explained that Cascadia implied a relatively well-preserved and well-appreciated natural setting inhabited by people “with a love of the outdoors and reverence for the environment passed to us from native people.” Another promoter of the idea, David McCloskey, depicts Cascadia as “a great green land on the northeast Pacific Rim,” “one of the newest and most diverse places on earth,” and “a land of falling waters.”

The ideas of Ecotopia and Cascadia were to a significant extent exceptionalist. They viewed one particular corner of North America as a special region, and intimated that the various parts of it (including those on either side of the international boundary) had more in common with one another than they did with the rest of their respective nations. Callenbach carried exceptionalism to its logical conclusion by portraying Ecotopia as independent from the rest of the United States. To a limited extent, art was imitating life in Callenbach’s novel, because during the early 1970s residents of Oregon had begun their own separatist campaign by trying to persuade migrants from California and elsewhere not to move to their state. Oregonians were in one sense tilting at windmills, because the law of the land prohibits one state from excluding those from another. Moreover, the campaign was, for some, merely a clever way to call attention to environmental problems. The anti-Californian effort also came couched in humor: Oregonians attempted to discourage newcomers with jokes about the high annual rainfall, the state bird being the mosquito, and the state animal being the earth worm. The governor promised to erect a “Plywood Curtain” to keep Californians out, and bumper stickers read “Don’t Californicate Oregon” and “Keep Oregon Green, Clean—and Lean.”

Governor Tom McCall (above) presenting an environmental award to Richard Chambers, who was the mind behind Oregon’s bottle bill. (In Brent Walth, Fire at Eden’s Gate, Portland, 1994, p. 255. Photo by Joseph V. Tompkins and courtesy of the Chambers family.)

But numerous Oregonians were quite serious about the campaign. They held Californians to blame for many of the environmental problems associated with growth in Oregon, and they hoped to alleviate those problems by discouraging in-migration. Not all Oregonians joined the effort: A groups of business and labor leaders founded the Western Environmental Trade Association in 1971 to combat the “environmental hysteria” or “environmental McCarthyism” that they feared would undermine Oregon’s economy. But the anti-Californian attitudes persisted. In the 1980s and 1990s, many in Washington and Idaho came to join Oregonians in their hostile attitudes toward Californians, assigning to refugees from the Golden State a disproportionate share of the blame for the environmental (as well as social and economic) problems of the Northwest. (See Lesson 1.) They shared the Ecotopian or Cascadian sense that their region was exceptional, because of its environment and because of its residents’ desire to protect that environment, and they worried that the influx of outsiders—particularly from the Golden State—endangered what was distinctive about the Northwest.

The anti-California campaign, although highly visible, was hardly the main achievement of regional environmentalism. Just as a spate of political reforms had made Oregon into America’s “Laboratory for Democracy” in the progressive era, during the later 1960s and the 1970s the state led the nation in implementing new environmental reforms. Led by Republican Governor Tom McCall (1967-75), it (among other things) cleaned up the Willamette River and created an adjacent “greenway”; instituted a state department of environmental quality; passed a law requiring minimum deposits on beverage bottles and cans; protected parts of six streams in the state as “wild” rivers; expanded the state park system (while setting aside a percentage of campsites for Oregon residents only); and developed a far-reaching land-use planning system that created urban-growth boundaries and mandated that cities and counties formulate comprehensive plans to comply with state land-use guidelines. Washington proved more reluctant to pass environmental reforms (the state turned down “bottle bills” in 1970 and 1982, for instance), but beginning under another Republican Governor, Dan Evans (1965-77), it followed a similar path. The Northwest was relatively progressive in terms of environmental reform (although Idaho lagged behind the other states), even if it did not entirely live up to the “ecotopian” label.

Given the Northwest’s ecological sensitivities, then, it seems quite paradoxical that during the 1980s and 1990s there emerged in the region two well-publicized environmental crises that flatly contradicted its green reputation. Both crises revolved around the question of endangered species, with the two animals in question—the northern spotted owl and assorted runs of salmon and steelhead—serving as indicator species for the health of much broader ecosystems (the old-growth forests in the case of the owls, and riverine watersheds, among other things, in the case of salmon). That these crises would emerge among such an environmentally progressive people—that extinction could flourish in Ecotopia—requires some explanation. How could ecological catastrophe occur in ecotopian Oregon and Washington? Was the Northwest’s environmental reputation fraudulent?

The traditional ethos of growth is documented in the original caption printed with this view of a logging truck (above): “One of the most thrilling sights in the West is these large diesel trucks hauling logs on mountain roads.” (Special Collections, University of Washington, Postcard Collection Pub. by Eastman’s Studios, Susanville, California).

The outdoors as playground (above), and the urban focus of the environmental movement is prevalent in this image of family picnicking at Ediz Hook near Port Angeles. (Special Collections, University of Washington. Photo credited to the Washington State Department of Commerce and Economic Development.)

One thing to keep in mind is that ecological crises occur in part because people perceive them occurring and give them attention. The issues surrounding spotted owls or runs of salmon and steelhead, which may well have received less attention elsewhere, became prominent in the Pacific Northwest in part because of the environmentalist orientation of residents there (and especially those urban residents who lived at some remove from downturns in the timber and fishing industries, and saw the outdoors as a playground rather than a place to make a living). In other words, the population’s awareness of ecological issues helped to ensure that the crises occurred. It also seems important to recall that threats to owls and fish were due in no small part to forces external to the Pacific Northwest. The practices of Japanese fishermen, for example, the weather pattern of El Nino, or federal policies regarding the cutting of timber in National Forests were all largely beyond the control of people in the region. In some ways, then, the fight to preserve owls and fish was a fight to assert control over the region. But it was also more than that. Although Northwesterners were not entirely to blame for the environmental crises of the 1980s and 1990s, they had contributed enormously to them. If inhabitants of the region were environmentally progressive during the late 20th century, they had also encouraged the very problems that so occupied their attention.

To account for the contradictory phenomenon of extinction in ecotopia, it helps to place the problem into historical perspective. The widespread ecological awareness that made the spotted-owl and salmon crises possible was relatively recent. Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, and average people only thereafter began to appreciate widely the value of biodiversity. As Expo ’74 in Spokane had demonstrated all too well, a comprehensive environmental movement was rather new in North America. Moreover, although that movement enjoyed considerable success in the Pacific Northwest, it also encountered there a deeply rooted set of values that at many points ran counter to it. These values revolved around the traditional ethos of economic and demographic growth based in large part on extraction of such natural resources as trees and fish. Environmentalists lamented that it took so long to effect change and worried that any delays in implementing reform threatened the survival of species and entire ecosystem. Yet the reforms they sometimes proposed-like stopping all timber-cutting and road-building in federal forests, and removing certain dams from rivers-were the functional equivalent of stomping on the brakes and putting the regional economy into a dangerous skid. The environmental writer Barry Lopez, writing in Old Oregon (Autumn 1991), summarized the situation with words those spoke well to the Pacific Northwest: “One of our deepest frustrations as a culture, I think, must be that we have made so extreme an investment in mining the continent, created such an infrastructure of nearly endless jobs predicated on the removal and distribution of trees, water, minerals, plants, and oil, that we cannot imagine stopping.”

Salmon in the City (above). “Come to Oregon where the market is growing and the living is fun,” said the headline to this 1963 advertisement run by Portland General Electric Co. in Fortune magazine. The ad explicitly linked salmon to the quality of life that would attract a business executive to the Northwest: “Mr. Carlson is a nut on fishing. He can . . . drive 20 minutes from his home in the heart of Portland and spend a couple of hours trying to latch onto a salmon and still be in the office by 9.” (Caption & photograph in Joseph Cone and Sandy Ridlington, eds., The Northwest Salmon Crisis. Corvallis: Oregon Sea Grant, 1996.)

The peculiar juxtaposition of extinction and Ecotopia resulted from a collision between two different impulses, or maybe two different eras. Ecological consciousness took hold before the old ethos of growth had really given way. The endangered-species crises of the 1980s and 1990s attested to the regional turning point. In our readings, William Dietrich covers the spotted-owl controversy in Final Forest. Here, the destruction of wild runs of salmon on Northwest rivers can illustrate how one period of history ran into another. [An historical introduction to the topic is Joseph Cone and Sandy Ridlington, eds., The Northwest Salmon Crisis: A Documentary History (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1996). See also Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), and Charles F. Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992), ch. 5.] It is estimated that prehistoric runs of salmon and steelhead on the Columbia River numbered as many as 11 to 16 million fish annually, and that Indians caught as many as 42 million pounds every year without depleting the resource. By the later 19th century, non-Indians began commercial fishing on the river in earnest; in 1883 they harvested 43 million pounds of one species alone-the Chinook salmon. Thereafter the states and federal government began to regulate the fishery and to build hatcheries so as to propagate fish artificially. Yet the numbers of fish returning each year fell fairly steadily. Over-harvesting was one part of the problem (see Lesson 14), but destruction of salmon habitat-resulting from logging, farming, dams, and other things-was another. Northwesterners got increasingly alarmed about the declining Columbia fishery, but until the late 20th century they generally were not alarmed enough to do a lot about protecting it. By the late 1980s, eighteen different (locally distinct) stocks of salmon were extinct on smaller rivers and tributaries of the Columbia. In the early 1990s the number of returning fish had fallen to 2.5 million per year, and the annual catch had fallen to 5-8 million pounds. Each year brings more listings of threatened or endangered species, and more abbreviations or cancellations of fishing seasons. Each year also brings more proposals (at escalating costs) to “solve” the problem.

Industry along the Columbia River also contributed to the salmon crisis. This view shows the Long-Bell industrial development at Longview (above) while still under construction in 1924. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Long-Bell photo #1624, neg. #4461.)

On the surface it would seem that addressing the salmon crisis would be easier than addressing the spotted-owl problem. Wild salmon have a wider range of supporters, many of whom regard the fish as the critical icon of the Pacific Northwest. But in fact the threats to wild salmon come from things that are, even more than old-growth timber, fundamental to the political economy of the modern Northwest. Threats to the survival of salmon stem from changes to nature that would prove very hard to reform or undo. The habitat supporting wild salmon, especially spawning, has been severely compromised by the welter of activities undertaken by people in the region. Logging is one example of a threat to the species; a stream in an old-growth forest is estimated to produce seven times the number of fish as that in a harvested forest. Farming and grazing also disturb and pollute rivers and streams; urbanization and industrialization compromise them further. Hatcheries appear to be another threat to wild stocks of salmon. They have been deemed essential for keeping the numbers of fish high enough to support commercial and recreational fishing interests, but they undermine wild runs of fish in a variety of ways. To close down hatcheries, however, could jeopardize what remains of the fishing industry.

Dams on rivers present an even bigger obstacle to the survival of wild salmon and steelhead. In 1941 the main stem of the Columbia had three dams on it. Today it has fourteen, and the Snake River has ten. The entire watershed sports more than 400 dams, according to one account. On the main stem, salmon returning to spawn die at a rate of 13% on fish ladders at each of the four lower dams, and 5% or less at fish ladders on each of the upper dams. The downstream run for young salmon is even more deadly. Until quite recently, when efforts have been made to provide more water over the dams during spawning season, salmon headed toward the ocean died at the rate of 15% per dam (in years of especially low flow, the rate reached 35%). For every 1,000 salmon swimming downstream past eight different dams, 730 died along the way in an average year.

View of the hydroelectric power plant and dam on the Elwha River (above) near Port Angeles in 1914. (Photo by Asahel Curtis, neg. #28530, copy neg. Original neg, Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma.)

To date, solutions proposed for these high mortality rates have not reversed the decline. The Army Corps of Engineers, for example, loaded trucks with salmon fry on the Snake and upper Columbia, drove them downstream via Interstate 84, and released them below the last dam. The fish took a freeway to the ocean, and in doing so never learned very well the scent or shape of the river, which was essential for them to return and spawn. Spilling more water over the dams has seemed to help, but has not truly stemmed the decline. Now people have begun to speak seriously about taking down dams in order to restore salmon runs. That expensive solution seems workable on the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula, where the two existing dams are not essential to the local or regional economy. But dams elsewhere in the Northwest, especially on the Columbia system, are so integral to the regional economy that it is very hard to imagine what life would be like without them. They provide inexpensive electricity to power farms and industry as well as to heat and cool homes. (Nisqually Indian Billy Frank questions the idea of cheap hydroelectricity: “It’s not cheap. It’s all been paid for by the salmon. When these lights come on, a salmon comes flying out.”) The dams provide water for irrigation, allowing arid parts of the Northwest to become big agricultural producers. They control floods and erosion along the river, make inland navigation possible as far upriver as Lewiston, Idaho, and offer such recreational opportunities as boating and water-skiing. So many interests throughout the region depend on and benefit from the dams so much that it is very difficult to imagine taking them down.

It is useful to keep in mind that the system of dams is itself a quite recent development. The last big dams on the Columbia and Snake were completed the late 1960s. That is to say, at the same time that the environmental movement was beginning to crest—a few years before Callenbach published Ecotopia—the system of river improvements, envisioned in the 1930s to reform regional society and recast the regional economy, was being “perfected.” Just as the dams were finished and the benefits from the newest ones began to flow to those who had long awaited assistance from the Columbia Basin Project, environmentalists mounted new and sustained challenges to the dams. Their critique proved forceful, but it ran counter to what had been the basic thrust of regional society for more than a century. Since the 1840s Americans in the Northwest had been trying to harness nature in order to create wealth and transform the region into something more than a remote and isolated hinterland. Dams had helped to overcome the perpetual problem of economic underdevelopment in the Pacific Northwest. They represented, in a sense, the attainment of precisely what Americans had long wished for in the region. It may be possible, even desirable, to revise the goals for Northwest society and reverse course in order to protect salmon. But if the salmon cannot be saved, it may well be because the momentum of historical events for the last century or more has run in the opposite direction.

Chuckanut Sunset (above): “Mona Lisa pale stuff in comparison,” claimed this postcard writer while looking out at a Puget Sound sunset from Chuckanut Drive near Bellingham. (Special Collections, University of Washington, Postcard Collection. Photo by by Bert Long, Sr., published by Ellis Post Card Company, Arlington, Washington.)In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s it became fashionable to lament the influx of Californians to the Pacific Northwest. Contrast this approach to that of the late 1940s. California experienced a drought in the years immediately after World War II. The shortage of water threatened farming in the Golden State, and some people there proposed pumping water from the Columbia River southward to help quench California’s thirst. Two of the Northwest’s leading newspapers, the Portland Oregonian and Seattle Times, had a different idea, one more in keeping with the region’s pro-growth mentality and confidence in its projects to harness and use natural resources. “Why should not the people come to the water, instead of the water being transported…to the people? There are no barriers of which we are aware to the migration of [drought] refugees to the irrigable lands of Oregon and Washington, which are in easy reach of the great Columbia.” This impulse—inviting outsiders to move to the region, to contribute to and benefit from the conquest of nature there—has dominated the history of the American Northwest. It remains to be seen whether another perspective, one emphasizing quality of environment more than quantity of growth, can or should truly supplant it.