First people

David Scherer Water

It’s been a strange week. On Tuesday, Trump closed the state library, home to the largest collection of Pacific Northwest books in the world. Just days earlier, we celebrated the long-awaited opening of a new Olympia history museum.

As one door closes, another opens. 

This feels like the right week to put some attention on early Olympia history.

(Sometimes people talk about Native Americans in a way that promotes a false mythology — one that bypasses a hard-to-face truth. In writing this, I made efforts to avoid that tendency. I met with local tribal leaders and historians, and had my work vetted. What follows is not a comprehensive history. For that, I encourage you to visit the Squaxin Island and Steilacoom tribal museums, to whom I am grateful for their assistance and generosity.)

A land already inhabited

Native Americans have lived in and around Olympia for the last 12,000 years. By contrast, the history of white settlers begins in the last 2 percent of this time.

Today, South Sound tribal communities are thriving, and given centuries of violence, persecution and prejudice, this is no small miracle. Tribal communities maintain cohesion through cultural celebrations, and political power through remarkable organizing. In recent years, tribal influence has been a check on failed state environmental protections and a challenge to the corrosive effects of private sector development.  

Before white settlers arrived in the South Sound, countless generations of First People inhabited the region in large and small tribal villages, enjoyed the rich natural resources and used Olympia as a meeting place and seasonal camp. At that time, Native elders often outlived their counterparts in European cities — a fact that’s rarely acknowledged.

Tribal identity was more fluid before white settlement. Today, for reasons related to pushing back against assimilation and operating within the U.S. federal recognition system, regional Native communities are organized into more formal tribes. These include the Suquamish, Duwamish, Nisqually, Snoqualmie, Squaxin Island, Steilacoom and Muckleshoot. However, these modern tribes are themselves collections of former smaller tribes, villages or families.  

In 1800, the thousands of Natives living in and around Olympia spoke a dialect of the Puget Sound Salish language, Lushootseed. They lived in villages often of just one or two large rectangular houses with a single sloping roof and walls of split cedar boards covering carved post and beam frames. Each house was home to an extended family or to groups related by marriage, under the leadership of an individual.  

A house was multipurpose and often used as a workshop where fishing and hunting gear was constructed and mended; where canoe carvers worked on the beach just outside; and where weavers and basket makers created clothing, utensils, and artwork from roots, colored bark, grasses, the wool of mountain goats, and the fur of dogs.

During the warmer months, much of the focus was on acquiring the physical resources needed to survive. Individuals and groups came and went from villages. Canoeing and running were the primary forms of transportation. Staying in shape was practically a law in pre-settler times. However, things weren’t as lovey-dovey as Hollywood suggests. Slavery, raiding, kidnapping, and war were a part of life back then. In addition to outrunning enemies, Natives practiced dance as a defensive martial art for repelling attacks.

Strips of cedar bark were harvested from huge standing trees in the spring, when it could be pulled away easily for use in clothing and baskets. In summer, the mountain passes could be crossed for trading with friends and relatives to the east. Loaded canoes traveled between river and saltwater villages. Hunting expeditions pursued elk, deer, seal, bear, duck and other prey. Shellfish were harvested on beaches and mud flats. During salmon runs, a large part of a village’s annual food supply was acquired within a few weeks.  

The colder months were a time for an important yet less tangible wealth — the ancient legends and ceremonies handed down through generations. Songs and dances were the visible manifestation of a relationship with the supernatural world. Winter gatherings were a time when marriage ceremonies occurred.  

At the heart of winter traditions was the telling of syayahub (“syah-yah-hobe”), legends for the education of young people and enjoyment of adults. Through an oral literature given as short vignettes, epics or cycles of stories, lessons were passed down about the origin of the world and its inhabitants, about ancient monsters, natural phenomena, animal behavior, morality and culture.  

Settler power

It was into this intricate civilization of interrelated villages and families, of resources managed with a light hand, that the first Europeans entered.  In 1792, Peter Puget and his exploring party were the first documented white people to come to Olympia. After Puget, other explorers came through, but it wouldn’t be until 1832 that the first white people stayed, setting up a trading post near Steilacoom at the Sequalitchew Tribal Village on behalf of one of the most powerful corporations in human history.

The Hudson's Bay Company is remembered as having a friendly presence near Steilacoom, providing blankets and guns to all, but as you follow the increase of white settlers that come after, there is an escalation of hostility. This is an important first instance of passive-aggressive behavior that would continue as a hallmark of the dominant culture in the Pacific Northwest.  

Thirteen years later, in 1845, a young Nisqually tribal leader named Leschi discovered Michael T. Simmons and his friends, starving, lost near Littlerock, and stuck in the mud. The group had trekked all the way from Missouri to take the first land claims in the region now called Tumwater.  

The Simmons party would never have survived their first winter without Leschi bringing them supplies or the Steh-chass village, located at the base of the falls, offering them one of their longhouses. This kind of generosity was (and still is) the hallmark of Native communities in and around Olympia.

The early settler period was marked by an escalation of racial injustices. Thurston County is named for a guy who summed things up this way, “The negroes associate with the Indians and intermarry, and, if their free ingress is encouraged or allowed, a relationship would spring up between them and the different tribes, and a mixed race would ensue, inimical to the whites. These savages would become much more formidable than they otherwise would, and long bloody wars would be the fruits of the commingling of the races.” Oh, Sam, you’re such a romantic.

When bad things happened to Natives, there was no recourse. In 1854, while visiting Olympia, Tlingit tribal leader Tsus-sy-uch was shot dead by Olympia steamboat captain John Butler in front of dozens of witnesses just outside Butler’s house on The Westside. Butler claimed he shot Tsus-sy-uch because he and his tribe were demanding payment for a month of land-clearing work they’d just completed. Butler was of the school that Natives counted as slaves. He spent a night in jail, but was released the next day. There was no investigation or trial, and the tribe’s requests for restitution were ignored. As an ongoing insult, a street, creek, housing development, and cove on The Westside still honor Butler.

In the aftermath of this event, there were attempts to rope the area’s indigenous population into a regulated quasi-slave system. A chart circulated in Olympia in 1860 detailed wage standards for “native servants.” These included “1 day work = 1 handkerchief : 1 week work = one shirt : one month’s work = one blanket.” 

Less than 10 years after the Simmons party was rescued by Leschi and welcomed by the Steh-chass, the relationships between settlers and Natives had spiraled into open hostility. In 1856, their kindness was largely forgotten and the “Puget Sound Indian War” began. 

One of the first actions was walling off 4th Avenue in downtown Olympia with a log palisade, making the northern peninsula a fortified safety zone. This was one of many orders to come from our freshly-imported territorial governor, the Napoleonesque founding father of Pacific Northwest white guy rage, Isaac Stevens.

(There has been a lot of hating on Stevens in the news this spring — a lot of it deserving — and I’m about to pile on my own, but first, I want to say one good thing about the man. He started the state’s first library. And on Tuesday of this week, that library was shuttered. No one knows what’s going to happen to all those books, including the ones Stevens shipped out here from Baltimore, famously arriving before he did. There’s a lot in that library that isn’t online or in any other library. My last JOLT piece, the one about Harry Fain would not have been possible without the Washington State Library. I’d like to pull a Sam Reed and move the whole library into my department, but I don’t have a department. I just have this column. Well, if that’s enough, I’ll clear out my guest room and become your new state librarian. And, I’ll do it for half the money.)

Stevens declared himself Superintendent of Indian Affairs and went around the region on horseback attempting to get Natives to sign over claims to their land. When tribes wouldn’t sign, or didn’t understand his treaties, Stevens escalated hostilities. He burned bridges and responded to criticism with a promise that, “this war shall be prosecuted until the last hostile Indian is exterminated.”  

Over his six years, Stevens’ treatment of Natives prompted pleas for moderation. These came from Olympia residents and across the continent from then-President Pierce.  

Stevens’ so-called battles were one-sided bloodbaths that unleashed a brutality unprecedented in this part of the country. In one of the darkest examples of gruesome irony, Stevens manipulated facts, turned Leschi into a scapegoat and had him hanged for murder. 

(Far as I’m concerned, even if Leschi had killed anyone, it wouldn’t have been murder. Stevens had declared war. But on top of that, Stevens had no proof.)

On Dec. 10, 2004, a Historical Court of Inquiry, following a definitive trial in absentia, stated that Leschi was wrongly convicted and executed.

In the aftermath of his “Indian War” and his departure, laws were passed requiring documented Native workers wear special blue and red uniforms when in Olympia. Squaxin Island became a forced relocation area and one of history’s saddest jokes, The Medicine Creek Treaty was falsely advertised in local newspapers as having been “ratified by 633 duly-authorized Indians who were all satisfied.”

It’s not clear if anyone who signed the treaty had any idea what it actually said. It was written in English and crudely translated into the Chinook jargon, a trade language with a vocabulary of few hundred words, thoroughly inadequate for conveying the complexity of a treaty. Compounding this, there were reports of different versions of the treaty. One promised health care, education, and unrestricted access to fish and wildlife resources. Another version promised the Black Hills as a reservation.  

In the end, the tribes surrendered more than 4,000 square miles. During the years immediately following Medicine Creek, new laws were passed forbidding Native religious practice and inter-tribal trade.  

Stevens never enacted his master plan, which involved moving all of Western Washington’s Natives onto a single reservation. He left Olympia in 1861 to lead hundreds of Union soldiers to their deaths in several gruesome Civil War battles. At the Battle of Chantilly, after picking up a fallen flag and charging up a steep hill, he was struck in the head by a cannonball and died instantly.    

Reckoning and rising

It’s a myth that fighting for Native rights is a recently-started effort. As early as 1897, tribes were appealing through legal channels for fair treatment. One of the main pathways for justice was through the fishing rights promised in treaties.  

In the mid-1960s, these efforts made it onto the national news as a major political awakening was occurring. In some ways, “The Fishing Wars” as they were known in Olympia, were to Native Americans what busing was for African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement.  

The leader of this movement was Billy Frank Jr. He was arrested over 50 times for his dedication to the treaty fishing rights cause. Decades of discrimination and ignored treaties were brought to light by his leadership, activism and perseverance. In 1974, the landmark Boldt Decision finally secured the rights of the tribes as promised in treaties that had been ignored for more than a hundred years.  

The tribes involved benefited greatly from Boldt. Prior to the ruling, Natives collected less than 5 percent of the statewide salmon harvest, but by 1984, this increased to 49 percent. Part of the genius in this arrangement related to cooperative management through the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. Billy Frank Jr. served as its chairman for more than 30 years.  

Frank died in 2014. The Nisqually Wildlife Refuge was renamed in his memory.  

There are tribes still seeking compensation, land and adherence to long-ignored treaties. There’s damage that hasn’t been repaired. But this chapter of history hasn’t ended. That work is up to all of us.

David Scherer Water is a former employee of The Washington State Library. He explores absurdity in local culture through the lens of comedic nonfiction. He is the author of a history book and this column. Both have the same title. Discover more of his work here.