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Emerald City
An Environmental History of Seattle

The Unraveling of the Mixed World

Salmon swam through the stories the first peoples of Puget Sound told themselves. They were more than sustenance. At one time, salmon, like other animals, were more akin to people because salmon in their current form did not exist. They were one of many kinds of Animal People, protean beings that were neither entirely person nor creature who lived in the Myth Age before the arrival of humans. For eons beyond measure, the Animal People called this epic world their home, a place in which their powers and attributes were unbounded by time or space. Some could change size and shape at will, while others could converse with one another or fashion tools with which to build their homes. Then everything changed, suddenly. In some accounts, the demiurge responsible was a being called Changer or Transformer, who, as the storytellers later said, turned the Animal Peoples into animals, plants, or physical features-a mountain peak, a bend in a river, or a shoal in the ocean-then imbued them with personalities and traits befitting each. Changer thus prepared the way for the After Peoples, that is, humans.

In one story collected in 1916 by Arthur C. Ballard, a self-taught anthropologist, Snuqualmi Charlie told him the tale of Moon, the Transformer. While still a baby, the Dog Salmon people kidnapped Moon from his home in the Sky Country, brought him down to earth, and raised him as one of their own. When Moon came of age, he recognized his powers and began to prepare the world for a great change: "The new generation is coming now and you shall be food for the people, O Dog Salmon!" In the initial confusion during creation, Moon told the Dog Salmon people to go downstream, then, wondering if he had made a mistake, told them to come back upstream. Had he not made that error, the salmon would not have run down to the ocean and back again. Moon then set about transforming the rest of the world, frightening the many Animal Peoples who did not want to be changed. When Moon encountered Deer, he was sharpening a spear. Moon asked Deer what he was doing. "Making a weapon to kill the Transformer," Deer replied, whereupon Moon turned Deer into a deer, saying, "You shall be something good to eat." In this manner, Moon peopled the land with animals familiar to humans: a group of noisy fishermen became "sawbill ducks," or Merganser, a particularly greedy fisherman became Otter, and a thief who stole Moon's salmon dinner, roasting on a fire, became Wildcat, the soot of the flames turning into stripes on his face. After Moon had changed the world and before he created light, the Sun, he created the rivers, placing a man and a woman on each and telling them "fish shall run up these rivers; they shall belong to each people on its own river." "You shall make your own living from the fish, deer and other wild game," Moon commanded, and the couples had children "until many people were on these rivers." Without salmon, the After Peoples would not have endured and they knew this.

Telling stories about Salmon's origin was more than mere allegory or a simple sign of respect toward the fish. The stories sustained the world and the world sustained the stories over time. Salmon had power in the deep past, when they lived in the Myth Age, and they still had power in the present, too. Animal Peoples were transformed, but they did not disappear. After Moon changed the Dog Salmon, they remained both animal and people, spending part of their lives in the Dog Salmon world, wherever that was located, before returning to the human world. Indeed, describing what the characters of the Myth Age looked like is problematic because there was no "nature" as far as Native peoples understood their world. The dualities we take for granted in the modern era did not apply. Instead, the world was a shifting continuum in which the living past and the living present connected. For many Indians today, this is still the case. To see the stories or any other part of Native spiritual life through Western eyes flattens the historical complexity of Native culture. Social subsistence and spiritual survival intertwined in Natives' daily lives, yielding a readily understood ethic grounded in place and practice. But this system would change as new peoples arrived, first from Great Britain, later from the United States, looking for land and other resources, motivated by a very different kind of ethic. They would insert themselves into this mixed world with unanticipated and far-reaching results.

At first, Indians, as the interlopers called the inhabitants of the world Moon had transformed, accepted these new peoples, if somewhat warily. The interlopers also wanted to cooperate. After all, Indians knew where to hunt game, catch fish, and trap furs. They knew the lands and waters in detail and that intimacy translated into leverage in dealings with the newcomers who now lived among them. They knew where power dwelled. Natives incorporated these strangers into what became another sort of mixed world, one where Indian and non-Indian cultures and customs blurred and blended. It would be a short-lived accommodation for, as the tales told, change was constant and by the time the Americans came to the inland sea they called Puget Sound, bent on acquiring land, cutting trees, and building a city of their own, the mixed worlds Moon had created were beginning to unravel.

The Geography of the Transformer

Geologists say that Puget Sound began in fire and ice. Starting in the late Eocene, the slow process of continental drift pushed the Pacific Plate beneath North America, supplying the tectonic and volcanic energy that uplifted the Cascade Mountains and builds them still. In the early Pleistocene, the first wave of ice sheets, more than three thousand feet thick, began to carve out the deep fjords that became Puget Sound. Smaller grooves became basins for freshwater lakes, flat valleys for streams: Green Lake, Lake Union, Lake Washington, the Duwamish River, and the scores of small creeks scattered across Seattle today. The last ice sheets, the scientists say, began to retreat around fifteen thousand years ago, one mile every twenty-five years, leaving behind huge mounds of debris, glacial moraines that became islands in the Sound and ridges flanking its coasts. Soon after the ice receded, Mount Rainier erupted in the Osceola Mudflow. The paroxysm of ash and lava and mud swept north toward the sea almost six thousand years ago, inundating the foothills and coastline in a wall of rubble.

Eventually, the mountain waters pushed their way back to the ocean to create a tangled watershed encompassing nearly 4,100 square miles from the high Cascades, down the White River and the Green River, and into the flat lowlands. Here, the gradient mellowed, the current slowed, and the rivers either joined the Stuck River, which elbowed south into the Puyallup River near present-day Tacoma, or the Green and White Rivers, which flowed north to join the Duwamish and empty into Elliott Bay. The Green and White channels were often only a few hundred feet apart. Periodic seasonal flooding also sent the waters of the Stuck into the White River any time logjams plugged the path. North of this snarled intersection, the Black River, a short and slow watercourse, more swamp than stream, emptied Lake Washington into the Duwamish River. In most years, the waters reached Elliott Bay. In other years, when the tides were high, the Black and Duwamish sometimes flowed backward into Lake Washington.

The source of all this water was the confluence of even larger rivers of air overhead that delivered the Northwest's now-infamous rain. Aircurrents above the North Pacific Ocean collided with one another, generating moisture-laden storms, especially during the autumn and winter, that smashed into the Olympic and Cascade Mountains, rising steeply to elevations above nine thousand feet only a few miles from sea level. As the clouds struggled to surmount the peaks, they dumped snow and rain, as much as one hundred inches or more annually, nurturing the thick coniferous forests that spread across the land in the glaciers' wake. The resulting runoff swelled watercourses with silt and debris, engorging already swollen rivers to jump their banks and plow through anything in their path. The sea was just as unpredictable. The channeling effects of Puget Sound created extreme tides that pushed against freshwater tributaries. Tidal bores driven by fast-moving squalls raced up the Duwamish River all the way into Lake Washington, some twenty miles distant, overwhelmed the small Black River, and elevated the lake level by as much as ten to fifteen feet overnight.

The land that became Seattle was just as unstable and intricate as the waters around the narrow isthmus, only seven miles across at its widest point, measured west to east. American surveyors, sent by the federal General Land Office to map the interior reaches of Puget Sound in the 1850s, found that running survey chains over the rocks and through the mud was nearly impossible. Entry after entry in their field books included the stipulation "not on a true line between sections." It was an understatement that turned geology into a wry aside. As the last glaciers receded toward the Canadian Arctic, the irregular topography characteristic of present-day Seattle took shape, a crazy-quilt of ravines and hills, the tallest almost five hundred feet high, interlaced with skeins of creeks, rivulets, and springs. The ridges and hills tended to run north to south, trailing the glaciers' advances and withdrawals, while gravity pulled the water oozing from the gravelly soil downhill. Some waters poured into Puget Sound, Lake Washington, Lake Union, or the many small ponds nestled between the heights. Some of it sank into hollows carved out by the great ice sheets, turning dry land into marshes or, over time, bogs filled with sphagnum moss and mats of thick peat. On the high prominences and headlands fronting the ocean, like Alki Point, winds and weather pounded the soil. Here, water was scarce or brackish. Hardy prairies and grasslands dominated instead of the widespread forests with thick undergrowth of ferns and salal, a native tough-leafed shrub, common in the less exposed lowlands.

The verdure was deceiving because the retreating glaciers had pulled much of the nutrient-rich soil away with them, making growing conditions difficult for all but the toughest plants despite the frequent rain. For all of the jokes about Seattle being perpetually gray and rainy, precipitation has never been distributed equally across the city or the region. The complex maze of hills and valleys generates equally complex microclimates. Even today, one high-lying neighborhood, like Capitol Hill, can receive up to a foot more rain than the University of Washington campus, downhill and only two miles to the north. The meteorological properties of Puget Sound can magnify these effects. Sandwiched between the Olympic Mountains to the west and the Cascade Mountains to the east, clouds and precipitation can become trapped in the Sound's central and southern sections. Labeled the Puget Sound Convergence Zone, this phenomenon, most common from April to June but frequent during the rest of the year, ensures that the region is often cloudy. The city's yearly average precipitation is thirty-eight inches, less than New York or Boston, but annual variations, now or in the past, are not uncommon. Whenever ocean temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific rise by more than half of one degree Celsius, an occurrence commonly known as El Niño, the resulting effects on sea and atmospheric currents can push seasonal weather systems south and bring widespread drought or destructive winter storms to the Pacific Northwest.

Contrary to earlier theories of ecology, there was never a climax or steady state of affairs for the living creatures around Puget Sound. The constant instability of the physical environment ensured that. Indeed, the region's immense trees could not have grown to their spectacular heights without this turmoil. At the end of the last glacial period, the forests were dominated by lodgepole pine, a tree that loathed shade and reproduced quickly. As the climate warmed and grew wetter, Douglas fir and western hemlock began to predominate along with red cedar, which clustered in damp places. Douglas fir, in particular, thrived on chaos. The needles and dead wood at the foot of the giant firs often ignited huge forest fires that leveled tens of thousands of acres. The hot flames forced the firs to expel their seeds. Afterward, the nourishing ashes and abundant water made for fast recovery. To be sure, many firs and cedars lived for hundreds of years, later astounding European and American invaders unaccustomed to such huge trees. Captain George Vancouver, traveling south along the southern shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, just north of Puget Sound, in 1792 said the whole country "had the appearance of a continued forest extending as far north as the eye could reach." Later, as he journeyed south into Puget Sound, exploring the region for the Royal Navy of Britain, he described an "impenetrable wilderness of lofty trees, rendered nearly impassable by the underwood, which uniformly encumbers the surface." Yet Vancouver's notion of a static, unchanging wilderness was inaccurate. It compressed the deep scales of evolutionary time into human dimensions, ignoring how the forests were always changing in response to a volatile environment.

The great trees that commanded Vancouver's attention were only one part of this complex environment. Pacific salmon, the region's signature creature, co-evolved with the changing forests and mountains to develop their unique reproductive cycles over time. Cold and clear waters shaded and protected by dense forests made for perfect habitat-save one crucial deficit. Well before human times, sometime back in the early Pleistocene, the various species of salmon had become anadromous. Over time, they began to spawn and die in freshwater lakes and streams after spending their adult lives at sea. Ancestral salmon were forced to acclimate to rising and falling ocean levels each glacial period, which cut the fish off from freshwater in one cycle, salt water in the next. Most biologists agree that Pacific salmon, members of the genus Oncorhynchus (from the Greek words onkos, "hook," and rynchos, "nose"), evolved from a more primitive form of the genus Salmo. When the last great ice sheets receded, sometime between twenty-five and fifteen thousand years ago, salmon began to colonize the rivers around the North Pacific. Today, there are seven principal Oncorhynchus species in western North America-pink or humpback salmon, sockeye salmon, coho or silver salmon, chum or dog salmon, chinook or king salmon-plus two additional anadromous species: steelhead trout, a saltwater rainbow, and cutthroat trout, which has a freshwater variant like the steelhead. (Sockeye also have a strictly freshwater variant commonly known as kokanee.) Unlike the Atlantic salmon, a species that also migrates to and from fresh and salt water, most Pacific salmon spawn once, then die. It is, perhaps, romantic to think that salmon die so their young might live, and there is some truth to this. After the final glaciers withdrew and as the climate began to moderate, the rain and snow typical of the Pacific Northwest leached vital minerals from the porous, nutrient-poor volcanic soils and swept them into the sea. These trace minerals, essential to the proper growth of young salmon, were the biochemical triggers that enabled the fish to switch from freshwater to salt water and back again. So several Pacific salmon species evolved over time to replenish what their environment could not provide. After growing fat on the riches of the cold North Pacific and returning to spawn, dying salmon, energies spent, fertilize their nurseries with the sea's mineral wealth.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Emerald City by Matthew Klingle Copyright © 2007 by Matthew Klingle. Excerpted by permission.
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