Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 40 of 176)

From George Vancouver’s journal in 1792:

Thus by our joint efforts, we had completely explored every turning of this extensive inlet; and to commemorate Mr. Puget’s exertions, the south extremity of it I named Puget’s Sound.

Because Olympia, or rather what today we consider the suburbs of Olympia was first in western Washington, we call the entire inland sea in our region “Puget Sound.”

Originally, at least at its naming, Puget Sound only stretched as far north as the Tacoma Narrows. At that point, the water bodies took on other names such as Admiralty Inlet. If the first non-Indian settlements might have been further north, we might be talking about Admiralty Inlet rather than Puget Sound.

It is likely that Vancouver himself thought the honor he gave to the British Admiralty more significant than naming a minor arm of the major water body after one of his officers.

But, the British Puget Sound Agricultural Company came about 40 years later and at Nisqually, settled on the shores of the contemporary and modern Puget Sound.

When the Americans came, all bets were off. The second newspaper in what would become the territorial capital blatantly advertised itself as being “on” Puget Sound.

So, as American communities began to stretch north away from Oregon and Olympia, they move the Puget Sound name north with them, erasing past distinctions.

From Edmond Meany’s footnotes to Vancouver’s Journal:

These settlements… were near the southern extremity of this inland sea — the very portion which Vancouver named Puget’s Sound. That name became the familiar one, ans as the white settlements moved northward along the shores that name carried along regardless of other names, like Admiralty Inlet, Port Gardner, the Gulf of Georgia and Strait of Juan De Fuca. Puget Sound became the generic name for the whole region and is largely so used in the present time.

Port Gardner was named for a British vice-admiral and Vancouver’s patron and the Gulf of Georgia was for King George III. Both seem to outrank Lt. Peter Puget, hardworker he may be.

It wasn’t until 1919 that the name Puget Sound for the entire body of water from the Pacific inland was officially named Puget Sound.

Update:

Well, based on a comment from Edward Echtle (@Tenalquot) earlier this morning, it turns out it is McLane Creek. Couldn’t be anywhere else. The reason is Courtney Love still owns a place out on Delphi Road that contains a significant portion of the creek.

And, from the history of the property on Redfin, the house has been for sale in the recent past. It was listed three times since 2010 and had a pending sale in 2012. But, that apparently never came through and the property was delisted again earlier this year.

Original Post:

A few weeks ago when I went down to our own little ghost town of Bordeaux, I remembered in the back of my head something about Kurt Cobain’s mom’s house being somewhere in the neighborhood. It turns out Wendy O’Connor (Cobain’s mom) lived just across the road from what remains of the old town site for years. In fact, she lived in the house of the town founder:

The Bordeaux House is one of the few extant buildings of the town of Bordeaux which was headquarters to the Mumby Shingle and Lumber Company, one of the most important lumbering operations in Thurston County. The firm opened up the harvesting of timber in the Black Hills while pioneering new methods of logging and manufacturing. After cutting and processing billions of board feet of lumber from 1902 to 1941, the operation closed and the town was abandoned. Only this house, home of Thomas Bordeaux, the firm’s founder, featuring fine uses of wood from the mill and two other structures and a safe from the former hotel remain from the town which has excellent integrity are a small mobile logger’s residence and a deteriorated school.

It also turns out that in the years following Cobain’s suicide, that the house was the site of his last memorial service:

One unique feature: The house is one of about a dozen of Cobain’s final resting places.

On Memorial Day 1999, O’Connor organized a ceremony during which
Cobain and Love’s then 6-year-old daughter, Frances Bean, tossed some of
his ashes into McLane Creek, which runs behind the house.

The ceremony was recounted in “Heavier Than Heaven,” a biography of Cobain written by Charles Cross.

The problem in that passage (and in the similar passage towards the end of Cross’s book) name a curious local stream for the receiving Cobain’s ashes. McLane Creek is a creek on the western edge of Thurston County, but it is miles from the house on Bordeaux Road. McLane and Mima (the creek closest to the Bordeaux hosue) creeks don’t connect and flow in opposite directions.

According to Thurston County records, the Bordeaux house was owned by Courtney Love for almost ten years.

There also isn’t a creek that runs behind the house at all. There are two intermittent streams that run near the house, but nothing that I’d call “near.” The only actual creek — Mima Creek — near the house is through some woods and across a road. Hardly an easy thing to include into a memorial service.

It is possible that the memorial service wasn’t in fact held at the Bordeaux house, but rather at a nearby house that fronted the actual McLane Creek. Or, the ash scattering during the ceremony didn’t happen. Or it did, the ceremony was a the Bordeaux house and they just hiked a bit.

In one symbolic way, it does matter whether his family scattered Cobain’s ashes in McLane or Mima Creek.

McLane Creek and Mima are parts of different watersheds and flow in different directions. Literally in geography and figuratively in time.

McLane Creek, according to Cross:

In many ways, this too was a fitting resting place. Kurt had found his true artistic muse in Olympia, and less than five miles away he sat in a shitty little apartment that smelled of rabbit pee and wrote songs all day. Those songs would outlive Kurt and even his darkest demons.

 McLane Creek also flows north into Puget Sound, where the water meets Olympia and later Seattle. This is towards the future of Kurt Cobain, his adult life and eventually his tragic death.

Mima Creek, on the other hand, flows south into the Black River and then west into the Chehalis. It leads backwards into Kurt Cobain’s life back to the Harbor and where he was born.

One creek flows towards artistic creation and death, the other backwards toward tortured youth and birth.

A few weeks back I put up a selection of a longer piece about E.N. Steele I’ve been polishing. Here’s another portion of that longer piece, this one dealing with the idea of the lost aspects of his life. I was thinking about the portion when I heard about the Oyster House burning down this week.

E.N. Steele became president and director of the chamber of commerce in the early 20s, and in 1925 he was elected as one of Olympia’s first city commissioners on a reform ticket. He served as one of Olympia’s inaugural planning commissioners and later as mayor. He was elected to the state legislature, and at least for awhile, served on a joint conference committee with young Warren Magnuson.

Of course, his most notable contributions was in the field of oysters. Owner and manager Oyster Company, Olympia 1907-1950; Rockpoint Oyster Company, Samish Bay, Washington 1922-1950; past president Pacific Coast Oyster Growers Association; past executive secretary Olympia Oyster Growers Association.

Steele also literally wrote the books on the shellfish industry through his life in “The Rise and Decline of the Olympia Oyster” and “The Immigrant (Pacific) Oyster.”

Here is the most significant lesson I take from my survey of E.N. Steele’s life:

Like his time as a lawyer defending Indians in treaty rights cases, Steele’s most significant and intimate details of his life are examples of how marks on history erodes. The craters in Washington State and Olympia of Steele’s time are practically gone for us.

For example, Steele’s largest contribution to our lives was writing the 1934 “Steele Act.” Until recently that law would rule how liquor was regulated in Washington State. As Washington State looked for a system to manage alcohol following the end of Prohibition, Steele worked with a University of Washington professor to create the system of laws that would remain on the books for almost 80 years. The system of state run stores and a Liquor Control Board was in force until 2010 when it was overturned by initiative.

Second, the Olympia neighborhood where the Steele family lived for years does not exist. The city blocks that now make up the east capitol campus were drawn off the map in the early 1960s. The corner of 14th and Franklin where the Steeles lived is somewhere north of the Department of Transportation Building and above a massive parking garage in the east capitol campus.

The street Steele looked out every morning now runs underground before joining Capitol Way. Evidence of the middle class neighborhood, which featured the city’s second high school and small lots with craftsmen homes can’t be found.

Even though we still have an Oyster House restaurant in Olympia on the site of an old shucking plant, the Olympia oyster is probably the faintest memory that made up Steele’s life. The shellfish that was so plentiful in our city that it was named after our city is practically gone from our bay. It barely even exists anywhere naturally in our local area.

In the “Rise and Decline of the Olympia Oyster,” Steele tracks the eventual death of the Olympia oyster industry and with it the last major sets of the species. The main causes of decline were Industrial pollution and development overtaking the oyster’s natural habitat. And, as evidenced by “Immigrant Oyster,” Steele’s book about the more resilient and foreign Pacific oysters, the shellfish industry simply moved on.

But, in Olympia, it was deliberate changes to our shoreline that erased the Oyster that was named for our city from our history. From Steele’s history of the Olympia oyster:

In Southern Puget Sound in the vicinity of Olympia. where they were most abundant.

In those days a wooden bridge crossed Budd Inlet near the location of the present concrete bridge to the Westside district. In honor of an early pioneer, it was called the “Marshfield” bridge. Chinatown was located south of this bridge, along the east shore. So, in territorial days the Chinamen took over possession of the oysters south of the bridge. North of the bridge and on both sides of the bay, the oyster beds were claimed by the Indians who had a village on the west side, just north of the bridge. The natural oyster beds south of the bridge are now covered by water due to the dam recently constructed to create a lake for capital beautification.

I’m not exactly sure why I focus on the things that are gone now when I look around Steele’s life. I was first drawn in because of the small details I picked up about him being a treaty rights lawyer. But, the Steele Act, his neighborhood and the Olympia oyster are there too for me.

Maybe its how we don’t write failure into our histories. We only focus on the things that ended up having an impact.

…

His book I cited earlier, “Letters from Grandpa,” is literally a series of letters from Steele to his grandchildren. Each chapter is a letter that tells a story about an episode in his life. The letters are peppered with “with love to you all” and “I love you all very much.” These aren’t words of a grandfather laying down regrets, but stories of a life well-lived.

But, we don’t think about the neighborhood we lost. We think about the natural growth of the campus, the modern office buildings naturally counterbalancing the traditional stone buildings across Capitol.

We also don’t think much about Olys at one point being picked where Capitol Lake is now. We can still buy little Olys from the Oyster House, though you aren’t sure where they’re picked from unless you ask.